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Aurora: DEFCON: Why conference harassment mattersAurora: DEFCON: Why conference harassment mattersPosted Aug 17, 2012 1:41 UTC (Fri) by pyellman (guest, #4997)Parent article: Aurora: DEFCON: Why conference harassment matters
I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the instances of sexual harassment, overt or subtle, that certain of the squeakiest wheels are being subjected to, is intentional and not merely a reflection of the inherent nature of open source (or technical) conferences. That it, it's looking like Valerie Aurora and a few others have made a name for themselves as being particularly sensitive to this issue, and are being deliberately "tweaked". That it, guys are doing it just to get her goat.
I have been to numerous conferences both technical and otherwise, and haven't heard of or seen the kinds of overt harassment Ms. Aurora speaks of. And while the chances of such things happening are generally assumed to increase with the volume of alcohol being consumed, that doesn't really seem to be a factor here. In fact, having been to many hundreds of bars and large, alcohol fueled parties, that kind of behavior even in such situations would have been unusual, and would, if taken to the lengths Ms. Aurora describes, have resulted in a serious row.
Ask the question, if Ms. Aurora wore a shirt proclaiming "I won't stand for harassment from rude males", might things would get better or worse?
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Aurora: DEFCON: Why conference harassment matters Posted Aug 17, 2012 6:20 UTC (Fri) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
So if you don't notice it, it doesn't exist? Cool beans! :(
Aurora: DEFCON: Why conference harassment matters Posted Aug 17, 2012 14:54 UTC (Fri) by pyellman (guest, #4997) [Link]
I don't need to personally notice. I had a fairly large group of friends as a young adult, including quite a few women, and if something like that happened (which it occasionally did) I and others would know about it, and if I were to go by Ms. Aurora and others testimony, such behavior is more common at a geek tech conference than at a sweaty, alcohol fueled-dance club, something I find either hard to believe or would have to wonder whether something else is going on, like targeted tweaking.
Aurora: DEFCON: Why conference harassment matters Posted Aug 17, 2012 23:01 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I consider it extremely likely that such behaviour is more common at a geek tech conference, because alcohol-fuelled danced clubs, by their very nature, have lots of women present on roughly equal terms with the men. The small subset of men who are evil bastards to women when they get the chance will not generally act evil when there are lots of women around to spot it. When that situation does not obtain, they feel a lot more confident that they can do horrible things to the few women present and the men will simply not notice.
Alas, their reasoning appears to be correct.
(This appears to be analogous to the curious fact that teenage male scholastic achievement improves in mixed-sex schools just as teenage female scholastic achievement declines there. While the latter fact is attributable to the boys hardly ever letting the girls get a word in edgeways, the former appears to be because the boys tone down the more yobbish anti-intellectual edges of their teenage culture so as not to appear like yobs in front of the girls.)
Aurora: DEFCON: Why conference harassment matters Posted Aug 18, 2012 1:02 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I don't think it's more common at geek conferences than at dance clubs.
BUT, I would expect it to be about the same level (and possibly higher) at the 'private parties' near the geek conferences.
You have an environment very similar to the dance clubs, but without bouncers to keep people in line (if only by intimidation)
In addition, the fact that the 'private parties' have a much smaller female population means that the odds of any particular female being abused is probably significantly higher since there are fewer targets for the misbehaving guys to go after.
Even if the absolute number of problems at these 'private parties' is 1/4 that of the dance clubs, the fact that there are generally fewer than 1/10 as many females would result in each female being affected by an problem 2.5 times as frequently.
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