Last week, GitHub’s first female developer, Julie Ann Horvath, quit the company over a staggering string of allegations that while working there she was subjected to harassment, intimidation, and sexism in the workplace. Considering Horvath also launched GitHub’s Passion Projects initiative to recruit more women into the Open Source community, this was quite a loss. GitHub has responded by putting the founder at the source of her claims on leave pending an investigation.
In discussing what to do in response to the GitHub debacle, we floated the inevitable idea: write about how every woman who ever makes an issue of sexism in tech culture or geek culture is routinely subjected to backlash or harassment.
I didn’t want to write that article. I always write those articles, and I am exhausted.
In the days to come, you’ll read think pieces that examine sexism in Open Source communities. You’ll read roundups of similar issues in tech and geek culture, like the ones we’ve written many times over. You might even hear of the inevitable backlash and harassment that always seems to follow whenever a woman speaks about sexism in tech or geek culture.
But if there’s one thing to take away from what happened to Horvath, it’s a glimpse of a culture in which women’s voices are silenced, the same thing we learned from Joanna Russ’s landmark exploration of the systemic marginalization of women in publishing.
Here’s a guide for the uninitiated.
How to suppress women's coding.: