By now we all should know that women are routinely harassed in tech companies to a preposterous degree. On the other hand, I've seen cases where mentally disturbed people invent (or self-delude) incredibly detailed narratives of persecution. We could be dealing with a situation where one, the other, both, or neither is happening.
The thing that irks me about all this is that murky incidents like this, where the alleged victim is (to many) not a very sympathetic character, and possibly acted improperly herself and instigated the whole situation (if the anon blog post is to be believed), does little to help set an example for why the real instances of harassment are so wrong and terrible.
After this, I'm left with a very poor taste in my mouth. GH's investigation was likely somewhat flawed, though it's unclear to what degree. Horvath almost certainly wasn't telling the full story about what happened, and may even have instigated the entire thing, and is using the prevalence of sexism in tech (and the expected knee-jerk community outcry) to attack someone she's (unjustifiably?) angry with. Or maybe everything she's said is true, and the Preston-Werners are terrible people, and GH has/had a serious discrimination problem coming from the top. We'll probably never know.
> the alleged victim is ... not a very sympathetic character
> does little to help set an example for why the real instances of harassment are so wrong and terrible.
Ah, but this is why most victims don't go public. Very few of us would look good under intense scrutiny. And I think this whole process has demonstrated how tilted the playing field is, against those who do go public.
Some people say that this is why people claiming to be victims deserve a kind of automatic support. I struggle with that, but only because I've personally witnessed a couple of the rare cases where that empowered someone who was slightly deranged.
By now we all should know that women are routinely harassed in tech companies to a preposterous degree. On the other hand, I've seen cases where mentally disturbed people invent (or self-delude) incredibly detailed narratives of persecution. We could be dealing with a situation where one, the other, both, or neither is happening.
The thing that irks me about all this is that murky incidents like this, where the alleged victim is (to many) not a very sympathetic character, and possibly acted improperly herself and instigated the whole situation (if the anon blog post is to be believed), does little to help set an example for why the real instances of harassment are so wrong and terrible.
After this, I'm left with a very poor taste in my mouth. GH's investigation was likely somewhat flawed, though it's unclear to what degree. Horvath almost certainly wasn't telling the full story about what happened, and may even have instigated the entire thing, and is using the prevalence of sexism in tech (and the expected knee-jerk community outcry) to attack someone she's (unjustifiably?) angry with. Or maybe everything she's said is true, and the Preston-Werners are terrible people, and GH has/had a serious discrimination problem coming from the top. We'll probably never know.
The whole situation just stinks.