This is a timeline of sexist incidents in geek communities including:
- Technology industry
- Free and open source software
- Gaming
- Comic Book Fandom
- Science Fiction Fandom
- Universities
- ... and more
See Timeline of geek feminism for the development of geek feminism itself.
(Mary Gardiner explains the reason for this list in Why we document, originally on the Geek Feminism blog.)
Contents
1963
- The Great Breen Boondoggle: Walter Breen excluded from Worldcon as he was judged (correctly) to pose a threat to children.
1973
- Lena Söderberg's photograph is first used in image processing experiments.
1982
- Custer's Revenge (rape simulation game) released
1988
1989
1993
1996
1999
2000
2001
- Wives of Hackers panel
- LISA hooters girls - see Randal Schwartz
- Stonehenge OSCON parties (first reported incident)
2002
- F.I.R.S.T. Robotics groping incident (Technology industry & education)
- Debian mencal incident: longer developer discussion of usefullness of little tools to support women in menstrual period calculation
2003
2004
- 2004 Debian elections
- Ubuntu Warty visual theme
- March: Debian IRC sexism
- May (and ongoing): Ubuntero gendered name
2005
- January: Lawrence Summers sexist remarks on women in science
- Debian and LinuxChix harassment by MikeeUSA begins
- (approximate date) Go Daddy's advertising begins on television, with an ad featuring Candice Michelle during the Super Bowl airing in 2005
- Hostility to a GIMP bug reporter
2006
- April:
- July
- (year unknown, could be 2004 or 2005):Harassment/groping at San Diego Comic Con] (Reported in blog post July 2011) (Comic Book Fandom)
- Catamorphism's Wikipedia RfA (Wikipedia)
- August: Harlan Ellison groping Connie Willis
- September:
- Telsa Gwynne announces the closure of her diary and her withdrawal from Open Source, due to the unpleasant environment and online harassment among other factors.
- Hans Reiser's wife Nina is reported missing, he is charged with her murder in October
- December: Acme::Playmate talk
2007
- January:
- Reiser fans harrassing women at LCA2007
- Slender PMWiki "Female syntax" thread
- March:
- April:
- May:
- August:
- September:
- LWN linked to an article about women in IT; a resulting, lengthy comment thread (content warning: cissexism and transphobia) ensued that centered around attacks on Perl developer Audrey Tang.
- October:
- Puppy Linux death threats and massive resulting fail
2008
- January: Dragonborn Boobs in D&D. Immense internet argument! (Gaming)
- February: An Obstacle for Women in the IT Industry blog post (Technology industry)
- April:
- Open Source Boob Project (Science Fiction Fandom))
- Zuckerberg interview incident (Technology industry)
- Hans Reiser is convicted of the murder of his wife, Nina.
- May: Wiscon troll incident (Science Fiction Fandom)
- July:
- Debian harassment receives press coverage (FLOSS)
- Planet Fedora up-skirting photo (FLOSS)
- RubyFringe offers girlfriend daycare (FLOSS)
- Linux Symposium 2008 closing talk (FLOSS)
- Fat Princess (Gaming)
- Hans Reiser admits to the murder of his wife, Nina, by revealing the location of her body
- November:
- December: Valleywag insults Pownce founder (Technology industry)
2009
- February:
- March:
- April: CouchDB talk (FLOSS)
- May:
- June:
- July:
- EMACS virgins joke (FLOSS)
- DEFCON comic strip incident (Hacker culture)
- This IS your father's Readercon (Science Fiction Fandom)
- Phoronix Foodstruments (FLOSS)
- Stonehenge OSCON parties (again) (FLOSS)
- RealmsFail and resulting Harlan Ellison backlash (Science Fiction Fandom)
- Game Boy Bondage (Gaming))
- EA booth babe bounty (Gaming)
- August:
- Manthology incident (Science Fiction Fandom)
- FSF mini-summit on Women in Free Software announcement and LWN thread (FLOSS)
- SurveyFail (Media Fandom)
- Sony make phones for women (Technology industry)
- September:
- October:
- November:
- AmazonLISAFail (Technology industry)
- DojoCon thongs (FLOSS)
- Cory Fowler a Community Leader in Ontario and MVP for Microsoft partakes in online harassment of women by facilitating spreading of sexual innuendo jokes and promoting the use of the word brogrammer as a way for male programmers to bond an network.
- December:
2010
- January
- February
- Casecamp boobies incident (Technical conferences)
- PUSH N900 pole-dancing robots
- No women in horror [5] [6] (Fandom)
- Boagworld incident [7]
- March
- South By Southwest groping & harrassment [8] [9] [10] (Technical conferences)
- Drupal.org gender discussions (FLOSS)
- April
- Sexist "joke" in description of a "menstruation tracking" software package for the N900: Summary of incident (FLOSS)
- NodeOne Drupal card game ad (FLOSS)
- GenCon "Activities for the better half" icon (Roleplaying games)
- May
- It's Time to Tell Mum campaign
- ASCII-Pinup-Girl @sigInt [1]
- A plugin called 'Girls Plugin' featuring images of women in their underwear is added to Hudson. The plugin remained in Jenkins until 2014.
- July
- August
- October
- Penny Arcade announces Dickwolves tshirts; Courtney Stanton announces Dickwolves Survivors Guild tshirts in protest
- November
- December
2011
- January
- In a session at BarCamp San Diego 8, @SDGameGuy (Dan Melchione) demoed a Microsoft Kinect hack in which an volunteer appeared on a simulated green screen in front of an image of a strip club. (Technical conferences)
- Sexual and violent references and images in LCA 2011 Keynote (FLOSS)
- Rape apology on LCA mailing list (FLOSS)
- Dickwolves incident reaches its peak (Gaming)
- February
- March
- May
- June
- Elevatorgate - Incident at World Atheist Convention (Atheism/Skepticism)
- Lady had all support from local group for her event removed after rejecting advances from group leader (FLOSS) - UK
- July
- Why Know Algorithms talk at OSCON (Technical conferences)
- Assault at OSCON (Technical conferences)
- Heartbreak & Heroines Kickstarter campaign (Gaming)
- Male-only Battlefield 3 LAN party (Gaming)
- The beginning of Nymwars via the Google+ name policy debate (Tech industry/Social networking)
- August
- September
- Sqoot posts a blog article that includes a photo of a topless woman : the blog post titled "Sqoot Goes Topless" was about the company's dedication to transparency and featured an image of a topless woman. The photo only showed the area between the womans shoulders and waist. (some time between March and September 2012, it appears that Sqoot has removed the photo).
- CSconsulting posts sexist posters on college campuses
- October
- Adam Bien talk at JavaOne (Technical conferences)
- Paul Burton Talk at ExpressionEngine conference (Technical conferences)
- Grainger Games, sponsors of the Games Media Awards, upsets the proceeds with scantily-clad booth babes and dwarves, and leaves condoms on the attendees' tables. (Gaming)
- World Fantasy Con "Motorhead" harasser: http://jaymgates.com/misc/wfc-2011-creeper, http://secritcrush.livejournal.com/453187.html
- November
- Image of women spread eagled, holding a gun, with a monitor with the letter "V" covering her genitals featured on blog post by Witold Rugowski , a free-lance Ruby programmer from Poland, about passing current id to model in Ruby on Rails. It was shown on RubyReflector but was taken down soon after. The image was still on Witold's personal blog linked above.
- December
2012
- January
- February
- Announcement of new subgroup Arch Women triggers furious discussion on main forums including this excerpted thread. (Broken link)
- Sexual harassment at the Cross Assault fighting game tournament.[11][12][13][14][15]
- March
- The announcement for Sqoot's Boston API Jam lists women to fetch you beer amongst the "Great Perks" of attending.
- The founders of Geeklist react badly when a video that associates sexist imagery with their brand is reported to them.
- The VP of Path makes several sexist remarks during a presentation at SXSW.
- Tara Tiger Brown writes a Fake geek girls condemnation for Forbes.
- Planet Mozilla controversy
- Brendan Eich Proposition 8 donation
- April
- Melbourne coworking sexism: York Butter Factory, a Melbourne coworking space, makes a sexist tweet.
- Oatmeal comic on female gamers: Oatmeal made a comic implying "a terrible female gamer gets away with way more than a terrible male gamer".
- Mega Startup Bikinis: All-male team at Mega Startup Weekend makes presentation including gratuitous repeated image of women in bikinis. Chris Yeh, a presentation judge, speaks up and then blogs about it.
- Dell says shut up: Dell invites Mads Christensen to MC at a Dell-hosted customer and partner summit in Copenhagen in April. Christensen applauds the lack of women in IT and urges attendees to learn to say "Shut up, bitch!".
- May
- Kleiner Perkins gender discrimination lawsuit: On May 10, 2012, Ellen Pao filed a gender discrimination suit against Kleiner Perkins. In the suit, she alleged that the firm has engaged in systematic discrimination against women by failing to promote them comparably to men, by compensating them less, and by failing to act upon sexual harassment complaints.
- NYT op ed on harassment: The NYTimes published an op ed on the suit that opened with the assertion that "Men invented the Internet." The article also claimed that sexual harassment is rare or nonexistent in Silicon Valley: "You don’t really hear about randiness and mistreatment of women."
- The 2012 atheist and skeptic harassment policies campaign begins, and with it, significant hostility to the idea of anti-harassment policies and the specific details of suggested policies.
- Sony releases sexist Playstation Vita ad in France
- Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency ran a Kickstarter for a video series analyzing gender roles in video games. Her accounts and those publicly supporting her were flooded with harassment, threats, and slurs, which persists to this day.
- June
- On June 1, 2012, an all female singing group at the European Ruby Conference in Amsterdam were subjected to sexist abuse on Twitter. See blog post
- ASUS booth babe tweet
- Microsoft Azure Cloud Song: On June 7, 2012, Microsoft opened NDS 2012 with a song and a dance by female performer featuring lyrics ~approx"Micro and Soft are words that do not apply to my Penis", as well as mentioning names of various street drugs. YouTube video .
- Summercon Burlesque: On June 9, 2012, the SummerCon conference provided, as entertainment, female burlesque dancers. Blog post.
- TVTropes deletes rape trope pages after facing problems with their Google AdWords. This wiki hosted mirrors of the pages, which were eventually deleted in 2014. TVTropes quickly restored the pages to their site after massive outcry. Blog post.
- July
- "Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian" game is created, resulting in continuing Feminist Frequency Kickstarter backlash including harassment of Steph Guthrie who outed the game creator Ben Spurr.
- 0xB16B00B5/BIGBOOBS Constant in Microsoft Hyper-V: a Linux kernel contributor discovers that the constant used to identify a Linux Guest to the Hyper-V host is "0xB16B00B5"
- Al Billings threatens his colleagues at Mozilla
- A Readercon attendee reports René Walling to the RC committee. They decide to ignore their zero tolerance policy and ban the offender for two years, citing the need to educate men in how to not harass women. (They later recanted and enforced the policy, issuing a public statement and commitment to future actions.)
- Geek feminist harassment at OSCON: several OSCON attendees report harassment by (self-described) members of the geek feminist community.
- An offensive tweet was made against the PyLadies group at EuroPython 2012. Lynn Root (a keynote speaker and founder of PyLadies) blogged twice about the incident.
- Daniel Tosh makes a series of rape jokes at the Laugh Factory
- Joe Peacock writes a Fake geek girls condemnation for a CNN blog
- August
- Video game Borderlands 2 announces its girlfriend mode, an easy mode assumed to be for girlfriends of assumed-male-assumed-het gamers.
- Twitter user MisterE2009 harasses women in comics. Comics Creator Mark Millar responds.
- Dragon*Con bans Backup ribbons
- Steubenville High School rape case
- TekSavvy Characters ad campaign
- September
- A woman was sexually assaulted during Notch (of Mojang/Minecraft fame)'s party in Seattle, the same weekend as Penny Arcade Expo (PAX). Venue security staff dismissed her complaint.
- TechEd New Zealand - Groping at "Tech Fest" party.
- Sponsor at the Ohio LinuxFest tries to hand out swag with sexually oriented language.
- October
- Doug Belshaw's 'mother test'
- An Enforcer (volunteer and peace-keeper) at gaming con PAX publicly discloses that another Enforcer was removed from his role due to sexual harassment and assault of other Enforcers. [16]
- the Libre Office en Español Facebook group posted images to promote their products with implicit reference to sexual contents
- November
- BritRuby 2013 is canceled after being called out on an all-white-male speaker lineup. (Commentary from Lindsey Bieda and Avdi.)
- December
- Feminist Frequency
2013
- January
- Heavily sexualized ad for Voco voice control products emailed to CES attendees, along with sexual innuendo in public press release. (Commentary from AdRants here.)
- "Edge" conference criticised for all-male speaker lineup. Rebecca J. Rosen mentioned the conference in a call for men to boycott all-male conference panels.
- Alex Diavatis, writing for WorldOfGnome.org, wrote a post about Fedora 18 that included commentary about how Fedora 18 is easy enough for 'ugly girlfriends' to use without their boyfriends' help. The paragraph was later removed after complaints in the comments. Using girlfriend/mother to mean 'technical layman' is sexist.
- SexyPHP , a self-published book by C. A. Collins, published to Kindle via BookBaby.com
- Women in Makerspaces, the "e-textiles" post and discussion on a hackerspaces.org list. There was a very funny dramatic reading of the e-textiles post by Rory Marinich.
- Cory Doctorow finds the company Rapiscan, that makes TSA body scanners, funny because it could be pronounced like "rape" .
- Multiple speculative fiction authors ask creators to pressure Dragon*Con to end its association with Ed Kramer
- February
- LCA2013 shirtgate
- At Confoo Conference there was an after party event in which Frédéric Harper a tech evangelist for Microsoft sent an email to Cory Fowler and other Microsoft Evangelists via his Microsoft email asking if they would like to attend a strip club. He also asked other women at the conference if they would like to attend a strip club as an end of Conference celebration. Cory Fowler under his old @syntaxc4 account confirmed over twitter that the event happened (in 2014), Cory has since closed that account (associated with other brogrammer issues see 2009)
- "Hack of the Sexes", billed as a "civic hackathon pinning the boys against the girls" as well as a "contest to promote innovative solutions to civic problems from the technology and entrepreneurship community in Kansas City", was announced.
- An event in Nashville, Tennessee in the US, "Spark Nashville", announced itself as featuring "entrepreneurial and tech community patriarchs". In an extensive thread on Twitter, Jared Scheel defended the usage of the term "patriarch" and dismissed women's concerns about it as "petty" and "legalistic".
- Web and PHP Magazine at PHP UK 2013 hands out shirts with the legend "Enhance your PHPness" on them (playing on the double entendre of PHPness/Penis), leading to an outcry of institutional sexism. Others defend it as a joke. Web and PHP Magazine issue a statement denying sexist intent.
- March
- PyCon 2013 forking and dongles incident
- PyCon 2013 expulsion incident
- Shawn L's expulsion from hackerspaces
- Yvonne Brill's NYT obituary
- Onyx Healthcare hires Playboy model for HIMSS13 booth exibit
- RPG Camp Kickstarter trolling
- Sexist SXSWi wristbands at MIT Media Lab party
- Virool launch party YC startup hires women in lingerie for "nerd party"
- [Venture Beat article on women in tech] (good article, interviews CEOs, discusses various problems)
- Tropes vs. Men in Videogames Kickstarter
- PAX cosplay interview backlash - A cosplayer at PAX, Megan Marie, blogged "What would you do if you weren't afraid" in response to a sexist interviewer. She then got quite a lot of backlash.
- IDGA Party dancers at Games Developer Conference. Yetizen hired gogo-dancers and topless models.
- Martin Pohlman, co-founder of Portland hackerspace BrainSilo, is arrested on various charges related to raping women using a sedative-loaded medical injection device. He pled guilty to reduced set of charges. He was represented by local lawyer Bear Wilner-Nugent, the same lawyer who later began representing Michael Schwern.
- April
- May
- June
- RubyKaigi 2013 Kawaii Incident - an incident where "Taiwanese girls are ‘kawaii'" was used to promote a conference.
- Denver Comic Con panel
- Above the Game
- SFF harassment revelations 2013
- Anti-Pyladies accounts on GitHub
- Vox Day/Theodore Beale kicked out of SFWA due to racism. (Science Fiction Fandom)
- July
- Linux kernel civility discussion
- Women Who Kick Ass San Diego ComicCon panel. Great panel, sexist backlash.
- Anime Expo hidden camera - http://dancingwithscissors.tumblr.com/post/55464547361/judgementscythe-credit-to-whoever-is-in-charge
- Dragon*Con severed financial ties with Ed Kramer
- August
- DEFCON 21 incidents
- Skeptic harassment revelations 2013
- @elevatorgate harassment
- Jennifer Hepler, formerly a senior writer at BioWare, reports that Dragon Age players sent her abusive emails and forum posts, threatening phone calls, and "graphic threats" against her children.
- Software Developer David Winer of Scripting News writes a post titled "Why Are There So Few Women Developers?" in which he concludes that it's because programming takes patience and focus, like hunting.
- Lightspeed Venture partner Justin Caldbeck accused of sexual harassment by StitchFix founder Katrina Lake - who was subsequently prevented from discussing this by non-disparagement agreement.
- September
- TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon incident A team at TechCrunch Disrupt 2013 presents the TitStare app, which allows users to post and view pictures of men staring at people's cleavage. Another presenter pretended to masturbate on stage. TechCrunch apologized for the incidents. In response, Pax Dickinson , CTO of Business Insider, expressed his disapproval of feminism in tech; he resigned the following day.
- Mike Krahulic of Penny Arcade at PAX Prime 2013, during an on-stage interview where was asked what he felt was the company's biggest mistake, said it was pulling the Dickwolves shirts from the online store. This refusal to understand how the shirts were problematic reignited the controversy.
- Yukihiro Matsumoto, aka Matz, chief designer of the Ruby programming language criticized the efforts of RubyConf to correct for discrimination in speaker selection, characterized it as “reverse discrimination” and insisted, “We have RailsGirls instead.”
- Michael Schwern, prominent Perl developer, arrested on domestic violence charges
- An unidentified panelist representing Jamernot at a Technori event referred to two female presenters as “Hot girls in yoga pants.” An attendee submitted an objection online to the panel but his post was deleted by Technori moderators, so he stood up and objected verbally. The Jamernot rep responded , “That’s how the world is,” and subsequently tweeted in his defense .
- Fraser Millward, an entertainer hired by Microsoft to host an Xbox One event at Eurogamer Expo 2013, harassed and misgendered a woman self-identified as transgender on stage. She subsequently wrote about the online threats she received in retaliation for her speaking out.
- Anand Pillai created ladies.py, a code repo mocking PyLadies. PyLadies Bangalore called him out on this.
- October
- Codemash sexual assault
- standingwithDNLee Biologist and science writer Dr. Danielle N. Lee responded to being called a "whore" after politely declining to write for free. The Scientific American blog network removed her blog post about it without consulting her, with the excuse that it "verged into the personal."
- Reports of harassment of Scientific American bloggers by editor Bora Zivkovic surfaced around a year ago, but in October 2013 several women wrote in public naming him and describing his patterns of bad behavior.
- SF hacker group advertises "Hackers and Hookers " costume party. When called on it, they issue a classic non-apology (both advertisement and apology archived at link).
- Kent James, a core reviewer for the open-source Thunderbird project, wrote a blog post with the subject line "Real Men do Build Engineering". Despite knowing that this was sexist (the original post included the question, "So, are there any Real Men out there (or even Real Women) that want to be a hero, and save our project?"), in a comment, James stated "I decided to remove comments that disputed my use of the term 'Real Men'." (In an example of the Many bad things in the world silencing tactic, he implied that it was acceptable for him to insinuate that men are more likely to understand build engineering than women are because an organization exists that uses the term "real men" and claims to fight domestic violence.)
- At the ACM CIKM 2013 conference, a presenter showed a slide (photo) with the text "Big data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it... (Dan Ariely)" The conference did not have an anti-harassment policy posted on its web site.
- The Special support for women thread began on Linux Australia's discussion mailing list.
- November
- Several women go public with accounts of sexual harassment by Brian Wood, an influential comics writer.
- It's Okay to be Smart video
- libuv gendered pronouns patch dispute
- December
- http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/12/07/aki-con-cosplayer-assaulted/
- Twitter Blockgate
- Zoe Quinnzel / DepressionQuest harassment
- C Plus Equality code repository and impersonations (Feminist Software Foundation trolls continue)
- Paul Graham claims women have not been hacking for the past ten years, and he wouldn't know how to get a teenaged girl interested in computers.
- The illustration of an artificial servant girl with a broom appears on the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence Journal, which sparks a sexism row.
- Ed Kramer pleaded guilty to child molestation charges
2014
- January
- Microsoft Dear Azure campaign
- This is what it's like to be a woman at a Bitcoin meetup Two women attend a bitcoin meetup and are immediately groped, propositioned, and insulted
- Games reporter Josh Mattingly sexually harasses story lead
- NBC Sports affiliate editor Dustin Hennessey assaults two women at Arisia Con in Boston, MA The Code of Conduct policy empowered one of the women to report the incident and resolve the situation.
- Dana McCallum rape arrest
- Nitin Khanna, a prominent investor and executive in the Portland tech scene, is sued by a woman for raping her in 2012. The parties reach a settlement out of court, the terms of which are confidential. Journalists note the "eerie silence" from the usually-verbose tech community after the case came to light.
- Heckler disrupts feminist miniconf Haecksen at LCA
- February
- "Girls and software" article published in Linux Journal magazine.
- Male Champions of Change event
- March
- "The Dating Ring", a Y-Combinator funded startup, organizes a crowdfunding campaign to fly single women from NYC to San Francisco to meet men.
- Julie Ann Horvath quit GitHub
- GAME_JAM walk out
- debian-devel-games trolling Debian gets trolled into taking a "problematic" work of interactive fiction seriously.
- Brendan Eich is promoted from CTO to CEO of Mozilla. He resigns after 10 days.
- A conference "sexisme, jeu vidéo et culture geek" (sexism, videogames and geek cultur) is held in Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon. (in french) One of the participant tells that she was asked for advice in order to make the new women character in SupertuxKart as right as possible, but her advice were ignored to the point that the character has an upskirting animation.
- April
- Gurbaksh Chahal domestic violence conviction
- CodeBabes.com
- Cherry City Comic Con shames a woman for requesting a refund because she felt she would not be safe at the con.
- Attendee assaulted (with fists) in elevator by conference organizer, sparked initiative to create a code of conduct in European open source graphics software community which previously believed it didn't need one. Sponsors were notified, Valerie Aurora assisted with excellent advice. Code of Conduct voted on but not yet posted publicly as of 07/2015. Event occurred at Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany. Libre Graphics 2014
- May
- Booth babes make an appearance at the EMCWorld conference
- Django primary-replica terminology patch dispute
- Racist HipChat emoticon
- Isla Vista killings
- Google releases workforce diversity data
- Discussion on a proposed picture of the day for Wikipedia.
- James Frenkel attends and volunteers at WisCon 2014 after harassing an attendee the prior year (see SFF harassment revelations 2013).
- June
- An Atlassian developer, Jonathan Doklovic, compares Maven to his annoying girlfriend in a conference presentation. (http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/06/04/318882549/women-complain-a-lot-interrupt-developer-says-at-conference). The company quickly apologizes .
- A Livestream developer, Ash Taylor, wrote a public tweet calling tech feminist activists Ashe Dryden and Shanley Kane "cunts", after which he deleted the tweet and deleted his employer's name from his Twitter profile. Taylor issued an apology, but only after Livestream fired him from his job.
- Chicago TechWeek uses sexualized images of women to advertise a black tie event promoting their "TechWeek 100"; several of the honorees ask to be removed .
- An education technology startup founder, Ariel Norling, publishes her account of sexual harassment and rape at educational technology conference, ISTE. Audrey Watters, edtech writer, posts her own report of sexism and harassment in edtech and at ISTE. ISTE CEO Brian Lewis responds. Ariel took down her original post (Google cache) (Freze.it cache ) and wrote a follow-up detailing the responses she got, including harassment.
- Polish tech company 84kids posts an sexual job offer ad (translation: "I want to decrease margin to your <body>"). After comments pointing out problems with advertisement company fails to understand problem.
- Drupal Association board member MortenDK resigns from the board after a conflict resolution process after a DrupalCon conflict over the Code of Conduct and use of the word "pussy". Tweet, tweet, MortenDK post, (there are more links to be found)
- Marion Zimmer Bradley's child abuse described by her daughter
- An employee of the global, non-profit OWASP Open Web Application Security Project resigns and opens a case with the EEOC against OWASP leaders Jim Manico, Josh Sokol, and Eoin Keary. In a letter forwarded by Dinis Cruz, the employee states that Board member Jim Manico used "sexually aggressive and offensive, gender specific language" at the AppSec USA 2013 conference in November 2013, later followed by "public accusations surrounding my work performance." Keary calls the claims "slander and lies." Sokol says "the claim is filled with fantasy." Manico states they are "100% slander" and that OWASP's compliance officer finds the situation "too complex."
- 4chan trolls executed a phony Twitter hashtag campaign with the intend to discredit feminists and women of color. Twitter user sassycrass spotted this and started the #YourSlipIsShowing hashtag.
- gittip crisis
- An open governance activist, Jen Kotila, who has been working with open knowledge organizations in Copenhagen, speaks up about the sexual harassment and bullying she has experienced over the past several months in KopenLab.
- Campus Party Mexico 2015 #CPMX5 : @ApplicateMx gives a conference "Como hacker a una mujer" (How to hack a woman)
- Campus Party Mexico 2015 #CPMX5 : A company puts a QR code model in order to get the attendees to take pictures of her. Picture on Twitter.
- Tinder sexual harassment lawsuit
- July
- Scott Kveton, CEO of Portland-area software company Urban Airship, investigated for sexual assault. He goes on a leave of absence a few days later.
- Hearthstone Tournament in Finland forbids female players , apparently on orders from international tournament sponsoring authority
- Christien Rioux (dildog) co-founder of Veracode, suggests women can't write security exploits: "With regard to sexism in the security industry, if anyone knows about an exploit written and published by a woman, I'd like to see it."
- Max Temkin rape report
- WisCon announces a temporary and provisional ban on attendance for serial harasser Jim Frenkel, a decision that dissatisfies many people.
- Obie Fernandez, the CTO of Javelin, posted a tweet comparing node.js to "fucking a 20 year old". (Screenshot of tweet.)
- Cosplayer assault at San Diego Comic-Con
- Cory Fowler assistant organiser of Seattle PHP User Group is involved in a series of Domestic Abuse incidents involving Legal intervention and assistance from Seattle Police. The matter was deemed to be of a Domestic and Family Court nature and was handled with consultations from Seattle Police Domestic Violence department and legal representation on behalf of the victim.
- Madison Young, a member of the steering committee for Mothership HackerMoms, engaged in derailment when a rape-apologist video she had made resurfaced.
- August
- Report of a rape at DEFCON by prominent computer security researcher Adam Shostack
- Anonymous report of pervasive unwanted sexual attention at OSCON published
- BlackHat 2014 incidents
- Defcon 22 incidents
- Michael Lopp rape apologism
- Defamation of Zoe Quinn
- Pavel Curda, a prominent venture capitalist, sexually harassed entrepreneur Gesche Haas at a startup networking event. (This occurred in July; Haas reported it in August.)
- Darren Wilson GoFundMe Campaign
- Gamergate coordinated harassment campaign
- OnePlus One's "Ladies First" Contest
- Modern Video Processor An art piece at a computer graphics conference features video of scantily dressed women bouncing as they use power tools.
- September
- David Galiel, an advisor for ChickTech, perseverates about strawfeminst women who are "aggressive, harassing dicks" on Twitter. Bonus fedora/trilby.
- "Dear Kate" underwear Ada Collection ad campaign features women in tech, in their underwear with laptops.
- CMEA Capital settled a lawsuit alleging "pervasive and severe" harassment by chief operating partner John Haag out of court. According to ValleyWag, "The allegations are not limited to Haag. The complaint also says that management was aware of the problem—the firm's founder warned that Haag was a "predator"—and that the women faced retaliation from CMEA employees after they reported the allege."
- Sam Pepper faces claims for sexual harassment after uploading a "prank" video of him by grabbing women's butts. He made subsequent videos saying the girls were actors and that the video was a social experiment to highlight sexual harassment against men. A lot of people are speculative and disagree due to Sam's history of pranks and allegations of sexual abuse from other women.
- Good2Go app
- Netguide New Zealand's Bikini Brand Ambassadors
- October
- GHC 2014 Male Allies Plenary Panel
- Satya Nadella pay inequity comments
- OneMonth published a blog post titled "How Olivia Munn's iCloud Account Got Hacked" that included "While most people are dying to get a glimpse of their favorite celebs" and "After collecting valid passwords, the attacker was able to download the iCloud backup for the user and gain access to all those fun photos!" The post has since been edited. Link to screenshots
- Infamous hacker Kevin Mitnick threatens FreeBSD developer's job on Twitter
- Game developer Brianna Wu leaves her home after receiving rape and death threats. Boing Boing article VentureBeat article
- Anita Sarkeesian (Feminist Frequency) forced to cancel speech at Utah State University after receiving death threats and threats of a massacre.
- November
- Rosetta shirtgate
- Uber executive smear threat
- The incompetent portrayal of Barbie in Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer is discovered.
- Paris Coders' Night incident
- Harassment incident at Context (Jim Hines roundup)
- December
- Valleywag reports that real estate startup Zillow is being sued by a former employee for sexual harassment that the the former employee compares to "sexual torture."
- Social media startup Sportacam solicits for a backend developer, saying they want someone who's "totally gay for code" and listing job perks that include "Making it rain on them hoes." After being called out on Twitter, they doubled down with a mansplaining non-apology and claimed their offensive behavior was acceptable because it's just a joke. As of April 2015, Sportacam has not removed the job advertisement.
- Kiwicon 2014 expulsion of two speakers for transphobia and other code of conduct violations in their talk.
- [CW: suicide] Ruby developer and co-founding partner of software consulting firm Gaslight Doug Alcorn's 17-year-old daughter Leelah Alcorn, a trans woman, committed suicide. In her suicide note, she blames her parents for refusing to acknowledge her gender and for forcing her to go to reparative therapy in an attempt to make her cisgender.
- A person with an androgynous appearance was hassled when entering the men’s bathroom at Chaos Communication Congress 31. Signs for gender neural bathrooms were torn down.
2015
- January
- Milo Yiannopoulos (a leader of the Gamergate coordinated harassment campaign) published an article disclosing personal details about tech culture critic Shanley Kane's past romantic relationships; the article was reposted by Valleywag.[1]
- The Feminist Software Foundation trolling continued, with a phony Straw-feminist operating system called "ToleranUX".[2]
- Plaxo co-founder Minh Nguyen was arrested for the murder of his ex-wife's husband.[3]
- ZeroFox gives a talk entitled Mascots, March Madness & #yogapants: Hacking Goes to Collegewhich discusses various means of social media exploitation, while emphasising "well-endowed women," and many mentions of "yoga pants" leading to audience cheers and yelling "when do we get to the yoga pants" and similar.[4] Speakers, when contacted on twitter, insisted that they were presenting an objective view on soft exploits ("the reality is social media attacks involve sex & food as targeting "[5][6]) and denied any wrongdoing. [7]
Harassment ensues[8], and the person who raised the issue was chased off Twitter by people directed to her by blog posts[9], et cetera.
- Jace Connors car crash: Connors, known as a supporter of the Gamergate coordinated harassment campaign (and target of trolling himself) crashed his mother's car while he was on his way to Brianna Wu's house. He was armed at the time.
- February
- Racist and sexist jokes at the TechCrunch Crunchie awards. T.J. Miller, actor from the TV show Silicon Valley, called a woman in the audience a bitch. When she objected, he went on to say "Bitch, Asians aren’t supposed to be this entitled in the U.S. … Is this bitch from Palo Alto?"
- A speaker at Ignite Bridgetown, Crystal Beasley, protested when she discovered she was speaking at the same event as Scott Kveton, who was accused of sexual assault in July 2014. The organizers decided to cancel the event after Beasley's post.
- FOSDEM was criticised (e.g. by Sarah Mei) for not having a proper Code of Conduct, including by keynote Karen Sandler. The organisers acknowledged the criticism and stated their intention to improve.
- March
- In a presentation on "biohacking" at the CanSecWest security conference, Jan Krissler used a closeup of a pornographic image of a woman giving a blowjob (slide #37 from the deck posted here) to illustrate that high enough resolution photographs can be used to bypass retina scans. Most of the penis in the image was blocked out, but there was no ambiguity as to the content of the image. Also, in the presentation by Patrick Wardle from Synack, one of initial slides had a table of terms being defined with each having a simple art stye depicting women's body parts/sexual activities so as to explain the security terms (the terms included implant, hooking, backdoor, etc., which are valid security terms that he sexualized). Two of the images had black bars to supposedly censor them, but he explained that he was willing to provide the slides uncensored to those who ask him for them. Additionally, he used the justification that the US is uptight about sex as a reason for it being acceptable to include sexual content in a technical security conference. Both current online copies of the slide deck have this slide removed from them. Later the same day, and ironically immediately following a lightning talk which included one on the topic of respecting women members of the infosec community, several witnesses reported that there was a stripper at the official conference party.
- Michael Robertson, founder of mp3.com, tweeted that white men dominate Silicon Valley because "Science tells us men & women are biologically different including their brains and skills."
- On March 8, Linus Torvalds committed a "Code of Conflict" to the kernel. It was signed by 60 kernel maintainers and initiated as a patch by Greg Kroah-Hartman, one of the developers involved in the Kernel Civility Incident in July 2013.
- Context 28 is cancelled after extended fallout from bad handling of a harassment incident at Context 27.
- April
- Europython podcast comments
- Hugo Award nominations announced; ballot heavily dominated by Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies efforts. (Science Fiction Fandom)
- Anonymous user(s) repeatedly attempt to delete information about Cory Fowler from the timeline of incidents, persisting in spite of the deletions being reverted.
- A former Supertuxkart developper brings Supertuxkart upskirting animation and the multiplication of women in swim suit occurrence in the new release to debian women mailing list. Maintainer keep the package as is.
- May
- May 18, FORTAcloud tweeted sexist pic with promotional code, doubled down against criticism with supposed statistic that "99% of their customers are male between 18 and 42", and tweeted that "advertising with images of beautiful girls is sexy." In terms of other statistics, of the 5 images they've ever tweeted, 2 were women in underwear. See also Fortacloud50offmonday article.
- June
- July
- French Wikipedia discussion about removal of a domestic violence mention on Thomas Piketty page.
- Andrea-ritsu's tumbler post on Nintendo's Fire Emblem Fates. (here too) [TW drug, consentment] The author explains that the scenario allows the player to "drug" one of the lesbian character to make her see women as men. The author is targeted by Gamer Gate proponent.
- Jessie Frazelle's blog post describing the harassment and threats she received as a Docker core maintainer is published. She later leaves her position at Docker to join Mesosphere. Mesosphere's CEO is Florian Leibert, who assaulted Noirin Plunkett in 2010.
- Ellen Pao resigns from CEO position at Reddit. Users wanted her to step back as CEO, officially because she was hold responsible of Victoria Taylor (Ask Me Anything creator) eviction in the company but this narrative is put in question. On the other hand Ellen Pao removed some fat shaming and racist subreddits and this makes her unpopular for some communities. This article [TW:Online abuse] sums the situation up.
- August
- Rachel Nabors publishes a blog post describing her decision to decline attending an event she was invited to speak at because the organizer, Jared Spool, refused to adopt a code of conduct (see Spool's post describing his opposition to codes of conduct). Mike Monteiro calls Nabors' post "bullshit" on Twitter and defends the conference organizer personally. After multiple people criticize him on Twitter, Monteiro publishes a blog post criticizing codes of conduct at conferences because some conference organizers may not enforce them. He instead argues for stricter, more expensive, unachievable measures like certification of procedures by an outside team of experts (not available at that time). As of July 2016, neither Monteiro nor Spool have apologized to Nabors or publicly changed their stance on codes of conduct.
- September
- @irongeek_adc, responsible for A/V for some computer security conferences, accused of sexism https://twitter.com/HackerHuntress/status/639224664225546240, claims "Cries of sexism that's not there is one category. Examples: Donglegate, Shirtgate, Yogagate" https://twitter.com/irongeek_adc/status/639218545897930752, is called out by others https://twitter.com/McGrewSecurity/status/639167304819994624 https://twitter.com/RSWestmoreland/status/641707740704952321 BSidesLV subsequently issued a statement and no longer plans to work with him for future conferences.
- Katherine Moussouris files lawsuit against Microsoft for gender discrimination
- October
- Pubcon incident. A male speaker told a first-time female speaker, "Don't be nervous! You're the hot girl at the conference, no one expects you to do well."
- TechCrunch contributor Catherine Shu propositioned and groped by 500 Startups venture partner Tristan Pollock during event in Taipei
- November
- Ceylon code of conduct
- Automated script "smack my bitch up " that sends text messages with a random string after 9pm and the respective discussion about...the title.
- December
- IBM "#HackAHairDryer" campaign to encourage women in tech is criticized for sexist stereotypes
2016
- January
- R developer Oliver Keyes announces he's leaving the project after core team members dismissed a request to change a sexually explicit variable name.
- March
- Neil deGrasse Tyson tweets that any species for whom sex was painful would go extinct, then doubles down and defends his statement in an interview. Leaving aside non-human species, sex is painful for many humans, especially women. Minimizing or denying this is an example of rape culture in practice.
- Dragos Ruiu, operator of the CanSecWest security conference, hands out cards advising attendees to perform a "Slut Check" for wireless access points with poor authentication
- YET ANOTHER Game Developers Conference (GDC) party features sexualized women dancers. This time they are wearing schoolgirl uniforms and the party is sponsored by Microsoft.
- Adam Shostack confronted at RSA 2016 Conference in SF - accused of drugging a woman at ISC2 Security Congress 2014 in Atlanta. This is the third complaint against him as documented at ADAMSHOSTACK.COM and includes hospital records of the woman who had an allergic reaction to something she believes was put in her drink and a video clip of part of the confrontation by her angry boyfriend.
- Lambdaconf incident
- April
- PayPal all-male panel on gender equality
- Alleged sexual harasser and DC comics editor Eddie Berganza is named publicly and described as an "open secret" in the comics industry.
- Serial online harasser and stalker Alex St. John publishes an article in Venturebeat lambasting people who work 40-hour weeks for salary in game development. His daughter publishes a post disavowing him and his many racist and sexist opinions.
- VICE article about harassment of women at security cons
- July
- Nvidia exec "jokes" that a young woman does not know what GPU is.
- August
- (CW: domestic abuse) Startup CEO Gurbaksh Chahal convicted of domestic violence
- October
- Harassment incident involving Babak Nivi, AngelList founder and board member at poolside party - precise details unclear as covered by non-disparagement agreement, but reported on by NY Times here.
- November
- Computer hardware company Razer tweets a sexually-explicit "joke" advertising a product. Razer fans proceed to harass women who voice concerns about the tweet. They later deleted it.
- December
- Prominent Drupal event in Germany intended to give away issues of the German edition of Playboy to all attendees as part of the swag (along with industry-related material). They removed the magazines after complaints and issued an apology. The Drupal Community Working Group subsequently issued a statement on the matter.
- A senior Oculus executive was arrested in Washington State after soliciting sex from a police officer he believed to be a fifteen-year-old sex worker.
2017
- February
- Former Uber engineer Susan J. Fowler publishes a detailed account of the sexual harassment she faced at Uber and the responses she received when reporting it.
- Female exec hired to help Magic Leap appeal to women sues for sex discrimination
- April
- USA government Labor department accuses Google of violating federal employment laws and discriminating against its female employees
- Mozilla worldview discussion includes debate about including people who think trans people aren't real
- Teemu Hukkanen, Fairphone and Debian developer, was publicly accused of aggravated assault of woman on December 31, 2016
- May
- Elizabeth Scott v. UploadVR - UploadVR sued for gender discrimination, hostile work environment, sexual harassment, failure to prevent harassment, negligent hiring, Violation of the California Equal Pay Act, failure to reimburse for necessary business expenditures, intentional infliction of emotional distress and wrongful termination.[15]
- June
- Binary Capital VC Justin Caldbeck takes indefinite leave of absence after being accused by 6 women in the technology industry of harassment.
- Perkins Coie investigation into incidents of problematic behaviour at Uber reveals 215 total incident reports, including sexual harassment, bullying, bias and retaliation
- Emil Michael, Uber's SVP of business resigns after critical Covington and Burling report into culture at Uber, including inquiries into Michael’s trip to an escort bar in South Korea with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and other employees
- Eric Alexander, the president of business for Uber Asia Pacific dismissed after reports he obtained a rape victim's medical records
- Uber board member David Bonderman resigns after sexist remark at meeting addressing sexism
- Dave McClure (founder of 500 Startups) steps away from day-to-day running of firm after reports of harassment
- Chris Sacca (VC, Lowercase Capital) apologises for for helping make tech hostile to women — after being accused of inappropriately touching a female entrepreneur
- July
- After Dave McClure's resignation, allegations of sexual assault emerge, as well as suggestion that at least 12 other women had faced harassment by him.
- Coraline Ada Ehmke came forward with her account of being constructively dismissed from Github
- Lee Jacobs of AngelList on indefinite leave following allegations of sexual assault in 2013 - reported on TechCrunch
- AngelList co-founder Babak Nivi leaves AngelList for undisclosed reasons, report in NY Times detail incident at poolside party in October 2016, covered by non-disparagement agreement.
- 500 Startups venture partner Tristan Pollock placed on administrative leave of absence as sexual assault claim from 2015 reinvestigated, after victim posts about incident on TechCrunch.
- Arch Linux mirror "Loli.forsale" (created by Austin Gillmann) removed after complaint. Gillmann originally requested the name "mirror.cuntflaps.me". Gillmann subsequently posts on loss of "free speech".
- August
- October
- [CW: child sexual abuse] Zain Jaffer, the CEO of the mobile ad startup Vungle, is arrested for sexually abusing his children.
2018
- January
- April
- Richard Stallman weighs-in on whether abortion or childbirth is more traumatic, declaring that software manuals are not a 'safe space' and should allow such jokes.
Footnotes
- ↑ DoNotLink access to the article
- ↑ ToleranUX: Satirical Linux fork mocks calls for open source diversity on ArsTechnica
- ↑ Article on Tech Crunch
- ↑ Presentation abstract on ZeroFox
- ↑ Screen cap of correspondence on Twitter
- ↑ ZeroFox Twitter status
- ↑ Sensationalism – doing more damage than good (opinion essay on I Am Security)
- ↑ link to deleted Twitter status
- ↑ Hacker cons and speech codes on MikeBlog
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