I'll repeat myself to ease your fear of the rabid hordes of malignant women who want to make your life miserable: "they can make clear what will happen if they get a complaint about you."

Of course what will happen from a complaint should take malignancy in consideration and offer at least some kind of right to respond to offenders.

>I'll repeat myself to ease your fear of the rabid hordes of malignant women who want to make your life miserable: "they can make clear what will happen if they get a complaint about you."

Can be paraphrased to apply to "rabid hordes of adulterous men who want to make your life miserable". Better ?

I'm just pointing out that for people discussing how to best setup procedures for handling deviant behaviour, you sure assume only perfectly honest people would come to use said procedures. If you assume p% of possible culpability for the accused, shouldn't you assume the same for the accuser ? Otherwise, you are just discriminating against the accused.

This is a hard problem society as large has not solved yet - witness both the huge cost of false negatives (unreported offenses) and false positives (false accusations). I'm just skeptical a conference organiser will correctly solve this between two round of emails.

Oh sure, he can publish a boilerplate "we take all complaints very seriously" policy. I predict we'll see them appear at most tech conferences shortly.

Of course it's a hard problem. (And I've never assumed perfect honesty on either part. It seems you just read what you wanted to read to make your point.)

What I'm claiming is that policies ARE needed, the current "hmm, what should I do now?" policy is the worst policy of them all, because improvised decisions aren't usually the best ones.

Such a policy can any policy, from "yes, we believe all women, be them malignant or not, and we'll ban you on the first offense" up to "I don't care what you people do outside of the venue, you should call the cops (here's the number) if you have a problem." It's important to know where the organizer stands to take your pick. There might even be a niche for "female-friendly conferences" that will by definition have harsher policies on the issue.