This whole incident is sad. It's incredibly sad for Julie, for everyone at GitHub, for the founders, and for the alleged "crazy" founder wife who was banned from a company she probably sacrificed a lot for
> I'm surprised nobody sees sexism in the way that the wife has been stigmatized.
Y'know, I hope I'm wrong, but there's a good chance you're surprised because you don't know what sexism is. An awful lot of men seem to have this notion that "sexism" means "something happened to a woman that she didn't like." It doesn't. Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on a person's sex or gender, if you'll forgive me quoting Wikipedia. Calling out a woman for doing something shitty is not sexist. Saying "well, what can you expect from a woman" would be.
I think that the wife's actions would have been even less acceptable if she were male. The stigma is caused by the repeated unprofessional actions she did, and made worse by the fact that she was not even an employee.
No one cares what her gender is. She doesn't work for GitHub, yet she believed that she had hiring and firing power at GitHub and had the ability to read private chat logs. That is wrong, and she doesn't belong near the company anymore. It would be the same if she were male.
I don't see the sexism here. If you changed her sex to male, people would be just as negative on him/her. A spouse who is not an employee, swinging their proverbial dick around (no pun intended), meddling with the company's employees, and harassing them?
I think people would hate the spouse just the same if it were a man, so I disagree with you on this.
I think the stigma is based on alleged bad behaviour. As this behaviour has nothing to do with gender I don't think it's accurate to say this is sexism. I could be wrong.
One way or another, an employee has to be part of the workplace - it's their job. An non-employee doesn't have to be there, so access to the workplace is a privilege (and one that not all employers permit). When a non-employee misuses that privilege (e.g. by getting the the way of employees doing their work), it can and should be revoked.
Moreover, making mistakes in the context of misusing a privilege can and should carry greater stigma than making those same mistakes in some other contexts.
The situation would be equally bad if it were a male founder's gay lover or husband.
Nothing to do with sexism, everything to do with a person making decisions for the company who is (1) personally close to an executive and (2) without a formal role at the company.
Thanks for the credits :) I'm indeed the person who figured out what GH was working on based on Twitter's notifications letting me know that a bunch of my GitHub friends suddenly followed the atom.io twitter account. From there it was easy to link things together.
Its all about prioritizing. As much as the TSA may be a now, 30 minute inconvenience, there are so many more serious problems to solve. IMO it would be irresponsible of a candidate to position their political platform around improving the TSA which affects the avg american probably once or twice a year at most.
Meanwhile you have a struggling economy, attempts to ban scientific progress, shutting down the internet, inequality for minorities, the list goes on
