Can you cite any examples of people who have been silenced or shamed by a conference harrassment code?
At a professional conference, it should not be that hard to control your behavior. Just pretend your grandparents are with you. Adults routinely modulate their behavior based on the setting and it really is not a burden.
You can come up with all kinds of theoretical scenarios where you're a conference martyr. But I would really like to hear some specific, shocking examples of this happening to anyone. Because I've heard a lot of specific, shocking examples of women being verbally and physically harrassed.
It might be useful to remember how the conference organizers handled that incident:
> Both parties were met with, in private. The comments that were made were in poor taste, and individuals involved agreed, apologized and no further actions were taken by the staff of PyCon 2013. No individuals were removed from the conference, no sanctions were levied.
But let's grant for argument's sake that this was an example of public shaming that cries out to the very heavens for justice. What are some others? Just to balance out the huge number of reported harassment incidents from tech conferences, and the bigger number that must go unreported.
The harassment numbers are not really huge. Feminists try to maintain a list and I think it clearly shows that incidents are rare - and half the items on the list are even cases I personally wouldn't count. But even if you count them all, given the huge amount of IT events, it is a very short list.
I think at the last Chaos Computing Congress there were a huge number of incidents and feminist campaigners threatening people with self-made "red cards". Just to mention one example that might be easily googleable.
My argument is that the kind of thing you're concerned about basically never happens, while harrassment at tech conferences happens all the time.
That's an assertion of fact, which you can disprove by giving examples. Maybe I'm wrong and all kinds of men are being kept from conferences, and shamed into silence, by harrassment codes. Tell me their stories!
There are enough examples of men being ruined by female accusations. Most recent I remember from HN is the GitHub founder being fired. Then there was the guy who reverted the gendering comments on some open source project (was it NodeJS?) and received a shit storm. Another one I remember is the Ruby conference where an employee flirted with her boss at a restaurant (letting her colleagues drink from her navel) and then called rape when he ended up slow-dancing with her. Adria Richards is also a good example - why wasn't she expelled from the conference, what good is a policy if it isn't being enforced?
Your question is of course also absurd because you ask for examples of the absence of something. It doesn't create much publicy if somebody decides to skip a conference. I personally would think twice about going to a conference with such policies because I consider them insulting.
Another victim could be women - if the safe way to attend a conference is not to talk to women. I remember a post on HN by a woman who has long been a coder/hacker and got along very well with the male coders. But recently she noticed that they don't dare to invite her (or was it just the newcomer women whom they didn't know so well yet) to parties and after show events anymore for fear of unwarranted accusations.
I'm not concerned about how often it happens. I'm concerned about the potential for it to happen. The Richard's example shows that potential. Your insistence on more examples as some metric of proof is none of my concern.
You're worried about the potential of a code of conduct being used abusively. Meanwhile, they exist because of the real, not theoretical, abuse encountered at some events.
> I could name a hundred and you still wouldn't be happy. Why bother.
I could support what I'm saying, but that's too hard. The reality is there aren't many examples of someone being unjustly sanctioned by a code of conduct.
At a professional conference, it should not be that hard to control your behavior. Just pretend your grandparents are with you. Adults routinely modulate their behavior based on the setting and it really is not a burden.
You can come up with all kinds of theoretical scenarios where you're a conference martyr. But I would really like to hear some specific, shocking examples of this happening to anyone. Because I've heard a lot of specific, shocking examples of women being verbally and physically harrassed.