{"id":1545,"date":"2013-03-22T14:15:56","date_gmt":"2013-03-22T18:15:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/lianaleahy\/?p=1545"},"modified":"2013-03-22T18:25:58","modified_gmt":"2013-03-22T22:25:58","slug":"bottom-line-we-all-lose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lianaleahy\/2013\/03\/22\/bottom-line-we-all-lose\/","title":{"rendered":"Bottom line, We All Lose"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s an excellent <a href=\"http:\/\/amandablumwords.wordpress.com\/2013\/03\/21\/3\/\"> post by Amanda Blum<\/a> discussing the latest Women in Tech tragedy.  I call it a tragedy because people got hurt and damage could have been avoided every step of the way but instead spiraled out of control.<\/p>\n<p>Standing up about women&#8217;s issues is hard.  Choosing which issues are worthy of fighting the good fight and how best to handle a situation are not always obvious.  It&#8217;s a touchy subject.  Folks are nervous.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes the pendulum has to swing too far in the other direction before things right themselves.  Was her public response an overreaction?  Christie Koehler makes a good point in a recent post <a href=\"http:\/\/subfictional.com\/2013\/03\/22\/bold-ideas-uttered-publicly\/\">Bold IdeasUttered Publicly<\/a>: &#8220;&#8230;as someone not part of the dominant social order you have limited options for calling attention to transgressive behavior.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire post for a thoughtful explanation of what that means, but my take (and from personal experience) is that it&#8217;s really, really hard for a minority to speak up directly.  <\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s be honest, when was the last time you called someone out for bad behavior to their face?<\/p>\n<p>Regardless of whether you side with Adria or with how she handled the incident, all can agree that things definitely got out of hand thereafter.  <\/p>\n<p>Honestly, I feel bad that someone was fired over something that could easily have come out of my own mouth but it&#8217;s the subsequent nerd range and death threats against Adria that make me even more afraid to speak up (about anything) than I was before.<\/p>\n<p>As a dear male colleague said to me, &#8220;Why can&#8217;t we talk openly about these things without it exploding?&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s an excellent post by Amanda Blum discussing the latest Women in Tech tragedy. I call it a tragedy because people got hurt and damage could have been avoided every step of the way but instead spiraled out of control. Standing up about women&#8217;s issues is hard. Choosing which issues are worthy of fighting the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1911,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[114,2850,2403],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-professional","category-ruby-on-rails"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lianaleahy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lianaleahy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lianaleahy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lianaleahy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1911"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lianaleahy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1545"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lianaleahy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1568,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lianaleahy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1545\/revisions\/1568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lianaleahy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lianaleahy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lianaleahy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}