Lead-up
As early as 9 Apr 2014, community members voiced concerns about including Go Daddy on an allies panel, given the company's history of sexist advertising. In particular, Cate Huston's blog post calling on GHC to tackle the hard problems instead of celebrating companies that manage not to be actively terrible was widely circulated, and was even cited by ABI VP Programs Barb Gee in her opening remarks.
The Anita Borg Institute (the sponsoring organization behind GHC) defended the decision, stating that "after considerable discussion with them we are convinced their senior technical leaders are committed to make change."
Participants
- Opening remarks: Barb Gee, VP of Programs, Anita Borg Institute
- Moderator: Penny Herscher, CEO, FirstRain (@pennyherscher)
- Panelists:
- Alan Eustace, SVP Knowledge & Research, Google (@alan_eustace)
- Tayloe Stansbury, CTO, Intuit (@TayloeStansbury)
- Blake Irving, CEO, Go Daddy (@blakei)
- Mike Schroepfer, CTO, Facebook (@schrep)
Conduct of session
- http://gracehopper.org/2014-schedule/?subject=show_details&_year=2014&sid=2746#2746
- http://gracehopper.org/2014-grace-hopper-celebration-wednesday-livestream/
A self-described "guerilla intervention group" dubbing itself the Union of Concerned Feminists distributed roughly 450 Ally Bingo cards to the audience just before the session took place. These cards condemned the panel as "milquetoast corporate 'feminism'", and urged attendees to "read more about actual feminism in technology", pointing them to this wiki, the Geek Feminism Blog, ModelViewMedia, and The Ada Initiative.
Both attendees and people watching the live stream livetweeted the panel, and critiqued what was being said using the #ghcmanwatch and #ghc14 hashtags.
No Q&A session followed the panel.[1][2][3]
Although other livestreams from the conference were posted online for later viewing, this one was not[4]. However, a copy of the livestream later appeared elsewhere.
- Cate Huston's Storify of the panel and followup blog post
- A. V. Flox's Storify of the panel
Reaction
Follow-up session
Three of the four men from the original panel (@alan_eustace, @blakei, @schrep) attended a follow-up session the next day.
- https://twitter.com/alan_eustace/status/520273699857915905
- https://twitter.com/catallman/status/520281679966273536
- https://twitter.com/concernedfems/status/520325406168481792
- Cate Huston's Storify: #ghcmanwatch mark 2
GHC response
Media coverage
- http://readwrite.com/2014/10/09/technology-sexism-male-allies-grace-hopper-celebration
- http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/10/10/3578499/ghc-male-allies-panel/