That really sucks, and maybe the conference organizers could have been better at coming up with a way to deal with this, but I don't know what a sexual harrassment policy would solve. Sexual harrassment is immoral and depending on the nature punishable by law. Spelling that out would be like spelling out that you'd prefer people not to defecate in the hallways. We need to find solutions, not add organizational scar tissue (see http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/dont_scar_on_the_first_cu...).
While I agree that this problem could have been handled better in absence of a sexual harassment policy, there's a lot to be gained by having such a policy. In this situation I don't agree that conferences having sexual harassment policies are "scar tissue".
First and foremost, the scare tissue complaint largely relies on a policy being applied to an extremely rare event. Unfortunately this kind of thing is almost certainly less rare than you think. If you run a large or frequent enough event, sexual harassment will happen. It really sucks, but it's a reality of the world that we live in that we need to deal with. To make things worse, it probably will go un-reported and the person that it happened to will simply feel uncomfortable with the event and the community as a whole.
By having an explicit policy that addresses sexual harassment you accomplish a number of things:
* You make attendees more mindful of their actions. Often people who commit sexual harassment don't really realized the full extent and consequences for what they are doing. By stating that this type of behavior is unacceptable, upfront, at least some people will be a bit more likely to think before they act.
* Should something happen, the path to action is clear. Running a conference is a bit of a crazy job. You're keeping track of a hundred things at once and dealing with a dozen people's problems. This is not the best state to be in when you need to decide how to handle a delicate situation. By stating upfront how this type of behavior will be handled, it takes a load off of the organizers' shoulders on the day off.
* A strong signal is communicated to people who are concerned and possibly afraid to attend an event. People go through all kinds of horrible things in life. Often those experiences leave people (understandably) cautious about situations that might lead to similar experiences. By having an explicit policy, people with fears and concerns are given a strong signal that the event in question will be a place where they are safe and welcome.
As with anything you need to weigh the costs and benefits of introducing a policy given the context of your situation and as far as I am concerned, having a sexual harassment policy for conferences is an easy win for everybody involved.
I agree with you that there are a few women who are willing to accuse someone else falsely, and/or exploit harassment policies to advance their own agenda. Pretty much every identifiable group in society has individuals like that.
That said, the OP is just calling for there to be some sort of policy in place, so people aren't improvising when a complaint does arise. The policy doesn't have to be 'mandatory kickban on the first complaint'.
I can sympathize with your argument, but your comparison is a strawman, really. We don't have a defecation problem. We do have a harrassment problem.
There'd be no point in creating a code of conduct that explicitly bans defecating in the hallways because it's simply not an everyday problem. How women are treated in tech, however, is.
I'm saying this as a guy who is a strong believer in egalitarianism but highly sceptical of feminism, mind you.
If we had a defecation problem, yes, we should have a binding code of conduct for that. And as soon as the problem is gone, we should re-evaluate it, too.
Spelling that out would be like spelling out that you'd prefer people not to defecate in the hallways.
This is a little different because: (1) it's probably a common occurrence (based on the general incidence of sexual harassment & assault -- I don't know about coding conferences in particular); (2) it's something that is often tolerated -- it doesn't actually go without saying that the conference will think it's their problem or do anything about it; and (3) it's an assault by one of your guests on another of your guests, so it reflects on the experience you provide.
So to go with your analogy, suppose it was common in the industry that a few people at any given conference would try to poop on other people, and the conference organizers wouldn't know what to do about it. Then yeah, unless you were trying to cater only to a small subset of programmers with unusual tastes, it would be pretty important to come up with some sort of explicit policy and plan to deal with conference-poopers. Or coming back to reality, if you run a conference, you do have to make it clear to your guests that you will actively try to stop sexual harassment/assault. Then second of all, you have to follow through.
"Having a policy" just means (1) letting people know that sexual harassment won't be tolerated at your conference; and (2) having a plan you can execute when it happens anyway. It's pretty much steps one and two of "finding solutions."
The difference is that defecating in the hallways isn't a routine practice in our industry, but sexual harassment of the sort she describes is. There's a need for more awareness and action within the community -- and a hands-off "let the law take care of it" attitude ignores that a lot of this happens out of the public eye, and can only be stopped when people close to it take a more public stand against it.
The point is that sexual harassment shouldn't be routine and we shouldn't tolerate it. I sort of understand where the anti-harassment policy folks are coming from, but I vehemently disagree that it's appropriate to codify common decency and respect, especially in technical circles, where we should all know better. We should strive to treat each other with respect regardless of gender, race, or anything else for that matter and where we fail, we should call each other out and work to fix it.
I don't think a policy is just about codifying respect. It's also about putting together a mechanism for handling the inevitable failures. Consider the model policy from the Ada Initiative:
A good chunk of that is about how the working-to-fix part works. I think that's really valuable to have thought through in advance. I have banned people before (never for this, thank goodness) and in the moment it's incredibly hard to avoid over- or under-reacting if you have to think everything through from first principles.
Yeah, I get that--in crisis mode, a playbook is almost required to make sure you make no missteps as someone in charge. This is pivotal in, say, security incident response, or a corporate setting where there are all kinds of legal issues, but at a conference, which is mostly among friends, I don't know. Maybe if you can appropriately genericize the policy, but most of the policies I've seen have almost unilaterally been specifically tailored to protect women (which is great, for me--but maybe not for others who are being singled out). Or they'll talk about "feeling safe."
But, you know, when that guy walked up to me when I was talking to my (male) colleagues and specifically singled me out to ask that I allow him to photograph my "tits" as part of a conference "scavenger hunt," I told him off. Then he came back, and I told him off again. I never felt "unsafe," just angry and humiliated. If you're looking at "reporting someone if you feel fear," then it's likely that poor guy had a high possibility of being the one reporting it had he come back a third time.
tl;dr: Most of these policies make women and minorities out to be victims vs. ensuring that people just treat each other with common decency and respect. Not a fan of singling any of us out and I don't think it's productive.
