Adria Richards and Donglegate - Right or Wrong?

Article here. Excerpt:

'Whilst at PyCon, a conference for developers, Adria Richards was seated ten rows back from the stage. A row behind her, two men were having a conversation where they referenced "forking repos" and "big dongles". Adria overheard and decided she did not like what she heard, since conversations of an offensive nature are not allowed in PyCon's guidelines. She decided to tweet to her 10,000+ twitter followers in the industry, instead of speaking to them directly as suggested in the guidelines. The events that followed would lead to both parties getting fired.

Following this tweet, she contacted PyCon publicly via twitter and both men were taken away and reprimanded. Adria then decided that she should write an article on her popular blog about it. In this blog she implied what the men had said was sexist and preventative of women entering the tech industry. She also said that she had been a hero as well as later tweeting she felt like Joan of Ark. She described the men as "ass clowns" and their comments as being something out of Lord of the Flies.

As a result of this, one of the men was fired from his job. Understandably perhaps, many people in the community did not agree with this decision and the story began to go viral. Her twitter was inundated and then it took a far more sinister tone, with misogynist men tweeting threats of rape and even a picture of a decapitated female corpse accompanied by "your next". Adria's company began to lose clients, its reputation and its brand equity. Adria was subsequently fired from her role. There has been much division in the media on who was right and who was wrong here, who overreacted and who did not. I aim to examine the facts in this article and try and determine the answers to these questions.'