A software developer was fired Thursday after she tweeted a photo of two men, who she said were making number of sexual jokes, according to USA Today.
Adria Richards, developer evangelist for SendGrid, was let go by the company because it did not “support how she reported the conduct," said CEO Jim Franklin in a company blog post, USA Today reported.
While attending the PyCon conference in Santa Clara, California, Richards tweeted a photo of two men who she said were making sexual jokes she deemed distasteful and sexist.
According to its website, “PyCon is the largest annual gathering for the community using and developing the open-source Python programming language.”
This latest incident is one of many, in which quickly sent messages, sent through social media, have been met with strong repercussions. According to USA Today, it's also brought up questions as to whether or not “private conversations in public settings,” can be showed to the world on sites like Facebook and Twitter.
"To be clear, SendGrid supports the right to report inappropriate behavior, whenever and wherever it occurs," Franklin said in the blog post. "Her decision to tweet the comments and photographs of the people who made the comments crossed the line. Publicly shaming the offenders – and bystanders – was not the appropriate way to handle the situation."
According to USA Today, Richards was offended after hearing the man make comments about “dongles” and “forking the repo”. These terms are more commonly used when talking about technology.
Richards tweeted in her blog "Three things came to me: act, speak and confront in the moment," she wrote in her blog. "I decided to do things differently this time and didn't say anything to (the person) directly. I was a guest in the Python community and as such, I wanted to give PyCon the opportunity to address this."
The person who made the comments, and remained nameless. was also fired. He worked for gaming software company PlayHaven.
According to news site Tech Crunch, he issued an apology in a blog post on the Hacker News website. USA Today could not verify if he actually wrote the post.
"I was let go from my job today, which sucks because I have three kids and I really liked that job. (The person who tweeted my photo) gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate," the post read.
CEO of Playware Andy Yang also made comments about situation in a company blog.
"PlayHaven had an employee who was identified as making inappropriate comments at PyCon, and as a company that is dedicated to gender equality and values honorable behavior, we conducted a thorough investigation," Yang said. "The result of this investigation led to the unfortunate outcome of having to let this employee go."
