It was the tweet that launched a thousand trolls. When Adria Richards tweeted out a picture of two men she overheard making sexual jokes behind her during open-source conference PyCon, the internet erupted.

Much has already been discussed about the “Donglegate” incident, from how everyone lost (both were fired) and what Richards should have done instead, to the very dangers of asking what could have been done differently at all. The resulting brouhaha is the kind of zeitgeisty moment that only happens when inflammatory topics combine: sexism in tech, social shaming, and the potential of social media to generate intense and unwanted publicity.

Rather than attempting to discern whether Richards was in the right or the wrong, I’ve been thinking about why the issue blew up and what it reveals. Because it’s far from the first time this kind of thing has happened. The Richards incident and resulting backlash not only reveals the lack of diversity and presence of misogyny in tech culture, but the myth of meritocracy and the growing belief in “misandry” online.

[#contributor: /contributors/593308492a990b06268ad084]|||An Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, Alice Marwick's current projects include a study of sexism and misogynistic speech online conducted with the Center for Law and Information Policy at Fordham Law School. Her first book, *Status Update: How Social Media Changes Celebrity, Popularity, and Publicity*, will be published in October by Yale Press.|||

Regardless of the nuances of the incident, the fact remains that Richards faced a gargantuan backlash that included death threats, rape threats, a flood of racist and sexually violent speech, a DDOS attack on her employer – and a photoshopped picture of a naked, bound, decapitated woman. The use of mob justice to punish women who advocate feminist ideals is nothing new, but why does this happen so regularly when women criticize the tech industry? Just stating that the tech industry has a sexism problem – something that’s supported by reams of scholarly evidence – riles up the trolls.

One reason for this is the growing popularity of “Men’s Rights Activism” (MRA) – groups of men who refer to feminism as “misandry” and advocate vociferously that men face more discrimination than women. Its popularity is growing and is especially active online on sites such as Hacker News and Reddit, where much of the public controversy around Donglegate has played out in the comments. Even sites like GitHub, where the PyCon conference code of conduct was posted, are not immune.

MRAs and feminists have completely different, often contradictory, worldviews. “Lewis’s Law” (coined by journalist Helen Lewis) holds that “the comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.” So when we read such comments, we see lots of people arguing but not really engaging. They’re like two ships passing in the night, talking past each other: While feminists believe it’s important to call out people for sexist remarks to address structural gender inequality, another group believes calling out sexist remarks is just another example of women exaggerating harm, censoring reasonable behavior, demanding “special rights” beyond what men have.

Like feminist activists, anti-misandrists have blogs and forums where they share news and strategies for combating what they see as anti-male behavior, from beliefs about misandry being culturally pervasive in education to ignored stats about male rape. Sociological research tells us that when people with likeminded beliefs congregate together, they collectively move to a more extreme position. MRA ideologies therefore become not only visible, but frequent; normalized for people exposed to them; and disseminated beyond specialty forums into broader internet – and tech conference – culture.

>When people with likeminded beliefs congregate together, they collectively move to a more extreme position.

Men’s Rights Activism sort of makes sense in a culture where masculinity places just as many limitations on men as femininity does on women. While women have hundreds of years of gender criticism to draw from when dealing with compulsory femininity, men don’t. There are few spaces where men can talk about the impact that gender stereotypes have on their lives.

However, just because these points of view are equally visible both online and offline doesn’t mean they're equally valid. Factual evidence simply does not support the idea that men are being oppressed and that women have the upper hand socially, legally, or economically.

Yet the myth of equality persists, since the technology industry considers itself a meritocracy where the “good” ones – for example, talented engineers and programmers – will rise to the top regardless of nationality, background, race, or gender. When considering the dismal numbers of women (as well as African-American and Latino men) in tech, the meritocratic presumption is that these minorities aren’t good at or interested in technology; otherwise, there would be more of them.

If we admit there are structural barriers to entry, and a culture that actively discourages women and men of color from participating, then it logically follows that technology is *not *a meritocracy. And this threatens many dearly held beliefs of technology workers: It suggests those at the top aren’t there because they’re the best, but because of hard work and privilege. It suggests that the enormous wealth generated by tech startups and founders isn’t justified by their superior intelligence. It requires change from a culture in which male normativity is, well, the norm – to a more inclusive one where penis jokes and booth babes are no longer acceptable (and the mere suggestion to discard them isn’t met with a hailstorm of protest).

In short, it requires geeks to re-examine their own revenge fantasies of being outsiders who now rule the world and admit that they might, themselves, be actively excluding others.

>Masculinity places just as many limitations on men as femininity does on women.

This is why seemingly tiny, individual acts of sexism – like innocent dongle jokes – matter. Such “microaggressions” combine to reinforce structural* *sexism. MRAs and garden-variety geeks expressing similar attitudes may not be radical activists ... but they’re radical defenders of the status quo.

In such a context, what happened to Richards has very little to do with the impact of her tweet and much more to do with deterring future women from speaking out. This is even more relevant given the amplifying power of social media and public shaming. Just look at the recent incidents involving popular Reddit troll Violentacrez (outed by Gawker); teenagers who used racial epithets when referring to the re-election of President Obama (named and publicized by Jezebel); and inflammatory Hurricane Sandy tweeter @comfortablysmug (unmasked by Buzzfeed).

Yet while all of these cases involved some sort of doxxing, they didn’t result in the same sort of laser-focused hate speech directed at Richards. It seems that’s reserved specifically for women who call out sexism. The misguided focus on whether or not Richards was in the right ignores the bigger picture, which reveals a well-documented pattern of women in technology being shamed, doxxed, threatened, and harassed when they speak out publicly against sexism.

Sadly, what happened to Adria Richards tells women they’re only welcome in technology if they keep their mouths shut. There’s a big gap between geeks and programmers, and MRA-influenced trolls, but this incident demonstrates what happens when these communities overlap. Just as MRAs vehemently protest the mere suggestion that men are responsible for social ills, technologists need to make it very clear that blaming women for sexism is not acceptable.

Editor: Sonal Chokshi @smc90