PyCon is the largest annual conference dedicated to the open-source Python programming language; it counts among its sponsors Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Normally, it is exactly as boring and unremarkable as a gathering of twenty-five hundred programming-language enthusiasts sounds. But this year, on March 17th, two employees of PlayHaven, a company that develops tools for video-game marketing, made a couple of jokes while sitting in the tenth row of a “lightning talk.”

One of the jokes was about “big dongles.” It was a dick joke. (Amy Poehler has made a similar joke on national television, at Best Buy’s behest.) The other joke, according to a commenter on Hacker News, who claimed to be one of the two employees, was a remark that “I would fork that guys [sic] repo.” It was, “mr-hank” claimed, a reference to the fact that taking a developer’s code repository and “forking” the code, creating a new development based on the original, is a new form of flattery—in other words, not sexual in nature. Adria Richards, a developer evangelist for SendGrid, was sitting in front of the pair, and overheard their conversation. She could, as she later wrote on her blog, “feel [her] face getting flustered.” Then she took the above picture of the men and tweeted it to thousands of followers, with the hashtag #PyCon. She captioned it, “Not cool. Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and ‘big’ dongles.” PyCon organizers swooped in, talked to the PlayHaven employees, and declared the situation “dealt with” on Twitter.

An Internet firestorm ensued. PlayHaven fired one of the employees, who remains unidentified. (PlayHaven’s C.E.O., Andy Yang, said in a blog post, “We will not comment on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways.” The other employee, Alex Reid, “is still with the company and a valued employee,” said Yang.) The Verge turned up this Pastebin post, promising attacks on SendGrid and its clients until it fired Richards. A denial-of-service attack against SendGrid followed, rendering its site inaccessible to users. SendGrid then announced in a tweet that Richards had “been terminated.” A follow-up blog post explained that while “SendGrid supports the right to report inappropriate behavior,” Richards’s “decision to tweet the comments and photographs of the people who made the comments crossed the line.” All the while, Richards, who is black, has been bombarded by deeply misogynistic and racist vitriol on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere, including threats of rape and murder.

Given the advantages of time, distance, and a rational mind, it is relatively easy to see that basically everybody involved erred (though some far more severely than others). No one emerges unscathed: Richards’ public tweet shaming the pair was disproportionate to the inherent offense in their comments; the pair should not have made an unfunny dick joke—one that has been made too many times already—at a tech conference that emphasizes its diversity and code of conduct; PlayHaven should not have immediately fired the developer for the “inappropriate comments” (even if there were other factors, the timing is poor); vigilantes should not have launched attacks against SendGrid; SendGrid should not have fired Richards (again, if only for timing, not to mention that it sends the message that speaking out is wrong); and most of all, horrible people should not have bombarded Richards with threats of death and rape.

It’s the last aspect that is most problematic: the ugliest manifestation of the simple truth that the technology industry, and the culture around it, has a serious, persistent problem with women. As Amanda Blum, a Portland-based technology consultant, put it in her post about the situation, “[Sexism] runs so deep and so organic to the industry that even men who would see it in other places don’t recognize it in our insulated world.” Courtney Stanton’s account of her own experiences at tech conferences is sobering, as is this timeline of “sexist events in geek communities,” on the Geek Feminism Wiki, even given its obvious patchiness.

There are not enough women working in technology and related fields; this is bad enough. But much of the culture itself is warped, as the harrowingly misogynist response to Richards clearly shows. (Or just consider the “shockingly sexist” launch of the Galaxy S4, the flagship phone of one of the biggest technology companies in the world.) Its effects are seen not only on the Internet, amidst the mostly anonymous hordes, but inside of Silicon Valley’s increasingly insular, I.P.O.-money-lined bubble. The mythos of its own unyielding, progressivist meritocracy is foundational; it cannot tolerate threats to its truth. So employees are quickly fired as press releases are fired off (even as male employees are not often fired for creating that atmosphere in the first place). In geek communities on the Internet, rape threats rain down in forums or on Twitter in response to moments when male privilege within those communities is called out or challenged. Behind that is a real sense of bereavement and victimization. At best, when that sexism is filtered through more benevolent intentions, we get “the forty hottest women in tech.”

A lot has to change. Perhaps we should start with getting rid of the word “dongle.”

Credit: @adriarichards.