This is a timeline of sexist incidents in geek communities including:
- Technology industry
- Free and open source software
- Gaming
- Comic Book Fandom
- Science Fiction Fandom
- ... and more
See Timeline of geek feminism for the development of geek feminism itself.
(Mary Gardiner explains the reason for this list in Why we document on the Geek Feminism blog.)
1973
- Lena Söderberg's photograph is first used in image processing experiments.
1982
- Custer's Revenge (rape simulation game) released
1988
1989
2000
2001
- Wives of Hackers panel
- LISA hooters girls - see Randal Schwartz
- Stonehenge OSCON parties (first reported incident)
2002
- F.I.R.S.T. Robotics groping incident (Technology industry & education)
- Debian mencal incident: longer developer discussion of usefullness of little tools to support women in menstrual period calculation
2003
2004
- 2004 Debian elections
- Ubuntu Warty visual theme
- March: Debian IRC sexism
- May (and ongoing): Ubuntero gendered name
2005
- January: Lawrence Summers sexist remarks on women in science
- Debian and LinuxChix harassment by MikeeUSA begins
- (approximate date) Go Daddy's advertising begins on television, with an ad featuring Candice Michelle during the Super Bowl airing in 2005
- Hostility to a GIMP bug reporter
2006
- April: Slashdot "OMG Ponies" April Fool's Day joke [1]
- July
- (year unknown, could be 2004 or 2005):Harassment/groping at San Diego Comic Con] (Reported in blog post July 2011) (Comic Book Fandom)
- Catamorphism's Wikipedia RfA (Wikipedia)
- August: Harlan Ellison groping Connie Willis
- September: Telsa Gwynne announces the closure of her diary and her withdrawal from Open Source, due to the unpleasant environment and online harassment among other factors.
- December: Acme::Playmate talk
2007
- January:
- Reiser fans harrassing women at LCA2007
- Slender PMWiki "Female syntax" thread
- March:
- April:
- May:
- August:
- October:
- Puppy Linux death threats and massive resulting fail
2008
- January: Dragonborn Boobs in D&D. Immense internet argument! (Gaming)
- February: An Obstacle for Women in the IT Industry blog post (Technology industry)
- April:
- May: Wiscon troll incident (Science Fiction Fandom)
- July:
- Debian harassment receives press coverage (FLOSS)
- Planet Fedora up-skirting photo (FLOSS)
- RubyFringe offers girlfriend daycare (FLOSS)
- Linux Symposium 2008 closing talk (FLOSS)
- Fat Princess (Gaming)
- November:
- December: Valleywag insults Pownce founder (Technology industry)
2009
- February:
- March:
- April: CouchDB talk (FLOSS)
- May:
- June:
- July:
- EMACS virgins joke (FLOSS)
- DEFCON comic strip incident (Hacker culture)
- This IS your father's Readercon (Science Fiction Fandom)
- Phoronix Foodstruments (FLOSS)
- Stonehenge OSCON parties (again) (FLOSS)
- RealmsFail and resulting Harlan Ellison backlash (Science Fiction Fandom)
- Game Boy Bondage (Gaming))
- EA booth babe bounty (Gaming)
- August:
- Manthology incident (Science Fiction Fandom)
- FSF mini-summit on Women in Free Software announcement and LWN thread (FLOSS)
- SurveyFail (Media Fandom)
- Sony make phones for women (Technology industry)
- September:
- October:
- November:
- December:
- Women underrepresented in Modern Science Writing (Science) [2]
- Brightkite using hot girls as bait (Technology industry) [3] [4]
- CrazyDomains Pamela Anderson advertisement (Technology industry)
2010
- January
- Realms of Fantasy women's issue (SF fandom)
- #ubuntu-women logging proposal
- Russian commentary on Ubuntu Women leadership (FLOSS)
- February
- Casecamp boobies incident (Technical conferences)
- PUSH N900 pole-dancing robots
- No women in horror [5] [6] (Fandom)
- Boagworld incident [7]
- March
- South By Southwest groping & harrassment [8] [9] [10] (Technical conferences)
- Drupal.org gender discussions (FLOSS)
- April
- Sexist "joke" in description of a "menstruation tracking" software package for the N900: Summary of incident (FLOSS)
- NodeOne Drupal card game ad (FLOSS)
- GenCon "Activities for the better half" icon (Roleplaying games)
- May
- It's Time to Tell Mum campaign
- ASCII-Pinup-Girl @sigInt [1]
- August
- Dries Drupalcon keynote reactions (FLOSS)
- Australia Tech Ed Meter Maids (Technical conferences)
- New Zealand Open Source Society Mailing list (FLOSS)
- First Dickwolves comic at Penny Arcade
- Adrianne Curry sexually assaulted at Star Wars Celebration V.
- October
- Penny Arcade announces Dickwolves tshirts; Courtney Stanton announces Dickwolves Survivors Guild tshirts in protest
- November
- December
2011
- January
- In a session at BarCamp San Diego 8, @SDGameGuy (Dan Melchione) demoed a Microsoft Kinect hack in which an volunteer appeared on a simulated green screen in front of an image of a strip club. (Technical conferences)
- Sexual and violent references and images in LCA 2011 Keynote (FLOSS)
- Rape apology on LCA mailing list (FLOSS)
- Dickwolves incident reaches its peak (Gaming)
- February
- March
- May
- June
- Elevatorgate - Incident at World Atheist Convention (Atheism/Skepticism)
- Lady had all support from local group for her event removed after rejecting advances from group leader (FLOSS) - UK
- July
- Why Know Algorithms talk at OSCON (Technical conferences)
- Assault at OSCON (Technical conferences)
- Heartbreak & Heroines Kickstarter campaign (Gaming)
- Male-only Battlefield 3 LAN party (Gaming)
- The beginning of Nymwars via the Google+ name policy debate (Tech industry/Social networking)
- August
- September
- Sqoot posts a blog article that includes a photo of a topless woman : the blog post titled "Sqoot Goes Topless" was about the company's dedication to transparency and featured an image of a topless woman. The photo only showed the area between the womans shoulders and waist. (some time between March and September 2012, it appears that Sqoot has removed the photo).
- CSconsulting posts sexist posters on college campuses
- October
- November
- Image of women spread eagled, holding a gun, with a monitor with the letter "V" covering her genitals featured on blog post by Witold Rugowski , a free-lance Ruby programmer from Poland, about passing current id to model in Ruby on Rails. It was shown on RubyReflector but was taken down soon after. The image was still on Witold's personal blog linked above.
- December
2012
- January
- March
- The announcement for Sqoot's Boston API Jam lists women to fetch you beer amongst the "Great Perks" of attending.
- The founders of Geeklist react badly when a video that associates sexist imagery with their brand is reported to them.
- The VP of Path makes several sexist remarks during a presentation at SXSW.
- Tara Tiger Brown writes a Fake geek girls condemnation for Forbes.
- April
- Melbourne coworking sexism: York Butter Factory, a Melbourne coworking space, makes a sexist tweet.
- Oatmeal comic on female gamers: Oatmeal made a comic implying "a terrible female gamer gets away with way more than a terrible male gamer".
- Mega Startup Bikinis: All-male team at Mega Startup Weekend makes presentation including gratuitous repeated image of women in bikinis. Chris Yeh, a presentation judge, speaks up and then blogs about it.
- Dell says shut up: Dell invites Mads Christensen to MC at a Dell-hosted customer and partner summit in Copenhagen in April. Christensen applauds the lack of women in IT and urges attendees to learn to say "Shut up, bitch!".
- May
- Kleiner Perkins gender discrimination lawsuit: On May 10, 2012, Ellen Pao filed a gender discrimination suit against Kleiner Perkins. In the suit, she alleged that the firm has engaged in systematic discrimination against women by failing to promote them comparably to men, by compensating them less, and by failing to act upon sexual harassment complaints.
- NYT op ed on harassment: The NYTimes published an op ed on the suit that opened with the assertion that "Men invented the Internet." The article also claimed that sexual harassment is rare or nonexistent in Silicon Valley: "You don’t really hear about randiness and mistreatment of women."
- June
- On June 1, 2012, an all female singing group at the European Ruby Conference in Amsterdam were subjected to sexist abuse on Twitter. See blog post
- ASUS shows its backside: On June 4, 2012, computer manufacturer ASUS sent a sexist tweet from the official company twitter account. The tweet, which included a photo of a woman showing off an ASUS computer at a computer expo along with inappropriate comments about the woman's appearance, has since been removed.
- Feminist Frequency Kickstarter backlash
- Microsoft Azure Cloud Song: On June 7, 2012, Microsoft opened NDS 2012 with a song and a dance by female performer featuring lyrics ~approx"Micro and Soft are words that do not apply to my Penis", as well as mentioning names of various street drugs. YouTube video .
- Summercon Burlesque: On June 9, 2012, the SummerCon conference provided, as entertainment, female burlesque dancers. Blog post.
- July
- "Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian" game is created, resulting in continuing Feminist Frequency Kickstarter backlash including harassment of Steph Guthrie who outed the game creator Ben Spurr.
- 0xB16B00B5/BIGBOOBS Constant in Microsoft Hyper-V: a Linux kernel contributor discovers that the constant used to identify a Linux Guest to the Hyper-V host is "0xB16B00B5"
- A Readercon attendee reports René Walling to the RC committee. They decide to ignore their zero tolerance policy and ban the offender for two years, citing the need to educate men in how to not harass women. (They later recanted and enforced the policy.)
- Geek feminist harassment at OSCON: several OSCON attendees report harassment by (self-described) members of the geek feminist community.
- An offensive tweet was made against the PyLadies group at EuroPython 2012. Lynn Root (a keynote speaker and founder of PyLadies) blogged twice about the incident.
- Joe Peacock writes a Fake geek girls condemnation for a CNN blog
- August
- Videogame Borderlands 2 announces its girlfriend mode, an easy mode assumed to be for girlfriends of assumed-male-assumed-het gamers.
- Twitter user MisterE2009 harasses women in comics. Comics Creator Mark Millar responds.
- Dragon*Con bans Backup ribbons
- September
- A woman was sexually assaulted during Notch (of Mojang/Minecraft fame)'s party in Seattle, the same weekend as Penny Arcade Expo (PAX). Venue security staff dismissed her complaint.
- TechEd New Zealand - Groping at "Tech Fest" party.
- Sponsor at the Ohio LinuxFest tries to hand out swag with sexually oriented language.
- October
- An Enforcer (volunteer and peace-keeper) at gaming con PAX publicly discloses that another Enforcer was removed from his role due to sexual harassment and assault of other Enforcers. [11]
- the Libre Office en Español Facebook group posted images to promote their products with implicit reference to sexual contents
- November
- BritRuby 2013 is canceled after being called out on an all-white-male speaker lineup. (Commentary from Lindsey Bieda and Avdi.)
- December
2013
- January
- Heavily sexualized ad for Voco voice control products emailed to CES attendees, along with sexual innuendo in public press release. (Commentary from AdRants here.)
- "Edge" conference criticised for all-male speaker lineup. Rebecca J. Rosen mentioned the conference in a call for men to boycott all-male conference panels.
- Alex Diavatis, writing for WorldOfGnome.org, wrote a post about Fedora 18 that included commentary about how Fedora 18 is easy enough for 'ugly girlfriends' to use without their boyfriends' help. The paragraph was later removed after complaints in the comments. Using girlfriend/mother to mean 'technical layman' is sexist.