Women in Technology

WITchat Community Code of Conduct

“Women in Tech” in this document refers to the Women in Technology chat group at womenintech.slack.com. “The administrators” refers to the administrators on this organization, a list is available at the top of the Team Directory (must be a member of the organization to view).

Women in Tech is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.

This code of conduct applies to all Women in Tech spaces, including public channels, private channels and direct messages, both online and off. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the administrators.

Some Women in Tech spaces may have additional rules in place, which will be made clearly available to participants. Participants are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules.

If you’re a recruiter, please see below this section for some additional requests of you.

Harassment includes:

• Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion
• Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment.
• Deliberate misgendering or use of “dead” or rejected names
• Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behaviour in spaces where they’re not appropriate
• Physical contact and simulated physical contact (eg, textual descriptions like “hug” or “backrub”) without consent or after a request to stop.
• Threats of violence
• Incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm
• Deliberate intimidation
• Stalking or following
• Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes
• Sustained disruption of discussion
• Unwelcome sexual attention
• Pattern of inappropriate social contact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others
• Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease
• Deliberate “outing” of any aspect of a person’s identity without their consent except as necessary to protect vulnerable people from intentional abuse
• Publication of non-harassing private communication

Women in Tech prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. The administrators will not act on complaints regarding:

• “Reverse”-isms, including “reverse racism,” “reverse sexism,” and “cisphobia”
• Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you.”
• Communicating in a “tone” you don’t find congenial
• Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions

Reporting

If you are being harassed by a member of Women in Tech, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact the admins by sending a message with the /admin command. Just /admin Hey, I have an issue I'd love to discuss is enough!

This code of conduct applies to Women in Tech spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of Women in Tech outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by Women in Tech members, especially the administrators, seriously. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. The abuse team reserves the right to exclude people from Women in Tech based on their past behavior, including behavior outside Women in Tech spaces and behavior towards people who are not in Women in Tech.

In order to protect volunteer admins from abuse and burnout, we reserve the right to reject any report we believe to have been made in bad faith. Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may be deleted without response.

We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse. At our discretion, we may publicly name a person about whom we’ve received harassment complaints, or privately warn third parties about them, if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of Women in Tech members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.

Consequences

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the administrators may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all Women in Tech spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other Women in Tech members or the general public.

Pitches

If you’re coming here only to make a sales pitch, please don’t.

However, we’d love to know what our members are up to. Join in. Get to know us. It’d be amazing if you actually participated in the community as a person. Generally people are much more receptive to other folks who participate in their space than outsiders trying merely to get attention.

Keep it topical. We have channels for a lot of things. Trying to get the attention of several thousand people at once by posting in #main is unkind and out of proportion. Go find the place where people who are actually going to be interested are, and talk to them. If you can’t find such a place, this may not be the community for you.