Allegation: I arranged accommodation for women to make it easier for them to attend Scala conferences

In our conversations, he also mentioned a few times where he helped other women to attend conferences that they otherwise couldn’t have attended by sharing Airbnbs with them to reduce their travel costs. ⦗...⦘ As a student with limited financial resources, I accepted the tempting offer and felt grateful that, once again, he helped me.

The words appear to suggest that this happened several times; that when it happened I stayed in the accommodation with the women in question; that when we shared accommodation, nobody else stayed with us. Readers could also infer that I paid for the accommodation.

None of this is correct.

Besides the time Y references in her statement, I shared AirBnb accommodation alone with another female Scala developer on just one occasion in 99 conferences I attended between 2008 and 2020. I never paid for any woman’s accommodation, except where she was a speaker or partner of a speaker at my own conference.

Conference Schedule

I have a record of having attended 99 Scala and Functional Programming conferences since 2010, from the start of my career until the COVID-19 Pandemic.

For each event, I have a record of where I stayed; what dates I was there; whether I stayed in a hotel, at an AirBnb (or similar) or with family or friends; and who else shared the accommodation with me. This has been reconstructed from a combination of my phone’s tracking data, AirBnb trip history, hotel booking confirmations, emails with conference organizers and flight bookings.

Across ten years, and 99 conferences at which I was an attendee, there were only two occasions when I shared accommodation alone with another woman who was not my partner. Both occurrences were in 2018, and are shown in green on the diagram above. On both occasions, the other person covered her own costs.

The second of these times was with Y in Berlin, which she references in her publication of 27 April 2021. She was aware of the one previous time, from a conversation we had on 13 May 2018.

At the time I had this conversation, I had stayed only once in accommodation with a female Scala developer (who wasn’t my partner). But not only that, I had told Y this information.

Attendance

The claim Y makes appears to incorrectly conflate two different facts:

1. I tried to encourage conference organisers to pay for accommodation for women to attend Scala conferences, as a way to increase conference attendance by women.

2. I frequently stayed in AirBnbs when attending Scala conferences, and I sometimes shared with other Scala developers.

Yet, at the events (including my own) where I helped a few other female Scala developers with their accommodation, I either did not stay in the same accommodation or stayed with other (male and female) guests present.

Moreover, I never paid for their accommodation, nor did I ever suggest that I deserved any kind of gratitude, because I saw it as the generosity of the conference organizers; not me.

Encouraging Women to Attend Conferences

The Scala community has always been heavily gender-imbalanced: from my observations at conferences, I would make an unscientific estimate that there are between ten and twenty men for every woman in the community.

Many people saw this as a problem, and there have been various attempts to encourage more women to join and remain members of the Scala community. I gave my support to some of these attempts and criticized others when I felt they served a simplistic agenda without empathy for the women involved. This is an ongoing and contentious debate, and I don’t want to address its merits or deficiencies here.

In October 2017, I met a woman at Lamda World who had benefitted from a scheme by 47 Degrees whereby they paid for her accommodation to allow her to attend the conference in Cádiz. She would not have attended otherwise.

Inspired by this idea, I proposed something similar to the organizers of Scala Sphere in early 2018 when they asked me if I could help to encourage more women to attend their conference. My proposal to them was to reallocate their budget from hotels to group AirBnb accommodation, and to have more rooms available for the same cost; then to make these rooms available for free to women in the Scala community. I suggested several women to invite.

At the planning stage, this idea appeared to work well: the conference benefitted from having more female attendees, and I felt the idea was worth proposing to other Scala conferences.

Here is an email I sent to the organizers of LX Scala in Lisbon, explaining the idea:

Email from me to LX Scala organizers proposing shared AirBnb accommodation

I did not get a response to this email. Rightly or wrongly, I took this as a vote against the idea, and I do not recall any other occasion afterwards where I proposed the idea.

Thus, as an idea, it was proposed and applied only once, at Scala Sphere in 2018; proposed but ignored once, for LX Scala the same year; and then effectively abandoned.

However, the one time it was applied coincided with Y’s attendance at that conference, and she was aware of it—and loved the idea. It was for that reason that she wanted to share accommodation at the next conference she attended.

When I organised my own conference, Scala World, which took place in rural England, I encouraged speakers to share group accommodation. I did not separate male and female speakers, but everyone always had a private room. Speakers were encouraged to bring their partners. This created a community spirit which was generally appreciated. In this respect, I organised accommodation for Scala developers, several of whom were women.

Sharing Accommodation

I had many friends in the Scala community, and I was happy to share accommodation with them. On 19 occasions I shared my accommodation with other Scala developers. This does not include the times I stayed with friends or family with no association with Scala, or times I shared with my partner. Out of these 20 occasions, 18 had at least one other male guest, and nine had at least one female guest among the group.

As noted before, there were only two occasions where I stayed alone with one other woman, one of which was the occasion referred to by Y in her statement.

Costs

Except for my own conference, Scala World (where I paid for the accommodation of all my guests) I never paid for the accommodation of anyone I was staying with. I usually had a tight budget for my own travel, and my generosity did not extend to paying for other guests.

Instead, I gladly took advantage of opportunities to share accommodation because a proportion of a shared apartment was usually significantly cheaper than the full cost of staying somewhere alone. On at least one occasion, my accommodation was paid for in its entirety by a friend.

As a student with limited financial resources, I accepted the tempting offer and felt grateful that, once again, he helped me. Y, My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

Y strongly implies that I paid for her by citing her “limited financial resources”, describing my offer as “tempting” and expressing her gratitude for my help.

If you read her words and concluded that I had paid, you were misled. A budget of $600 for Y’s accommodation was agreed with Typelevel on the day she first told me she was attending the conference.

Email showing that Y had a budget for her trip.

Whatever monetary benefit Y had from sharing accommodation with me, I benefitted equally from sharing with her. The costs were split in half between us.

My Request

If you signed the Open Letter in 2021 because you found Y’s publication compelling, please reconsider her words in light of the evidence above.

Her post was hugely damaging to me. The complete absence of due process meant that none of her claims were ever verified with me before they were published.

If, like many others, you feel like justice may not have been rightly served, you can make a meaningful step towards helping me get my life back by removing your name. I am grateful for your consideration.

❧

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