A math teacher who’s been at SF’s top public high school for 20 years went on leave after giving students quizzes that demeaned girls and “fat kids.” Some parents are also unhappy that he posted "Grades vs. Dignity" videos on YouTube of students dancing in exchange for extra credit.

As the Chronicle reports, Tom Chan, a math teacher at San Francisco’s top-rated Lowell High School, went on indefinite leave Monday after it was discovered he was giving students quizzes with questions about “dating girls” based on their “sexy points” as well as their weight and punting a “fat kid” into the air.

According to some former students on Reddit and a parent who spoke to the Chronicle, Chan’s been assigning these types of quizzes to students since he first started teaching at Lowell more than 20 years ago.

Lowell Principal Jan Bautista sent out a message to families Monday evening announcing Chan “needed to go on leave,” and his return date was uncertain. The Chronicle reports that district officials wouldn’t confirm whether Chan went on leave of his own accord or by force.

Parents spoke to the Chronicle anonymously due to fear of retaliation from the school. One parent, who said the quizzes promoted fat-shaming and perpetuated stereotypes that girls aren’t good at math, expressed shock that they weren't brought to Lowell administrators' attention sooner.

“It’s pretty shocking,” they said. “The fact that nobody has brought this up to the school and he’s been there a really long time.”

The parent also conveyed discomfort over YouTube videos Chan posted, titled,  “Grades vs. Dignity,” in which students earned extra credit by performing a dance routine in front of other students, which came across as a bit exploitative in such a high-pressure environment as Lowell.

“They’re buying grades from him by humiliating themselves,” the parent told the Chronicle. “The kids look like they’re laughing and stuff, but I’m not sure all of them are into it.”

The parent said their kid liked Chan well enough and the students brushed his humor off as being “bad dad jokes,” which the students interpreted as Chan’s way of making math more fun (to everyone but girls and “fat kids,” apparently).

“We take these concerns seriously and are actively investigating,” said district spokesperson Laura Dudnick, per the Chronicle. “While we cannot share details because this is a personnel matter, we can share that once an issue is brought to our attention, we investigate every report and take appropriate corrective action if required.”

Dudnick said students and families can report any issues or concerns through the school district’s anonymous reporting system, but the parent who spoke to the Chronicle was skeptical their voices will be heard by administrators, and said that the kids in Chan's classes are owed an apology.

Image: Blackjack48/Wikimedia

A startup star who wrote in his memoir that “Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak” is Apple’s new ad executive, and Bay Area women who work at Apple would like a word.

UPDATE 5/13: The startup star “is no longer with Apple,” according to The Verge, though it is unclear whether Antonio García Martínez jumped or was pushed. A company spokesperson merely told The Verge, “At Apple, we have always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace where everyone is respected and accepted. Behavior that demeans or discriminates against people for who they are has no place here.”

ORIGINAL STORY: The tech industry press had generally glowing remarks on Monday when Apple hired Facebook alum Antonio García Martínez to the Apple Store ad team. “It's the latest sign of the company's growing advertising ambitions,“ said Business Insider. The similarly named Apple Insider similarly observed it was “a sign that the Cupertino tech giant is expanding its own advertising ambitions.”

The reception has been far chillier inside the spaceship doughnut campus known as Apple Park. The Verge has obtained a copy of an internal petition from Apple employees decrying Martínez’ hiring. “We are deeply concerned about the recent hiring of Antonio García Martínez,” the letter says. “We demand an investigation into how his published views on women and people of color were missed or ignored, along with a clear plan of action to prevent this from happening again.”

Most of the concerns are quotes from Martínez’ 2016 book Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley, and one stands out. “Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit,” he wrote. “They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.”

Well, there was an epidemic plague, and it turned out the billionaires were the useless ones.

Of his time at Facebook, he writes: “There were few women one would call conventionally attractive at Facebook. The few there were rarely if ever dressed for work with their femininity on display in the form of dresses and heels. A fully turned out member of the deuxième sexe in a conference room was as clear an angel of death as a short-barreled .38 Special revolver. Gokul gave an awkward smile, and bolted out the door the moment I sat down. I looked across the table. If her look was supposed to disarm me, she needed either more cleavage or more charm.”

Neither Apple nor Martínez has commented on the petition.

Normally, this fellow’s views on privacy would be the source of any debate on his being hired, and it seems likely Martínez was specifically recruited as part of Apple’s privacy war with Facebook. Maybe Apple even hired him as a troll move to provoke Facebook. But the risk of making a troll move is you could end up trolling yourself, and this likely just the beginning of an ugly chapter for Apple.

Related: Lady Gaga Gives Private Concert For Apple Employees, Tells Off Haters In Audience [SFist]

Image: Arne Müseler via Wikimedia Commons

• Marin County — like San Francisco — has opted to push back certain reopenings amid spikes in COVID-19 cases. [NBC Bay Area]
• But Muir Woods is still expected to reopen tomorrow to nature seekers who reserve their spots at GoMuirWoods.com. [KTVU]
• With multiple small bushfires continuing to burn in the Bay Area this weekend — many of which are worsened by drier-than-average conditions and strong winds — firefighters and safety officials worry it could be an ominous sign of the wildfire season to come; a "Red Flag" warning has also been issued for tonight. [KPIX]
• Bay Area locals, particularly in the East Bay, continue to fret about growing illegal firework activity. [KRON4]
• One person was killed and another four were injured in a spate of shootings across Oakland late Saturday night and early Sunday morning. [East Bay Times]
• While you're watching today's episodes of queer solidarity and gay celebration, macerate on some Pride-centric snacks. [Eater SF]

Image: San Jose Public Library via Flickr

Ex-Googlers can do more than just found a Bodega startup that the internet loves to hate. Some ex-Googlers might force the search giant to cough up back pay and a hefty slice of its profits to thousands of female employees at the company who may have been underpaid or underpromoted. Three women who left Google/Alphabet because they claim they were “segregrated” into lower-paying career tracks have filed a lawsuit against Google that intends to become a class action, according to the Associated Press. The suit sets to prove that Google pays and promotes women less than their male counterparts, according to the plaintiffs, former senior manager Holly Pease, sales executive Kelli Wasuri, and software engineer Kelly Ellis, who has tweeted on the matter.

The suit comes against the backdrop of U.S. Department of Labor lawsuit against Google for “systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce,” and of course the comically sexist saga of fired brogrammer James Damore, who continues to make himself look less intelligent by the day. (Honestly, the replies to this tweet are true comedy magnificence).

Accusing Google of “assigning and keeping female employees in lower compensation levels than male employees with similar skills, experience, and duties,” the suit could force Google/Alphabet to pay out big bucks to those more than 21,000 current and former female employees. Wired notes that should the suit turn class action (which it has not yet), the pool of potential plaintiffs would expand to “all women who have worked at Google since 2013.”

The Guardian acquired a copy of the lawsuit, which accuses Google of “assigning and keeping female employees in lower compensation levels than male employees with similar skills, experience, and duties.” James Finberg, the attorney who filed the suit, claims he’s been contacted by more than 90 women who currently or formerly worked at Google.

ABC 7 has the full text of Google’s statement responding to the matter. “We work really hard to create a great workplace for everyone, and to give everyone the chance to thrive here,” the statement insists. “In relation to this particular lawsuit, we'll review it in detail, but we disagree with the central allegations. Job levels and promotions are determined by rigorous hiring and promotion committees and must pass multiple levels of review, including checks to make sure there is no gender bias in these decisions.”

Earlier this month, the New York Times acquired a spreadsheet of Google salaries and bonuses that shows a pretty clear pattern of women being paid less at every salary level in the company.

But class actions like this have, so far, not been easy to establish, let alone win. A lawsuit brought by recently deceased Walmart employee Betty Dukes that alleged gender bias in wages and promotions across the company and sought to establish a class of 1.6 million female employees was shot down by the Supreme Court in 2011, with the justices unanimously deciding that the class was too large and diverse in its circumstances to be certified.

Attorney Anita Hill recently penned an op-ed, however, encouraging women in Silicon Valley to take a cue from women on Wall Street in the 1990s, specifically the "Boom Boom Room" case of 1996 in which 2,000 women ended up joining a class action and winning a $150 million settlement from Smith Barney over the sexist culture there. "It’s time women in tech consider taking advantage of the law to disrupt the industry once and for all," Hill wrote.

Related: 60% Of Women In Tech Are Sexually Harassed (And More Numbers To Make You Throw Up)

Two-starred Michelin chef Dominique Crenn has a few words on social media this week for the San Pellegrino 2018 Young Chef competition, which just announced its juries in 21 regions around the globe. Crenn, who last year was named "World's Best Female Chef" by this same organization — which also puts out the renowned and often maligned World's 50 Best Restaurants list — said at the time that she hoped "that award won’t exist in two years," but she nonetheless accepted the honor. Now as they set out to judge a couple hundred of the globe's top young chef talent, she wonders aloud how the male-dominated food world is ever going to achieve any equality when male jurors for a competition like this far outnumber the female ones. "I thought we all got the memo that women are 50 percent of the population," she writes on Instagram. "Oh wait. 54 percent."

Crenn seized on the fact, as seen in the post below, that as San Pellegrino was announcing its chef jurors one region at a time, there were nine regions in which zero jurors pictured are female. "Your leadership skills are disappointing, you are not inspiring and I hope you learn from this, and show up for all of us. Please evolve and do the right thing," she writes.

I thought we all got the memo that women are 50 percent of the population. Oh wait..54 percent..👊 I guess @sanpellegrino_official @sanpellegrino_us ...YOU DIDN'T.. your leadership skills are disappointing, You are not inspiring and I hope you learn from this, and show up for all of us. Please evolve and do the right thing. "we are In 9 countries not one female representative, truly shocking considering we are 50 percent of the population shame on you @SanPellegrino" If you agree please #regram this post !!!!!

A post shared by Dominique Crenn (@dominiquecrenn) on Sep 5, 2017 at 3:44pm PDT

As Eater notes, looking at the full list of jurors on the San Pellegrino site, there are indeed women on a number of the regional juries, including Ana Ros representing Eastern Europe, and Daniela Soto-Innes and April Bloomfield representing the US. But Crenn makes a good point that out of 21 regions, it seems strange that no qualified female jurors could be found in nine of them — and where there are women included, they are outnumbered by men by three-to-one, four-to-one, or five-to-one ratios.

This of course isn't the first time that Crenn has had to publicly question the unequal treatment of women in the food world. At a San Pellegrino-sponsored panel in Sydney in April — on which she was the only woman — Crenn spoke out angrily after an audience member asked her if she felt like she had missed out on "the very important role of being a mother to children" by becoming a star chef — not realizing that in fact Crenn is a mother to twin girls. She said "we need to change the conversation around this," and went on to tell the male questioner, "If you have kids, I hope you stay home with them, so that your wife can go out and be a bad ass woman."

It remains the case that many women do choose family over career in the food world, as they do in many professions, and that male-dominated, militaristic high-end kitchens tend to be hostile places for women in which to rise up the ranks, though some do.

But how does that ever change when the award-making apparatuses, like San Pellegrino's chef competitions, stack the decks against women in their own jury selection?

"Please evovle," indeed.

Related: New York Times Profile Of Dominique Crenn Is Inherently Sexist, But Glowing

It's tough out there for a Jewish CEO whose online empire has become a potent messaging and organizing tool for neo-Nazis and anti-semites. While the spread of online hate is not unique to just Facebook — YouTube, Twitter, and GoDaddy are wrestling with similar issues — the outbreak of Nazi groups on Facebook is promoting a new batch of Charlottesville-inspired hate rallies here in the Bay Area and nationwide. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg responded Wednesday with a preachy post declaring, “With the potential for more rallies, we're watching the situation closely and will take down threats of physical harm.” But that post is accompanied by a Business Insider piece reporting that Facebook had its own internal hate speech problem, with a now-shuttered anonymous company message board that, according to The Verge, “sometimes deteriorated into racist and sexist statements.”

Was Zuckerberg's feel-good pronouncement a PR move in response to the revelation about the message board? The savvy CEO may have been tipped off that the Business Insider article was coming, but it went up almost a full day after Zuck's post.

The above image is a protest poster that appeared on the Menlo Park campus after Facebook shut down a Slack-like internal company message board called FB Anon. The internal chat group was intended as a forum for employees to “freely share concerns and opinions about the workplace” without using their real names. Oh, Facebook employees didn’t have to use real names?

The discussion in that forum reportedly got ugly during the Black Lives Matter unrest of early 2016, the same period when Facebook was in hot water because employees were crossing out the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ on a company whiteboard. The November election of Donald Trump apparently emboldened the rage within that forum, particularly posts expressing the sentiment that women can’t code.

Facebook shut down the internal messaging group in December 2016, and news of its existence is just surfacing now. Facebook’s ‘head of people’ (yes, that is the actual job title) Lori Goler told Business Insider, “The FB Anon internal Facebook group violated our Terms of Service, which require people who use Facebook (including our employees) to use an authentic identity on our platform. Last year we disabled any anonymous internal groups or pages within Facebook, and reminded our people of the places at our company where they can have discussions about issues that matter to them, openly or confidentially as appropriate.”

This may or may not have led to Zuckerberg’s personal hate speech proclamation. The post is mostly typically bland Zuckspeak that details no concrete action, but does get somewhat personal.

“As a Jew, it's something I've wondered much of my life. It's a disgrace that we still need to say that neo-Nazis and white supremacists are wrong — as if this is somehow not obvious,” he wrote. “There's too much polarization in our culture, and we can do something about that. There's not enough balance, nuance, and depth in our public discourse, and I believe we can do something about that.”

You will notice absolutely no new policy articulated in Zuckerberg’s post, just the inference of some kind of crackdown. But given past Facebook crackdowns, I would not have a Wow reaction if most of the content removed over this was just breastfeeding pictures and exposed nipple shots.

Related: Conservative Street Artist Sabo Has Facebook Page Taken Down, Blames Anti-Zuckerberg Posters

Here we see James Damore, who had himself a sad little two-person protest at Google’s Mountain View headquarters Thursday afternoon. (Mr. “Fired for Truth,” of course, fudged the truth on his resume.) But yesterday was a whirlwind day in the Damore uproar, as the story of his viral anti-diversity screed that got him fired has gone from butthurt manbaby curiosity into a disturbing online bullying campaign of harassment against Google employees. Google had planned an all-company ‘town hall’ meeting yesterday to soothe concerns over the matter, but there was no soothing. Recode reports that CEO Sundar Pichai canceled the meeting as employees were being harassed and doxxed.

Googlers (Alphabetters?) were able to submit their town hall questions in advance via an internal system called Dory, but when staff’s names and questions started leaking to right-wing hate sites, Pichai called the meeting off less than an hour before it was supposed to begin. Wired obtained Pichai’s cancellation email, which is seen above. “TL;DR Sorry for the late notice but we are going to cancel today’s Town Hall,” the CEO wrote. “Our Dory questions appeared externally this afternoon, and on some websites Googlers are now being named personally. Googlers are writing in, concerned about their safety and worried they may be ‘outed’ publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall.”

Ironically, Pichai then addressed a young girls’ coding event Thursday evening, speaking to a crowd of teen and tween ladies who were finalists in an app-building competition. The Verge has the full text of Pichai’s remarks, which appear to be only about five minutes in length, but are symbolically quite significant given the timing. “To the girls who dream of being an engineer or an entrepreneur, and who dream of creating amazing things: I want you to know that there's a place for you in this industry, there's a place for you at Google,” Pichai told the girls. “Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. You belong here and we need you.”

Feeling uplifted? Let me completely demolish that sentiment with the news that trolls are organizing a March on Google next Saturday, a supposedly nationwide effort at all Google offices to stand up for the rights of men to openly criticize their female colleagues’ biological inadequacy. “Today, the March on Google was announced by Jack Posobiec and a coaltion [sic] of free speech activists around the United States,” the site says, clearly not having consulted spellcheck. “Organizers are reaching out to James Damore to invite him to speak as well as planning a ‘Google Meme Contest’.”

The March On Google website is quite a piece of work (check out their kick-ass home page!) and the comments, as you can imagine, reflect a mindset that assumes the Constitution guarantees white men the right to high-paying tech jobs. The spelling and punctuation in the comments are predictably awful, but the threats seem disturbingly real. “That ‘Report Your Coworkers’ meme is weapons-grade,” writes one commenter, sounding eager to harass. “Make that viral, and put posterboard-sized versions of it in the hands of marchers.”

And sure, we have had plenty of fun at Google’s expense on this site, but they’re in a pretty tricky and scary situation here. Their own tools are being used against them, as Damore is now doing interviews with alt-right YouTube stars — perhaps indicating that he's enjoying his new fame at the expense of his critical thinking abilities. And they’re taking fire from both side on the gender equity front, being sued by the U.S. Department of Labor who allege that the company does not pay women equally compared to their male counterparts. But that concern might seem secondary right now, as this particular men’s rights brouhaha may soon spawn threats, violence, and workplace harassment on a whole other level.

Related: Anita Hill Says Women Should Sue If They Want Silicon Valley To Get Less Sexist

In a pointed op-ed in the New York Times today, Anita Hill, who these days is working as a plaintiffs' attorney at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, suggests that "It’s time women in tech consider taking advantage of the law to disrupt the industry once and for all." She uses the revelation of that anti-diversity, sexist manifesto by a Google engineer — identified today as James Damore, and fired from the company as of yesterday — as an inciting incident to call for women to start filing class-action lawsuits against Silicon Valley companies if they want to see real change occur when it comes to equality in the workforce.

"While [Damore's memo] may be unusual in its explicit embrace of this kind of backward thinking, the attitudes that underlie it are nothing new in Silicon Valley," Hill writes. "Google’s decision to fire the employee responsible for the memo neither dispels the notion that a systemic problem exists nor solves it."

Further, she brings up Susan Fowler's barn-burning open letter about sexism at Uber as well as lawsuits and Labor Department inquiries into similar situations at Tesla, Microsoft, Oracle and elsewhere as evidence that the problems are systemic, and won't be addressed quickly or easily.

"The tech industry is stuck in the past, more closely resembling Mad Men-era Madison Avenue or 1980s Wall Street than a modern egalitarian society," Hill writes, bringing up as an example the "slew of class action discrimination lawsuits" brought against Wall Street firms in the 1990s, like the "Boom Boom Room" case of 1996 in which 2,000 women ended up joining the class action winning a $150 million settlement from Smith Barney over the sexist culture there.

Also, she suggests, sharing the tech wealth with women could mean everybody wins. "The economic benefits could be remarkable. Advancing women’s equality, which includes minimizing the gender gap in labor force participation, holds the potential to add $12 trillion to global G.D.P. by 2025."

Of course, individuals like Fowler tend to have their own careers in mind when they stay angrily silent, and it's going to take a courageous few to decide to take on tech titans the way some women took on Wall Street firms two decades ago.

But, Hill says, Damore's memo should serve as "an alert about how deeply and passionately anti-equality attitudes are held."

Previously: Google Fires Engineer Who Wrote Controversial Anti-Diversity Memo

The Google software engineer who suggested that women are biologically less well-suited to engineering work in an internal memo last week was fired on Monday. Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote, "First, let me say that we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it. However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace."

The engineer, James Damore, told Reuters he was "fired for 'perpetuating gender stereotypes'" in his manifesto, "Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber." Gizmodo obtained the 10-page document, which elicited much commentary among Google employees on social media, noting that Damore "argues that women are underrepresented in tech not because they face bias and discrimination in the workplace, but because of inherent psychological differences between men and women."

For instance, Damore essentially says women, looking for a work-life balance, eschew opportunities to advance to positions of power while men are driven in their quest for status.

Google's new Vice President of Diversity, Integrity & Governance Danielle Brown sent a memo to employees; according to Motherboard, she wrote, "Many of you have read an internal document shared by someone in our engineering organization, expressing views on the natural abilities and characteristics of different genders, as well as whether one can speak freely of these things at Google. And like many of you, I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender. I'm not going to link to it here as it's not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages."

Reuters reports, "Damore said he was exploring all possible legal remedies, and that before being fired, he had submitted a charge to the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) accusing Google upper management of trying to shame him into silence."

Pichai's note adds, "Our job is to build great products for users that make a difference in their lives. To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK. It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct, which expects 'each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.'"

Susan Fowler, the former Uber engineer who helped reveal Uber's culture of sexual harassment, was amused/resigned by the memo:

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg added, "Inequality in tech isn’t due to gender differences. It’s due to cultural stereotypes that persist. We all need to do more."

The Department of Labor is investigating Google over an alleged gender pay gap.

Previously: Google Employee Writes Internal Memo Railing Against Women, Diversity; Rage Ensues

San Francisco chef Dominique Crenn has had to endure a lot of sexism over the years, god bless her heart. A leader in the notoriously-female-unfriendly industry of putting food in an oven and taking it out again, even when she's written about positively, as she was in a recent New York Times profile, she's still confronted with crap like a quote from Chronicle critic Michael Bauer saying (I guess it's supposed to be a compliment?) "She cooks the way the men are cooking." But in recent days the Atelier Crenn founder has demonstrated that she's also ready to tackle fools the way men we all should tackle fools, by firmly correcting their errant ways.

First, there was her appearance Saturday as part of a four-chef panel for San Pellegrino's World's 50 Best Restaurants list at the Sydney Opera House. During the audience Q&A portion of the event, Crenn, the only woman on the panel, was asked by a male audience member if she regretted that she had missed out on what he "considered to be the very important role of being a mother to children." I'll let Australian reporter Jane de Graaff take if from here:

Silence.

Then, a swelling ripple of uncomfortable gasps and muttering.

Followed by Crenn sitting back and stating "well that's a loaded question," with a wide grin.

It should be added that Crenn had already deliberately steered away from this line of questioning earlier in the talk, when Graham noted that he had previously lost female chefs because there is simply a certain 'time' when women step out of their cooking careers to have children, and that it is unavoidable.

What Crenn had said at this juncture was basically 'thank you, yes we need to stop pretending that we are all the same, but I also think we need to change the conversation around this.'

Now the question is legitimate, it was simply phrased poorly by a nervous speaker and as such came across as not only prying, but judgmental and sexist. It also disregarded Crenn's heroic statement that we need to change the way we think about this conundrum for women in any industry. But, faced with such a bald inquiry in a public forum, Crenn did not shy away, or get angry, or even claim her right to privacy on such matters. What she did instead was something that caused the audience -male and female—to erupt into heartfelt applause.

First she pointed out that everyone has to weigh up their personal life against their career. Everyone—no matter what their gender—makes choices and decisions every day when it comes to their career; "I hope you have to make them too".

Next she asked the speaker if he even knew if she had children, or if he simply assumed that she did not because of where she was and what she was doing—highlighting just the kind of conversation that needs to be changed. She then revealed that she in fact has twin daughters, something that she has kept out of the sphere of common knowledge. It shouldn't shape how we see her as a chef.

Finally, she finished with a most radiant example of just how we can begin to 'change the conversation', with this for her questioner; "If you have kids, I hope you stay home with them, so that your wife can go out and be a bad ass woman."

The. Applause. Was. Deafening.

But Crenn wasn't done fighting the battle against medieval thought quite yet, as Eater SF notes that Monday, she took Vice to task for an article quoting Dutch chefs on “the absence of boobs in the workplace.” Gems from the article include one chef's remark that "Good female cooks often quit their work because the boyfriend, for example, finds it hard to be in second place; his girl is often away from home and that means he has to cook his own food," another's that "it's still more of a male thing to have the strength to work long hours, isn't it?" and third shining example of masculinity who said "I want more women in the kitchen. They don't necessarily all have to be beautiful, though that would be a bonus, of course."

I am sure there are other equally offensive quotes, but I started getting so pissed I had to close that tab. Crenn, however, has more fortitude than me, and went after the publication on Twitter:

As Jay wrote last month, "it sure would be nice if the success of a female chef weren't still treated, in 2017, as if it were cause for great surprise and wonder." But until the seemingly regressive food world catches up with the times, watching the Michelin-starred Crenn show those bozos what's what will continue to be a feminist delight.

Related: New York Times Profile Of Dominique Crenn Is Inherently Sexist, But Glowing

In April 2016, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick announced that publisher and business mogul Arianna Huffington would join his company's board of directors, praising her "emotional intelligence," the kind women tend to have so much of. "I’m confident she will bring some ethos and pathos to our Uber logos," Kalanick said.

Let's hope so, at least on the "ethos" part, and now it looks like we'll get to see. As the ride-hailing company reckons with the account of a former female engineer, Susan Fowler, who alleges she was harassed, and then intimidated and stymied by HR, Huffington writes on Uber's blog that she'll be taking a leadership role investigating the situation.

On Sunday, Fowler wrote that in a tumultuous year at Uber, she was harassed by a possible repeat offender because, she was allegedly told, he was a "high performer." While he got a pass, and allegedly took advantage of it to harass more women, her mobility at the company was blocked. According to Fowler, the situation was such that a 25 percent female team was, in short order, just 3 percent female.

In response to the widely-circulated accusations, Kalanick penned a company-wide email and announced former Attorney General Eric Holder would participate in an investigation into the alleged HR turmoil. Now it's Huffington's turn to say her piece, and she claims she'll ensure the accountability of Uber's leadership, having spent more than 60 minutes speaking with the company's HR head.

I just joined Travis and Liane Hornsey, Uber’s recently hired Chief Human Resources Officer, for the company’s weekly meeting. We spent over an hour discussing women in the workplace — and talking about the review that’s underway by Eric Holder and Tammy Albarran into diversity and inclusion at Uber.

Travis spoke very honestly about the mistakes he’s made — and about how he wants to take the events of the last 48-hours to build a better Uber. It was great to see employees holding managers accountable. I also view it as my responsibility to hold the leadership team’s feet to the fire on this issue.

Change doesn’t usually happen without a catalyst. I hope that by taking the time to understand what’s gone wrong and fixing it we can not only make Uber better but also contribute to improvements for women across the industry.

This was Huffington's initial reaction to Fowler's account.

After joining Uber's board, last summer Huffington left her role as chairwoman, president, and editor-in-chief of the publication that bears her name to champion powerful, pressing causes.... such as getting a good night's sleep, the subject of her book The Sleep Revolution. She's also working on her company Thrive Global, a "corporate and consumer well-being and productivity platform."

As BuzzFeed tech writer Nitasha Tiku observed last year, Huffington has framed her arguments about sleep and fatigue as labor issues. But so far, she's exerted "little pressure on employers to improve working conditions beyond installing a nap room."

Huffington ought to be rested and ready to go in her accountability efforts at Uber, then.

Previously: Ex-Uber Engineer Says Company Is Full Of Sexual Harassment, Intimidation

In former Uber engineer Susan Fowler's widely-circulated blog post "Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber," what was "strange" was repeated alleged sexual harassment, and what was "very" was the company's alleged failure to address that harassment and instead to punish her for bringing it up. In short, Fowler details a horrorshow of systemic failure at Uber that made it a seemingly unfair and unsafe place to work as a woman. As a result, Fowler claims that at Uber, women site reliability engineers like her dropped from 25% to 3% of the work force.

In response, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick ordered an "urgent investigation" into the allegations, calling the behavior they described as "abhorrent [and] against everything we believe in" at Uber. According to New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac, Kalanick also sent out an email to employees in which he says that Arianna Huffington, a board member of the company, would be at an "All-Hands Meeting" at Uber in San Francisco today. Huffington will review the investigation, Kalanick says, as will former Attorney General Eric Holder, who has worked with tech companies like Airbnb on their discrimination policies.

Recode also received the memo to employees, which is as follows:

Team,

It’s been a tough 24 hours. I know the company is hurting, and understand everyone has been waiting for more information on where things stand and what actions we are going to take.

First, Eric Holder, former US Attorney General under President Obama, and Tammy Albarran -- both partners at the leading law firm Covington & Burling-- will conduct an independent review into the specific issues relating to the work place environment raised by Susan Fowler, as well as diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly. Joining them will be Arianna Huffington, who sits on Uber’s board, Liane Hornsey, our recently hired Chief Human Resources Officer, and Angela Padilla, our Associate General Counsel. I expect them to conduct this review in short order.

Second, Arianna is flying out to join me and Liane at our all hands meeting tomorrow to discuss what’s happened and next steps. Arianna and Liane will also be doing smaller group and one-on-one listening sessions to get your feedback directly.

Third, there have been many questions about the gender diversity of Uber’s technology teams. If you look across our engineering, product management, and scientist roles, 15.1% of employees are women and this has not changed substantively in the last year. As points of reference, Facebook is at 17%, Google at 18% and Twitter is at 10%. Liane and I will be working to publish a broader diversity report for the company in the coming months.

It is my number one priority that we come through this a better organization, where we live our values and fight for and support those who experience injustice.

Thanks,

Travis

In the past, Uber has declined to publish its diversity numbers, a practice adopted by much of its cohort of tech companies, so the company decision to do so is notable. Observers of Uber might also notice a trend in that, when Kalanick last faced internal and external pressure, to terminate a working relationship with President Trump, he did so, stepping down from his role on the President's Economic Advisory Council.

Related: Uber CEO To Step Down From Trump Advisory Council

Yesterday, engineer Susan Fowler Tweeted, "I wrote something up this weekend about my year at Uber, and why I left," with a link to an essay titled, "Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber"—which is a more succinct title than "I Was Repeatedly Sexually Harassed At Uber, As Were Other Female Engineers, And Even Though We Reported It, Uber Management Did Nothing To Stop It And Actually Tried To Mess With My Career Because I Was Upset About The Sexist Culture."

The allegations in Fowler's piece are so damning that Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, already reeling from the #DeleteUber outrage over his company's immigration ban reaction, went on the defensive offensive a few hours later:

Fowler joined Uber as a site reliability engineer in November 2015, and said, "[I]t was a great time to join as an engineer. They were still wrangling microservices out of their monolithic API, and things were just chaotic enough that there was exciting reliability work to be done." She had chosen a new team after training, but then things got weird:

On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn't. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn't help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.

Uber was a pretty good-sized company at that time, and I had pretty standard expectations of how they would handle situations like this. I expected that I would report him to HR, they would handle the situation appropriately, and then life would go on - unfortunately, things played out quite a bit differently. When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man's first offense, and that they wouldn't feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to. Upper management told me that he "was a high performer" (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn't feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part

I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that. I remarked that this didn't seem like much of a choice, and that I wanted to stay on the team because I had significant expertise in the exact project that the team was struggling to complete (it was genuinely in the company's best interest to have me on that team), but they told me the same thing again and again. One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn't be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been "given an option". I tried to escalate the situation but got nowhere with either HR or with my own management chain (who continued to insist that they had given him a stern-talking to and didn't want to ruin his career over his "first offense").

As I got to know them, and heard their stories, I was surprised that some of them had stories similar to my own. Some of the women even had stories about reporting the exact same manager I had reported, and had reported inappropriate interactions with him long before I had even joined the company. It became obvious that both HR and management had been lying about this being "his first offense", and it certainly wasn't his last. Within a few months, he was reported once again for inappropriate behavior, and those who reported him were told it was still his "first offense". The situation was escalated as far up the chain as it could be escalated, and still nothing was done.

At one point, she sought to transfer to a "less chaotic" engineering operation, but her transfer was blocked for unknown reasons, in spite of her stellar performance reviews, because of a new "negative" review system. Fowler later found out, "It turned out that keeping me on the team made my manager look good, and I overheard him boasting to the rest of the team that even though the rest of the teams were losing their women engineers left and right, he still had some on his team."

Fowler also detailed an insane bit of Silicon Valley swag drama, with the company offering to buy leather jackets for all site reliability engineers. Everyone found their sizes, placed orders—but then management announced only jackets were being ordered for the men, "because there were not enough women in the organization to justify placing an order." When she brought up how Uber could probably buy jackets for the six women engineers left, "The director replied back, saying that if we women really wanted equality, then we should realize we were getting equality by not getting the leather jackets. He said that because there were so many men in the org, they had gotten a significant discount on the men's jackets but not on the women's jackets, and it wouldn't be equal or fair, he argued, to give the women leather jackets that cost a little more than the men's jackets."

When Fowler says she brought it up to HR, the (female) HR rep "asked me how often [female SREs] communicated, what we talked about, what email addresses we used to communicate, which chat rooms we frequented, etc. - an absurd and insulting request that I refused to comply with" and she ended up "berating me about keeping email records of things, and told me it was unprofessional to report things via email to HR."

Finally, after her manager implied that he would fire her because she reported the director (his boss) to HR, Fowler, who pointed out to her manager that his intimidation was illegal to which he insisted it wasn't, "reported his threat immediately after the meeting to both HR and to the CTO: they both admitted that this was illegal, but none of them did anything. (I was told much later that they didn't do anything because the manager who threatened me 'was a high performer')."

So Fowler left to join Stripe, the card payment start-up. As CNET reported, "Much has been said about sexism and the lack of women in Silicon Valley. Women make up around 30 percent of the workforce at major tech companies, but take up only 15 percent of technical roles. In a 2016 survey of 200 women who had worked in Silicon Valley for over 10 years, 60 percent of respondents said they'd received unwanted sexual advances, 65 percent said those advances came from a superior and one of three said they were in fear for their personal safety." And by Fowler's estimation, the percentage of women site reliability engineers dropped from 25% to 3% when she left last year.

Sarah Lacy, by the way, is the Pando Daily editor targeted by Uber executives, who bragged about being able to ruin her life.

Kalanick said he fully supports Ariana Huffington, who Tweeted:

Fowler has been receiving a lot of support:

Of course, this is Silicon Valley, where a venture capitalist's "friendly" advice to women trying to make it in the tech world is use initials, not your first name, and remove your photo from LinkedIn.

Several official-looking but clearly unofficial BART notices observed by riders this morning call attention to the national uptick in angry, bigoted attacks since the election of Donald Trump in a campaign whose rhetoric brought them to the mainstream. The sign, presumably a response to local incidents of such behavior, are clear and concise, but they don't seem to give a hoot about cuss words:

Obviously someone with some Photoshop skills created these, and BART would likely have minced a few more words if they were to post anything about this issue — and the signs appeared wedged on top of existing BART ads in trains. But hey: Great guerrilla artwork, guys!

Hate crimes in San Francisco were down in 2015 but may be on the rise now, with high-profile incidents including a woman attacked for wearing a Hijab at San Jose State University and a racist verbal attack observed on an SFO-departing flight. That was quelled by a plea from the plane's captain.

A viral video circulating on November 11 showed a woman on BART engaging in a racist, xenophobic verbal attack against a woman that referenced Donald Trump. As SFist noted at the time, her rantings, though upsetting, appeared to stem from mental illness. After propagating the video, ABC7 added the update that "People who know the woman shown in the video, who engaged in a racist rant, have contacted ABC7 News. They say the woman is living with mental illness and they are concerned for her safety."

"We ask our riders to be decent to each other and practice common courtesy," BART spokesperson Alicia Trost told NBC Bay Area at the time. "Folks should be able to get to their destination without being harassed or mistreated,” Trost said. “While free speech needs to be protected, threats to do harm and violence against our riders and employees will not be tolerated. We ask our riders to be our eyes and ears and report illegal activity to BART Police. We will send an officer right away to respond.”

The next day, BART tweeted a similar message:

The rhetoric now from would-be BART officials is, well, more explicit: Get your shit together or get off BART.

Are you listening, pantless man smoking meth or possibly crack on a train this summer?

Related: Video: Pantless Man Smokes Meth (Or Crack) On BART