Twitter Apologizes After Throwing “Ill-Chosen” Frat-Themed Party for Employees

Silicon Valley US: @Twitter is having a #Frat party for employees. #Lovewhereyouwork #diversitymatters #brogrammers. pic.twitter.com/WkX4aHHl6g

— Global Tech Women (@GlobalTechWomen) July 22, 2015

Twitter might not have intended a recent “frat-themed” party it threw for San Francisco employees to satirize the company’s problems with gender, but it might as well have.

A female Twitter employee shared (and later deleted) a pic of the dubious celebrations last night, but not before it was also posted to the “Global Women in Tech” Facebook group. Twitter quickly apologized for the party’s theme, with spokesperson Jim Prosser explaining to Fusion:

This social event organized by one team was in poor taste at best, and not reflective of the culture we are building here at Twitter. We’ve had discussions internally with the organizing team, and they recognize that this theme was ill-chosen.

It’s hard to imagine that an organizing team would fail to see the implications of throwing a frat party (complete with Solo cups, a “Twitter Frat House” sign, and a Twitter beer pong set), unless the company’s overall culture enabled that kind of implicit sexism.

Although I appreciate that Twitter apologized promptly for the misstep, “the culture we are building here at Twitter” continues to be an undeniably white straight male one, both in terms of the harassment received by women and people of color on its platform, and the diversity of its employees.

It might seem petty to chastise Twitter for its poor party planning skills (somewhere Angela from the office is righteously grinding SOLO cups underfoot), but there’s a direct correlation between a workplace’s tendency towards thoughtless bro-ishness and its diversity stats: women make up less than a third of Twitter’s employees, and the company is currently embroiled in a gender discrimination lawsuit.

(via Jamie Frevele at Mediaite and ThinkProgress)

—Please make note of The Mary Sue’s general comment policy.—

Do you follow The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?