Galt - This is a great post. It tells the story and links it to the other narratives like marriage.
Based on the MERITS of her case:
She can't program or code or develop. Her small company probably got over the line of employees allowed before the EEOC starts investigating. So they had to find a woman to hire for any reason. She was hired as an "evangelist" to build bridges to other developers and companies and the community. In reality, marketing / PR / sales.
This is a woman who, at her core, hates the very people she is supposed to be building bridges with. They are mostly white males who can DO something (like develop software), as opposed to her (she can only be an "evangelist" for the software, if she could develop it, she would be developing it).
So she overheard a dongle joke, and was going to make the horrible perpetrators pay and pay via her proven technique of social shaming.
She did the exact opposite of what her job called for in her arrogance. She burned bridges, turned off potential customers and employees and would have bankrupted her company if she hadn't been fired. She viewed the resources of her company as her basis for waging war against the hated "people who actually do something" in the industry.
As a side note, it seems to be an unquestioning article of faith in most Internet contributions on this that the woman sets the standards of what can be said or not. Why? It's just like a marriage here - the spouse who really earns something (usually the male in a marriage) has no say in the standards of how the marriage is going to run.
Here, software developers could in some cases be very talented, but a bit socially awkward. Everyone has pluses and minuses. Women like Adria Richards are going to determine themselves that no one is going to be socially awkward (although no one would ever demand that she herself actually ... develops software), and that is that. And then she is going to be judge, jury and executioner in the public sphere.
That is why spoiled brats like Adria can bloom today. Men have just become wimps for the most part who think that women have the last say.
