One of the problems with naming names is that there are two sides to every story, so it tends to lead to "he said, she said" and tends to get very ugly -- the man has reason to defend himself and often feels he didn't do anything wrong and may not have been intentionally bad. Another is that the woman who does so harms her own reputation. Who the hell will want to work with her if they know that should they crack an off color joke or make some other faux pas, she will go all SJW on them and seek to publicly hang them high?

Women are never going to get anywhere if they continue to jump on their high horse every time they have a run in with some guy. It is the men who have power. We (women -- as I am one) have to find a way to work with them if we want to get anywhere. And learning to sidestep trouble and frame things as innocently as they are reasonably able to be framed is a path forward. Jumping to ugly conclusions and starting a shitshow every time something happens is not.

The author was a CEO who apparently did multi-million dollar deals. I suspect she knows whereof she speaks. The shitshows we have seen posted to HN mostly seem to be women who are less successful than that.

I say this as someone who was molested and raped as a kid, who talks openly about that fact and what it did to me yet I have protected the identities of the perpetrators, for quite a lot of reasons. So this is something I have firsthand experience with.

The other problem is that naming names tends to not let it be a growth experience for men who screwed up because they just did not know any better. We all inherit an awful lot of shit culturally (I grew up in the deep south -- here is me talking about stupid racist assumptions I did not know I had and how I became aware of them: http://ask.metafilter.com/261222/How-can-I-practice-gratitud...) You have to start with the assumption that men are just as much a victim of circumstance as women if we are ever going to find a path forward.

Once you out a man, he is publicly branded. Once that is done, he is much more likely to feel compelled to justify his actions to himself. That means he is likely to keep being an asshole and not become more sensitive to the issue. That does not let us, as a culture, move forward. Nailing men to the cross for relatively harmless assholery keeps all of us, as a group, pinned in place. I would like to move forward. The status quo sucks. I do not wish to do anything which prevents progress.

I am not saying that names should never be named. But the kinds of things described in the article, while definitely deal-breakers socially and in terms of business, are relatively harmless. She is not talking about being beaten and raped. She is not talking about the sort of thing that would justify calling the police and having him charged, criminally.