GitHub Co-Founder Quits Following Harassment Allegations Tom Preston-Werner's departure comes a month after an employee publicly stated that she was harassed by members of GitHub's leadership team.
By Jason Fell
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Tom Preston-Werner, one of the co-founders of San Francisco-based GitHub -- a social network for software engineers -- has decided to resign from the company he helped start.
Preston-Werner's departure from comes after a third-party investigation into of harassment allegations made by a former employee. Last month, former GitHub designer Julie Horvath said publicly that she was harassed by members of the leadership team, including a co-founder and his wife.
In interviews, Horvath likened GitHub to a "boy's club." She suggested that she had been treated differently because she is a woman and pointed to at least one "very inappropriate" conversation with Preston-Werner's wife.
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"The investigation found no evidence to support the claims against Tom and his wife of sexual or gender-based harassment or retaliation, or of a sexist or hostile work environment," co-founder and CEO Chris Wanstrath wrote in a blog post today. "However, while there may have been no legal wrongdoing, the investigator did find evidence of mistakes and errors of judgment."
Horvath, meanwhile, has taken to Twitter to call GitHub "pathetic" and to say that the investigation wasn't really an investigation at all, among other things.
Women at GitHub who sprang forward to defend the men who harassed me, it is naive to think the same thing cannot and will not happen to you.
— Julie Ann Horvath (@nrrrdcore) April 21, 2014In Wanstrath's post, he said GitHub is implementing new human resources initiatives and training opportunities to make sure employee concerns and conflicts are "taken seriously and dealt with appropriately."
"We want to create a great place to work for all our employees and we can't do that without acknowledging the challenges that exist in providing an inclusive work environment," he wrote.
Related: Richard Branson on Why Diversity Is an Advantage
