People are piling on Shirley Hornstein because (1) she got caught, and (2) she's female. The second of these is 90 percent of it.
If you "trick" powerful people into accepting you as one of your own by claiming connections you don't have, and succeed in doing so, you've earned it. (If you fail, then slink away quietly and try again in a couple of years.) A lot of people are dumbasses who let the crowd make their decisions for them, and they deserve what they get from people who can mislead them about the crowd opinion (and mostly, those outsiders are just as competent, and would only be rejected because they weren't born in the "right" place).
Overt fraud is wrong. If you claim to be a doctor and don't know a thing about medicine, that's quackery and it endangers people and you belong in jail. If you convince the powerful that you are part of their club until the lie becomes true, then it's not really my thing, but I see nothing wrong with it.
Claiming that you worked at company X when you didn't is like claiming that you have a degree from a university that you didn't attend, and is one of the most clear-cut and common examples of professional deceit. I don't think this is a sexism issue at all -- look at how roundly Alexey Vayner was mocked. While I don't think the TechCrunch article was an example of charitable judgment, people are bloodthirsty and love to string up an "example case" every so often.
>>> (2) she's female. The second of these is 90 percent of it.
Women do get a terrible time in tech,the video game industry in particular, because of their gender, but this doesn't seem to be the case here. Care to explain why you think otherwise?
If you "trick" powerful people into accepting you as one of your own by claiming connections you don't have, and succeed in doing so, you've earned it. (If you fail, then slink away quietly and try again in a couple of years.) A lot of people are dumbasses who let the crowd make their decisions for them, and they deserve what they get from people who can mislead them about the crowd opinion (and mostly, those outsiders are just as competent, and would only be rejected because they weren't born in the "right" place).
Overt fraud is wrong. If you claim to be a doctor and don't know a thing about medicine, that's quackery and it endangers people and you belong in jail. If you convince the powerful that you are part of their club until the lie becomes true, then it's not really my thing, but I see nothing wrong with it.