GitHub engineer leaves the company citing gender-based harassment

The exit of engineer Julie Ann Horvath from programming network GitHub has sparked yet another conversation concerning women in technology and startups. Her claims that she faced a sexist internal culture at  GitHub came as a surprise to some, given her former defense of the startup, and her internal work at the company to promote women in technology.

Julie Ann Horvath, an influential engineer at GitHub who has been vocal about the company’s increasingly positive culture for women, has left the open-source code platform and is alleging on Twitter that there was gender-based “harassment” targeted at her there. Horvath, who joined San Francisco-based GitHub in 2012, also founded its laudable Passion Projects series of women in tech talks to “surface and c elebrate the work of incredible women in our industry, as well as produce more female role models within the tech community.”