“And for the love of the gods i don’t believe in, when someone apologises, rather than sniding “not enough”, think “not enough but a step nonetheless in the right direction”, that’s how you build respect and tolerance and a community for all women.”
Not sure if this was a criticism of me saying that an unofficial sort of statement made by someone kind of representing FiLiA didn’t really help, but really, the offensive action took place on the main stage in the biggest event of the weekend, attended probably by the majority of attendees.
Any apology should have been official and made to all those who attended that event and may have been upset.
If, as was claimed, they had asked speakers not to do this, then it would have been perfectly reasonable (indeed sensible) to quickly state that the views expressed were not those of those running FiLiA and that speakers had been asked not to do this. They should have apologized to anyone who was upset and made it clear all women were welcome.
Any competent event organiser, having realised this was a risk (otherwise they would not have had to warn speakers) should have given thought to what they would do if it did.
I haven’t done events management, but I have done customer and client care. When something has gone wrong with your product or service and you are clearly responsible (they invited the speaker and are therefore responsible for how she acted) then a genuine apology and stating (and meaning) that you will be doing x, y and z to resolve it is one of the ways to create truly loyal customers/clients.
John Boyne showed how it was done. I bet he’s gained thousands of new readers after his genuine apology to Glinner.
Making excuses, mimimising, both sides-ing” and handwringing about how “it was awful she shat on our stage” are all ways of showing people you aren’t really sorry and have no intention of doing the right thing.
And if that’s the case, then your product will remain under that cloud.
They may have plenty of other clients/customers and don’t care about losing some. Maybe secretly, they agreed with the sentiments of the woman who “shat on the stage” and are glad to see the back of those who were upset. Or maybe they’re incompetent.
Their clients, present and potential, have no way of knowing which of those it was, or if it was something else instead, but not making that apology leaves the stage open for people to assume any or all of those reasons and to discuss it at length.
A swift statement of what went wrong, where they stood and what they intended to do to stop it happening again would have meant we would probably be discussing what a good time we had at FiLiA and looking forward to Blackpool. The failure to do so is the reason this thread is filled with pissed off people on both sides.