This is Hackathon Harassment
Sorry but this doesn&#x27;t seem like harassment to me.  Read his email without projecting any tone, it sounds totally reasonable. Your mentor also wasn&#x27;t being sexist, he was suggesting you not start a startup by discarding the most passionate team member who helped write the prize-winning software.<p>I&#x27;m not seeing the &quot;you&#x27;re a woman and I&#x27;m threatening you&quot; anywhere.  &quot;By the way I designed cool t-shirts, you want one?&quot; and &quot;Lets not have any bad vibes due to this&quot;, doesn&#x27;t sound like &quot;Do what I want or I&#x27;ll kill you.&quot;<p>Maybe the guy is selfish, and intensely trying to &quot;make it&quot; (sounds like a young over-eager tech guy), but he&#x27;s not threatening to attack or &quot;victimizing&quot; due to sexist views imo.<p>If someone disagrees, please provide one shred of evidence.  As best I can make out its summarized with the big-text quote midway through:<p>&quot;He didn’t use all caps. He didn’t swear. He didn’t yell. All he did was calmly… threaten. Subtly… insinuate. And distance himself from reality, little by little.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m not impressed, the bar has been raised for claims of harassment and victimization.  If you had spent your whole weekend working around the clock on a project that won the prize on your own code, only to be told your dreams were now crushed because you &quot;weren&#x27;t a good fit&quot;, you&#x27;d probably be begging to find a way to hold onto the tickets or the project as well, whether your boss was male or female.<p>[Edit] And also, the mentors, the coordinators, the others in the posts all seem to agree that this isn&#x27;t harassment.  This really points to an issue with hackathons in general.  You have people contributing to a &quot;startup&quot;, then getting tickets to an expo, all without any contracts, just some verbal agreements -- these type of disagreements are bound to happen.