Maybe there's mismatched expectations of a women going alone to hotel rooms with the men they later accuse of assault.
The man gets the wrong idea that the woman is interested in sleeping with him, whereas the woman just wants to have a nice conversation in the enjoyable environment of a hotel room.
Most women can tell fairly easily when the man they are talking to is sexually attracted to them (and signs of attraction is something almost all women watch for whenever they talk to a man they don't know very well).
If the man then invites the woman to a hotel room, 99.9% of women will strongly assume that the man is trying to advance a sexual agenda if the most likely alternative motivation for the invitation is that the man "just wants to have a nice conversation in the enjoyable environment of a hotel room."
Is that how you would characterize the situation as described by one of the women?
(Yet, perhaps that type of mismatched set of assumptions is at the core of this situation in the first place)
> In our conversations, he also mentioned a few times where he helped other women to attend conferences that they otherwise couldn’t have attended by sharing Airbnbs with them to reduce their travel costs. He asked if I wanted to share an Airbnb on my trip to the Typelevel conference in Berlin. He also mentioned that he planned to invite others. As a student with limited financial resources, I accepted the tempting offer and felt grateful that, once again, he helped me. At first, he mentioned that I could invite others to join our Airbnb. Having attended only two conferences, I did not know many people at the time. When I thought of a person to invite, he stopped me and asked if I was not feeling comfortable sleeping in the same apartment as him, and if I was trying to get a chaperone for us. I felt bad that I made him feel untrusted and stopped asking others to join.
I read the parent of the comment I replied to, but I didn't read the OP, and maybe everyone who writes a comment should read the OP.
Having not read the OP (still), I believe that most women -- most extremely young women even -- would expect a sexual advance in the situation described in your quote.
I'm not commenting in any way on whether the man deserves any consequences that might have befallen him for any sexual advance or sexual behavior after having made the invitation described in your quote.
I'm commenting only on, "Maybe there's mismatched expectations," which I (still, after reading your quote, and not having read the OP) consider quite unlikely.
I understand and to an extent agree with what you're saying--by the end of that quote, I think that's a reasonable expectation.
But we are reading that whole sequence at once, whereas in reality a journey elapsed to get there and I think the context matters.
If I'm in a hotel bar and I get invited up to a hotel room, that's a fairly clear signal (though maybe she's Canadian and just being polite [0]).
But if I want to attend a conference recommended by an advisor/mentor, and they suggest we share an Airbnb and that we can include additional attendees, that framing would be very different to me. At that point in the story I do not have the same expectation.
So I agree that ending is a red flag, but I think it's different when you've built up a context from prior information--one that specifically dissuades that interpretation--vs. getting it all at once as we do here. Now instead of starting at zero, you have to actively change your mind and overcome the inertia of that initial interpretation.
I'm also going to go out on a limb and suggest that participants in a programming conference, in aggregate, might not have exceptional emotional development. That casually explained is tongue in cheek but, I'm sure it resonates with a lot of people.
[0][https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xa-4IAR_9Yw]
I'll also point out that this is written in hindsight, when the author clearly does have a different understanding now, and is framing it accordingly.
> When I thought of a person to invite, he stopped me and asked if I was not feeling comfortable sleeping in the same apartment as him, and if I was trying to get a chaperone for us.
I mean I got red flags just from reading this.
I agree with you. But it started quite differently, didn't it?