I was working for a software company that had a major product launch in the works and we were carefully planning the big announcement. Everything was being kept top-secret and we were all under threat of serious repercussions.
In order to ensure that the Big Announcement went out according to plan there were a lot of pre-scheduled messages just waiting for the moment to go out, and quite a few checks to make sure they didn't go early.
My job was as a Quality Assurance engineer and while reviewing an upcoming software release I discovered one of these pre-scheduled messages embedded in the software as an announcement that be displayed at the proper moment. The problem was, this announcement was included in all its glory in plain text within the release, meaning any curious nerd (basically our entire user base) would find the secret announcement without any problem.
I immediately raised a red flag in a message straight to my manager expressing my concerns that this announcement wasn't appropriately obscured and that pushing out this software release would cause our Big Announcement to get leaked.
The next day, I get to work and all hell has broken loose. It turns out the software had gone out and with it the Big Announcement. Of course there was no response from my manager for my concerns.
After asking around I finally found out that he had never raised my concerns or made any attempt to halt the release because he thought I was "being emotional."
Honestly, getting blamed for a massive corporate leak is a pretty appropriate punishment for blatant sexism.
