Seattle, WA – On May 12, the Progressive Student Union held a counterprotest outside of a “free speech” conference at the University of Washington hosted by Huskies for Liberty, a libertarian student group. At this conference, Pedro Domingos, a professor emeritus of the Computer Science department at UW, spoke discussing how he is being silenced by the “woke” mob.

Pedro Domingos has tweeted, “Half of the female STEM faculty in the U.S. were hired over more qualified men,” and “Women are more neurotic than men, and as they gain more power society becomes more neurotic as well.” Beyond these sexist statements, he said has that Black people and white people should not be sentenced at the same rate, told another professor to commit suicide after they made an effort to remove racist biases from machine learning training data, and more. Following this, the Computer Science department at UW released a statement indicating they do not support Domingos’ behavior.

After Domingos claimed he was being censored, Huskies For Liberty reached out to him to provide him a platform.

In front of Kane Hall where the speech was being held, students demonstrated that this bigotry is not welcome on campus. They chanted “Sexists off campus!” and “Free speech, not hate speech!”

Valerie Marriott, a member of Progressive Student Union, said, “Pedro Domingos feels threatened by the concept of equality, because he can’t see past the status and power he is losing.” Conservative students attempted to shout down the counterprotest while saying “Hate speech is free speech” before being forced to close the door to the building by campus police.

Numerous students and workers passing by talked with Progressive Student Union members, agreeing with the need to fight back against misogyny on campus. Further information, a statement of the incident, and a compilation of Domingos’ tweets are available at @uw_psu on Instagram and @psuuw on Twitter.

#SeattleWA #sexism