Chances are your head's spinning right now. That accusation of bias caught you off guard, you got kind of defensive, and now all hell has broken loose. You're feeling attacked on all sides. You're a good person at heart, and having all these people treat you like the antichrist is pretty upsetting.
You need to say something, but you're probably not in the best headspace to write copy right now. So to help you along, here's my 100% guaranteed-or-you-money-back scandal defusement apology template:
Recently we [CONCISE ACCOUNT OF WHAT YOU DID]. Someone pointed out that this was offensive, and we made things worse by reacting badly instead of listening carefully.
What we did was offensive, and how we handled the feedback was wrong. We apologize to all the people we hurt.
We want to learn from this experience. We welcome your thoughts: please tell us how we can do better, and don't hold back.
Here are a few of the things this template doesn't say:
- "Some people were offended"
- "We're sorry if you were offended"
- "May have been construed as offensive"
- "We made a good-natured joke that was misinterpreted"
- "All in good fun"
- "We had good intentions"
- "We apologize to anyone who was offended"
- "I know some people who weren't offended"
- "A lot of that was out of our control"
- "Our feelings were hurt by the reaction"
- "We're a great company, check out our products"
Now is not the time to tell your side of the story. Communication has shut down, and whose fault that is is completely irrelevant. The only thing you can control right now is what you say. It is in your power to defuse the situation, but to do that you must take full, complete responsibility. No provisos, no weaseling. This may seem difficult and unfair. But ask yourself: is defending yourself really more important to you right now than fixing the problem?
Good luck.
@catamorphism, thanks for the thoughtful reply, I appreciate it. I'll try to address your points as best as I can.
Regarding your first point, I understand and I agree we can't expect people to be rational in some situations. But surely you agree that there are different levels of oppression/hurting that therefore can and should be handled differently? If I see a person beating another, I'll react differently than if I see someone (possibly without knowing) offend another on the internet. Note that I'm not saying that there's no offense--I said offenders must learn to decouple the actual accusation (and evaluate it objectively) from the tone that accusation is made. Just because someone yelled at me, it doesn't mean they're wrong--the accusation must be considered carefully, and I must apologize.
But, of all places, the internet allows you to stop, think, and handle things in a constructive manner. Let me give you an example:
http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/
This blog alone helped me understand what women go through in a way that no "please take it down, it's fucking offensive" tweet would ever be able to. The point is that we're people, all of us, and it's unrealistic to expect that we behave differently. We will do mistakes. We will get defensive. We will fail to understand what the fuss is all about ("I just made a good-natured joke that was misinterpreted") because we have blind spots, were raised to believe we aren't doing anything wrong, etc.
I submit that, in a sense, oppressors (even the worst ones) are victims themselves--they're hurting themselves, even if they don't know it. Lashing out at them without any consideration that they're human beings too is akin to sending people to jail without any consideration about how you are going to rehabilitate them (yeah, look at how good prisons are in making people regret their actions).
In the specific case of Geeklist, as @avdi pointed out, I'm sure you agree they never meant to offend anyone in the first place, right? So consider how much more helpful to the cause of oppressed women in tech would have been to ask them politely to take that video down and explain why, e.g., by pointing them to the link I pasted above. In the end, what we got was a half-assed apology, and it looks like they're dedicating this month to clean up the mess they got themselves into, but I must ask: do they really believe in what they're doing?
And that was my whole point. You win by changing people's hearts, and you change people's hearts by trying to relate to them on their grounds.
Please do call me out on what I said. I'm honestly trying to understand.