You're bending over backwards to avoid admitting sexism exists in tech. That's like saying both men and women engage in locker room talk, so there's no sexism in professional sports and in fact it's sexist to imply that women can't handle locker room talk. We've heard that one before.
> You're bending over backwards to avoid admitting sexism exists in tech.
I'm saying that sometimes the answer is to remember that people are different full stop rather than jump straight to gender as the key difference, which may give you a mistaken analysis of the problem. If you have a situation that disadvantages quiet nice people and most of your quiet nice people are women, this results in negative outcomes for women but the best path to a solution is to figure out how to fix it for -all- quiet nice people.
I've made no claim either way in this thread so far as to whether sexism exists in tech - what I've done is to point out certain things that were cultural/management fuckups in general rather than specifically sexist, and to suggest that calling them what they are will make them easier to fix. It seems reasonably likely to be true that the origin of the bias against 'quiet nice people' comes out of gender roles, but that which is sanely classifiable as structural sexism at an institutional and cultural level by the time it manifests at the ground level is hurting everybody holding those personality traits and is therefore best dealt with as it is.
Or: Patriarchy theory is a useful analysis tool but I'm damned if I'm going to try and teach it to everybody if I can get results at least as effective much more quickly by making them realise they're being an asshole to nice people.
Honestly, I would rate the probability as pretty high that the culture also has a sexism problem, and that there will be plenty of issues that are best addressed in those terms, but that's orthogonal to the point I was trying to make.
