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Comment by AlisdairO | Hacker News Reader

Good grief. You'd think, considering the near constant criticism of men in technology for gender bias, that fact might have warranted a mention as an aside at least.

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One bias I don't see often mentioned in research papers is for researchers (or those who present the work of researchers) to draw light to findings supporting certain narratives while leaving findings supporting another narrative only available to the very small percentage of people who go and read the full report.

Sampling bias, perhaps? Or how that thing is called? If there's, say, 20% of women in a field and 80% men, and you get treated badly twice as likely by an average woman than by an average man, you'd still observe (in absolute terms) more instances of bad treatment from your male peers. Surely this could distort one's perception.

Women being harsher on other women is a common phenomenon. Even famous feminists like Gloria Steinem have addressed it.

Most of the even-half-informed criticism I see is about systems for gender bias, and specifically acknowledges that people regardless of gender who have been brought up in a world with biases have internalized those biases.

As a man in technology, I can't say I've ever felt personally attacked for gender bias.

I guess it depends on how you look at it. When I see phrases like "boy's club" (not in this paper), it implies to me that there's a group of men who work (consciously or unconsciously) to keep women out. I'm aware that it's not at all an uncommon finding that women are pretty hard on other women, yet I think that receives very little play in the popular media.

Perhaps I do take it too personally - I do my very best to be fair and reasonable with all my fellows, whatever their various deviations (or not) from the industry norm might be. It's upsetting to me to be tarred with this guilt-by-association. I find it particularly disheartening in the venue of OSS: I've always viewed it as a truly fantastic collective charitable effort, yet lately it seems to be getting depicted more and more as some kind of refuge for white men to exclude everyone else.

I feel the same guilt, I'm a student - I'm excluded from scholarships, meetups and career events because of my gender, that plus the regular criticism aimed at the industry - I feel ashamed every time I'm asked to fill out an equality form. I don't know what to do about it.

Don't let it effect you? Or, "I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character" can be applied to sex and any other identifiable trait as well.

It doesn't serve the narrative

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