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Comment by ben174 | Hacker News Reader

The vocabulary is absolutely flawed. These are very bold claims which need to be backed up with facts.

For instance, the behavior is clearly spelled out here:

    One day, one of my supervisors jumped to my defense at a team event, in an awkward display of sexism.

OP explains how she felt and tells us exactly what action caused her to feel that way. However:

    The group started insinuating...

    They also made remarks implying...

These don't tell me any actual actions, just how she interpreted them. I'm left to judge the second two quotes by the severity of the action in the former.

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I was thinking the same.

I'm a man an being recently made more aware of how some females friend perceive some so called "un-harmful cheesy jokes" I often advocate to my boss or college that they shouldn't make such jokes because you can never now how they are perceived.

However to escalate the problem up to the HR you need at least some ground. At some point she said than HR asked here to explain what she found was offensive. And she suggest that asking what was offensive was itself offensive. This is pretty meta.

I don't see how HR acted badly they needed to known exactly what happened in order to act. I mean you cannot pretend to be a whistleblower but kept being shy or vague about words used. And you can't say it was edited by the press, it's a blog.

So if OP is here please be clear did the manager say something like: "Guys please don't be to hard on my sweet little girl, you know she can't handle it"

And then colleges could have gone "Hey here come the boss's bitch!"

This I can understand, not vague and redacted sentences. Because unless you are precise (and sometimes graphic) sincere skeptical people will always wonder if it was your colleagues attitude or you perception that was flawed.

I see it this way as well.

I would strongly argue that the by far most important thing is how the receiver interpreted the actions, though. Of course expanding on the actions themselves might help others understand better, but as far as I can understand, being met with scepticism for what you describe is part of what makes the experience so hopeless after bringing the courage to follow up on something uncomfortable.

> just how she interpreted them

That is EXACTLY the root of the problem. People interpreted them differently. Especially if there are a country / cultural difference.

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