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Comment by Wintamute | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you. My admittedly snarky/oblique point was that these days it's personally, professionally and politically advantageous to make negative generalisations about males, but not about females. Just pointing out a fashionable double standard, as I see it.

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I was providing localised anecdata about the people I specifically work with.

I don't think its against site rules to state personal experiences, actually it's the basis of healthy debate.

If I said something along the lines of "all female engineers" without the context I provided; i.e its most of the female engineers I personally work with, then yeah I could see how that would be construed as virtue signalling. I assure you that's not my intention, and apologies if it comes across that way.

When we share personal observations, especially on a site like this, it's reasonable to expect that most people will interpret them as an invitation to treat them as insight into wider patterns. If your anecdata was of no wider application, and you only believe it be relevant to your specific circumstance, it begs the question why publish it at all?

In any case, no need to apologise - from your other comments I don't think we're on diametrically opposed sides in this particular political tussle. Go in peace.

Ah, sure.

Some of it is due to a fashion though. At some point the bias towards what you say end would look as quaint as the bias against women in the 50s or so.

People will get to view at the behavior you describe in the same way people looked at hippies after their fashion was gone...

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