The first half of the sentence ("women in STEM") is meant to reflect on the confounding approach to the person mentioned in the second half of the sentence, a woman in STEM. First half "YAY GIRL POWER GO!," second half is that same bunch of people, presumably the Twitterati in question, being down on an opinion held by a woman in STEM who, well, the Nobel Prize is pretty good as a confirmation that you are STEMming very hard, when what they ought to be doing is, "Hey, we were just talking about women in STEM, maybe we should not reflexively criticize the very model of the person we were praising when she has an opinion which might be new or troublesome to us."

It's because of a lot of the people who push for more women in STEM (i think there is a movement called that too) also called out Karico for her vision on politiking and asskissing in academia (and science in general. My sister interned in a private lab in the past spring, it seemed to be even worse than academia on those point, although the pay was way better).

It's not a dig at the movement or their values, i do think its a minority who do this, but its a vocal minority who might be capturing the movement (i don't think this is the case, but this is a danger. look at what HAES as become).

There is an argument that, to make STEM more friendly to women, it needs a culture change - which implies less weird-nerd culture. Whether this argument is correct or not is a separate matter (I'm leaning towards "it's complicated, but I'll round off to 'no'.") But what's going on here is people holding this argument are dunking on a woman in STEM.

I'm on the same page as you here.

Even the proposed rule

> Any system that is not explicitly pro-Weird Nerd will turn anti-Weird Nerd pretty quickly

just feels like a misunderstanding of the paradox of tolerance[0] ("in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance").

So we need to question what the author means with "Weird Nerd", because if a weird nerd just isn't expressing intolerance, I can't fathom how anyone could have an issue with it ...and become "anti-Weird Nerd".

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance