One of the beautiful things about the tech industry and the internet is anyone can start a company and run a business without anyone knowing anything at all about the person.

In the D Language Foundation, we've had contributors who nobody has met and nobody knows anything about them other than their pseudonym. It's also our policy that no attempt is made to unmask them.

> The tech industry is and will likely remain misogynistic: women are comprehensively excluded from senior or technical roles, relentlessly abused and have serious trouble making headway in tech careers

Who doesn’t get abused in tech? Has anyone worked on a team before that wasn’t toxic at least some of the time? Definitely doesn’t make it right, but tech is notorious for destroying hopes, dreams and careers.

I think it's important to have more women in computing and the industry, starting from the education pipeline. Too many women enter tech through career shifts rather than climbing their way up from a CS program and this sometimes exacerbate cultural differences. More girls need to be pushed towards hard computer science subjects like algorithms and machine learning, rather than the easier programs like human computer interaction. Otherwise the tech culture at the highest level of engineering will be too insular. One big problem in American tech is that "diversity" surveys are done by gender rather than sex, and what appears "diverse" on paper isn't necessarily the same in practice. If you want to get rid of the "bro" culture and sexism, then get more high achieving women who can lead by example. A man wearing a skirt is great for HR diversity metrics but useless for encouraging more women to go into tech. We need to get rid of the culture where gender minorities are used as props for tokenism. There are plenty of high achieving women mathematicians physicists and traditional engineers. For some reason computing and software engineering are just not that appealing to girls.

A lot of what OP is complaining about is just good old fashioned toxicity and workplace politics. Switching the genders won't change anything. Go into healthcare and education where it's women-dominated, and you will hear the exact same complaints.

> I am fairly regularly called violent, demented and mentally ill by anonymous commentors on the internet, ranging from pathetic fascists on HackerNews and ranging all the way up to Jordan Peterson himself. While part of this is unfortunately just a reality of being a trans woman on the internet, Ludicity , when he saw some of the comments that I've drawn, was actively shocked and angry: apparently some of what I catch is significantly worse than anything he's ever gotten. And he's a brown guy on the internet with a much larger following than I have: I'd have expected him to catch at least some properly vile racism. The level of sheer, unmitigated misogyny that any woman in tech with a public-facing presence is subjected to is that bad. Taking the discussion offline, things get even worse. The work culture at Activision Blizzard was perhaps one of the more grotesque examples of the sheer, vile harassment we experience, but it's not unique. This happens everywhere, and the disturbing thing is that when we bring it up, it's seen as a weakness in us that we can't cope.

Something is disturbing here all right.