When I decided I wanted to get into this industry, I was a teenager in highschool who figured it all seemed fun and exciting. Creating stuff for a living was awesome, and I wanted to be apart of it.
Fast forward a highschool and college diploma, 10 years in the future. I have gotten where I wanted to be, and it is pretty great. Only now though is something else about this industry really starting to sink in for me: the stereotypes. Not the nice "those guys make a lot of money" stereotypes, but rather the vicious kind. I am talking about stereotypes portrayed in media and and embraced by society that suggest anyone who interacts with computers for a living has bad hygiene, long hair, likes fantasy and sci-fi a little too much, is rude or otherwise lacks social skills, etc. A lot of them don't even make any sense; I still can't figure out if all programmers are supposed to be drinking mountain dew all day, or beers. Even the stereotypes that are not seemingly contradictory rarely apply to any particular programmer. I like to think few if any apply to myself...
This is just how stereotypes work I guess, and I am learning to deal with it. I can't say it is easy though, and I have altered my behaviour in many cases to distance myself from it. When people at parties ask me, "What do you do?", I no longer actually answer the question. Instead of saying that I am a computer programmer or that I work with computers, I say, "Oh, I work for [company name]". They still know what I really do (if they give it a little thought at least) but the reactions I get are noticeably better.
This is all more or less inconsequential though. These are not great hardships; these are "First World problems". What is an issue though are certain very particular stereotypes that our industry has acquired: sexism/misogyny. I don't think it is really important how deserved or not these labels are; but what I do know is that these labels are social kryptonite. They are the things that can end friendships and careers.
We hear about these issues in our industry a lot, particularly here on HN. Usually the poster of the story makes it clear that they think these are issues that the industry only has because a few men act this way. Everyone is not guilty, except perhaps so far as they turn a blind eye to it. The apparent idea behind raising awareness for this issue is to get people to speak up when they see it. I understand that, and I understand why it is necessary. I don't like having these labels anywhere near me, that they are applied to my industry at all makes me uncomfortable, but I understand it is important.
So what then am I supposed to do when I see comments like the one by isalmon above? I am pretty certain he meant nothing untold by it, I am sure his intentions were all decent. I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt there. Even so, I can absolutely see how a comment like that could be read as being rather offensive and could help solidify the sexism/misogyny complaints that have been levelled against our industry. It should not be hard to imagine a blog post making it to the top of HNs about a comment exactly like that being overheard at a tech conference. I don't want to burn isalmon for something I am sure he did not mean to do, but I feel that I must do something.
So what am I supposed to do?