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It sounds like you are describing a problem with the San Francisco dating scene, which does relate to a small subset of the SWE experience, but hardly covers anything close to the totality of being an SWE.

Well, I certainly was not trying to 'gaslight' you considering I repeatedly anchored my view in "for me" and "engineers I know" and then used a statistic to say that my experience seems pretty standard.

To gaslight you would be to try to convince you that your experience is not what it was. I have no doubt that one's social context determines the outcomes here a lot.

Is it just possible that your dating problems come from somewhere else? I personally haven't experienced the negative social consequences you're describing, but I'm also not dating in SF.