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Comment by eightpersimmons | Hacker News Reader

Lack of manners and as..ole men are enabled by a sexist environment. These are symptoms of an underlying problem. Women don't feel safe in these environments because of the behavior of a relatively small number of individuals, but these individuals are enabled by a system problem in which their behavior is rationalized and ignored as just s social faux pas.

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>Women don't feel safe in these environments

Women don't feel safe in tech conferences? Like it's south central Los Angeles or something?

I've attended several tech conferences, with women colleagues and friend, and I've not seen all this hoopla people constantly bring up on HN. Heck, those things don't even happen on Linux and OSS conferences, much less in business tech meetings. Groping a woman? WTF have you witnessed that?

I don't know, maybe it's that conferences in Europe are different.

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents

Not much pertaining to Europe (if anything), plus a lot of unrelated incidents among the list. I mean, how does this qualify:

"An offensive tweet was made against the PyLadies group at EuroPython 2012. Lynn Root (a keynote speaker and founder of PyLadies) blogged twice about the incident."

Really? One can find thousand of offensive tweets for anything, from your choice of programming editor, to Mac vs PC, to politics, to Twilight, to Coke Light vs Zero. And an "offensive tweet" somehow deserves to be in a list about "sexist incidents"? Other stuff is nearly as lame.

Judging from the above list, and compared to, e.g. the fashion or the journalism industry, the tech industry seems comparatively sexism free.

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