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Comment by hackinthebochs | Hacker News Reader

>I am saying that it IS an issue, but that the issue is not one of gender discrimination, just one of kids, and humans, being dicks

Wrong. You're assuming that all forms of bullying are equally bad. This is patently false. Bullying based on traits that already set you apart can reenforce imposter syndrome. Specifically in the case of programming, a woman in a male-only class will already feel isolated and like she doesn't belong. Being bullied with gender-specific insults is much more harmful to this persons potential as a programmer than being bullied with gender neutral ones. So addressing specifically the sex-based bullying is necessary in addition to bullying in general.

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All bullying is based on traits that set you apart. People don't bully "one of the crowd". They bully the outliers, the different ones, the ones who are female, or fat, or thin, or clever, or stupid, or black, or white, or old, or young, or even the kid that wears last season's "cool clothes".

It's not about gender. It's about ostracism. You don't have to be female to be ostracised. You just have to have something, anything, that sets you apart from the crowd.

This is the societal control mechanism we have culturally evolved to ensure conformity and "strength" in groups. It is really, really, really fucking dangerous, and leads to fun shit like Nazism. It's also really powerful, and is the basis of nation states.

Ergo, the problem needs treating at its cause, which is a cultural illness, and is far from simple to treat. You cannot simply resolve one emergent aspect of it and then expect to treat each aspect the same way. You do not cut down a tree by plucking at its leaves.

>All bullying is based on traits that set you apart.

This is certainly true. What I meant to convey was that in the context of a programming class, being bullied for a trait that is itself already suspect within oneself reenforces it and thus is more damaging. If that girl had been bullied in the programming class because she was fat, it may not have had as much of an impact on her decision to pursue the career. Being bullied because she's a girl on the other hand, had the secondary effect of reenforcing the idea that she doesn't belong in tech.

That's a fair point, and I agree that in the circumstance due to the framing of the situation it could be more harmful - but it doesn't change the fact that the root cause is bullying.

We as a species have a remarkable proclivity to be very unkind.

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