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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

I can empathize here but at the same time she is calling this person publically (in the Journal!) a sexist without a whole lot of hard evidence (or if she has more, she didn't present it here.) I'm sure it won't take long for the internet detectives to figure out who this person is. That's pretty harsh.

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err. sure, but that's how it goes whenever you're questioning the rational behind someone's decision. What evidence could exist? There's no go back to state save and play it with the male character test. You can't find out what he was thinking, and he'd never tell you. He'd give you a perfectly rational line of thought. Humans are fantastic at rationalizing their decisions. This is why sexism is such an ugly subject. The only practical way we have to view it is from an objective distance with aggregate data. You can not personalize it. What frustrates me is how personal most sexism stories are.

I'm not sure where you're disagreeing with me here.

Only on the threshold of evidence. No evidence could exist, no standard could possibly be met short of full fledged confession.

To be fair, I don't think any Internet detective would care enough.

What really rubs me the wrong way about this article is the way it comes off as her crying wolf. It's bad for the women that actually experience proper sexism that truly limits their potential. The way I read this article is that she had a bad read on how eager her candidate was to accept the position, low-balled him on the offer and he decided he would take a better offer somewhere else. Nothing about that is sexism and yet calling it sexism is hurting the cause.

He had already accepted the offer, attened product meetings, and discussed hiring strategy for employees, then he threatened to bail at the last moment. Don't you think that's a bit flaky? Since after renegotiation, he joined the company after all, did he then flake on the anonymous other company with whom ehe had supposedly accepted a better position?

Any reasonable alternative, short of not telling the story?

She could have reached out to this person and told them she was writing this and if they had anything they'd want her to include. Regardless of how they rationalized it, as sexism or not, in any case this would have provided an important epilogue to include in her story.

In other words, if this person had even the slightest possibility of seeing it her way and coming out and apologizing for their actions and learning of their mistake, they certainly won't now. If anything the reaction will be to try to save face by telling everyone that she overreacted and is seeing sexism where there was none, regardless of the truth.

I think the article was not calling them out, so much as calling out the environment that caused her to be unable to lead.

Hopefully we don't get people trying to make it into something it's not (a vendetta)

It's not a vendetta but publishing a story about how a specific person is a sexist who can be easily identified isn't exactly a very fair thing to do to that person when there is clearly a non-trivial likelihood this was not actual sexism.

Perhaps not intentional sexism, but I'd say this is very real. Though I think she might want a new coach who isn't going to jump to conclusions.

There is clearly insufficient evidence in this story to know either way. If you can "say this is very real" then I don't think you read the same article I did. There are plenty of other explanations for what happened to her, given what she told us, other than that the person did not want to work with her because she was a woman.

I'm saying that the fact that, from his perspective (and somewhat from hers, self-deprecation has awful effects), she had lower standing than he did, probably helped fuel this. Even if it wasn't her gender that caused it, but her youth.

It's hard to not be ageist, but in this case I think there was some of that "she's half my age so why is she higher ranking than me" involved.

But you're definitely right that there's not much evidence here. I can still make assumptions no matter how much of an ass they make me.

There's sexist and there's sexist. Even the nicest person can be biased, and the bias can be basically invisible to everyone involved. Sexism isn't just about male chauvanists.

Yes of course and the fuzzy nature of identifying where this kind of latent bias exists is why articles about it are best done in a manner that can not identify individuals specifically and potentially ruin their lives.

I highly doubt that one charge of sexism is going to ruin his life, especially when so many people are running to defend him. I didn't even see his name in the article.

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