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Comment by mratzloff | Hacker News Reader

As a guy, I get pretty sick of it. I've noticed the "kiddie gloves" effect for a long time on HN and so I tend to just stay out of those threads altogether. I've found that if I disagree or critique a woman a thousand misguided defenders swoop in, presumably in some attempt to be chivalrous.

Guys, give it a rest and treat women the same as you would men. They don't want or need special treatment.

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If anything, I would find myself more concerned about all the overly sensitive fellow males swarming me for something they perceive to take offense to on behalf of someone or a group entirely unrelated to them than I am potentially upsetting anyone on whose actual behalf the offense is feigned.

We must read a different HN and participate in different industries.

> They don't want or need special treatment.

Many women these days are certainly expressing that they want special treatment. The question is if they need it, and if they are representative of women in IT as a whole.

I suspect the women who unhappy are writing posts about it, and the ones who don't want special treatment aren't saying anything because they're doing just fine. IMO it's a noisy minority, but given the recent story about the woman who got felt up at a Bitcoin meetup, perhaps more sexist behavior is going on than I see.

I'm a female programmer. I don't want to be hit on or looked at like I'm from another planet; I want to be judged by the quality of my work. It's going to my satisfaction, so I don't feel the need to complain.

No one else has said this yet. Probably most relevant thing ITT.

Haven't seen this. Could you give some examples?

This is probably being brought up due to the Bropages post from yesterday which resulted in hundreds of comments stating that a rubygem with the simple name of 'bro' is somehow going to totally devastate the fragile psyche of all women in IT.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121268

Ugh, as a guy, that whole thread was silly. I got the joke, saw they were erring on the side of "dude" rather than "immature jerk" and stopped reading. What stopped me from contributing was that I couldn't find an easy way to cut examples out of a man page. Although it does occur to me belatedly that a grep for "<command> -" would probably do it for many commands. Or maybe there's another standard syntax that could be used. It also reminded me of that tool that could explain a command by annotating a given example. Hmm, maybe the sexist name debate stopped me from contributing more than I'd thought. That said, it was because the debate didn't interest me -- it wasn't relevant enough to the original subject matter, I felt.

Related, one can now not use the Swedish name for "bridge" in projects. Bridge being a common technical term is the same exact 3 letter "bro", and will likely call down the storm if used.

My dream of bridging man pages and info manuals crushed.

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