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Comment by jellicle | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with the writer that sometimes mating behavior can be observed in office settings, that's not actually the main problem in the tech industry.

The problem in the tech industry is that there are a lot of misogynist assholes who are put into positions of power and encourage that behavior in their businesses.

The average techie is a male who has spent a lot more time interacting with his computer than he has interacting with women. He does not understand women, he fears women, and what he fears, he hates.

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> The problem in the tech industry is that there are a lot of misogynist assholes who are put into positions of power and encourage that behavior in their businesses.

It's really, really weird that I keep reading this. Are you sure you want to single out tech industry as having a lot of assholes? Because, I'm a person who's come to the tech industry after being in various different industries over the years -- particularly, I've worked alongside a lot of mechanical engineering folk, sales folk, and construction folk. And let me tell you, far and away the tech industry folk have been the least misogynistic I have ever had to deal with. I can't even tell you the kind of things my fellow engineers used to tell me, how they depicted their relationships with women (invariably viewing them as just sex objects, etc.).

I'm not really sure why there isn't much public and vocal outrage about problems in those industries. I totally don't understand it.

Two potential explanations: the tech industry can't stop talking about itself on twitter and blogs. How many mechanical engineers do you know that spend a large % of their day procrastinating by surfing the web and participating in meta-talk about the industry. Our day-to-day tool for doing our jobs also just so happens to be a worldwide communication device. Just like the media loves to report on themselves, the tech industry loves to post on the internet about the tech industry, so the effect of a single asshole's comment is magnified by a social network powered shitstorm, further entrenching the meme that tech is full of bigots and causing a flood of discussion and hyper-analysis of it.

The second explanation is that the tech industry is actually less mysogenistic than others, as you have noticed, but ironically due to the lack of widespread mysogeny like you see in areas like finance, when an "incident" occurs, a lively discussion happens because there is a critical mass of non-sexist males, not due to a lack of them. Off course, this feeds into the meme which cements it more as accepted truth, despite any real data or study showing that tech has a above average rate of male mysogeny.

Another possibility is that the tech industry is currently a desirable place to work. People generally don't care if you exclude them from jobs that they wouldn't want anyway, but if other people are having a lot of fun, changing the world, and getting paid for it, it really sucks if you're excluded from that because you lack a Y chromosome. Hence when stories appear about "software eating the world" or Google engineers getting paid $300K/year with $6M retention bonuses or startups getting sold for $19B after 4 years of work, everybody wants a piece of that, and any hint that it may not be a perfect meritocracy is problematic.

If there are a bunch of misogynistic assholes among film projectionists or underwater welders, I wouldn't know, nor would I really care. I care about the tech industry because that's where I've devoted to spend my working life.

"The average techie is a male who has spent a lot more time interacting with his computer than he has interacting with women. He does not understand women, he fears women, and what he fears, he hates"

I think this is unhelpful pop-psychology babble. The average techie is no different than the average human. Average humans with spouses/partners, siblings, friends and bills to pay, just like you. They have hangups, insecurities and personalities no different than your own. These myths about how they interact with computers, fear or hate women is nothing more than often repeated nonsense from people that haven't spent much time in the real world meeting and interacting with real people.

Please stop writing such sexist nonsense. You are part of the problem here.

In the future, you can reduce your diatribe to what you actually believe "patriarchal misogynist assholes" and that will help everyone out. Your supporters as well as those who would disagree with you.

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