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Comment by mckiddy | Hacker News Reader

Are you serious? Opinions like these are exactly why women are having a hard time in tech in the first place. If I have to spend every waking moment at work obsessing about whether a single comment will make my female coworkers label me as a sexist asshole, then you bet I'll avoid working with them as much as possible.

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Rather than obsessing every waking moment, or shutting your eyes and ignoring the topic altogether -- both of which seem extreme -- you can perhaps find a balance:

Read the article, consider its merits, and do what you can when you can.

Perhaps you should consider what happens when a colleague has to spend time thinking about whether or not the comments you've failed to police yourself are actually threatening, creepy, or indicative of other much more harmful behaviors you may be capable of?

>when a colleague has to spend time thinking about whether or not the comments you've failed to police yourself are actually threatening, creepy, or indicative of other much more harmful behaviors you may be capable of

If they have to spend time thinking about whether or not it was actually threatening or creepy they might be digging a little too deep to find those meanings.

Maybe if you were a decent human being, you wouldn't have to.

So it's ok for you to use demeaning language towards women, but not ok for them to consider that sexist?

Because so many of these points are demeaning, right? Practically everyone I've ever met uses "you guys" in place of "you all", etc, with no derogatory intent. Certainly anyone familiar with the western US would realize and understand this. My mom and dad are both technically illiterate, and I gladly use both as examples. I would never assume a woman is non-technical _at a technical conference_, but everywhere else in the country the average woman is far less likely to be in a technical career than the average man, by simple probability. IT IS UNUSUAL.

Making assumptions about individuals based on your interpretation of statistics about their gender is inherently sexist. Most of us do it, but that doesn't make it less harmful.

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