[tptacek]

Heading off an extremely unproductive subthread:

It's not that women (or people in ethnic minorities, or older workers, or demonstratively observant religious people) experience flak from peers at conferences or in their workplace.

It's that they experience that flak while being a member of a tiny minority. It's the power imbalance that makes this toxic.

Also: "are you this socially awkward in every situation?" and "do you shower daily?" cracks would be infractions in a lot of workplaces. If you did it repeatedly after being warned, you could get kicked off a team. It is absolutely not as if guys just hear this stuff all the time and deal with it. Probably nobody who believes that has ever managed a large team.

[tbrownaw]

So it doesn't actually matter whether "they" (whichever "they" we're talking about at the moment) get more or less or the same amount of flak as everyone else? The ONLY thing that matters is that they are a minority, and that automatically makes them persecuted whether or not they're treated differently?