| "I don't see why being too sensitive is seen as somehow worse in the startup/developer community than being too insensitive." I'll venture a guess: because many of us find it incredibly tiring and annoying to have to constantly stop and think "is there any possible way the following sentence could be interpreted as prejudiced against any group?" when communicating. If person A says something non-sexual and person B finds a way to make it so (ie "that's what she said") we think person B is the dirty minded one, not A. However if person A says something non-racial and person B finds a way to make it so, we act like A has committed a grave offense and needs to apologize. Too many people in America can't look at an ink-blot without seeing sexism or racism or discrimination of some stripe. Being "too sensitive" is often just causing controversy or problems where none needed to exist. It also makes it so that legitimate discrimination is harder to notice because it gets lost in a sea of false accusations. The tl;dr is: save the outrage for legitimate discrimination, don't waste time & energy trying to manufacture it everywhere |
Let's take discrimination out of the picture, and look at a less contentious example.
In a relationship, how often does saying "you're overreacting, just calm down" get someone to calm down? The alternative is to, perhaps, listen to the complaint, rather than dismissing it immediately.
Finally, let me point out that there's an interesting systems thing going on here. Imagine you're raised / cultured in a system that is stacked in your favour. Would you notice it, or would you just notice that there are these annoying people who keep complaining about nothing?