I've seen a sudden flurry of articles on the "broprogrammer" meme. I'm starting to wonder if this is a carefully choreographed hoax that the MSM has fallen for.
Tasneem also talked with several of the badass developer folk who build FOSS tools for the news world at SxSW, who encouraged her to write about the phenomenon.
From that point, having been published in Mother Jones and gotten a good deal of traffic, other news outlets are going to pick up and start commenting on it.
Matt Van Horn != a trend. How difficult is that to understand? When everyone has to use the same obnoxious prat to extrapolate into some wider trend, maybe there isn't a wider trend.
A few years back I had a female coworker who flirted with me endlessly. I stopped staying in the office late because she would always do the same.
"New trend -- shegrammers and the troubles they cause".
I'm not sure you need me to give you a break if you're missing the trend here :)
If you read the mother jones piece, you'll notice that Matt Van Horn isn't the only data point cited. Just the exemplar that set the author off on writing about the subject. Just in the past 6 months there have been a number of instances of casual and blasé instances of chauvinism and/or sexism and then efforts to downplay the reaction.
Wow, that's at least multiple items per month across the millions of people in tech.
Worse, it takes the expression of subjective personal opinion and turns even that into some sort of offensive assault. That site offends me as a man, thus I will add it to my masculism site.
The media are the hoaxsters, as they are with most "trend" type stories. Find one example of something (rainbow parties, crazy diet "fads", etc) and you have the diversity that is natural with billions of people. Cast that as a trend, however, and suddenly it's something that everyone needs to be aware of and concerned with.
This isn't a trend of fluff pieces, and i think it's rather demeaning to attempt to dismiss it as such. Even if there aren't any folks that actually exemplify the brogrammer, developers are being catered to, regardless of how tongue in cheek, as brogrammers.
And that's pernicious for a whole pile of reasons.
In the case of Tasneem Raja, she was actually in Matt Van Horn's talk at SxSW, and was one of the folks pissed off enough to walk out of his talk (and explicitly says as much here: http://www.motherjones.com/media/2012/04/silicon-valley-brog... ).
Tasneem also talked with several of the badass developer folk who build FOSS tools for the news world at SxSW, who encouraged her to write about the phenomenon.
From that point, having been published in Mother Jones and gotten a good deal of traffic, other news outlets are going to pick up and start commenting on it.
This isn't a conspiracy, this is traction.