[arbutus]

"The only real sexism prevalent in the tech industry are the groups of militant feminists setting up endless, patronizing, segregated "coding for girls" meetups."

It's easy for this kind of thing to be completely invisible when this is your attitude. Sexism in the tech industry is alive and well, and there are a lot of good reasons to have meet-ups for both girls and women.

When you immediately start lashing out about "militant feminists" the second someone suggests that sexism exists, you're saying that our experiences are invalid and that you know better than us how welcome we are in the industry. It should be completely unsurprising that this does not make us feel welcome.

[tomp]

I don't understand his post the same way. He said that the only sexism prevalent in this industry is the "girls code"-type sexism. Sure, sexism exists everywhere and always, as does racism and other -isms. Simply said, people will be jerks. However, it is unreasonable to draw conclusions for the whole industry based on the behaviour of one such jerk, that just happens to be a male sexist (I'm sure you'd find female sexists and black racists as well).

[arbutus]

I don't need to base my opinion off of one guy's account of an incident in a blog post - I have a laundry list of my own very unpleasant experiences as a female developer to base my opinions on. I've also spoken to a great deal of other women who have a very similar list of very similar experiences. A lot of these experiences have aspects that are specific to the tech industry.

If you only have insight into industry sexism as far as one or two jerks, it's likely because you aren't a part of the affected demographic.

[facepalm]

"A lot of these experiences have aspects that are specific to the tech industry."

Huh - how can the tech industry be more sexist than other industries? Please explain? I mean in what way can such an experience be tech specific? "Woman can't code" comments perhaps, but what else?

[rosser]

Apologies; I fat-fingered the down button when I meant to +1 your comment. Might someone reading along at home please help remedy that for me?