[RodericDay]

This is a common belief of geeks and maybe most people everywhere, that breaking down concepts into more easily understandable elements and working on outreach is something necessary for progress. They also seem to expect the oppressed group to do all the heavy lifting- figuring how to complain in the right tone as well as mustering the energy to complain in the first place.

I'm not sure history suggests that this is the way to go. There's no easy, smooth social change, and self-described "moderates" should give more room for people to be angry. Your post, instead of giving some "advice" on how to help tell the message, should just be doing that instead. Skip this condescending explanation! Stop making it about shy males!

More importantly though, many people think they want to be convinced by cause-effect arguments A, B, and C, and they advocate for that kind of context-less discussion forum, but really what they need is to be allowed to discover A, B, and C on their own terms after being presented with a persuasive experience D. But to make it really connect, you need to get the person involved. Calls of sexism help with that. As an intellectually confident person, people calling me out bluntly and confidently about my sexism got way further with me than people trying to sell me some sanitized variant designed for socially stunted males.

I don't mean to blow up on you or anything, but seriously it's every day on HN that someone who gives the impression that "he sees both sides" and has got it all figured out seems to be taking some awkward position as mediating sage instead of following their own advice and helping craft the message. The overall impression is, of course, one of endless condescension.

[drawkbox]

I stated outright it was sexism and asked more women to relay those situations so people do understand it. I was just stating from the side of that not all that might be deemed sexism was always meant as such. i.e. usually it is stupidity over arrogance which some assume the latter and more often it is the former. Almost all misunderstandings stem from some aspect of this. Where people are stupid, they need to learn somehow, examples help.

But living in a world with 99% of people not being technical (unless you are at work) you have to assume most people are not and talk to them in that way, nothing to do with gender really. In that aspect talking in a way that a person understands is polite (completely ignoring is another thing entirely -- a good speaker involves all). Once that person lets it be known that they are technical then a new door opens up and you can drop some acronyms. Any person will tune their message to their assumed crowd otherwise they waste alot of air. If you go up to 100 people (or women) and just start talking in programmer/technical jargon most of them will look at you funny. I talk to dudes I work with differently that are in business and programming as well. I don't talk down to them in any way, I communicate. If they get it, all engines ahead, if not, they ask for a simplified version, same deal with aspects of the business on the flipside.

What I see is also a problem in the sexism journey is that sometimes people that are understanding and do see the problem get pulled into it in ways that make them look bad. I almost didn't post the message above because I knew I'd get some of this even though I 100% agree. So they stay away from it, just because there may be gender issues doesn't mean there isn't some give and pull on both sides to help it along.