<story><title>Seriously?</title><url>http://bitquabit.com/post/seriously/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danso</author><text>I have nothing to add to this other than what &quot;The Real Katie&quot; said in &quot;Lighten Up&quot;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62;&amp;#62;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Every time I spoke up about the above crap, I got some sympathy, but I also got some guy who didn&apos;t understand what the big deal was. If I wasn&apos;t in the middle of being raped or beaten or threatened or fired, guess what I needed to do?&lt;p&gt;Lighten up.&lt;p&gt;How long would you put up with it? Do you love anything that much? If your spouse subtly treated you like crap every day, how long would your marriage last? If you saw a friend being treated this way by their boss, wouldn&apos;t you tell them to quit?&lt;p&gt;Or would you tell them to lighten up?&lt;p&gt;You, person who told me to lighten up, saw one little thing. It didn&apos;t seem like a big deal, did it? One little line! One joke! One comment! But it&apos;s not just one thing to me: it&apos;s one of thousands that I&apos;ve had to endure since I was old enough to be told that &apos;X is for boys!&apos; It&apos;s probably not even the first thing I&apos;ve had to deal with that day, unless you&apos;ve gotten to me pretty early.&lt;p&gt;That&apos;s the main problem with subtle discrimination. It leaves those that it affects the most powerless against it, quietly discouraging them. If they speak up, they&apos;re treated to eye rolls at the least, and at the worst, are called oppressors themselves. We&apos;re accused of not wanting equal rights, but of wanting tyranny.&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Seriously?</title><url>http://bitquabit.com/post/seriously/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>RyanMcGreal</author><text>I see the usual grab bag of men making excuses for misogyny in software is out in force on Hacker News:&lt;p&gt;* Insisting sexism is not endemic to software, it&apos;s just idiots being idiots.&lt;p&gt;* Insisting sexism is not endemic to software, it&apos;s just jerks being jerks.&lt;p&gt;* Dismissive pedantry over the claim that women are deterred from software by incidents of sexism.&lt;p&gt;* Blaming women themselves for not going into software.&lt;p&gt;And all of it laced with blithe stereotyping language (&quot;panty bunching equivalent&quot;, &quot;bitching&quot;, &quot;drama&quot; and so on).&lt;p&gt;This predictably depressing reaction hasn&apos;t been good enough for a long time. The reason more women aren&apos;t in software is &lt;i&gt;staring us right in the face&lt;/i&gt; but we&apos;re too busy being dismissively sexist to see it.</text></comment>