The efforts to explicitly reign in the sexism in tech are quite recent (late 2000, early 2010, and even later in France where I live).
My point is that what you perceive as a recent reaction might be the same old sexist culture continuing to spread, ruin life’s and block careers (which is a definition of backlash: reactionary fight against feminist advances)
There seem to be a few classic stories that have been spun:
- that a gender imbalance in students or employees automatically implies sexism
- that being casual about sex is automatically sexist
- that not favoring a feminine, talkative, consensus-first working style is sexist
- that women deciding to leave tech means they are being "chased out"
I don't find any of these arguments particularly convincing. It seems like misogyny usually just means "something a woman hates" as opposed to actual overt discrimination and mistreatment.
What you may be referring to from the early 2010s is that a few activists of the Adria Richards type found that all they had to do was cry sexism, and a bunch of naive geeks stood ready to self flaggelate about how sexist all the other men were, but not them, no no no.
Which of course means that tech is not particularly sexist at all, certainly not compared to media or finance.
If there is one thing that is unabashedly sexist, it's western feminism, which has had 50 years to show its homework, and has revealed itself to not be interested in gender equality, but only in advancing female interests and positing women's rights, preferences and working styles as superior to those of men.
Strangely, despite this long track record, feminists still haven't realized that they are the status quo and they do everything they can to maintain a monopoly on gender discussions and issues. The use of words like "reactionary" is meant to emphasize this: that anyone who does not agree with them is trying to go backwards. But this is a lie, because despite their "gender studies" we understand men and women worse than ever before. Many of these same activists now even refuse to define what a woman actually is, but they are all sure that women have it worse. Funny that.
But I'll say right away - starting your post with "What evidence of sexism do you have?" is a bit laughable. There's a lot of evidence of sexism in our industry. But it seems that you are unwilling to consider any of it. If you truly believe that western feminism is the REAL sexism, do you think there is a chance to find any middle ground or agreement on this discussion?
I have something to say about almost everything you wrote, but I'll pick the thread on one spot that I think has the most potential:
> It seems like misogyny usually just means "something a woman hates" as opposed to actual overt discrimination and mistreatment
Well...yeah? If there is a concept, or behaviour that men happen to not mind, but women on average/generally/mostly do, and an environment that contains mostly men either actively promotes that concept/behaviour, or tacitly ignores it by looking the other way, that is going to create an environment that is hostile to women!
Now you might say, that's not inherently a problem. But what if this is an environment that doesn't inherently benefit from an imbalanced gender ratio. Then those behaviours, that hostility, is actually actively funnelling viable capable women out of the environment, and there is no meritocracy to ensure that it can occur.
> Many of these same activists now even refuse to define what a woman actually is,
Casual transphobic dog whistle? Disappointing.
There are some very opinionated engineers, but they are an exception and quite rare. They might bark a little from time to time but it doesn't have any real repercussions.
Sure, if you are one of the few women in tech, you might face some difficulties getting into established groups, but that isn't due to sexism for the most part. Far more often it is some misplaced courtesy or something else in my experience.
Compared to medicine for example, tech is pretty harmless. Medicine has a lot of women, but that doesn't mean much. Surgeons for example are know to have their elitist clubs and it often is exclusively men. I have yet to hear similar "locker room talk" or what you call it in any tech circle. Probably exists but it has to be quite rare.
To my knowledge the diagnosis for tech was pretty much that there are far more men here. But that isn't indicative of sexism. So I don't understand what you mean by "extremely sexist" at all.
