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.
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".
http://www.theonion.com/articles/sociologist-considers-own-b...
Give me a break.
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.
Read the pieces and you'll see!
(that’s maybe 5%, tops, of actual incidents that happen)
And that's pernicious for a whole pile of reasons.
