I think Ronson strongly suggests that this is in fact the case.

Ronson's a great journalist for acknowledging the complexity of a situation without attempting to offer answers he's unqualified to give, imho.

> “So you’re in your new workplace…” (Hank was offered another job right away) “…and you’re talking to a female developer. In what way do you act differently towards her?”

> “Well,” Hank said. “We don’t have any female developers at the place I’m working at now. So.”

> “You’ve got a new job now, right?” I said to Adria.

> “No,” she said.

Incidentally thank you for all your comments on this article. They're really thoughtful and have helped me understand what is clearly a very big issue much better.

She wasn't being excluded. She wasn't being made fun of. She wasn't being oppressed.

If the joke was, "lol that dongle reminds me of penis!" then the only significance of that joke is that it acknowledges the existence of human sexual organs. That's it. That's all it does by itself.

All that about being offended and excluded and threatened, that is all baggage that she brought with her into that situation. She imagines that the joke was, "lol that dongle reminds me of penis ...and reminds me that we must continue to oppress all women muhahaha!"

That's her imagination. She made that part up. Hank didn't say or imply or even think anything remotely like that. And it doesn't matter if other people share her delusion - any more than it would matter if this was a religious issue and she was claiming someone had committed blasphemy. It doesn't matter that other people share the delusion that god is real.

Aren't we granting too much power to minorities? Let me tell you a story that happened to me.

I once went to a Java developers meetup. I'm a Lisper, probably the only one that was attending, so I was a clear minority (that was 3 years ago, back before everyone jumped onto functional programming bandwagon and started replacing 'A's in their company logos with lambdas, etc.). I actually only went there because my friend was giving a talk about Git. That, and they had free pizza. But I digress.

Anyway, there was this guy showing an interesting library for Java, name of which I can't remember now, that was aimed at seriously reducing the amount of cruft and boilerplate one has to write, replacing common patterns with annotations. I thought it was a great idea, and wanted to congratulate him, but suddenly, the entire audience started criticizing. That it's wrong, it's not "the Java way", etc. I voiced my opinion, that it clearly improves readability, for which I heard that I "don't get the Java way of doing things". I think I might also heard someone telling me, "you're a Lisper, this is different, you won't understand".

Now should I be offended at that reaction? Well, I felt bad, but should I cry foul, and vent out on the obvious discrimination of concise languages? Should I Tweet about how misolambdic the people on that conference were? How they hate metaprogramming? Should I get someone fired from their job because they told me I'm a Lisper, and thus don't understand Java? I'm a minority after all. I can't even get a job in the field I love, and have to code PHP to earn my bread.

I don't think anyone would find affirmative answers to above questions reasonable. And yet in some cases, it's apparently fine to overhear a random joke and turn it into a mess that gets two people fired from their jobs, just because you're a part of a minority. Do we want a society that's afraid of minorities? Because in a way, it validates discrimination - when people see that the smaller group has a disproportional ability to cause damage, it makes people hate them, not welcome them.

Moreover, I believe that not being easily offended is the sign of being a mature person. You shouldn't let some passing airwaves upset you to the point of losing control.

I'd guess the article author didn't notice/find the HN comment, or he would have asked her about it, I'm curious what she would say (she never meant it, she was just trying to save her own job? She changed her mind? She has complicated feelings?)