This is simultaneously: a) a bizarrely uncharitable view of "management types" and their intelligence level, b) a clear indication that you don't think the evidence is very good, and c) a ridiculously impractical view of how impossible it is to keep a simple thought from spreading, let alone just occurring.
The fact that the person you were responding to is, in your words, a "management type", and came up with this objection should show how dumb it is to try and keep it out of the discussion. They can clearly think of this objection on their own.
If you can, and you say that you can, and you don't complain about it, then that becomes expected. This is as true of wearing a suit and tie to work as it is for putting in long hours. Finance is in a really shitty place because of this and I don't want the tech scene to follow suit.
The problem is that hacker news is not a place where it's safe to ignore the political effects of your speech and focus purely on epistemic truth. Private mailing list? Sure. In person? Sure. On a public forum where management types will imply that you're an overpaid lazy hipster? Yeah no.
If you want a place where people can focus on finding out what's true, you need to make it safe to do that. You're never going to get a truth-seeking discussion about gender or race on r/SRS for exactly that reason. Hacker News is better than most because it's well moderated, but it can't and won't be that way for things that touch on the economic relationships between software developers and their employers.