I would think that women face enough challenges in their workplace without being viewed by their coworkers as being hostile and out for their livelihoods.

Maybe I have this all wrong, but this seems that "news" pieces like this do not help anybody but the media (though perhaps it makes those on either side of the gender divide who already view the others as enemy combatants feel validated).

Except that's not what's happening. The war is between the ideology that genders are equal and the ideology that genders are not equal.

Framing it the way you have is a standard tactic employed by people who are entirely aware they are at war and have set up feminists as enemy combatants already.

I think a better summary would be this:

The war is between the ideology that genders should have equal opportunities and the ideology that genders should not.

A better statement: The war is between the ideology that individual humans should have equal opportunities, and the ideology that certain groups should be statistically equally represented in all fields.

(Or sometimes it's all fields that result in "power", a poorly defined term.)

[1] Interestingly, those religions usually have more women than computing. I've never been to a church where women didn't outnumber men.

https://inclusiveactioneverydaylives.files.wordpress.com/201...

Is it equal opportunity to see the baseball game, or equal opportunity to pick up a crate?

There are certainly people who state opposition to each of these forms, although they each tend to say they support "equal opportunity," meaning the other.

One major obfuscation made by various activists in this discussion is that lack of EQUITY can only be caused by a lack of SAMENESS. As illustrated nicely by the cartoon, some folks are short. If shortness is distributed unevenly, then SAMENESS will result in some groups being underrepresented.

So, if shortness is distributed unequally, and there's a big wooden fence in front of the game, you could respond by saying that tall people are naturally more suited for game-watching, and argue based on tall people having historically been more successful at it. But that claim isn't likely to stand up to a deep examination of causality and reality.

There are two significantly more defensible responses: give short people enough crates to see over the fence, or tear down the fence (preferably by figuring out what purpose it serves, and building something else to serve its purpose without the side effects, like a Plexiglas fence).

Then your ability to watch the game will be determined only by your natural talent at game-watching, not by your natural talent at being tall.

Interesting observation. The questions that follow next are:

(1) What are the "fences" in Silicon Valley that lead to the issues described in the article (a single fence is interesting for illustration, but in practice there are probably multiple fences)

(2) Of those additional "fences" how many are the fault of culture (the article cites several such as viewing women entrepreneurs as potential mates first and funding opportunities second) and how many are circumstances beyond the control of anyone in Silicon Valley (like the last of STEM support during formative years (childhood/adolescence/higher education) or the fact that greater testosterone levels correlate with greater aggression and risk taking that VCs tend to look for (several times in the article there are examples of women not being forward and actually asking for money or not asking for enough). The self selection of female entrepreneurs only seeking out VCs that have funded women and or have women involved is yet another fence that no one can solve but the women (this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. what if several VC funds out there haven't funded a women because many women they may have wanted to fund never approached them to ask for money).

The former "fences" (like viewing female entrepreneurs as mates, we should drive out of the industry. But some of the latter issues are the responsibility of women (and the men whose exhibit the same traits) to solve. I know a ton of shy nerdy guys that would never get funding because they don't know how to pitch and get someone to cut them a check (close the deal). They either have to learn those skills or they have to pair up with another person who has skills in selling. Being tenacious and aggressive matters.

Of all the men working in Silicon Valley, a tiny fraction of them are actually fundable because they have the skills to be funded (technically brilliant and/or tenacious/alphas). The overwhelming majority do not get funded because they either don't have the technical skills or they are betas or omegas.

For startup ideas not reliant on some major, defensible technological advantage, the VC industry has a strong preference for founding teams teams that have at least one alpha among them regardless of gender.

One question I'd love to see studied is testosterone levels of people (relative to their own gender) pitching VCs and whether they get funded, and if so by how much.

Assuming there is a preference for investing in people with high testosterone levels, the second question which I'd like to see investigated (but I don't know how you'd design an experiment for this.) is whether or not investing in greater testosterone levels is a good investment thesis/strategy.

Some (fairly major) golf clubs don't let women play on their courses[1]. Plenty of people think women should not be allowed in combat roles in the armed forces[2]. I could continue...

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/10186258/Go...

[2] http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/should-women-be-allowed-to...

It would be pretty easy to cite circumstances when women are excluded and men are excluded. For example, there are men's only colleges and women's only colleges, and the number of women's only institutions of higher education greatly outnumber the number of men's only institutions (The only one I can think of is Hampden Sydney in Virginia).

Personally, I'm very anti-gender binary, so my purpose of commenting here is that it is intellectually dishonest to cite examples where women are excluded and conveniently omit examples where men are excluded.

Actually those clubs don't let women become members of the club, but they do let them play on the course. (Specifically, Muirfield does.) Or in some cases (I'm not sure if it's a nonzero number now that the R&A golf club has had its vote) they don't own the course.

I would also swap out "opportunities" for "autonomies", but that's being pedantic and obscure.

In short, the enemy is the patriarchy, and if you think for a minute that that only negatively affects girls and women, well, then you've never been a shy nerd asking out that cute girl from your math class who's also a cheerleader. Spoiler alert, P(that goes well) < 0.01.

Certainly those ideals are rooted in sexism and are in many ways sexist, but the sexism isn't what caused the problem in my example. The gender norms by themselves (ie doesn't matter whether they're the way they are due to sexism) caused the problem, because they basically say that a guy is worthless if he isn't a nearly perfect example of the masculine gender.

She's rejecting him because he doesn't have enough of the traits that society says a man should have (and maybe has too many of the traits that society says women should have): He's not strong, he's not assertive, he's not domineering, he's not good at arbitrary athletic competitions, etc. etc. etc.

This has everything to do with his sex. He is being rejected (hypothetically - within our thought experiment here) because he is considered to be an insufficient exemplar of the male sex. To phrase it a different way - he is insufficiently masculine for this cheerleader (i.e. a very high-status female) to have an interest in him.

You correctly point this out later on - She's rejecting him because he doesn't have enough of the traits that society says a man should have (and maybe has too many of the traits that society says women should have): He's not strong, he's not assertive, he's not domineering, he's not good at arbitrary athletic competitions, etc. etc. etc.

Sex is purely genitalia. The two extremes are male and female, but this is a spectrum and not a binary.

Gender is all the other shit that society piles on top of that. The two extremes in western culture are masculine and feminine, but this is a spectrum and not a binary. That this mostly lines up with the sexual spectrum is an arbitrary decision by society; society could define gender in such a way that it is orthogonal to sex. Examples of where gender doesn't line up with sex in western society include butch within the lgbtq community: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butch_and_femme. Other societies have in fact defined gender in a way that doesn't line up with sex, so this isn't just theoretical: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity#Non-Western_gen....

In the thought experiment he is not being rejected because of his sex. He is being rejected because of the gender he presents is not sufficiently masculine enough.

That's sexism.

"The first important thing to understand about sexism is that it is systemic. Gender-based prejudice, on the other hand, is individual, although it exists in the context of a sexist system."

"But men who experience oppression based on the way they express their gender are still not oppressed on the basis of their gender itself. That is to say, they’re not experiencing that oppression because they’re men. Non-men, on the other hand, experience gender-based oppression because they aren’t men."

[1]: http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/01/sexism-vs-prejudice/

What does this is gender roles and their consequent beauty norms. People decide that women are best off looking fit and have big boobs and are outgoing and have a certain personality. These norms are communicated to them all throughout their childhood through media and peer pressure. In exactly the same way, ideals create the jock as well.

When you actually look at the people embodying these stereotypes, there's nothing all that much different about them, they're just people who've managed to adopt these norms. They might even be meaner than normal, enforcing these roles themselves.

Gender roles, beauty norms are part of the culture that feminists call patriarchy. Patriarchy is just sexism at the social / cultural scale. They wouldn't exist without these broader cultural dynamics, people would just be people and you could ask out whoever you want and she wouldn't shut you down because she has a place to maintain in the hierarchy, a hierarchy created and maintained by sexism.

Once you realize that women perpetuate patriarchy too and how, that's when you start to really understand just what it is.

If you need an analogy, think about how the general lack of respect for privacy at both the individual and the legislative levels negatively affects all of us, even those who 'have nothing to hide'.

I'm not really clear on how such divisions emerges from sexism. At its root, it seems to come from primate status competition, within separate groups that happen to be divided out by sex.

Among the boys, the jocks are those who prioritize sports and physical achievement, while the nerds are those who prioritize academics and mental achievement. This divide persists even in the absence of females - for example, all-boys schools still have aggressive athletes and quiet, bookish introverts, regardless of the presence or absence of the opposite sex.

If anything, the thing you're describing as patriarchy and/or sexism is the effect, rather than the cause.

you've never been a shy nerd asking out that cute girl from your math class who's also a cheerleader.

Feminism is designed to make sure it's illegal for the shy nerd to ask out the prom queen. Spoiler alert: feminists are not the friends you may think they are.

False accusations of any crime are horrible, but they are in no way common: The United States Justice Department agrees [with the rough percentage of false rape claims], saying false accusations "are estimated to occur at the low rate of two percent -- similar to the rate of false accusations for other violent crimes."

Coincidentally, 2% is the number of rape accusations that ever result in a conviction: https://rainn.org/get-information/statistics/reporting-rates (this sources back to the DoJ as well. RAINN just has a nifty infographic.

We live in a society where more people now aspire to be tech CEOs than pro athletes or rock stars, and tech is one of the main centers of power both politically and economically.

It's easy to dismiss the article because there are a few mischaracterizations and exaggerations. But you need to remember that most people get their information about the tech world from second hand sources, and SV is largely opaque and closed off to the general public.

If you actually read it for what it is rather than just judging the author based on her knowledge of obscure inside-baseball tech scandals then I think there are some valuable points.

Women are sometimes treated badly in technology. Technology also has few women. But what evidence do we have that the former is a significant cause of the latter? It's hard to even demonstrate a correlation, let alone causation.

The notion that a male majority which happens to almost entirely comprise the upper echelons of the technology industry might, intentionally or (just as likely) not, set up self-reinforcing cycles of encouragement for men and discouragement for women is not an extraordinary claim. It is bog-standard human pack-animal clique behavior. And nevertheless, clear, ringing evidence of these phenomena are published routinely.

For example it is a field where if you take 5 years off you are treated worse than a fresh graduate... Funnily enough a lot of women might want the ability to take a few years off.

Or for example it is an industry which has a lot of instability and lack of internal mobility. This means that you often are forced to leave jobs you love and where you have close friends in order to progess, or because they pivoted, or simply went out of business. Less women are willing to put up with this crap.

I've worked as a software developer at a couple of larger companies where maybe 15% of the developers were female. However, about 40% of the systems analysts/business analysts/project managers/testers/QA were female. These are roles in which you interact with the developers on a daily basis.... Surely if the issue was software developers being sexist then women wouldn't want to do these other roles either.

There is some sexism in the industry, but no more than many other industries which have plenty of women.

Being able to take 1+ years off when you have children without serious career damage is more important to woman than men.

The research I have read suggests that women are much less likely to leave a job they enjoy and where they have made friends in order to get a pay rise than men are. It's not much of a leap for women to consider this issue before entering a field.

Likewise there is considerable research on women being more risk averse than men and surely this at least has an impact on joining the startup world.

My last two paragraphs basically boil down to a question for you: why are women who are, in your opinion, not becoming software developers because of sexism still entering into roles that interact heavily with these sexist software developers?

That doesn't mean that the solution to the problem is in university enrollment, but it does explain why it's easier to find women in non-tech roles in software companies: it's because those roles don't require an early life commitment to a career in technology.

http://www.prb.org/pdf08/scientistprofiles/occprof08_actuari...

If you want to appeal to "bog-standard human behavior", it would help if you showed that computing, physics and actuary have "bog-standard human behavior" while law and medicine don't. As I said, not even correlation has been demonstrated.

Just so that you can understand what I mean by "correlations", let me demonstrate with a different theory. Theory: women are less likely to have high quantitative ability, so fields with higher quantitative ability requirements will have fewer women. Demonstrating a correlation would involve showing a downward sloping graph with quant ability requirements on the X-axis and %women on the Y-axis. Like the graphs here: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required...

Then I'd need to present evidence that women are less likely to have high quant abilities. Like in these papers here (note that the abstracts have been creatively worded to be published, skip to the data tables): http://www.sciencemag.org/content/321/5888/494.summary http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2889145?uid=3738256&ui... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21038941 http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf

Simply pointing out that humans act like humans fails - it predicts flat graphs rather than downward sloping ones.

You just made two different extraordinary claims: that women (as a demographic) intrinsically lack quantitative ability, so much so that they're at a disadvantage in industry (not merely at a disadvantage in the competition for Fields Medals), and that computer science as an industry is uniquely dependent on quantitative ability, moreso than actuaries (where there is significantly greater female participation.)

Your extraordinary evidence for this is a blog post with regression lines.

Sometimes your rhetorical strategy on HN is bracing and useful. Like all message boards, HN is prone to flights to abstraction and goalpost moving, and the introduction of facts can cut through that and ground the discussion.

Other times, it seems like you simply have far too much confidence in the significance of the facts you choose, and your overconfidence hamstrings you.

I don't have to care whether male quantitative ability has more variance than female ability. I can sort of enjoy reading about it on Marginal Revolution without incorporating any of those conclusions into my identity or philosophy.

I do care about the idea that results about variance in quantitative ability speak to CS ability. For the great majority of specialties in CS, they do not, at all. I think you may be blinded to this by the specialty you've chosen to work in, which is math-intensive. I'm a systems programmer --- in fact, a crypto-intensive systems programmer! --- and I will go to the mat against the idea that computer science requires atypical quantitative ability.

At any rate: it is self-evident that professional software development doesn't require the quantitative aptitude required to compete for university math tenure.

You don't have that graph. All you have is vague theories like "bog-standard human behavior prevents women from entering a field". This theory predicts that every historically male field should remain historically male, which is false.

I am not making an extraordinary claim. I am looking at the numbers for female participation in CS, noticing that they are anomalous, all the more so given the relative size of the CS professions (they are enormous, which should have helped smooth out the anomaly), noting the incentives for participation (CS professions are, relative to the effort it takes to enter the field, well compensated, flexible, geographically well distributed, and not physically demanding) and observing that there are only two logical explanations:

(a) Social and process factors are having the effect of encouraging male participation and discouraging female participation, or

(b) Women are intrinsically sharply less capable of performing in software development despite a demonstrated ability to perform in law, accounting, medicine, and even other STEM fields.

In the absence of something much more compelling than a blog post on slatestarcodex, I feel pretty comfortable ruling out (b).

I.e., do you have an upward sloping graph with focused effort on the X and %female on the Y?

I find it a bit surprising that you are so unconvinced by Scott Alexander's actual quantitative data (not to mention all the other academic studies I linked to), yet find vague hints at a single datapoint to be proof positive of an alternate hypothesis.

I think you find it persuasive because you work in a small specialty of CS that is particularly math-oriented (even if I don't buy that your facts apply to your particular specialty).

Also, given that you keep bringing up CS as somehow unique, does this mean you attribute other STEM fields without women (e.g. physics, aerospace engineering) to a different cause?

Results from unbiased work-sample aptitude tests would influence my views. But they wouldn't influence the views of the "pro-gap" faction; I expect the results would be explained away as "well of course that cohort of women captured by your sample does well on the test; it's all the other women that have the problem."

Anyways, I'd pay attention to that, because: the biggest fallacy I see in arguments that suggest the gender gap is benign is the notion that it attributable to intrinsic differences in intellectual attributes between males and females; when people attempt to explain those differences, they appear not to connect to software development in any but the most naive, high-school guidance counsellor kinds of ways.

My sensitivity to that fallacy has, like, the inverse vector of what I think yours is: I started my career with a huge deficit in math (my worst subject in high school, which is where my formal education stopped), but was successful regardless, and not because I plugged form fields into databases: after doing somewhat interesting systems programming for an ISP as a network admin, my first real dev job was compiler-theoretic. So I'm automatically suspicious of the belief that software development is closely tied to math aptitude.

As for why intellect gap arguments persuade you and not me, I think I understand now. I tend to believe that there are very few independent dimensions in human intellect, you seem to think there are many. I'd suggest investigating psychometrics in a bit more detail - I found this idea very surprising, but it holds up quite well. Take tokenadult's linkdumps on hiring procedures as a good starting point.

Also, let me emphasize that I don't claim my theory is perfect - I just claim it's the best supported. Quantitatively, all the correlations point in the right direction. I see no reason to exclude other theories, e.g., Sapna Cheryan's "women avoid nerds" theory ( http://faculty.washington.edu/scheryan/research.htm ) - the correlations at least line up there, admittedly anecdotally (doctors and lawyers are high status, computer and math geeks are low status).

The idea that CS, math and physics are somehow uniquely unkind to women seems weak to me. I see no plausible reason why "bog-standard human behavior" would be worse in STEM - if anything, you'd expect objective fields to care less about human behavior. (That's probably why computing is so tolerant of weirdos.) Note that you haven't even provided anecdotal evidence that computing is somehow worse than law in this regard.

See: "extraordinary claims...".

In fact, the evidence supporting the idea that programming is special in this regard is precisely that you don't hear doctors talk about how they had spent their childhood years endlessly playing Operation, while meanwhile you do hear many great hackers say they spent their whole childhoods playing with computers (or, when unavailable, then the nearest facsimile: taking apart electronics, playing with Game Genie codes, building erector sets...)

It's also a counterintuitive claim, given the reality of what software development work actually is. A plurality of professional developers do little more than plumb connections from SQL database tables they understand poorly to front-end frameworks they didn't write. That's the practice that requires exposure from preschool, like a competitive concert violinist?

No. Not buying it. Sorry.

Changing both these things would improve the gender balance.

Actually, aerospace engineering might have a bit of that. Have there been studies to see if children with the opportunity and encouragement to design, build, and fly their own model aircraft might perhaps be more likely to grow up to be successful aerospace engineers than children who aren't exposed to such things?

I never claimed that, though. I think my actual claims were pretty mundane:

1. Children who play with computers have an advantage when, later in life, they're learning programming.

2. Young girls, in many places, are not encouraged to play with computers the way that young boys are.

http://www.ae.utexas.edu/news/students/683-more-women-ase

Undermines your point a bit.

The point of citing fields in your discussion with me is that there are quantitatively intensive fields which have significantly greater female participation than computer science, despite the dubious idea that computer science as it is actually practices is quantitatively more demanding than, say, the demands on corporate lawyers to structure debt and equity financing.

The point of citing fields in this particular discussion is that there are demanding technical fields in which practitioners generally get little to no exposure to the work until they approach the age at which professional software developers enter the industry.

Did you miss the distinction? I sometimes go "on tilt" in discussions and misfire like this too.

It's certainly possible that not as many women are interested in technology careers as men. (Seems overwhelmingly unlikely to me based on both anecdotal and rigorous evidence, but as a good scientist, I should say it's possible.) But why does that justify mistreating those women who are interested? And why should we be satisfied with our behavior based on merely being not as bad as a religion or another industry?

Citation? I would say this is a huge assumption, presumably backed by your anecdotal experiences. To offer an anecdotal counterpoint - from what I have seen of the majority of the college-going American generation, they do aspire to leadership positions in general, but seldom through purely technical means.

I really, really don't think the broader population is anywhere near as enthusiastic about startup culture (which is probably what you mean by "aspire to be tech CEOs") as you think it is.

As for technology being a main center of power, that is correct. But probably not in the idealistic way you're thinking of, regarding entrepreneurship and "disruptions" or anything like that. The fruits of their labor may be used indirectly, but it's primarily closed-room contract work and military defense that is used to exert political power, not that trendy startup or open source project.

If you think sexism is bad in technology, you should see it everywhere else. The gender gap has gotten a bit better in the last twenty years or so, but traditionally male occupations are still overwhelmingly male, and likewise for female occupations. And salary gaps where you do find men and women working together are just abominable.

Sexism is one of those things you just kind of ignore until you really start looking, then once you do you see it literally every fucking where. And it's utterly depressing. We like to think that because we gave the vote to black people and women that we're enlightened.

Feminism, as a movement, is aimed at battles it thinks it can win. Nerds who aren't particularly attached to conventional forms of masculinity are already partly won over.

Sexual dimorphism, which includes psychological traits, extends to humans as well. We are animals too after all.

What an age we live in. Nearly every animal on earth, including our closests primate relatives, have innate morphological and behavioural differences between male and female. Yet noticing that homo sapiens exhibit the same differences has become a thought-crime of the highest order.

These differences cause a tendency for men and women to gravitate towards certain fields. Skewed sex ratios in a profession do not necessarily indicate discrimination and its time to stop pointing and sputtering when not everything is 50/50.

http://www.slideshare.net/terriko/how-does-biology-explain-t...

On the other hand, if you make non-scientific claims, it's pretty easy to push "innate biological differences" to mean whatever you want it to mean. Like that women are more naturally suited for programming than men, because it's just like prepping dinner.

http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-...

Most troubling, any mention that innate biological differences between the genders could play a role in the skewed gender ratios is not even considered in these diversity attack articles. It has become a thoughtcrime.

It's terrible because it doesn't fit the narrative you're trying to push. Paying occasional lip service isn't the same as "fighting for the right". Working in a coal mine or fighting in the battlefield isn't a "right". It's an obligation blue collar families fall into.

That said, from within Silicon Valley it sure looks like the feminists are coming for the supposedly easy money of engineering while ignoring the risky things like policing. True or not, it's sometimes the perception that matters.

Do you have any theories as to why, even in high school -- both in the US and the country you grew up in -- CS is more popular with boys than girls? And do you have any suggestions for how that could be changed?

I think those are all places that need to be fixed.

But at the same time it's possible to think of the front line as being the place where the battle to move forward is being fought now, instead of places where little progress has been made.

From that perspective talking of SV as a front line isn't wrong: if women can't be treated equally in the supposedly progressive environment of SV, then other places will be even further behind.

  But at the same time it's possible to think of the
  front line as being the place where the battle to move
  forward is being fought now, instead of places where
  little progress has been made.

So you want people who are already putting up with plenty of progressive dogma to put up with more progressivism, when the rest of those areas that raldi [1] mentioned haven't seen a lick of the same progressivism, impacting their lives in decades?[2]

Dont you think that such unfair pressure solely on the tech world, will only serve to alienate them?

Won't it cause them to dig their heels in?

Is that kind of retrenchment desirable?

In what way does that make any sense?

This is isn't even the first time I've heard this line of fuzzy thought-leadership.

I find it grating when people offer such silly twisted logic to prop up their premises.

When any form of change is imposed on any section of society, at too fast a rate, there will be resistance.

When any form of change is unfairly imposed on ONLY one section of society or in ONLY one geographic region, within the same country, there is bound to be a even greater degree of resistance.

[1] The construction industry, The Bible Belt, The restaurant industry, West Africa, The movie industry, The Vatican, The sportswriting industry, The people who make Superbowl ads, Japan, The adult entertainment industry, The Middle East, Wall Street, Nepal, The upper echelons of American politics

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8964102

[2] I'm by no means advocating less than progressive conditions to prevail in any industry or any geographic region. This could be just as well, said of the conservative end of the spectrum. In other words, there are conservative pockets, hell bent on turning their already conservative professions even more rigid and unyielding.

I'm a little unclear if you are arguing that the terminology of it "being the front line" is irrational, or if equality is irrational.

If the first then I agree that it's an odd way to describe it, but I'm not sure I could explain their thinking any better than above.

If you are arguing that equality is irrational then I have to say I disagree quite strongly.

When any form of change is unfairly imposed on ONLY one section of society or in ONLY one geographic region, within the same country, there is bound to be a even greater degree of resistance.

I agree that there is resistance to seeing changes only occur in some areas. I agree it is unfair that equality isn't equally distributed.

Now, of course, there's a question as to whether the gender biases of the makers of the Internet impact the gender biases of the things that happen on the Internet. But I think they do. At the least, for fora like Reddit and HN where the platform and editorial direction are linked, it seems obvious that they must. For platforms like Twitter or G+, policies such as harassment response and tradeoffs, whether real names are common or uncommon[0], what speech is considered appropriate or inappropriate, etc. can all impact what voices are heard and who is empowered by the platform.

[0] I don't mean by this to imply that there's a standard feminist answer on whether real-name policies are good or not. There are feminist arguments on both sides.

Once you reduce that list to ones with as much wealth as tech, its a pretty dang short list and it'd be interesting at that point to compare gender % in each.

The amount of impropriety that you see in the VC darlings is off-the-charts. I worked (briefly) at an ed-tech where the married executives openly flirted with female subordinates (and one was fired for refusing advances). You'd never see that shit in finance, these days. That era ended when the people raising VC now were in diapers.

I would guess that "the upper echelons of American politics" are also less sexist than Silicon Valley, given that there are women succeeding in US politics, but wouldn't know from direct experience.

BTW, who's the Sheryl Sandberg, Meg Whitman, or Marissa Mayer of Wall Street?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation

EDIT: I guess I am alone.

It's an exaggeration to say there's a gender war at all. It's feminists against the patriarchy. Feminists are real people. What's the patriarchy?