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khumak50

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What point would that be, exactly?
Ok I'll bite. My first point was that women are not underrepresented in tech because of bias or discrimination. They're under represented because vastly fewer women complete the training required to go into tech and actually apply. If I post a job and only men apply, then I'm going to have an all male team. Pretty simple.

My second point was that while some of the complaints women have about harassment are surely justified, a lot of it is just the fact that they're treated with kid gloves by guys who don't want to have to deal with HR if they say the wrong thing. So they have nothing against women, they're fine with working with them, but they don't get the same sort of collaboration that men get because we have to be more guarded with women. I work directly with maybe a few hundred people on a day to day basis and of those few hundred people, exactly 2 are female. So yeah, they the get kid glove treatment just in case.

If I offend a male colleague he'll ignore me, or say no comment or f off or something and leave it at that. Ok, note to self don't talk about that with him again. Maybe it was a comment about politics, or gun control, or religion, or whatever other subject (I don't talk about sex with anyone at work, male or female). No problem. If the same thing happens with a woman, the perception is the response is likely to be a complaint to HR. I don't get a heads up that she doesn't want to talk about that or whatever, it's straight to HR. I have never personally had to deal with HR BTW, I'm talking perceptions. I'm all business when I talk to women at work so there's nothing to be offended about.

There are guys who get the kid gloves too btw. Most of the guys I work with are pretty laid back and roll with the punches but occasionally I'll bump into a guy who seems easily offended. When that happens, he gets kid gloves from then on too. The problem with kid gloves though is that while it guarantees I won't offend you in the future, it also guarantees I'm going to prefer working with someone else on anything substantial in the future so any boost to your career you might have gotten from more substantial collaboration with me on a big project goes away.

As to whether the HR fears are justified, it's hard to say since I've never had to deal with it personally but I have certainly heard of people in my company being fired by HR for stepping over the line and in 100% of those cases the person with the complaint was female. Does that mean men never go to HR? No clue, but I have never seen it.
 
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