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Comment by blizkreeg | Hacker News Reader

If male engineers had to endure similar stuff said to them, I wonder how they'd feel - 'hey nerd', 'are you this socially awkward in every situation?', 'do you shower daily?', 'do you have any hobbies?', and the list goes on.

OP: I'm happy that your good experiences outweigh the bad ones.

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Funnily enough I have noticed that this does actually happen. My current position is at a company that works in the building industry and we often get non-IT members of the company saying stuff like that about IT people.

But I don't think really compares to the sexism though. Being in a different department means they do not have any actual control over us and we actually make more money than other departments (not including management positions). So I am sure it does not feel as threating and demeaning as the sexism experienced by woman.

It definitely does. I'm 27, look 20, and work as a senior linux engineer at a relatively high profile trading company. Until people see the work I do, they think I've been hired entirely through nepotism. It's incredibly frustrating, but I'm finally starting to "get used to it".

I'm lucky that as an adult male engineer, I've never been asked whether or not I was a "real" engineer and horrible things like the woman in the original post was. However, I paid dearly for my choice in interests as a child when I was physically bullied to the point that I was forced to change elementary schools. I was also ostracized significantly (by both men and women) in high school for being "a computer nerd". Don't assume that no male engineer understands what it is like to "endure similar stuff".

Heading off an extremely unproductive subthread:

It's not that women (or people in ethnic minorities, or older workers, or demonstratively observant religious people) experience flak from peers at conferences or in their workplace.

It's that they experience that flak while being a member of a tiny minority. It's the power imbalance that makes this toxic.

Also: "are you this socially awkward in every situation?" and "do you shower daily?" cracks would be infractions in a lot of workplaces. If you did it repeatedly after being warned, you could get kicked off a team. It is absolutely not as if guys just hear this stuff all the time and deal with it. Probably nobody who believes that has ever managed a large team.

So it doesn't actually matter whether "they" (whichever "they" we're talking about at the moment) get more or less or the same amount of flak as everyone else? The ONLY thing that matters is that they are a minority, and that automatically makes them persecuted whether or not they're treated differently?

We do endure it. We just don't care and don't talk about it.

Yeah, um this happens all the time. I never wasted time worrying about it.

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