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Comment by bobbles | Hacker News Reader

It would be interesting to get Rebeccas thoughts on the introduction.. it sounds strange reading it, but I could easily expect something like that from someone who was a close personal friend of the couple.

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There's a little bit of selection bias: I wager that if you asked the women in a Mad Men-style secretarial pool if they minded having their bottoms patted and their appearances complemented, a majority of them would say 'no', because women who minded (and had any other employment options) would have long since left the secretary pool for greener pastures with less bottom-patting (or have never gotten such a job to begin with).

The sort of people who can make it in the tech world are smart, motivated, powerful people. If they find the tech world uninviting, they have plenty of options elsewhere. So it's perfectly possible that you could survey a hundred women in tech and find that all but a handful don't notice or don't mind their peers' attitudes towards women, but that if you were to survey a hundred women who could be in tech, 95% of them would find the behavior unacceptable.

all but a handful don't notice or don't mind their peers' attitudes towards women

You left out an important subset, here: Those who notice, and mind, perhaps even mind a lot, but who know better than to admit it out loud, because doing so won't help them.

She gave her thoughts in a comment: http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2012/02/startup-dudes-cut-sex...

>called out a (perhaps well-meaning) but tone-deaf presenter //

Does she mean he has a physical impairment, which would seem more than a bit crass to point out in the context, or is this an idiomatic/euphemistic expression that isn't coming over right?

She likely is referring to the tone of speech, not a tone as in note or frequency.

I've never heard "tone deaf" used in this way; hence the question. Is it a common USA use? Burgeoning or erstwhile?

I don't know that it's common in the USA, but it seems to be well understood in these parts at least. It's used to describe anyone unable to accurately gauge the mood of the people they're addressing and who thereby offends them with their remarks.

Hi there...thanks for the clarifying! Language is incredibly loaded and we're all guilty. I absolutely intended that the presenter was not attuned to the impact of his speech. Here's more on that thread. http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2012/02/startup-dudes-cut-sex...

We're peoples divided by a common language, as they say. Thanks for clarifying.

"tone deaf" is common, but it is being replaced by "clueless" over the last 10-20 years:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=tone+deaf%2Cclu...

burgeoning, is, compared to erstwhile:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=erstwhile%2Cbur...

erstwhile replaced quondam in about 1910:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=erstwhile%2Cquo...

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