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Comment by hythloday | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, unfortunately, if there is a gender stereotype to these kinds of conversations, it's that invariably there will be a response from a man saying "you did it wrong", regardless of the particular action the woman took. c.f. "She should have talked to her supervisor" here to "she should have made a witty come-back to the guy directly" to the guy with a low-cut sense of appropriateness.

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Is the difference between those solutions really just because she's a woman? I'd like to believe that they are just differences of opinion on the best way to deal with issues. Some people prefer to appeal to authority, while others feel it's better handled by routing around authority and 'handling it yourself.' Depending on what she did, she would be criticized by one group or the other.

On the other hand, since this is an issue of sexism, I think that people put on their 'this is a serious discussion' hats which tend to make them more hypercritical than at other times.

We'd all like to think that. Unfortunately, there's a pretty widespread tendency to tell people who bring -ism issues to attention that they're Doing It Wrong, You Should Do It This Way That Wouldn't Upset Me Instead.

So while they might be reacting with their opinion of a better solution, there's a lot of form of using that exact form of argument to attempt to silence.

Also, she was the one in the situation; perhaps she's got good reasons to do it this way, rather than whatever way is being suggested? And isn't it kinda arrogant to think you (the group you, not pyre) know better?

This sort of bikeshedding shows up all over HN and on all sorts of non-ism issues. For example, infinite scrolling vs pagination:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3759101

Yes, but it's not just about the banal critique, it's about the subtle (or not so subtle) invalidation of the offense, the cephalic burial in sand over the problem, discussing the particulars of a single instance of a problem that's seemingly all over the place.

You really think the "you did it wrong" response has something to do with gender? It's a standard response to pretty much anybody doing anything notable. There's always somebody on the internet that thinks he (or she, in most cases one has no idea) could do better and must express this fact publicly. Most of the comments threads have a grain of that, and some are made of it 100%. I know there are gender stereotypes and other issues, but this is not an instance of that, it's a common thing.

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