This Industry is Fucked

Because women are the easiest target, essentially.

The people who do this essentially are pure sociopaths, and they pick the easiest targets because they're bullies. Women are an easy target for several reasons:

1. Isolation. Women are a minority in tech and there's a larger social stereotype that women can't do math/are incapable of advanced reason/whatever tosh you want to throw in here. That means it's easier to tell women they're trash and undeserving and have them believe it. There's not a lot of people most women can go to to complain about this or receive validation that these are poisonous lies without triggering another stereotype, being weak and vulnerable.

People would rather sit in silence and take it than be seen as a whiner.

2. In performance oriented cultures it's very common to shit on each other as an in-group building behavior. People who can 'take it' are the in group and people who get offended are the out group. Bullies can exploit this by knowing exactly how far they can push and make it seem like good natured ribbing even in a public social context. More subtle bullies can take things further by establishing unique contexts for minor slights to give them greater meaning that isn't there for other people, so that when the victim complains they seem irrational and crazy to observers. (Another stereotype of women.)

3. Cultural factors. All those stereotypes regardless of how much truth there is to them become self fulfilling prophecies. Women are weak and vulnerable is essentially an advertisement for bullies to go target women, bullies enjoy hurting women more for reasons that could be basically summed up as actual misogyny.

As for harassing men as well, they do. They just use different words when they do it. It might be helpful to throw out terms like 'women-hating' or 'misogynist' and zoom out a bit to look at the ways bullies hurt people in different contexts. Bullies don't care who you are, they will hurt anybody who will give them the warm fuzzies of having gotten someone. And to do that they will use whatever tactics or words will hurt.

These people use rape threats and death threats against women because they hurt. Women as a class are the most receptive to this sort of negative input for various cultural and yes physical reasons I won't elaborate on. But bullies have all sorts of tricks to use on other people. If you're a typical heterosexual male they'll tell you you're gay and unmanly. If you're gay and proud they'll tell you you're deviant scum. If you're a minority they'll call you racial slurs and insult you with stereotypes. If you have visible pimples they will tell you you're ugly. They will pick out whatever salient features are available to hurt you with and use them. It's less helpful to think of a lot of these people as racists or what not so much as optimization processes for suffering and tears.

They don't care who you are, they will hurt anyone.

Death threats are illegal in most countries. So yes, police action.

Everybody on the internet gets harassment. Especially those who twist facts and misrepresent arguments to push their own agenda.

For example, if you get harassed because you do things like mentioned above and then say it's because you're a woman.

And as alwyas, [evidence needed].

This is not common and, given her focus area in tech, it just happens to be more pronounced among those individuals. Ever heard of 4chan? All it takes is one post of your info and you'll get a swarm of people descending on you...

Linux/open source is full of such individuals.

They do it to get a rise out of people and the internet is a nice anonymous vehicle to do it under. Has nothing to do w/ the broader industry of tech and more to do with a group of misfits who like to frazzle people for the lulz.

Get the police involved and keep these unfounded broad based attacks of a whole industry to yourself. By making such statements, you're attacking people unjustly and doing the same thing to others that is being done to you. Techies are not rapist... I could care less if you're male/female. The industry is not fucked. You just got trolled by some dweebs on the internet.

One pronounced incident and everyone is ready to cast stones at an industry.. If anything, this needs to stop. It's really getting old and, as someone who does their best to value/see people as equals as a good number in tech do, I'm getting tired of this sh*t.

I asked my only female coworker about this, and she said she had never experienced sexual harassment, and found tech culture tame compared with finance, where people would shout at programmers over the phone if things went wrong.

Just one data point.