No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

What's happening here seems like a mix of the power of anonymity on the internet mixed with the fact that women are underrepresented in game development. The former lets people harass, taunt, and threaten with many times very few consequences, whereas the latter leads to favoritism to other members of the in-group, and derogation of the out-group.

So what can we do? Unfortunately, the issues are larger than me to grasp. But since we are on Hacker News, I'll give a few technological solutions I've taken a few minutes to come up with that may help:

1. We have spam filters right now on email -- what if those filters also watched for hate words? If it met a certain threshold, the message would not be shown in the main article. We could mark email/comments as "hateful", and when it reached a certain threshold that comment would be hashed and added to a repository that could be checked against for future comments. People would try to get around it like they do spam filters (I H.A.T.E Y.O.U., etc), but with enough training I feel a good deal could be filtered out.

2. HR departments should be moved to unbiased third party services. I feel many employees are afraid to report discrimination or harassment because many times their HR coordinator knows the people involved. If you move it to an unbiased third party, you can report pseudo-anonymously (they will know who reported, but won't tell the company until after they have confirmed or need to follow up with the company) without the worry that the third party is biased towards a specific party.

There needs to be a lot more thought put into how we can fix this than the few minutes I spent above, but it might be a good first step.

EDIT: modified for brevity's sake. (I'll replace with the original again if people want to read it)

It might seem extreme, but when you've been on the receiving end of numerous vile messages a day, including rape/death threats, discovery of your home address and gems like "Women are the niggers of gender ... If you killed yourself, I wouldn’t even fuck the corpse" (as referenced in article), non-anonymity may seem appealing.

Also, as a society, I'd like to think we can do better than "sorry about the rape/murder threats, we'll try to hide most of them from you"

I disagree. A team's composition is the only thing that matters when it comes to minimizing this sort of behavior towards co-workers (whether in or outside work). And a team which is comprised of people who have not experienced a professional work environment can not be expected to be professional. It's the same reason we don't expect interns to be immediately familiar with the reality of programming in a business; they have no context of business reality.

I honestly believe that it's fair to say that vast majority of people will act poorly, when the action has no (or few) repercussions; it's why we have easily-pickable locks on our houses, to deter the 98% of people who would steal small items if there were no barriers or consequences.

Diversity and professionalism are the locks to deter people from behaving poorly in a work environment. Of course, this leaves the small minority who would act poorly regardless of the repercussions, their behavior can only be resolved through rules and contracts regardless of the team size or composition. The most you can ever hope to do is prevent the majority of attacks, and penalize the minority appropriately.