I’m a white cis male, and I work as a software engineer at a Silicon Valley unicorn. My employer is a perennial darling of the HN crowd, and is likely to continue its rocket ride in the years to come.
I’ll be completely candid here: I have some kind of problem with women. This isn’t to say that I don’t like women or don’t want women to succeed. I just don’t want to associate with or be seen around women. I’m sure there’s some kind of deep reason for this, but I haven’t exactly been looking for it.
On the other hand, I’m a huge believer in the “live and let live” principle. I found a good way of reconciling these two sides of my personality. Whenever I’m thrust into a situation in which I must interact with women, I gracefully extricate myself from it.
I’m very sneaky about this too. Sometimes my departure can be performed swiftly, but other times I must maneuver over a period of days or weeks to get myself away from an unpleasant situation. I’m never overt about it, I never hurt anyone in the process, and I’m pretty confident that no one has any idea that I’m like this.
In the past I’ve had to abandon projects I was working on, and even ditched maintainership of a popular open source project because a female coworker started contributing to it. Given that I’ve been doing this for a couple of decades, I’m willing to say that I’d do more or less anything to get away from women, as long as no one gets hurt. Yes, it might take a while, and I might need to make some sacrifices, but I’ll eventually get away.
Of course this started way before Twitter mobs and cancel culture became a thing, so I can’t claim prescience. But I do permit myself a little smugness at this point in time. I think I’m pretty much cancel-proof.