I think there's a pretty good case out there for the fact that sexism hurts men as well as women. Sometimes profoundly. I can only imagine how devastating it would be to want to devote one's life to caring for, raising, and teaching children, while trying to deal with suspicions of, as others have suggested here, intending to sexually abuse!

I think there's a lot of work to be done if we want a better culture than that.

I have a question for readers out there: are there any specific instances in which gender stereotypes impeded or prevented or dissuaded you from pursuing something you would have liked to that you'd like to discuss? Sexism isn't one sided.

Some posts to seed the discussion:

- iamelgringo on his experience nursing http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=333168

- smoody on feeling isolated in an engineering culture in which women far outnumbered men http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=332894

- sanj making an analogy between a college experiences http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=332889

To be honest, some of the worst experiences with sexism I have nowadays revolve around the ludicrous extrapolations of the evolutionary psychology du jour that come up anytime a debate surfaces around gender equality on HN. The porn ridden CouchDB presentation didn't really rate for me (though I didn't attend) - it was the reaction afterwards that was more stressful. A single person can just be socially inept, but when it's clear how pervasive homebrew theories for why men are bred to prefer risk and have more variation in intelligence and aim for high status and pursue young women and are bred to be polygamous and on and on, it becomes much harder to forget, from day to day, that sexism is around me.

Occasionally I find voices being raised around some engineering issue. I feel like I need to yell to be heard - and being visibly upset doesn't do much to quell the intensity. In certain dark moments this has had me considering leaving engineering, though I doubt women have a monopoly on the sentiment.

To be honest I think a lot of the things that would have kept me from my career choice are behind me. I've heard people express surprise that I take on a technical role in my company, or that I founded it. Even around the liberal Berkeley I sometimes hear surprise, from strangers, that I of all people would have studied physics. There was a time when that would have impeded me more, but I avoided a lot of it dropping out of junior high - which seems to be the time when a lot of girls drop out of many stereotypically nerdy interests.

Sometimes the worst sexism experienced by women comes from women. The worst of it that I've experienced probably shouldn't go here, but some of it I've dealt with through HN. This is probably more annoying than anything else, but I had the privilege of reading Bonnie Ruberg write in "5 Reasons Why I Want Digg For Girls" say that a project I was working on (I started a company in the area, it's doing well) was interesting to her because "only because they're the kind of things I know my male, Internet-loving friends could sit around and blab about for hours."

One gauge for the degree of cultural influence on technical career choices is the nationality skew. Andreescu et. al. (http://www.ams.org/notices/200810/fea-gallian.pdf) note that the Bulgarian, Russian, and USA IMO teams perform at roughly the same level, and their female team mates perform at a similar level as well. But the Bulgarian team has had 21 girls in its history, the Russian team 15, and the USA team only 3. This, they argue, demonstrates that the disparity cannot be due to country specific difficulties for girls in qualifying for the IMO - instead "some countries routinely identify and nurture both boys and girls to become world class mathematical problem solvers; others, including the USA, only rarely identify girls of this caliber."

There's also the issue of stereotype threat. As Diane Quinn writes (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0341/is_1_57/ai_75140...) "Stereotype threat occurs when a person is in a situation in which a negative stereotype about that person (or that person's group) could be applied to the person and used to judge the person's behavior." Shih et. al. performed a study in which Asian American women wrote a math test. Before the test was taken, participants were asked to identify their race or sex. Those who were asked their race rather than their sex performed significantly better.