So, let's see here; Meredith Patterson has:

* "...posted an idea for a new feature to the developers’ mailing list for an open-source project...[but on list she had no access to, it was] dismissed the idea out of hand because a woman had proposed it." The feature only became available because she had the opportunity to implement it in such a way that it became a "rousing success". (I should stop right here because that's about as damning an incident as I can come up with.)

* "...called the police in a foreign country to report an attempted rape at a conference, and argued with them when they told my friend that nobody would consider it assault since they’d both been drinking."

* "...thwarted a wannabe PUA at a conference completely by accident" by "a blazingly single-minded focus on whatever topic I happen to be perseverating on at the moment".

Now, I don't want to seem to be saying that she's wrong to feel as she does, or that her experiences are somehow invalid, or that she's in "denial" as some idiot put it. I'm not. Really. It works for her and others, and I think she would admit it doesn't work for everyone.

On the other hand, I don't think her suggestion of, "What I’ve got, and what I wish the rest of the 'women in tech' community who rage against the misogyny they see everywhere they look could also have, is a blazingly single-minded focus on whatever topic I happen to be perseverating on at the moment," is a workable approach.

Most of the people I know can't ignore those sorts of things and can't be satisfied "...literally [doubling] over laughing at how nonplussed he must have been to see it not only implemented, but implemented to rousing success." Most of the people I know don't want to.

(Ok, here's an internet-reasoning hypothetical for you: I know a lot of geeks who use the term "sportsball"; I believe many of them have this sort of antipathy because they faced some kind of abuse from the sportsball players of the world. Would you, assuming you're one of such, be willing to ignore that abuse because you were passionately interested in baseball or (American) football---both of which have fascinating statistical stories to tell, by the way?)

Now, me, I'm a right cranky, misanthropic rat-bastard and I can certainly single-mindedly focus on whatever interests me at the moment (early Mesopotamian and Near Eastern history, abstract algebra and programming languages, and natural language processing at the moment, fwiw), but I don't want to hang around a community that is casually abusive to anyone, even if it isn't me. And, damn it, maybe I want the goddamn feature that didn't get implemented because the idea was dismissed because of who suggested it.

I notice from some of the other comments that there are those who believe that the single-minded focus is the royal road to success in tech. It's not. How many people do you know who have the focus but aren't successful? (This isn't really an example because he is successful enough that you know his name, but has anyone read Chuck Moore's blog lately?) And how many people do you know who are successful but aren't especially focused---maybe because they didn't have to swim upstream against incidents like Patterson's? (Anyone remember the old Ruby community?) Further, by the way for those of you in the startup community, you probably don't want total focus on tech to be the ultimate. People like that are very easy to take advantage of.