I think a lot of what you're talking about has more to do with an apparent inability of some people to act with any sort of common sense around other human beings rather than 'class'. This happens in any workplace (my mother was a secretary, and had to leave one of her companies because her boss was consistently making advances), but in technology especially so.
Perhaps this is a symptom of the social environment a lot of programmers seem to have in common. A lot of us spend our teenage years alone or with a small group of very close friends. Because of that, certain people might not develop a full understanding of social customs, or worse: deride them as 'silly'. This is a fundamental mark of immaturity, and most people and most programmers grow out of it. Some people don't, and I think it's especially common among programmers because they (and yes, this is stereotype) tend to be very solitary.
People like us tend to spend a lot of time online, where you can make sure you only talk to people who are very similar to you (case in point: HN). Not being forced to talk to people with different opinions results in stunted social growth. A huge part of life is learning to interact with people who are different than you.
When you throw someone who doesn't have a lot of experience with social norms and is used to having everything their way into an office work environment, they generally don't mesh well.
> I think a lot of what you're talking about has more to do with an apparent inability of some people to act with any sort of common sense around other human beings rather than 'class'.
Some of it, maybe. A lowered standard of functional adulthood for such people doesn't seem like it would do them any favors; instead, it'd deny them the very feedback they need to learn better.
Immaturity doesn't strike me as the major problem here, though, unless you want to argue that the average degree of social maturity in our industry resembles that more commonly expected on a grade-school playground.
Even if that were true, then the maltreatment under discussion would be a lot more evident than it is to those of us who aren't its targets, because those who engage in it would lack the necessary cunning to choose their target and their context so that a complaint can be dismissed as he-said-she-said. Such cunning requires at least some capacity, whether cognitive or intuitive, for social analysis -- enough so, in fact, to exceed the minimum threshold for "I didn't understand what I was doing was wrong".
This being true, your choices are either to assume the existence of a feminist conspiracy aimed at the overthrow of the existing industry, or to assume that those men who are most responsible for the problem under discussion know very well that most of us would utterly refuse to put up with their shit if we saw it going on, and that's why they make sure that we don't.
I think a lot of what you're talking about has more to do with an apparent inability of some people to act with any sort of common sense around other human beings rather than 'class'. This happens in any workplace (my mother was a secretary, and had to leave one of her companies because her boss was consistently making advances), but in technology especially so.
Perhaps this is a symptom of the social environment a lot of programmers seem to have in common. A lot of us spend our teenage years alone or with a small group of very close friends. Because of that, certain people might not develop a full understanding of social customs, or worse: deride them as 'silly'. This is a fundamental mark of immaturity, and most people and most programmers grow out of it. Some people don't, and I think it's especially common among programmers because they (and yes, this is stereotype) tend to be very solitary.
People like us tend to spend a lot of time online, where you can make sure you only talk to people who are very similar to you (case in point: HN). Not being forced to talk to people with different opinions results in stunted social growth. A huge part of life is learning to interact with people who are different than you.
When you throw someone who doesn't have a lot of experience with social norms and is used to having everything their way into an office work environment, they generally don't mesh well.