Some years ago, I was cleaning up a public space on a beach when three people stopped to talk. One was a woman about forty and two were girls of early high-school age, I judged. I asked about the latters’ school. They went to a charter or magnet or something. I asked about that. Then I asked what they’d do if they wanted to go to a football game.
“Oh, you can go to Central if you really need to.”
That sneering, superior condescension towards one’s age mates is not normal in that age group. It has to be carefully taught and I figured one of the teachers was right there.
I asked about their studies and we chatted a bit.
The older woman said, “You know a lot for a man.”
“Oh, come on,” I said.
“No, really. Not many men know about history like you do.”
[I was not being deep, philosophical, or profound]
I felt that if I came back briskly, it would give her grounds to tell the girls that all guys are buttheads.

At that moment, over the lake three A10 Warthogs went screaming south. I turned to look, placing the three women behind me.
“Your tax dollars at work,” the older woman said with a vile and sneering tone.
I turned around with a big, dumb smile oblivious to the undertone. Without knowing me, she was inviting me to participate in her view dishonoring an institution in which I had been a proud participant. Bitch.
“Isn’t that great! The more of those I have working for me, the better I like it.”
She looked at me in horror.
“You were in the Air Force?”

Crap, I thought. Hogs are ground attack aircraft. If they’re working for me, that means the targets are on the ground and so am I. So I WOULDN’T BE IN THE BLOODY AIR FORCE!! WOULD I? Where do they GET these people?

But I said, with a bigger, dumber, more oblivious smile,
“No. Infantry.”

I raked another few bits of trash.

When I looked up, they were thirty yards away and picking up speed.

Am I a meanie to laugh when I think of this?

And, boy, would I be interested in how the stereotype repair went. I’d pay some good money for that.

So when I hear about misogyny, which I have never seen in operation and which my female family members have never mentioned, I think of that day on the beach.

All I’ll do before leaving this thread is point something out, and make a suggestion:
I don’t know that the women in my immediate circle “deal with” misogyny, or are so interested in other things that they don’t notice it, which is a different issue. I suspect it’s the latter. It could be that it’s ‘way overblown and they don’t have to deal with much at all, or ignore much at all.
(My bold.)
You don’t know; you just suspect and talk about what could be. You haven’t read what women have to say about their experiences, and it doesn’t really sound like you’ve talked to the women in your own life about whether they’ve had to deal with misogyny, and if so, how. You just suspect they haven’t.

So my suggestion is that you talk to them, and take some time to read the Margolis and Fisher book and the Spertus paper (neither is very long), or other books on women’s experiences in SME (science, math, and engineering). Personally, I suspect that what you’ll find will be surprising.

The IT folks who come to my office are all guys. But one day I saw a young woman in the room which is the center for heat, A/C, and phone switching. She had a bound sheaf of schematics and a laptop. I don’t know what she was doing.
The guys don’t seem like socially inept Trekkies. I do know one guy who’s in the business who’s happily married, and I know his wife. They seem okay.

The IT guy who helps us at home started with us at about sixteen. Said he took his father’s computer apart and reassembled it when he was nine. He did off-the-books IT work for home computers for spending money. I ran into him working at the local supermarket and asked how it was going. He got very serious and said the work was physically challenging. Fortunately, I’ve trained myself not to react overtly to surprises, so I just said something like, “I bet,” and changed the subject.
The kid is not macho and my wife, who knows a bit more about him, says his relationship with his girlfriend looks pretty standard.He’s since graduated, gotten a job with a school system, traded up to a gently-used Cadillac and no longer answers his phone. Ungrateful pup.

So I don’t buy macho.
I will allow for the defensiveness of the nerd.
IMO, that would be approached in a different fashion from macho.

Is there quantifiable data proving the previous experience (messing around with ‘puters) has no effect on education in the field?

One of the reasons my female acquaintances are not bothered by misogynistic attacks is that there are so few attacks. As with racism and homophobia, if you choose your lens carefully, any ambiguous situation can be labeled as some kind of ism.

Example. When my dtr was in school, she had a job which I will describe as gatekeeper in a retail situation. A group of state troopers showed up according to the scheduled meeting. One had not done his homework and, as a result of what he was not going to be allowed to do, got rude. She was not hurt. Not offended. Did not collapse in a pile of angst. She did report his behavior. She was later interviewed by some shooter from the state police who led her to believe this guy is a loose cannon, but not for much longer.
This could be considered a misognystic interaction, except the guy would have–had, according to the interviewer–been just as much a butthead to guys.
Whichever, the institution responded appropriately. If my daughter were interested in stacking up misogynistic attacks, this could be a counter. But she’s not, and, besides, this clearly isn’t.
IMO, feminists would grab on to this as gold. Not only was it male-female, the male in question was a big, strong guy with the uniform and gun and all that patriarchal oppressor equipment.
To die for.

My daughter was assaulted once. By another girl.

My dtr and DIL have both had career obstructions put in their way–and have overcome–by corrupt, dishonest, incompetent ‘crats. Who happened to be women. I am sorry the ‘crats in question were not men. Imagine what could be made of that.

When I was a very young child, women wore odd, complicated things on their heads referred to as “hats”. These were the subject of stand-up comedy, cartoons, and various other sneers.
A psych prof explained “gestalt” by hypothesizing a woman walking down the street in one of these things. Across the street, a couple of guys are laughing. The woman, conscious of this floral monstrosity on her head, thinks they’re laughing at her. But she has no way of knowing. Nevertheless, when she gets home, she has a “counter”. She’s absolutely certain the guys were laughing at her hat.
Now, the second part of this is that it’s a false positive. But she doesn’t know it. After the first false positive, she’s more inclined to believe a second ambiguous situation is a laugh at her. So that’s two. Three is, naturally, easier. By ten…. Pick your gestalt and anything is possible.

My wife, when she first taught at the university level, was asked to join a group of university women. The first item on the agenda of the first meeting she attended was how her career had been negatively impacted by men. She had no stories of such and was not invited back. I guess she was supposed to know she was supposed to make them up.

The father of one of my dtr’s friends was institutionalized for bipolar when the kid was in high school. The “crazy dad” was a subject of teasing from her female acquaintances. The boys said nothing. Maybe they didn’t know.

I don’t know that the women in my immediate circle “deal with” misogyny, or are so interested in other things that they don’t notice it, which is a different issue. I suspect it’s the latter.
It could be that it’s ‘way overblown and they don’t have to deal with much at all, or ignore much at all.

And they do not –most especially do not–use the accusation of misogyny as a club to shut down arguments over, say, whether Hillary is a good prospect for pres.

Sweating Through Fog, chapter 8 of Unlocking the clubhouse describes the specific interventions the School of Computer Science at CMU took to increase the enrollment rate and decrease the attrition rate of women majors. Prior to these changes, in 1995, 7% of new students enrolled in the School were women; five years later, that number had risen to 42%. (137) They identify the following interventions:
1. Adjust admissions criteria to admit a greater percentage of students students with less CS experience. (130)
2. `[P]ut better, more experienced, and more senior teachers … into the earliest courses of the curriculum, where women reported having the most distress’. (131)
3. Integrate `a unit on diversity, particularly gender equity, into the teaching assistant training’. (131)
4. Alter the curriculum in ways that emphasise `technology in the context of its real-world uses and impact’ (131).
5. `[D]iscussing the results of our research [on women’s experiences in the School] … and introducing diversity considerations into discussions of curriculum and programming’ (133) with faculty.
6. `Among students, in addition to stressing to entering students that prior experience in nto a critical issue, we began to talk about achievement in computer science as more multidimensional than the standard “boy hacker” icon.’ (133)
7. Cultivating relationships between CMU faculty and high school CS teachers, who in turn encouraged their students — both male and female — to apply to CMU. (134)
8. A handful of interventions designed to encourage women to apply and form a community of female students of the School, which the authors do not believe was successful.

It seems clear to me that interventions 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 were designed to target the macho culture of the School, and all the interventions taken together were extraordinarily successful. Also, none of these 8 are Affirmative Action programmes in the standard sense — though they were, of course, affirmative actions taken to increase the percentage of female students in the School.

Incidentally, starting in AY 1999-2000, the Office of Admissions for the School began to consider `applicants’ nonnumeric attributes’, including `economic, ethnic, and gender diversity’ (136). This suggests, Richard, that gender was not taken into consideration in the mid-’90s, when the women interviewed by the authors were admitted. So not only were the women interviewed ones who had been admitted to the school without the benefit of Affirmative Action programmes, they were ones who had the self-confidence and fortitude to survive in a hostile community that falsely accused them of being `admitted with lower standards’. The fact that this blatant falsehood was used to marginalise these women is another indication of how hostile the community was to their presence.

Finally, Richard, it’s fantastic that the women in your life haven’t been discouraged by misogynistic personal attacks. (Although you said they don’t `seem to be bothered’. Have you asked them directly?) But, as the woman I quoted above said, `We shouldn’t have to deal with it’.

In addition, if this sort of thing is wrong, it’s wrong all over.

Some years ago, Sears spent $10 mill defending itself against EEOC accusations of discrimination. Women were not proportionally represented in the highest-income departments–selling such things as lawn tractors and snow blowers. Sears best efforts could not get enough women to volunteer. Apparently free choice is not legitimate.

I don’t know where these easily-wounded women come from. My sister, wife, daughter, daughter-in-law, DIL’s sisters, various friends don’t seem to be bothered by this ephemeral fog of misogyny.

The last time any of them said anything about it was when my dtr was maybe eight and playing mixed AYSO soccer.

“Dad [I was also coach]they’re making fun of me because I’m a girl.”
Moments later, when the dust settled, there was one guy down, two looking for their shoes and my daughter headed up field with the ball.

The only trouble any of these notable women have had has come at the hands of other women.

But if it makes you happy to think of malicious computer geeks doing the locker-room thing in the physics lab, go for it.

I think you can only go so far with these explanations that every difference in outcomes is a result of coercion and hostility. It is interesting and amusing to compare “Unlocking the Clubhouse” with Steve Sailor’s riff on the sad, shocking lack of gender diversity in the illegal drug trade.

I do not require all my commenters to be feminists, but they must be feminist-friendly — or address other subjects.

I’ve written tons about men in women’s studies classes (having been one myself); search my archives and leave your comment at a more appropriate place.

What for? Either there are different standards for defined groups or there are not.
If there are, pointing it out may be rude, but insisting on stifling the discussion makes things worse.

If there are not, then there isn’t much point in discussing the non-existent and people probably don’t.

And do you have any idea of how a guy feels in a women’s studies class when he asks a question which may not be in accord with CW? Or might indicate he missed something? If you don’t have any idea, why not? If you do, what is the guy thinking/feeling?

Do you have a problem with cleaning all houses? Or just some?