The claim was "How do you piss off a technical woman so she will leave your team? It's easy. Just go and lob a few complaints about her behavior that would never apply to a guy."
I'm a man and I've also been in the situation of overly sensitive office managers. Maybe this problem does happen to women more often than men, but to say that it never happens to men is completely untrue.
Playing the sexism card every time you run into a bad manager with a dysfunctional team seems like wasted effort to me. In the case above it's really hard for me to get past this developer's sour grapes to know if there was real sexism or just inability to recognize her (or anyone's) competence.
I'd rather see some thoughts on how a reasonably competent team loses a solid female developer.
The issue isn't sensitive managers, it is that sensitive managers call men jerks, lazy or assholes, but they'll say that women are "shrill" or "too emotional".
There's a difference there -- with the woman, the manager is attacking her as a person. With the guy, he is directing the commentary towards the man's behavior.
Your examples could just as easily be read the other way -- that "jerk", "lazy" and "asshole" are directed at the person whereas "shrill" or "emotional" are towards behaviour. I don't see what criteria you're using to put these examples in one category or the other.
The distinction is that, in many peoples' eyes, "shrill" as a personal insult is almost always directed at women. There is a stereotype of a shrill woman.
I think that's the point, though -- this was emphatically not sexism of the "requests for sex acts" variety.
This is why I found this interesting -- these are mistakes that can happen in perfectly competent teams, and men on the team may be unaware that they're doing things that would be annoying to a targeted male co-worker, but will make a female co-worker feel like she's trapped in a sexist environment (and may irritate her enough that she leaves the company).
Even more enlightened folks tend to have some layer of X-ism built in to their thinking; it's hard to avoid. It takes a lot of training to avoid expressing it in subtle ways, and to see others expressing it.
Seriously, I had my (white, upper-middle class) uncle tell me racial discrimination didn't exist anymore in many parts of the US anymore, based on what he saw around him.
Unfortunately, if you're in the less-favored group, you don't have that luxury of blindness, and (especially after a few really blatant cases) you'll tend to see it everywhere.
I'm a man and I've also been in the situation of overly sensitive office managers. Maybe this problem does happen to women more often than men, but to say that it never happens to men is completely untrue.
Playing the sexism card every time you run into a bad manager with a dysfunctional team seems like wasted effort to me. In the case above it's really hard for me to get past this developer's sour grapes to know if there was real sexism or just inability to recognize her (or anyone's) competence.
I'd rather see some thoughts on how a reasonably competent team loses a solid female developer.