There is no comparison to be drawn between a physical assault and robbery and allocation of work between male and female participants at a project planning meeting. That is absurd and inherently disrespectful both to women and to victims of physical assault.

You’re advocating a double standard for women. You’re demeaning their entire gender, saying that women (in general) are just too inherently weak and fragile and frail socially to stand up for themselves in group situations with men, and thus need extra social rules to protect and work around their weak mode of interaction. Your proposed solution, that we men should don kid gloves and be nice and kind and gentle, is even more demeaning to women (and to men). There’s nothing about the female gender that makes a women inherently unable to step up and assert herself – indeed, many, many women do exactly that.

The real solution is not to institute a double standard, but that little girls should not be raised to have passive personalities and to be submissive to perceived group desires; and that women who were born into such situations and raised to have such personalities need to learn to stand up for themselves (as many women (and men) before them have done).

Attending CASCON is free and there are a number of very interesting topics being presented.

I’d like to add that even subtle challenges to other people’s disrespectful comments goes a long way. It’s not easy, and it takes practice; many times I can’t find the courage or the wit to retort to offhanded discriminatory comments, but when I manage to, the challenge defuses the insults pretty effectively.

Now back to your post, did you ever try to contact the woman again and let her know how you felt in regards to what you did?

I do now understand what you said once in our weekly meetings, that having girls in a team makes for a much more productive one. My team was all girls with the exception of myself!