I feel like downvoting it now. That kind of stuff just has no place in rational discourse. If the poster wouldn't hesitate to say it in real life, that's beca

I feel like downvoting it now. That kind of stuff just has no place in rational discourse. If the poster wouldn't hesitate to say it in real life, that's because throwaway comments like that have no record and no real cost among your friends. A comment on HNN is there for a while, though, and visible to everyone. It's appropriate that it have a cost to say something really ... I want to say stupid. But inaccurate is maybe something better. I went to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology back in medieval times when it was all-male. This attitude was pretty natural there at the time - we were an all-male top engineering college in the same town with ISU, a middling state university, and St. Mary-of-the-Woods, an all-female liberal arts college. Engineers tend to measure intelligence by skill with math and science, so naturally Rose's student body was, by our own measure, the smartest of the three. One year, there was a talk by a Rose alum who had been Out There in the business world, giving advice to the not-yet-graduated. One thing he said stuck with me - he said that one of the hardest things facing Rose graduates was working with women. This is because they consistently underestimated them, and were then crushed, because women are not stupider than men. But there's nothing surer to provoke animosity in any coworker than underestimating them.