No, it's not just unpleasantness. Even digressing from the fact how much those words you talk about actually hurt, here's a neat link: http://www.endvawnow.org/

No, it's not just unpleasantness. Even digressing from the fact how much those words you talk about actually hurt, here's a neat link: http://www.endvawnow.org/en/articles/299-fast-facts-statistics-on-violence-against-women-and-girls-.html http://www.endvawnow.org/en/articles/299-fast-facts-statisti... Some highlights, cherry-picked for specific statements about "first-world" countries, because I don't feel like googling for more right now: * In the United States, 83 percent of girls aged 12 to 16 experienced some form of sexual harassment in public schools. * In Australia, Canada, Israel, South Africa and the United States, between 40 and 70 percent of female murder victims were killed by their intimate partners. * Between 40 and 50 percent of women in European Union countries experience unwanted sexual advances, physical contact or other forms of sexual harassment at work. As said before I don't really feel like googling, but from memory in the US at least 15% of women experience sexual violence during their lifetime, and stats for EU aren't really that much better. As for OP, the issue here is that in case of a systematic bias against a certain group of people it isn't always possible to remove the possibility of perceiving the dividing factors. You can forbid asking about religion in interviews, but gender is, in many cases, immediately obvious, either from given name or from appearance. Ah, and calling talking openly about gender an "obsession" is somewhat offensive, saying that the issue isn't treated seriously about EU is also patently false (we regularly have ideas like forcing a percentage of company boards to be women, for example, sadly still ineffective), and adding a dismissive quote by a woman at the end right after mentioning that women can be sexist too is sorta ironic.