> The whole point was to illustrate how sexism at work can come in far more subtle forms than "my boss keeps pinching my ass" or "I can't stay late because that's when the guys all gather around the biggest monitor and watch porn" or even "too many fsck jokes".
That's fine, but it didn't illustrate sexism at work at all. That's the criticism.
She was not illustrating aggressive sexism where it's blatantly obvious; that's my point. She was covering a more subtle variety, wherein (in this example) the "too emotional" card was played, with her, all the time simply because (it was clear to her) she was a woman. She ran a simple experiment, and in this interaction didn't even volunteer information that might seem critical, just answered questions simply and without elaborating or making any additional comment (like, "yeah, that was kind of frustrating that I had to be woken up to fix this, even though it was X's shift").
The card was played anyway.
Are you in the club of people saying she needs to document all of the times that card was played against her in the past (and not played against male coworkers), or "it wasn't sexism"?
She explained the context. The card is played all the time. She tried this little experiment, and did everything she could think of to avoid it short of speaking in a robot voice. No dice.
Is this some kind of "proof" that it was sexism and couldn't be anything else? Of course not; but she was convinced enough (from her total experience) that she left the job. "The straw that broke the camel's back" is just a tiny straw. The expression assumes there is already a massive bale already on board.
Hell, even if further investigation (video footage, I guess?) somehow showed that this case was most likely not related to her gender at all, the problem is still there: the environment felt unpleasantly sexist to the woman working in it.
Is this not worth talking about? It's a deep subject, and many companies are affected in non-trivial ways; main point #2 of the blog post was that because she was forced out by this discomfort, the company is suffering real losses. Good IT workers are not interchangeable, and you might lose a cornerstone of your business due to seemingly-trivial mistakes repeated many times.
Are you in the club of people saying she needs to document all of the times that card was played against her in the past (and not played against male coworkers), or "it wasn't sexism"?
I'm in the club of people who don't think she told a convincing story in this blog post. All she illustrated was a scenario where she felt she was treated unfairly, annotated with her opinion that it was out of sexism. There isn't much to learn about there--certainly less than I've learned from other stories of sexism in technology. There's a difference between picking out a subtle instance of sexism and picking out a completely ambiguous situation where one person feels they've been mistreated and assuming it's sexism.
Really, I'm not especially critical of the author here. She was probably just venting. For something to be Hacker News material, it should probably be a little more than merely an instance of venting.
It's possible she could have chosen a better example. But hey, this is what actually happened in the particular event that caused her to decide enough was enough, and leaving the company was the most important part of the post (i.e., this matters to businesses beyond just "ah well, some women may be a bit annoyed"). That made it an important post to make (vs. venting at a random ambiguous event) & discuss (I thought).
AFAIK, you didn't even get a chance to bring up any of those other, better examples; the discussion of the actual topic didn't happen. Maybe if you'd coupled those stories with the point that "companies can crumble because of these mistakes" that would have been a good starting point?
Larger point -- there are many hundreds of HN stories that just drift past every day with few votes and little to no discussion; their arguments are weak, they aren't interesting enough, they're just rehashing old ideas, etc..
Obviously, that's not what happened here -- this discussion now has ~175 comments that are emphatically not lukewarm suggestions that maybe there's a better post out there to serve as a lynchpin for a discussion of subtle sexism.
That's fine, but it didn't illustrate sexism at work at all. That's the criticism.