FSF to host a mini-summit on Women in Free Software

Just to say, I'm pretty sure that if I faced half the $#@ that I hear described by women, I'd never have stuck around in FOSS.

They're all telling you that yes, they face dramatically more BS than men. This is pretty easy to confirm. You're sort of brushing that aside to preserve your prior assumption -- not based on any data, AFAICT -- that no, men and women are treated the same, and in order to do that you speculate that really the problem is with the women, because they just such delicate flowers.

Do you see how your comment might be adding to that BS they face?
I'm not saying your heart is in the wrong place, but that's just the thing. They're not just complaining about a few bad apples that we could kick out or something (but don't) -- there are subtle sexist assumptions woven into our default assumptions and ways of interacting, and that means that they face this stuff at some constant low level from all directions. Sounds exhausting to me.

> In the threads here, we have seen plain statements from Bruce being reinterpreted in ways that make them *very* offensive to women

Alternatively, it's possible that those statements actually are offensive to women -- that they felt excluded, disrespected, and so on -- but that you and Bruce didn't have the right background to see that until they were commented on. I don't think I did any "reinterpretation" of your statement above; I think I just took it's plain meaning and pointed out *in context* it had problems you might not have noticed.

If anything, my impression is that the women commenting here are letting a lot of stuff slide and picking a few particularly egregious things to comment on, because there's just too much BS out there and life is too short. That's kind of the opposite of thin-skinnedness.