My issue with your post is this: obviously those things are very serious problems. But they are only the most egregious ones. I feel like any company not run by dolts can manage not to allow punishing women with the rationale that they might get pregnant and to stop blatant sexual harassment -- after all, these things are completely illegal. But even if we solve them there are still lots of more subtle ways that companies can be made less welcoming places for women than for men and addressing those probably requires much more conscious consideration.
And my problem with your response is that it still happens every single day legal or not. Let's fix the egregious problems for good, then we can focus on the subtle ones.
Take a solid engineer like Valerie Aurora or Sarah Sharp or even say Jessie Frazelle (in addition to the previously mentioned Uber engineer). This happens to other human beings, it is awful, it should stop. I would LOVE to work in a team with any of them solely to learn from them and grow my own skills. All of them have publically written about how they've been wrongfully discriminated against.
Yoire welcome to believe this isn't a problem and that it is common sense to not do these things and yet we still here the same story over and over and over. If my daughter wants to be an engineer I want her to be graded on the only thing that really matters, which is her intellect and ability to sell her solution as the best given the business requirements. Nothing more or less.
I think what emodendroket is getting at is not that this stuff is unimportant, but that the vast majority of us have no occasion to address the egregious problems with any regularity, so we should also focus on the things we can affect on a day-to-day basis. While bad things do happen every day across the industry, at any given workplace (or more specifically, within an individual working group) they are fairly infrequent, and only a small number of people actually witness them or are otherwise in a position to take action.
In contrast, we do have opportunities every day to address the more subtle issues - talking over people, expecting women to take notes, paying more attention to ideas that come from men, etc. Even at a company where no woman is harassed or underpaid or refused a promotion, there are almost always things that can be done to make the environment less uncomfortable for women, and these are things that everyone can and should pay attention to all the time.
