I'm not going to pick on you specifically here, but this is a great place for me to highlight something.
I think folks in tech (and society at large, frankly) have a bit of a fundamental misunderstanding of what comprises discrimination and sexism. The systematic disenfranchisement of a gender/race/ethnicity whatever term you want to use, often is not remedied without some kind of equality of status, that's what 'retweeting only women' is doing. Its giving equality of status to women that they likely would not usually have. Fundamentally I think its hard for a lot of folks to grasp this, even those who have historically been discriminated against when it comes to something they don't understand, part of that is human nature, but over and over again actual psychological studies and sociology studies show again and again that when you give people equality of status only then do things change. [0][1][2][3]
As far as Pax goes, CTO of a growing (and arguably large at the time even) should have known better, and frankly, his comments, joke or not, were inexcusable. I also don't care what people may say about what people say in private, because that is something I cannot react to, because I'm not party to that conversation, but this took place on a public forum, and it was in very poor taste at a minimum, and given an executive at a company, likely someone with such poor taste on a public forum as such I can't imagine was doing much for bettering workplace standards. This may be complete conjecture which I acknowledge. With that said, in my experience dealing with people who tend to act the same way in a public forum, in private they're more often than not just as inexcusable.
I think folks in tech (and society at large, frankly) have a bit of a fundamental misunderstanding of what comprises discrimination and sexism. The systematic disenfranchisement of a gender/race/ethnicity whatever term you want to use, often is not remedied without some kind of equality of status, that's what 'retweeting only women' is doing. Its giving equality of status to women that they likely would not usually have. Fundamentally I think its hard for a lot of folks to grasp this, even those who have historically been discriminated against when it comes to something they don't understand, part of that is human nature, but over and over again actual psychological studies and sociology studies show again and again that when you give people equality of status only then do things change. [0][1][2][3]
As far as Pax goes, CTO of a growing (and arguably large at the time even) should have known better, and frankly, his comments, joke or not, were inexcusable. I also don't care what people may say about what people say in private, because that is something I cannot react to, because I'm not party to that conversation, but this took place on a public forum, and it was in very poor taste at a minimum, and given an executive at a company, likely someone with such poor taste on a public forum as such I can't imagine was doing much for bettering workplace standards. This may be complete conjecture which I acknowledge. With that said, in my experience dealing with people who tend to act the same way in a public forum, in private they're more often than not just as inexcusable.
[0] http://commons.emich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1408&co... [1] http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-... [2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/ruchikatulshyan/2015/01/30/racia... [3] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/02/10/business-...