A lot of it is authentic misogyny, because there are a lot of bad people out there and misogyny is as old (and as new) as dirt.
My point is that programmers and technologists, as a group, aren't inclined to be worse than the general population. (Most programmers are pretty damn supportive of women getting into the industry and being treated as well as men.) However, the dominant culture is Silicon Valley isn't set by programmers ("nerds") but by the people sent West by the mainstream business culture to boss nerds around. That particular set of people (the colonial overseers) is across-the-board awful, and they've taken the waning casual sexism of the MBA-culture world (meeting a client, or celebrating a good day at the trading desk, at a strip club) and leveled it up into something a lot worse, and that's what we see in the Valley. It's authentic misogyny but it comes from the top. Your typical young engineer is just an average nerd; not a misogynist.
My point is that programmers and technologists, as a group, aren't inclined to be worse than the general population. (Most programmers are pretty damn supportive of women getting into the industry and being treated as well as men.) However, the dominant culture is Silicon Valley isn't set by programmers ("nerds") but by the people sent West by the mainstream business culture to boss nerds around. That particular set of people (the colonial overseers) is across-the-board awful, and they've taken the waning casual sexism of the MBA-culture world (meeting a client, or celebrating a good day at the trading desk, at a strip club) and leveled it up into something a lot worse, and that's what we see in the Valley. It's authentic misogyny but it comes from the top. Your typical young engineer is just an average nerd; not a misogynist.