I don’t think what Bryan said was offensive per se. However, it did catch me off guard, and I said “Is he really going there?”
I don’t want to live in world governed by “PC” rules, but I think there is some worth in keeping a conversation egalitarian. What Bryan said wasn’t offensive, but I think one of the reasons that it made some people feel uncomfortable was that it was the sort of thing someone might say just before they segued into something offensive. We probably all have a collective memory of when more overtly sexist “boys talk” conversations were more common in the tech world.
In the corporate world the specter of sexism is still large. I’ve interviewed at a lot of companies that just happen to have a very young, conventionally attractive secretary. How did that happen? I’ve also known many female colleagues who have felt pressured to dress a certain way, in an industry where we put up with male engineers looking like hobos half the time. Remember what happened at Github this year?
Sometimes we forget how daunting, and intimidating an atmosphere technology can be to an outsider. I know that there is a lot of machismo in certain coding circles. This can be very off putting to people who don’t have a lot of personal connections in the industry. From the outside, coders can look extremely elitist and judgmental. I remember teaching a friend relational database stuff, and the friend was absolutely terrified that I find a mistake in the work. Such is the mystique of coding.
Given all that, I hardly find it surprising that some women have a hard time including themselves in the coding community. It might appear rather hostile to an outsider. There a lot of bright young people with college degrees, who could be coders right now, who don’t think they can swing it because of the apparent perceived hostility of the community to outsiders.