No. It sounds like her line manager was every single untrained techbro manager at a startup.

Everyone hates HR and managers. And there are a lot of reasons to. But taking someone who is “good at technical work” and expecting them to understand how to manage people is a mess. You almost immediately find out about all their “under the surface” biases and they genuinely have no idea how to work around those.

Like, it is good that people are acknowledging how massively fucked this is. But people should really understand that… this is “normal” for women in tech. And you get the occasional “Oh god, that is horrible. Good thing things aren’t like that here” as your co-worker screams internally because she learned that rocking the boat at all is a good way to never get promoted again.

Her manager was a piece of shit who didn’t know how to treat other people properly and who had zero respect for her and (reading between the lines) didn’t have the slightest grasp of misogyny in the workplace (or actively perpetuated it) and had no idea how to manage anyone effectively.

They should’ve been fired the second or third time they utterly failed her. But when upper management are also douchebags they see nothing wrong and even encourage that bullshit.

Work for a decent place for a few years and you see the stark contrast very clearly…