Could this huge attention to a gender related question be marked as sexist in Academia.SE?

Question

Recently, this question has received a huge attention which is related to relation of a woman with her male colleagues in some European universities. I believe this question is written in a selfish and self-promoting way (it's obvious from its title!) and I think the reason behind this huge attention is a sexist, which attracts male users just based on gender related description in the question. I think we have a lot of more related questions to academia which will be closed or don't have even one answer or comment but this huge attention to an off-topic question (This question is more suitable to Workspace.SE) seems the Academia.SE's rules are broken to keep this question open just because of its popularity. I appreciate if someone could explain that the popularity that this particular question has received shows a gender or sexist discrimination in this forum or not?

Answer 1

No.

Though your opinion is different, I believe it is addressing something that is highly relevant to academia: note that answers and comments from other women back this up. Just because it would also be on-topic in another venue does not mean it is off-topic here. The academic workplace is different from the general workplace for several reasons, including limited mobility, different hierarchical structures, culture differences, etc. The issue of overlap between Workplace and Academia questions has been discussed before on meta and there the consensus answer was that questions that could be asked at Workplace.SE need not be considered off-topic here.

If anything, the question-asker went out of her way to avoid criticizing the people behind the behavior or making this a problem about men in general or anything like that, to the extent that I am quite confused why you consider it sexist. I would prefer that questions like these not find their way to the Hot Network Questions and therefore attract attention from outside Academia.SE, but that's a separate Meta discussion. Like your previous question on meta, the HNQ is part of the reason this post has attracted so much attention.

I'm a bit discomforted by the accusation of sexism, because those sorts of arguments are often used to dismiss people who experience bias (similarly with racism, particularly in the context of accusing dark-skinned people of racism for expressing their experience of negative bias from light-skinned people).