from the early pc game series 'leisure suit larry,' via classicgames.about.com

A Mother Jones writer attended a tech panel at South By Southwest. A marketing rep (not a programmer) from a social-media startup company boasted of its fratboy-esque corporate culture, making borderline-rude “jokes” along the way.

The Mother Jones writer walked out of the session, then filed an essay claiming a rising subculture of sexist “brogrammers” had infiltrated the tech biz.

The term was quickly picked up by Businessweek, CNN, and others.

Then Gizmodo.com, using an equally small slice-O-reality as its own basis, claimed “There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Brogrammer.'”

My take: What there are, and have been for more than a decade, are dot-com douchebags.

Those are the loud, brusque, macho jerks running a lot of these companies—both startups and now-established sites.

You saw them in the early 2000s. You saw them in the film The Social Network.

You can see them in startup offices from Seattle to Brooklyn, preening and yelling deals into phones and being rude to people (female and otherwise).

I suspect you won’t see them as much among the coding rank-n’-file, in positions where precise thinking counts and the hard-sell doesn’t.

But all it takes is one or more a-holes at the top to make a shop feel like an uninviting place for women employees—or for women customers.

(You do know that social media, mobile gaming, and all these other fast-rising online realms have female-majority audiences, don’t you? Some dot-com douchebags apparently don’t.)