I think that a lot of people who have not directly experienced this sexism believe this, that it is the exception and not the norm.

Even as a guy, I have personally witnessed that it is the norm, and that most organizations that have managed to avoid being sexist by default are very special indeed.

There is some bias that makes people (men) want to believe that “it can’t possibly that bad, or if it is, it can’t possibly be that common”. Be aware of this bias.

Whether this is the norm for a large population of employers is a statistical question that you cannot "personally witness" even in principle. We desperately need a better way than anecdata to look at this.

I don't think it matters whether or not this is "the norm"; what matters, to the large extent, is whether or not these problems are common enough that people write these articles and that people uovote them. "The norm" isn't some magical threshold where if it's below a percentage of environments it doesn't matter - how much effort we should put into fixing these problems is more-or-less directly proportional to how bad they are as measured by how much complaining we see about them.

Almost all of these pieces of advice function for anyone, and those specifically about women can be translated for any trait "X" - minority group or even something-common-but-not-here. I've gotten typecast because I like videogames - Freaking everyone likes videogames.

> how bad they are as measured by how much complaining we see about them. > common enough that ... people uovote them.

But you must have noticed that social media feeds on outrage? People amplify the extent of things they are shocked by, by sharing and upvoting. Looking at the amount of noise generated in media/social-media would be a very poor way of measuring the true extent of anything, but especially of something so politicized as harassment of women.