He says that women in male dominated industries sometimes don't succeed simply because they're crap at their job. That can be said of any group of people in any profession; so why bring up that example in the first place?
Sure. But bringing that example up in the first place, even if we disregard the context, should not be construed as sexist. Given the context, however, that women's (as a group) experience of the gender divide is informed by feminism, patriarchy, oppression, etc., gimmepie is pointing out that some women who justify their personal shortcomings with barriers of the gender as a whole is highly disingenuous. I don't think that's sexist at all. I will explain the "why" in further detail below.
As an aside, both gimmepie and Lotus state explicitly that it would be sexist or ridiculous to suggest that women as a whole are less ambitious or competent than men.
He also says that suggesting that women in these industries are less hard working etc. is not sexist. Yes, some individuals are indeed less hard working, but the poster he was replying to was talking about women as a group. Not as individuals. So yeah, it would be sexist to suggest that women as a group are less industrious. This idea, that it is sexist to say women are less hard working etc., is an idea he tried to contradict by putting up a poor argument that "some women are crap at their jobs." Again no one was talking about individual women, they were talking about the group as a whole - so he's making an irrelevant argument. The fact that he tried to refute that concept at all shows an interesting amount of implicit sexism.
It may have been the case that he was responding to a poster who was talking about women as a group, but the semantics of what he was saying is unambiguous.
"However there are
plenty of times where women in these industries don't succeed simply because they're crap at their job."
Clearly not all. 'Plenty' implies 'some', and philosophically speaking, 'all' can mean 'some', so I'll grant that it's certainly not impossible that gimmepie could've meant all women. But that's a stretch, in my opinion, to suggest that we was discussing women as a group (implying all women), especially if we consider the following:
'Times'. At this point it is clear that he is referring to individuals or individual occurrences, not a group. Now, it's true that the plural of a certain word can have multiple connotations: 1) simply referring to a multiple of the object, or 2) referring to all members of that object as a single body, a group. You've been reading him using the second connotation, but I think I have provided sufficient evidence that he in fact used the first one.
Now to explain the "why", gimmepie was responding to the unqualified statement from Lotus that suggestions that women are less industrious than men are sexist.
I just want to point out that you're not entirely correct when you say suggesting women in male dominated industries might be less industrious, hard-working etc would be sexist. I can think of one very obvious scenario in which this is not the case: what if it's true?
Gimmepie is not responding that the unqualified statement that women are less industrious than men are not sexist - he is responding that it is not sexist to state that there are times when women are unsuccessful in their jobs because they are incompetent. In more general terms, he was sceptical about an unqualified statement, and provided an example to support his scepticism. This is why his mentioning that some women are indeed incompetent at their jobs is relevant - he felt that the belief that the assertion that women are less competent than men is always sexist is as over-generalized as the belief that women are less competent than men. He wasn't generalizing, on the contrary, he was merely pointing out a caveat to what he thought was a generalization.
I don't mean it personally or anything, but I found those criticisms of gimmepie's posts lacking in support. I'm well aware that I've been picking on you for the form of your argument and not discussing the thread topic at all, but I think it's in the spirit of this forum to point out flaws in arguments. It's nothing personal, it's just business :P
Now getting back on topic: one aspect in which the female gender is privileged is their rising success in the educational system to the point that girls perform better than boys pre-university (not to say that women don't do better than men during university, I can't recall anything off the top of my head). This trend has been going on for decades, where is it going to lead us in the future? Again, making sure that it's not that girls are performing just as well as boys, it's that their performance is exceeding that of boys. Usually we talk about women's disadvantages, but what I've mentioned above isn't something that I think is talked about - anywhere, really.