Sparck Jones mentored a generation of researchers, male and female, and came up with a slogan: “Computing is too important to be left to men.”

Most of Jordan Peterson's ideas stem from a gnawing anxiety around gender. “The masculine spirit is under assault,” he told me. “It’s obvious.” In Mr. Peterson’s world, order is masculine. Chaos is feminine. And if an overdose of femininity is our new poison, Mr. Peterson knows the cure. Hence his new book’s subtitle: “An Antidote to Chaos.” “We have to rediscover the eternal values and then live them out,” he says.

The gender imbalance was also on display at last month’s North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, which was organized by a prominent investor, Moe Levin. Mr. Levin originally slated 86 men and one woman as speakers. After complaints, he replaced two of the men with women to achieve what he thought should be enough: 84 men onstage and three women. “It just coincidentally happened that there were more men than women speakers,” Mr. Levin said. “It’s not intentional not to include them. It’s just we don’t have time to include them.”

The diversity of perspectives reflects an evolving debate over harassment among women across the country. In interviews with The New York Times, most women agreed that a reckoning for the sexual misdeeds of men in the workplace was a long time coming. But ask the question “What do we do about it?” and the answer has become as wide ranging, nuanced and intensely personal as the offenses themselves.

“I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong,” said Nick Matthews, 42, who works at PwC, formerly PricewaterhouseCoopers, and lives in San Francisco. “But has anything I’ve done been interpreted another way?”

As the nation’s technology capital — long identified as one of the more hostile work environments for women — reels from a series of high-profile sexual harassment and discrimination scandals, these conversations are gaining broader traction.