I, cis white guy in the bay, was hired as a consultant to help build out a product and was pair programming with a woman founder & new engineer and made some passing comment about the CSS quality not being "ideal" or something of the sort. This was later brought up as something that they interpreted as some kind of sexism which completely caught me off guard and put me in a very awkward position of having to respond to that and explain that it was just poorly phrased, not sexism.
In the grand scheme this was very minor situation, e.g. no managers, HR, or social media involved, just between a few people on the project, but it's something I'll never forget and had colored how I interact with women going forward.
Basically I just want to avoid that ever happening again because if you're on the "No I'm not sexist" side of the argument, you've basically already lost in how society engages these days.
Not saying you weren't the subject of over-reaction, or not, but I think this is an example of sub-par feedback. It would be better to point out the issues in concrete terms, and say this is something that should be addressed, and why. And if you can't do that, you should ruminate on it until you can reify whether it is wrong, and what ought to be done, and why. Do this with anybody. If they argue with you, they'll be arguing only on technicalities, not personalities.
The other side of the same coin is whenever you receive nasty and undeserved feedback, you don't reply or argue.. You say "thank you for the feedback" and ruminate what good you can take out of that, if any. You don't fight back - not if you actually want to receive feedback in the future.
It's exactly what the article is saying: men are clamming up. If one doesn't know how to deliver excellent feedback/is worried about the packaging, the sane strategy is to just shut up. There's seldom a personal upside for delivering constructive feedback to anybody - and in a situation where bad delivery has unlimited downside, it's smart to just refrain from it.
I don't think it applies as much to coding practices, where you can provide specific and constructive advice and there's a concrete thing that can be debated (i.e., the changes to the code-base). What makes good business reasoning relies upon intangibles, like experience. But even here, one could point to examples of a strategy being used in the past and failing. You can't argue with the historical facts as being innately sexist. You could argue that the variables have changed, but then there's something concrete to talk about.
Edit: minor clarification