Mr. Altizer is part of a backlash against the women in technology movement. While many in the tech industry had previously dismissed the fringe men’s rights arguments, some investors, executives and engineers are now listening. Though studies and surveys show there is no denying the travails women face in the male-dominated industry, some said that the line for what counted as harassment had become too easy to cross and that the push for gender parity was too extreme a goal. Few were willing to talk openly about their thinking, for fear of standing out in largely progressive Silicon Valley.

Even so, “witch hunt” is the new whispered meme. Some in tech have started identifying as “contrarians,” to indicate subtly that they do not follow the “diversity dogma.” And self-described men’s rights activists in Silicon Valley said their numbers at meetings were rising.

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Others are playing down the women-in-tech issue. Onstage at a recent event, the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla said harassment in Silicon Valley was “rarer than in most other businesses.”

Many men now feel like “there’s a gun to the head” to be better about gender issues, said Rebecca Lynn, a venture capitalist at Canvas Ventures, and while “there’s a high awareness right now, which is positive, at the same time there’s a fear.”

The backlash follows increasingly vulgar harassment revelations in Silicon Valley. Several female engineers and entrepreneurs this year named the men they accused of harassing them, and suddenly tech’s boys’ club seemed anything but impervious. Travis Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder, resigned as chief executive after the ride-hailing service was embroiled in harassment accusations. Dave McClure, head of the incubator 500 Startups, called himself “a creep” and stepped down. This month, the chief executive of Social Finance, Mike Cagney, also quit amid a harassment scandal.

In the aftermath, many stood up for gender equality in tech. Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder, asked investors to sign a “decency pledge.” Many companies reiterated that they needed to improve work force diversity.

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“In just the last 48 hours, I’ve spoken to a female tech executive who was grabbed by a male C.E.O. at a large event and another female executive who was asked to interview at a venture fund because they ‘feel like they need to hire a woman,’” said Dick Costolo, the former chief of Twitter, who now runs the fitness start-up Chorus. “We should worry about whether the women-in-tech movement has gone too far sometime after a couple of these aren’t regularly happening anymore.”

But those who privately thought things had gone too far were given a voice by James Damore, 28, a soft-spoken Google engineer. Mr. Damore, frustrated after another diversity training, wrote a memo that he posted to an internal Google message board. In it, he argued that maybe women were not equally represented in tech because they were biologically less capable of engineering. Google fired him last month.

After months of apologizing by Silicon Valley for bad behavior, here was a young man whom some in tech’s leadership could potentially get behind.

Paul Graham, who founded an influential start-up incubator, Y Combinator, posted two articles about how the science behind Mr. Damore’s memo was accurate. Another start-up investor, John Durant, wrote that “Charles Darwin himself would be fired from Google for his views on the sexes.”

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And the investor Peter Thiel’s business partner, Eric Weinstein, tweeted, “Dear @Google, Stop teaching my girl that her path to financial freedom lies not in coding but in complaining to HR.”

Mr. Durant declined to comment. Mr. Graham said in an email that there needed to be more distinction between fact and policy, and Mr. Weinstein said there was “a sea of brilliant women” and that more needed to be done to “figure out how to more fully empower them.”