I had a similar issue when I was doing more help desk work as a college student. I worked in a hospital and older women would always complain that I wasn't friendly enough. I had a miserable fucking life - I was grinding myself into dust in every aspect and was doing this work purely to get to the next stage of my career. I was never unfriendly, I just was on a mission to get the work done and get out. Instead, these older women who were complaining really wanted a free therapy session. They didn't do meaningful work - they weren't cardiologists or anything of that (anyone with a "real" job would be so much more focused on resolving the issue and getting back to work - and, more importantly, learning how to self resolve the issue so they never had to talk to us again). Merely some paper pushers. I'd see my colleagues get hung up for 30 minutes listing to some of these older women talk to them about their life and then they'd come back with a haggard face.

Ironically, I ended up getting reprimanded again for having unprofessional tone because I made my response emails "too friendly". I was glad to leave that job and never return to help desk type work again.

Gerald Weinberg in one of his books, either The Secrets of Consulting or Becoming a Technical Leader, wrote of training himself to smile more, since some clients found his normal neutral look intimidating.

As for RBF, I always think of https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/alternatives-to-resting-...

You made me read each and every one of those something-something-Face lines. I think this one closely approximates the problem I had with that senior colleague:

You Make So Much More Money Than I Do and You Do Nothing Face

I think I see your polite point about Gerald Weinberg (he's a man and still he had to smile like an idiot) but in my case I can tell you with great certainty that it was my gender that was the matter. See my quip about the dour dudes above. In particular, nobody expected the dev team to be all smiles, but that didn't apply to the design and marketing etc teams who, to my knowledge, did nothing but chat and smile all the bloody time. The dev team was situated in a basement and people made all sorts of jokes about that, too. It was not a great place to work in and I left as soon as I could. I never had requests to smile in any other workplace, so I remember the incident above partly because it stood out.

In other workplaces I dealt with different, non-gendered stereotypes. E.g. a senior colleague (again) was making a fuss about some outrage she had to deal with in her personal life in the desk right opposite to mine in an open plan office. After a bit she said something apologetically to me about making noise. She kind of kicked me off my flow so I went "huh?" like, "I didn't hear anything" because I wasn't paying attention. She said "I guess you are very good at shutting out external distractions", something like that. Kind of a nerd stereotype then.

I really don't have a BRF though.

Edit: can I say something politically incorrect? I don't think I've registered any overt discrimination for my gender as a woman in tech. I may have noticed a tendency towards the opposite, like some people may be weirdly enthusiastic to see a woman programmer (I'm a post-doc researcher now so the stereotypes are much milder). Though to be fair that implies there's also people who are exactly the opposite from enthusiastic, they just don't let it show because they know their colleagues will think they're assholes. If I've ever been discriminated against it must always have been before I even got to the interview stage, so I have no way to know.

Before we married, my wife complained of a co-worker of mine who would say "smile--you oughta smile more" to women, including her and at least one woman who reported to her. So I don't doubt at all that women get a lot of that.

As for your edit, I don't think that it is politically incorrect to speak of your own experience, and I can hardly imagine a forum less hostile to that message than HN.