My impression is that these and other blogs have been tremendously successful in letting young female scientists learn about extremely successful female role models in academia. They've also been extremely illuminating personally to me (a male engineer) because they call out instances where folks are "innocuously" sexist, and helped me understand how even certain cases of well-intentioned male behavior is actually discouraging from a female PoV.
All I can say to the OP is:
(1) she should keep writing so that young women entering CS know that successful female s/w engineers exist.
(2) encourage other successful female s/w engineers to start blogging.
(3) don't ever hesitate to blog about instances of sexism - well-intentioned or otherwise - because at the very least this can help clueless male engineers learn how to behave.
(4) Don't ever hesitate to confront people for sexist speech or actions. The problem is only going to away if we create a culture where sexism would be career suicide and the first step to this is confronting the sexists.
All I see is "Look how cool and special I am! I'm a girl and I can navigate in the men's world!". She tries to bring up a problem but I cannot quiet see a real problem there.
"Already at a disadvantage, they are playing a seemingly impossible game of catchup with very little positive feedback or support. The culture, the standards, and the norms are all male-centric, and the book talks about women in computing being guests in a male-hosted world."
It's a big problem if you want to become an average programmer that has to rely on that feedback and support. Guess what? Most truly skilled people learned almost everything by themselves. Generally speaking most intelligent people learn by themselves (if there are means to do it) and find themselves a little alienated from the general culture.
My point is simply if you want to achieve exceptional results you will most likely be an exceptional person too. And being a woman, being ugly being whatever will not have much influence. In some situations it will help, in some it might do the opposite, it's random.
If you want to be average then yea, as a woman it will be harder in IT, but if you want to be average why not pick a job average woman does?
If she [the author] cares so much about the social aspects of being in IT industry then I don't know why she cannot accept the way it is.
Why should she have to accept it the way it is?
As human beings we all have the basic right and duty to improve things for the better. If the situation is not the way it should be and I believe the comments agree to that premise then WHY should she try NOT IMPROVE them?
If the same topic were addressed by a male programmer we would all be talking how chivalry and good people are in abundance who want things to change, would not we?
Thank you for the downvote that you shall soon exercise but someone had to say this loud even if it shows mildly irrational side of me.
Because she's not trying to improve them - she's trying to skew the game. Maybe it's "male-centric" to insist that only the quality of the work matters - but personally I say that quality of work transcends gender and speaks for itself. Because my long experience of this industry is that we are the least biased people on the planet, gay, straight, black, white, boy, girl, fat, then, it doesn't matter if you can deliver. And if you can't deliver - the excuses that work in the rest of the world - don't cut it with us.
But if she truly believes that being a woman that truly likes programming (aka does not want to be just another average person gluing code for a big company or equivalent) there is so magical force that makes it harder for a woman then she is basically wrong. And that is a feeling I got from reading it, so my "accept" meant recognizing that it's not any harder to be an exceptional programmer for a women and move on.
As for the down-vote I wanted to do it after reading that trick sentence, but somehow I cannot find that option :-). I never vote here anyways.
The writings of (e.g.) Knuth and Stallman consistently refer to programming as a communal activity. It shouldn't be necessary for it to be a calling—or to use a perhaps more objective term, a niche (that you've created for yourself)—for someone to participate in a economic/professional setting.
Another way is to reject that environment and build your own, and I suspect that explains a certain number of startups which have been surfacing of late. The alternative is continuing to power the hate engines of the Valley, and that's just not going to work.
Really? Have you seen a case of somebody that had truly amazing, useful strengths and was still somehow being "blocked" from success by the environment as a whole?
It sounds like a huge conspiracy to me (the way I rephrased it, of course it might not be what you meant).
Like I said amazing people will always have trouble fitting in, but if they can produce amazing results there's always a way to reap rewards from that. There's nothing that's only exclusive to the "gender gap". It's a general fact that being different is not being average. I don't even see a problem!
For me it's like saying 10 sticks out amongst 2s and that it's a problem. Well no wonder it does as 10!=2. It's a fact not a problem.
Either accept that you're different or make yourself more similar, you cannot have both.
Honest question: is that your experience? I'm not a programmer (currently doing a PhD in crypto), but I was under the impression that female programmers encounter lots of "innocently offensive", "maladapted" and "uncaring", but not so much "vicious and mean". (Which is bad enough, but "well-intentioned-but-stupid" is easier to fix than "evil".)
I'm pretty sure that you have more experience being a female programmer than I do, though. ;-)
People beside the top 1% are still people, and the impact on their life does matter.
True equality is when everything is the same. Period. If we want man and woman to be truly equal than men have to equal women. If you have to make a distinction of a female schlub and a male schlub then you have an inequality right there.
The odds are really freaking good, and only some of the goods are odd. Sure there are a bunch of socially awkward engineers, but because of the sheer scarcity of women in the field, if you are a single female you can have first pick of a lot of really nice available guys.
I thought the days were past when women only got jobs to find husbands, seems not!
Jean -- if you don't want to be known as the person who only talks about gender issues, at the very least, try to intersperse some technical discussions into your gender articles. Or, better yet, write articles about tech instead of the fact that you're female.
Maybe you should check the actual contents of her blog before you post condescending BS like this? Only two of the eight most recent articles are about gender, less if you go further back.
As an aside, it's not like men are actively encouraged to become programmers by their social peers. There are a small group of men who program and support each other in that vein, in the general population it doesn't exactly represent the hopes and dreams of parents of male children. (Eg. Mom and Dad statistically would encourage becoming a lawyer or doctor much more than a programmer).
I think as a society we should encourage women and men to do what they want rather than that they should fill some predefined gap that we think needs filling. I could care less about the gender gap in computing or the gender gap in nursing.
* There's a variance between the number of men and women in field X.
* This gap does not correlate with the number of men and women in the general population.
* Therefore field X must be discouraging women from going into the field that would otherwise be interested in the field.
I believe the thinking is that if everyone did what they wanted to do, then the gender balance in any random field would probably be relatively close to the gender balance of the general populace.
