[towlejunior]

>CS is supposed to be so super scary and women need special hand-holding and encouragement to attempt it.

This. I think this is really damaging. A misogynist sees this characterization and thinks, "Lol. See, what did I tell you?" An employer thinks, "Hiring women requires hand holding." A young girl thinks, "My friends won't want to do this with me."

[greyskull]

I want a world where we don't have to have this conversation at all. But, until we get there, don't we still need some role model type people for those women who are intimidated? I may be completely off base here: any time there's a big social shift, it takes a bunch of effort by a relatively small number of people. Right now, the industry is male-dominated, and many women are either too intimidated to start or this is not even on their radar. "Role model" type people do help, and maybe at some point a few years down the line, we've bolstered the female population enough where people enter and exit naturally like any other balanced profession.

[Dr_tldr]

There's a difference between a role-model and a self-promoter. The role-model hacks away at lots of projects, has an active github, and develops lots of experience until they're at the top of their field. The self-promoter writes a lot of blog posts about "being" in tech instead of actually "doing" tech.

The cottage industry devoted to writing blog posts about how hard it is to be a woman in tech and all the sexism and hardship all women face along the way seems to be doing their part to continue to intimidate and discourage women from learning to code. But for the self-promoter, this continued imbalance offers basically limitless opportunities for career progression through pointing out sexism rather than through technical ability.

Easily 90% of the female engineers I encounter are from East or South Asia where these blogs aren't widely read. It's an interesting correlation, even if by itself it proves nothing.

[qznc]

I don't like it but active promotion feels necessary in a world, where attention is the secondary currency.

[nathanasmith]

The cottage industry devoted to writing blog posts about how hard it is to be a woman in tech and all the sexism and hardship all women face along the way seems to be doing their part to continue to intimidate and discourage women from learning to code.

As long as there is a market for that kind of rhetoric and enough eyeballs show up to generate the ad impressions, blog posts will be written about it. If shit on a stick was what everybody wanted to read about, we'd be up to our ears on whether blue or purple shit was the hotness this fall. The transparency of it and that people seem to find it confusing is the funniest thing of all.

[mpeg]

I think talking about the issues is a good thing.

Tech is scary for women. I've seen all kinds of casual sexism on the workplace that, while generally not intended as hurtful, men simply don't have to go through.

As a man, I'm pretty sure I've never had people talk about how hot I was after I left an interview or meeting. I've never been singled out to go fetch coffee, or told to "calm down, love".

[towlejunior]

Zero of those things fun, granted, but zero are scary. That's a total misuse of the word aimed at you coming off as sympathetic to women's issues.

FWIW, my mom, mid-50s, has been in tech since the '80s. She has complained of sexism. She also says the idea that tech is more sexist is a joke, and that her younger female co-workers complain a lot.

[mpeg]

Yeah my mom also thinks that Spain was better off under a dictatorship, but that's just because she's a raging conservative and it never negatively affected her directly.

Anecdotes are anecdotes both ways, you saying zero of those things are scary is missing the point, women are not some sort of fragile creature that will get easily offended or scared; none of that is scary, sexism is not scary most of the time, but it's demeaning to be treated as a lesser.