[lsc]

>I think this is a great sentiment, but....and maybe I'm just not hanging out in the right parts of the internet or whatever...but I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect.

My observation of women I know personally is that they're a lot less likely to write publicly about things they have a less than perfect grasp of than, say, I am.

I do a lot of things that I am, quite frankly, unqualified to do, and most of them turn out crap. You can spend time with google and see megabytes and megabytes of text that came from my keyboard, and the vast majority of it is garbage.

I have, however, produced a few things that I think turned out to be pretty decent. in '09, I finished a book about the virtualization technology I used in my business. (To be clear, I co-authored the book, it wasn't just me, not by a long shot.) - but my point is that throughout my life, I've always felt like only my successes counted. I've always felt like falling on my face wasn't a big deal. And part of that was unhealthy; I kind of saw falling on my face as the default situation, the ground state. But part of it was healthy, too, in that the world really has been pretty forgiving of my mistakes, especially my technical mistakes. (my business mistakes, on the other hand.)

Where am I going with this? my impression is that many of the women I know personally who work in my field feel super uncomfortable with failure, especially with the kind of failure that comes from publicly being provably technically wrong, as you are, from time to time, if you publish technical documentation. My impression is that they fear falling on their faces more than I do. Part of that, I'm sure, is just that online, I think, people are just meaner to women. There seems to be this presumption that because I'm a white guy, I didn't get the job because of some quota... which seems really silly to me, for obvious reasons, but it's there.

I also think that men are socialized to deal with rejection more than women are, from an early age, and I think that if you aren't used to dealing with rejection, you are going to be a lot less likely to put yourself in a position where you are going to be rejected. And, if you are like me in that your technical abilities are a huge part of your sense of self, being proven wrong after writing up a thing does feel like a rejection, especially if the criticism is framed in a "you are not competent to write technical documentation" sort of way. For me, that's a rejection of what it is to be me; probably the worst feeling another person can inspire in me using only text. This goes back to the mean thing. People are very rarely mean to me in this way... and if people were often mean to me in that way? I would probably stop writing.

And it could be a lot more than gender; most of the women I'm thinking of went to good schools, both high school and college, while I barely made it through a terrible high school and have no college to speak of (though I'm working on changing that part) so I have a much different idea of how you learn. It's easy to see how going to a good school, or preparing to go to a good school could give you a different outlook on failure; Just failing one class can bring your grade average way down (I mean, way down by the standards that good colleges have) and a lot of kids feel like they only have one shot to get into the school of their choice. I've never experienced anything like that; If I do really horribly at a job, I can always just leave it off my resume.

[kqr]

> My impression is that they fear falling on their faces more than I do. Part of that, I'm sure, is just that online, I think, people are just meaner to women.

Part of that is also that women, in general, are much more sensitive to how other people perceive them; what their social "status" is. This can possibly be explained by their (prehistorical) roles as primary caretakers and being the "social glue" of small tribes. It could very well be deeply rooted in their biology.

With that said, I don't think it's relevant in this case. There are many other lines of work where women are in the majority where it's also easy to repeatedly fall on your face.

[lsc]

>Part of that is also that women, in general, are much more sensitive to how other people perceive them; what their social "status" is. This can possibly be explained by their (prehistorical) roles as primary caretakers and being the "social glue" of small tribes. It could very well be deeply rooted in their biology.

eh, I think that explaining behavior through cultural conditioning makes more sense than resorting to evolutionary psychology. Sure, the latter may or may not be the cause of the former, but we can at least directly observe cultural conditioning; it's quite difficult to verify anything about the social structures of prehistoric tribes. You could say the same thing, in a more verifiable way, talking about modern dating norms and expectations.

>With that said, I don't think it's relevant in this case. There are many other lines of work where women are in the majority where it's also easy to repeatedly fall on your face.

Note, i wasn't arguing that there aren't many women in computer science because it is easy to fall on your face, [1] i was observing that many of the women I personally have observed in the field aren't as active when it comes to publicly writing, I believe, because the consequences of that fall would be greater than those consequences are for me. Writing about the technology you use is rather different from directly working with said technology.

Most people write for social reasons; technical writing, generally speaking, returns practically homeopathic amounts of money. I guess I'm different there, too, in a non-gendered way; Being as I've got no education and only the skill that I have wrung from the miserly neck of experience, I need all the credentials I can get, and so writing well probably has a higher return for me than it does for someone who is educated, because I get the social juice, and I enjoy that social juice, but when I do manage to write something worth reading, it also serves to function as a kind of credential, and oh my, do I flog it. But for people who already have credentials? I would think that writing is mostly about the social rewards, and if those rewards are more negative for women than for men, as is my otherwise unsupported observation, that could certainly tip that balance to "I'm just going to do the work, let someone else talk about it."

[1]My own theory is that it's the trickle down from "cultural fit" discrimination at hiring. Why would you spend all the time and effort training if getting a job at the end was going to be really difficult? I'm in industry, in part because every time I've asked for a computer industry job, it has been a fairly easy process. Hell, I do nothing and people try to push or pull me in that direction. Every time I've asked for a job outside of this industry, it seemed like huge walls went up. If you don't want me here, I'm going to leave. But that's just me projecting my own feelings on to other people who have very different experiences.