[akavel]

> "I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect"

I disagree.

That is, I kinda agree and I totally disagree. I mean... argh, this is so hard to phrase for me here: I kinda "agree" - that one sees "more of" the writing about the meta-topics by women. But I disagree with the underlying fact (that women actually do "write more about meta-topics than technical aspects"). The problem (but also kinda non-problem?) here is, that women do write, but a reader often may not notice when the technical-aspects writer is a woman!... I know this is true, because I totally was once corrected here on HN for answering "he something" when it was a she - and started looking more carefully since. And now I see there totally are woman technical-bloggers, and many of them highly notable ones! (off the top of my head: Julia Evans, Joanna Rutkowska, Limor Fried/ladyada, ... just to start with.)

With that said, I believe the visibility paradox is a kinda self-fulfilling prophecy and/or hard to untie conundrum: either you have technical-aspects woman writers who don't emphasize being women (and thus can currently often get overlooked), or you have technical-aspects woman writers who do emphasize, and thus easily fall into category of "women writing about meta-topics more than technical aspect"... thus I believe we "see" more of the latter mostly because we typically don't recognize the former :/

[sosuke]

I can agree with your feeling. When I read a technical article I don't think about gender but I would say 'he' unless I knew with certainty the author was a 'she'. Even when a picture of the author is present I might never notice it, read and enjoy the technical piece, and move on. Hell I might even consider that I would say he, instead of checking gender, because I project myself into the story.

Anyhow, I believe you've gotten it right. We don't highlight gender unless that is the topic to be discussed. Otherwise we don't notice, I wonder what the real numbers are a little but I don't care. The person that looks for gender, to harass, is someone I can't identify with or empathize with. I don't understand them at all.

So people of every shade of gender please keep writing technical posts and I'll keep enjoying them! Thanks!