| HN Mirror

>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.