[rachelbythebay]

The gender gap means that you can have someone who is absolutely amazing due to her own strengths, but cannot realize them because of the vicious and mean environment around her. One way to deal with this is to strike out at the environment, and I encourage anyone so inclined to give it a shot. They will call you evil things, and you will feel really badly for it.

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.

[auganov]

"you can have someone who is absolutely amazing due to her own strengths, but cannot realize them because of the vicious and mean environment around her"

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.

[rachelbythebay]

Really. I realize you're going on just my word alone, but trust me, it's real. Amazing people who are on the right side of the gap might be cursed in private, but they will get ahead. They will go places which just are not open to others.

Meanwhile, amazing folks on the wrong side of the gap will be cursed in public through a variety of interesting ways, and will be held back unless they find those rare environments where they can thrive.

So really, it's not just a 10 vs. 2 thing. It's a "allowed to be 10" vs. "not allowed to be 10" thing.

Put it this way -- why did the author of the original post really leave Google? Her reasons might be like mine.

[auganov]

She quit Google and found a place for herself somewhere else, I don't see any gender-gap specific stuff there.

You make a distinction of amazing people being on the "wrong side" and the "right side". Ones on the right side do have some trouble but can progress in a fairly fluid manner aka did have some setbacks but could still progress without major environmental changes (got that right?). Those on the wrong side get more trouble and have to do a lot of searching for that perfect niche where they can succeed，right?

Well, then I think most amazing people ARE on the wrong side, I'd say that's the way things are for most amazing people. Ones on the "right side" are lucky or very very amazing.

Anyways those are some general facts about amazing people that go along with everything I said so far and still show no indication of the "gender gap".

I feel like I'm missing your point maybe, if so then we all love examples :-)

[rachelbythebay]

Okay, well, years before I got there, someone made the comment that "the company doesn't want women engineers, it wants boys with boobs". That is, there's talking the talk about diversity, and then there's actually living it.

An example, because you asked: I had a manager tell me I was not doing anything more than meeting expectations because folks at my level are expected to be "fire and forget". Apparently, because we had been having conversations about things going on with my project and how broken the code base was, I was not meeting his expectations of how engineers are supposed to behave.

I had to inform him that just because a great number of software engineers in his experience don't like talking about problems doesn't mean that everyone is like that. Indeed, some of them may be more likely to approach a problem in that way, and automatically treating that as bad is a pretty clear sign of biased behavior!

Note that I'm not saying this particular trap is a 1:1 with gender bias, since there are women who will never trip it and men who will, but you wanted an example and that is one from my life.

(Side note: I was delivering plenty of technical goodness during the period in question. When they can't find anything technical to fault, they invariably turn to something "soft" as described above...)

[gaius]

I was not meeting his expectations of how engineers are supposed to behave

Everyone, male or female, is expected to meet or exceed the expectations of their boss, male or female. It's called "employment".

[auganov]

I'm getting a slightly confused with that small debate we're having.

My original point was that a women that truly loves hacking and is exceptional at it won't have it harder to succeed, which does not mean it will be easy, it will be as hard, because most of the time if you're really good at something where performance is hard to measure you WILL get a lot of trouble breaking through.

My second point is that a women wanting to be a simple, average programmer that nobody knows about might indeed be less appreciated than your average man. But if she want to be a simple, average one than I guess she doesn't love programming, so why not pick something else?

I got the feeling that the article was trying to make us believe that there is a problem that should be solved, but I see no real problem.

Do you disagree?

(replied to my own comment because couldn't see the button under yours)

[JoachimSchipper]

> vicious and mean environment

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. ;-)