[hythloday]

I've never seen a discussion on Hacker News where the substantive point was "ZOMG girls can program" or "we feel out of place because there are so many men around". The discussions tend to be around experiences in the workplace that men don't have and that (some) women do; different treatment during pay negotiations, sexualized presentations at conferences, co-worker passivity about sexual harassment. Please don't argue against the straw-man that women can "blend in" (I'm not going to analyse the language there, but the whole tone of the article was a bit of a red flag) as long as they don't encounter any of this problematic behaviour, because no-one disputes that.

Equally it's probably not very helpful if the distillation of your point is "women ('girls'): have you even tried talking to your peers?". Of course they have, it's the most obvious thing to try. To re-iterate, the problem is not that geeky men and women have strong social cues not to interact at all (like some sort of really weird Victorian tea-party), it's that there is a minority of men are actively and aggressively misogynist and the majority of men who aren't refuse to call them on it. Unfortunately there isn't much that women can directly do to change this (hence the perpetuating problem), they can only highlight this behaviour and expect to be treated with professionalism and decency.

[lorettahe]

There does appear to be something new I learn every day. " it's that there is a minority of men are actively and aggressively misogynist and the majority of men who aren't refuse to call them on it" I really have seen none around, to be honest. As other guys on this post have been saying, they really would rather women bothering to talk to them. Speaking from a personal experience, I have not found any misogynists in the IT industry, but I have however worked with females who simply do not utter a word in the office, and these females have generated comments from my males colleagues to me, including 'She just does not like us'. I'm not trying to make a generalisation here. But I do think, in the IT industry, just like any other industries (such as teaching or even the finance industry), men and women can get along, because at the basics, developer roles and what they do aren't really that different to the other jobs.

[hythloday]

I'm really glad you haven't had those experiences (and I'm glad you wrote a post about that, even though I didn't agree with your points). I do think it's something that's getting less acceptable over time, certainly I've seen it decrease over my decade or so at work, so I have high hopes that it's on the way out. I'm really glad you haven't had those experiences (and I'm glad you wrote a post about that, even though I didn't agree with your points). I do think it's something that's getting less acceptable over time, certainly I've seen it decrease over my decade or so at work, so I have high hopes that it's on the way out.

Here's an example of what I mean by misogyny: a previous manager at a company printed out an A3 picture of a woman in hotpants and a bra with the caption "Please update your Jira tickets before you go home". When I came in the next day to replace it with a picture of 4 (clothed but sexualized-I think it was a picture of a male stripper troupe) men, I received a disciplinary action from the company. The same manager, when he introduced me to the team, introduced the male programmers as "he works on ToolName" and the female programmers as "she makes things look pretty".

This is reasonable subtle stuff, but I am surprised (though happy) if you've genuinely never encountered it rather than cultivating obliviousness or growing a thick skin.

[lorettahe]

I am sorry you had such bad experience at work :( Let's both hope situations improve as time moves on :)

[coroxout]

When chatting to your male coworkers, what happens when you don't know something or accidentally say something stupid? In my experience, a man may get a brief ribbing, whereas a woman gets a long, patronising or sarcastic lecture, and their mistake gets brought up for months afterwards as evidence that woman are ditsy and don't know the things that real geeks should know.

e.g. it was a running joke at my last job how women didn't know anything about hardware, but there was a male programmer there who repeatedly used "memory" to mean hard disk space and "hard disk" to mean the case, and nobody ever said anything. And a guy can banter back - this guy's comeback when anyone corrected him was "who'd want to know boring nerd stuff like that" - but a woman quickly gets pegged as sour, bitchy or snooty if she talks back.

And after a while of every dumb slip-up being jumped on, is it any wonder that some women don't leap gleefully into the conversation?

(Plus as female coder I am always happy to talk about programming, retro computing, science fiction or other "geek" topics, but 80% of the Man Chat in my office is about cars and Top Gear, which don't interest me at all.)

Don't get me wrong: very few of the male IT professionals I've known have been openly hostile. But there have been those who have seemed slightly confused by my presence and ignored everything I said, those who regularly met up outside work without asking me and months later said "we would have asked you, but we didn't think you'd be interested", those who say nothing when someone louder insults women...

...and the ones who rush to applaud when a woman insults another woman, which to be honest I found your post rather close to with its implication that any woman who's had a harder time in IT is whiny, antisocial or doesn't "know their shit". (Apologies if this reply just seems to continue that trend. I'm grateful to you for starting this topic, which I've found interesting, at any rate.)