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I think that it's probably easier for women to feel this way. More specifically, I think it's probably easier for men to shed these feelings. As a guy, there are a lot of social opportunities as a CS student; from clubs to just friends. In my classes the ratio of women to men were something like 1 to 30, so I can imagine when a woman's hanging out with her girl friends, they're probably not CS majors. And when a woman is involved in a CS club, she's probably one of the only women, and feels a bit like an outsider anyways. I think that sort of feeling is helped along when you are recognized by your peers. If you feel like you are "Just a person learning to code" but you think your friend is an awesome programmer, and one day you're working on a project together, and you realize that actually, you write better code faster than he does, or he compliments you, or you solve a problem he has been stuck on; eventually you start to realize the people you thought were pros are really not any different than you. But if you never get that feedback, or if when you do get that feedback you feel like you are an exception to the group, it's harder to shed that yoke. If you go to girl friends, who have no experience with CS and they tell you "wow, you're really smart, I could never program." that's pretty meaningless. If you're in a club where you're the only girl in a group of guys, and a guy says "You did a really great job" you mentally affix "... for a girl" to the end, or you wonder about his sincerity. As more women take CS, and as more communities like the blog above develop, I think there will be more opportunities for women to find that confidence. |
More importantly, in male-dominated fields men receive praise and validation much more easily than women do, which makes it easier for them to get over their impostor syndrome. For women the situation is quite different. I work for a private software company and our owner and CEO is female. She once explained it like this: women in tech are not taken seriously until after they have become successful.