[DanBC]

One consequence is that many people don't understand just how hateful the WWW is for some other people.

Sure, anyone can be the victim of really unpleasant attacks from others on the Internet, and it's been going on for years. But try creating different online characters. Give one a male name, give the other a female name. And make that the only difference. Now see the different ways people interact with you.

Having more diverse workforce can help you understand the problems of not having good blocking tools or reporting tools or privacy controls.

But then again, Google has a ton of women working for them and they've fucked up real names and G+ integration. So maybe I'm wrong.

[ANTSANTS]

I don't entirely buy this. Everyone can improve themselves by mingling with their peers and listening to the pros, so if women were so easily dissuaded by negativity on the internet, you'd expect them to do worse at everything, which is clearly not true. I think a missing nuance is that everyone is mean on the internet, but people are much more likely to take meanness in stride when it comes from members of their own gender.

The visual arts are very close to having gender parity (47.4% female in the US, according to [1]). A quick look around a site like Deviantart reinforces this. If you've spent any time around such communities, you'll know that young female artists are just as mean and obsessed with petty drama as young male computer geeks are with trying to look smarter than everyone else. Yet, the amount of professional female artists that emerge from those conditions is roughly equal to the amount of males that do.

This suggests that "guys being jerks to girls" is only a symptom of a different problem; for cultural, historical, or perhaps, as the article suggests but doesn't really back up, biological reasons, girls just aren't as interested in computers as guys are. If we had gender parity in tech, little Susan would probably be calling Anna a bitch for copying her code, and they'd both get by somehow.

As an aside, I've noticed that artists are much better about giving and receiving criticism than supposedly objective and "meritocratic" programmers are.

[1] http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/96.pdf