[sambeau]

>Is the gender of said author supposed to be curious or worthy of attention?

It shouldn't be. There are two things going on here:

* Perception of our industry as all-male biases women against joining

* Default use of 'He' exacerbates this by unsubtly signalling that our community is all-male

So why flag female hackers?

* To try to combat the perception of us being an all-male community (we're not)

* To signal to women and men that both genders can operate comfortably in this environment

Why do we want more women hackers?

* We are ignoring more than 50% of the programming talent in the world

[wolfgke]

A (female) instructor in charge of the tutorial of the Foundations of Computer Science lecture (forprospective Computer Scientists) was also responsible for the tutorials for prospective media scholars of Foundations of Computer Science (they had to hear the same lecture, but had easier tutorials and an easier exam about it).

When in the tutorial by accident she called a woman by "he", she told that in doubt in the tutorial for Computer Scientists she calls people by "he" and in the tutorial for media scholars by "she", since because of the gender ratios of these courses of studies this behaviour maximizes her likelihood to be correct.