The best part of daring to write this post has been seeing how many female geeks are out there. We made ourselves visible this week and I for one am deeply appreciating all of you. I’ve added many to my list of grrlgeeks on twitter. (If I missed someone, even if she is you, please message me).

In case you missed the link, go listen to this video about Egyptian female geeks. It is completely mind blowing.

That said, I’m ready to go back to coding, so I’ve decided to turn off comments on this post. Thank you for your thoughtfulness and willingness to re-examine assumptions. If you still think sexism doesn’t exist, I wish on you the comments I moderated into oblivion — oh wait, I don’t wish that on anyone.

I know a male–>female programmer who has some hair-raising stories along these lines.

[Just as I was about to post this I noticed the comment by @transman above. I bet you have a lot of stories too].

If you haven’t listened to the Hanselminutes episode on “Women in Technology in the Muslim World”, you should find 36 minutes to do so – http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HanselminutesPodcast203WomenInTechnologyInTheMuslimWorld.aspx or http://www.hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=221 it might give you a glimmer of hope that things really can be better.

So, I wouldn’t take it as as an insult, or a denigration of my abilities, to be asked to go into management, or to spend more time in PPT than C++.

Please don’t change your text based on a @jdalton’s request. Based on an apology, perhaps. Based on him learning the errors of his ways, perhaps. But his request seems like another privileged child, used to always to getting what he wants. This is the exact behavior — not a necessarily male thing or female thing, though it usually falls along those lines — a privileged person expecting someone he deems should be passive (a female) to do exactly what he wants when he wants it. A brat.

Instead of asking you to not quote his crap, perhaps he should stop spewing it. He doesn’t even seem to find the women he denigrates to be worth following.

@jquery Sour grapes? Just because someone is successful, they don’t have the right to state how they feel? Are blinders to reality requisite for those who succeed? you make no sense.

@Kyle Simpson: I know you’re trying, but you’re not quite enlightened yet. Try wearing a skirt for a week. Not that all women wear skirts, but it may give you a bit of insight into what it is like to be made to feel completely out of place – looked at, gawked at, made to feel like you don’t fit in. The comments you receive won’t be the same ones a woman in tech (wearing jeans and a freebie t-shirt) receives, but just knowing what it is like to get comments from people when you’re not even in a conversation with them and what it is like to get comments completely unrelated to your work from those who you used to think were ‘professional’.

@david wright Yes, in general, women are better at people skills. It’s not genetic. It’s learned. Women are just as geeky. It’s just that they are capable of more than one skill: coding skills and social skills. Women should not need to forget their social skills to be accepted as coders, instead, here is a great place for men to emulate women: male geeks should learn social skills. Men should become more like women, not the other way around.

So saddened to read that some people don’t even realize that society needs to be changed. It’s not a woman’s role to change the the world. It is everyone’s role.

Blows me away when men “know” what its like to be a woman, and think women don’t know what it is like to be themselves. Can I recommend some commenters and some quoted people read http://jangosteve.com/post/380926251/no-one-knows-what-theyre-doing Perhaps they can realize that they don’t know what they don’t know, so to the one’s of us who at least know that we don’t know, they appear to be full of shit.

I’m sure that the individual experience varies from person to person, but in my case it’s more of an inconvenience than anything.

It was really different after I got out of high school. College was something else. I was the only female in a classroom of 60 other guys. We were all there to code and beat the pants off each other in Tekken after class. No one cared. It was nice.

Work’s pretty much the same. Maybe it’s different in the casual game industry, where we can sit and discuss what sort of hardware can run Starcraft 2 properly or how the raid in an MMO went last night. It might be different because I’m the one who loves math the best out of the team (the only two females on the team are the mathematics fanatics. Go figure, right?).

Well I’ll tell you the advantage of being a female programmer. The women’s bathroom is always empty.

Women in Engineering have a tough job, and not because of the work. The general attitudes range from patronizing to outright exclusion by many of the more vocal males in most places I’ve worked. As a result, I see many more women move over to management, QA or the product side of the equation. I really wonder if many moved there because they got sick of the “macho nerd” crap. I certainly am.

I’m looking forward to Engineering departments which don’t tolerate this type of crappy behavior. Sadly, many quietly encourage it with the misguided notion that stereotypical white male jerk nerds make better stuff. I’ve got a good share of ego about my work, but I’ve found over the decades that keeping it in check is way more effective. Getting people on board with an idea (“socializing” for you corporate types), collaborative development, and at a minimum using hard facts to make a point are all superior to the cowboy way.

Come on guys, stop acting like programming is a martial art. Stop thinking with your hormones, and start using your higher brain functions. It seriously helps you code better.