Struggling with the Gender Gap

Some female academics in the STEM fields have started wildly successful blogs that talk about gender issues in an academic environment. A few I recommend to academics/grad students/postdocs of both genders are Female Science Professor, Academic Jungle and Female Computer Scientist.

My impression is that these and other blogs have been tremendously successful in letting young female scientists learn about extremely successful female role models in academia. They've also been extremely illuminating personally to me (a male engineer) because they call out instances where folks are "innocuously" sexist, and helped me understand how even certain cases of well-intentioned male behavior is actually discouraging from a female PoV.

All I can say to the OP is:

(1) she should keep writing so that young women entering CS know that successful female s/w engineers exist.

(2) encourage other successful female s/w engineers to start blogging.

(3) don't ever hesitate to blog about instances of sexism - well-intentioned or otherwise - because at the very least this can help clueless male engineers learn how to behave.

(4) Don't ever hesitate to confront people for sexist speech or actions. The problem is only going to away if we create a culture where sexism would be career suicide and the first step to this is confronting the sexists.

If she [the author] cares so much about the social aspects of being in IT industry then I don't know why she cannot accept the way it is.

All I see is "Look how cool and special I am! I'm a girl and I can navigate in the men's world!". She tries to bring up a problem but I cannot quiet see a real problem there.

"Already at a disadvantage, they are playing a seemingly impossible game of catchup with very little positive feedback or support. The culture, the standards, and the norms are all male-centric, and the book talks about women in computing being guests in a male-hosted world."

It's a big problem if you want to become an average programmer that has to rely on that feedback and support. Guess what? Most truly skilled people learned almost everything by themselves. Generally speaking most intelligent people learn by themselves (if there are means to do it) and find themselves a little alienated from the general culture.

My point is simply if you want to achieve exceptional results you will most likely be an exceptional person too. And being a woman, being ugly being whatever will not have much influence. In some situations it will help, in some it might do the opposite, it's random.

If you want to be average then yea, as a woman it will be harder in IT, but if you want to be average why not pick a job average woman does?

The gender gap means that you can have someone who is absolutely amazing due to her own strengths, but cannot realize them because of the vicious and mean environment around her. One way to deal with this is to strike out at the environment, and I encourage anyone so inclined to give it a shot. They will call you evil things, and you will feel really badly for it.

Another way is to reject that environment and build your own, and I suspect that explains a certain number of startups which have been surfacing of late. The alternative is continuing to power the hate engines of the Valley, and that's just not going to work.

It's a recurring complaint I'm mystified about. Do women really think young male computer nerds got positive feedback and support? Because hell no, that didn't happen. I learned because I was drawn to it. Nobody understood that, it made me a freak, even my few friends thought it was weird, but I couldn't resist. If seeing a perfectly objective machine pronounce your work correct doesn't amaze you, if you need external validation and enticement into the industry, if you can resist, then you probably should because it means this isn't your calling.