Coding Like a Girl

For one, that's a crime against statistics and formal logic itself. "90% of RAM is not fault tolerant, of course men are going to assume it's not RAM if it's fault tolerant" would be a ridiculous thing to say, because you just can't reason that way.

The kind of reasoning you want to do works like this: 90% of developers are male. Given that there are about as many men as there are woman, a randomly chosen woman has a 10% chance of being a developer. That's valid statistics. The problem is that this works relatively good while speaking to people in a subway, but at a tech conference you don't have a fair sample of either males or females. You aren't choosing at random but from an extremely skewed sample.

Of course there's instances where these kind of assumptions are valid, but most often (and with most stereotypes) it's just people applying statistics wrong.

"I'm not trying to say the whole article is bad so stay with me here, but is it just me or does some of this just come off as negative thinking and negative assumptions? A few examples from the article.. I have been a TA for weekend workshops that teach women to code. My male co-TA’s constantly asked me throughout the workshop how I was enjoying learning to program. ... ....Apparently, presenting as feminine makes you look like a beginner. You were at an event to teach women to code. I don't know the specifics because I wasn't there however maybe the assumption should be that they just didn't realise you weren't a student? I can understand how that must be frustrating but why attribute it to what you were wearing? I feel like the author didn't go into detail here. In another section the author links to a photo on twitter[1] that makes it appear as a commenter is telling Casey Johnston to read her own article. Casey Johnston: So many “solutions” to the lack of women in tech don’t get at the actual problems… Tomas Sancio: @caseyjohnston read the full article. There's a chicken and egg problem w/ female tech role models. Men want to be the next Jobs/Gates/etc. When I first read this screenshot I took it for what it was. "read the article"... i.e. "I read the article" and that's exactly what it turned out to be when I found the tweets[2] . The author putting this screenshot of twitter in here I feel is simply misrepresenting the situation or hasn't researched into even looking at the full context? I have to admit i've only looked at this for 10 minutes, maybe I'm getting the wrong picture here, but from what i've seen it's a completely different story to the one shown on the author's page. I often read these gender inequality articles, however I am always constantly disappointed when things like the above are over dramatized, or I do additional research to only find out that the author is presenting an incredibly biased view of a situation. I don't want people to conclude that there is no gender inequality, however I feel that things like the above do not help get the point across. In fact I think they do the opposite."

I'm not sure this really makes the case that its sexism at play. For example, if a guy wore a suit and tie to a conference, people might assume he's not a programmer.

Isn't this anecdote evidence that its the clothes, not the gender?