Females in the community.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 23 March 2016 at 08:37:01 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 3/23/2016 1:27 AM, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>> I never trust people who claim that they never discriminate, 
>> because I have yet
>> to meet a person that doesn't.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog

If you hide your gender you can, but I vastly prefer people who 
present their real name. I rate people more favourably if they go 
by their real handle, even if I strongly disagree with them, 
honesty is a very important quality. So I don't think 
discrimination can be avoided (in the broad sense), without going 
into hardcore deception (and that can be damaging). There is this 
famous essay of a MUD community that mourned over the death of a 
core community member, but it turned out the person just 
committed virtual suicide, not a physical death...

I've been playing several personas that were female presenting in 
settings where it was socially acceptable, but male acting, 
before this became a topic (mid 90s) and there certainly was bias 
in the interaction that ensued from time to time. It is also very 
educational to put yourself emotionally into identity and 
cultural expectations related to the opposite gender.

Anyway, there are positive qualities to both the more cooperative 
female side (information sharing) and the more competitive male 
side (debating) of interaction within a group. We all have both 
aspects, of course, and for progress we need a mix.

But gender affects how some people learn too. Male students may 
not want to admit to others that they don't know the topic and 
study the manuals instead of asking questions. Female students 
appears to have less resistance to asking questions. This is good 
if you want to be productive, but by studying the manuals you 
also learn a lot of stuff that you don't need at the time, but 
might need later. Some women also do this, of course, but I think 
there might be many very real gendered reasons for why more men 
are technical geeks than women.

Generally, it seems like it is more common for female engineers 
seems to be motivated by solving real problems rather than having 
the technology being the goal. I think male geeks often are the 
ones that picked their toys into pieces to figure out how they 
worked. Some girls do that too, just not as common.