nancye's comments

Equal employment laws and anti-discrimination statutes are real things, and they spell out which groups are protected classes - those based on race, sex, religion, disability, etc. Your workplace is not your living room, and not all ideas and behaviors are equally acceptable. I don't believe conservatives should be discriminated against, but when "conservative" becomes a euphemism for pro-white/anti-semitic/misogynistic beliefs, then you may find yourself running afoul of laws or corporate guidelines because those things are not on the same level as "should taxes be higher or lower" or "what's the right level of environmental regulation."

I'm not one to root for people to be fired for holding what I'd consider dumb or ill-informed opinions, but at the same time, as a woman, do I actually want to work on a team with someone who thinks I'm biologically unsuited to the job I'm doing and who is presumably judging my work more harshly and waiting for me to fail at things, who may have the power to review me poorly and affect my long-term career prospects? Gee, that's a tough one. If you've never had to work all day, every day at an office with people who treat you like that, or had to worry about being judged not on how hard you work but on who you are, be thankful. And that's obviously not a great look for a company that's already being investigated for discrimination, so I'm not sure they really had much of a choice here. Bringing bad PR to your company and potentially exposing them to legal liability usually doesn't end well.

The chart from this article is worth looking at:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

It wasn't just in the sixties - women's participation in computer science was growing until the mid eighties. As a woman who's helped other women learn to code, all I can say is that the interest is certainly still out there.

The use of 'girl' to refer to women often bothers me as well, but in this case, it's a reference to a song title: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_Different_for_Girls

This is true, but Dreamwidth is a blogging platform (it's a fork of Livejournal), so those errors weren't caused by the post's author. Presumably it's accessible enough for the user in question to be able to navigate and post at, though, since they say they're using a screenreader; I assume the "disabled and disgruntled" tag means this wasn't just an academic exercise.

They have that right, no matter how much I may disagree. But everyone I was actually talking to has been suspended or left preemptively, the organization I work for got booted, my non-tech-savvy friends and family aren't budging from Facebook, and my circles are dead. I was really excited about Google+ when it launched, but from where I sit, they've done a much better job of discouraging people from using their service than of actually building it up.

In fifth grade, my science teacher asked me if I'd copied answers off the boy who sat in front of me, even though my grade average was 20 points higher than his. In sixth grade, my math teacher was well known to favor the boys in the class and would only call on me if I was the only one with my hand raised. In eighth grade, another teacher chose two boys to represent the school at a math competition even though I had the highest average in the class. All little things, but I still remember them.

In high school, my all-girl team won the state science league twice, and I finished first individually. Did we take pride and inspiration in the fact that we'd beaten all the boys in the state? Absolutely! Were we truly at an advantage when it came to math and science education? I never felt like it, and I knew a lot of bright girls who internalized the "girls aren't supposed to be good at this" message in ways that affected their education and career choices. Sometimes a little girl power is just what helps you to keep going in the face of subtle or overt discouragement from the people around you.