One of the Hacker News comments on Anna Billstrom’s article regarding female users on StackOverflow caught my eye:

We have had article after article claiming it is obvious women are being oppressed in the tech industry. Every week there is one of these. Many make bigoted claims about male engineers, enforcing stereotypes of male geeks I have never actually seen in industry. Where are the technical articles written by women? There are plenty of contributions complaining about oppression, while attacking men and claiming absurd stereotypes. Where are the technical contributions?

While there are multiple potential issues that could be raised with regards to this comment, I’m going to focus on the second half – the part asking “where are the technical articles written by women?” Well, let’s use an example that’s close at hand – the blog post I wrote about Git submodules. That blog post wound up on Hacker News and also on Reddit.

For now, let’s set aside whatever opinions you have on the content of the post itself – assuming you can at least agree with me that it’s an example of a technical article. In exchange, I’ll refrain from commenting on the merits of the comments I’m quoting here.

If you look through the comment threads on both sites, you’ll notice something: any instances of gendered language that the commenters use assume the author is male. They refer to “him” and talk about what they think “he” should do or their opinion of “his” thoughts on the matter. Some examples:

Hacker News:

It appears that one of the solutions he recommends, git-subtree, is going to be merged into git soon:

Reddit:

He complains about having to branch in both the parent and the sub project, but I have found that not to be a problem at all, and kind of nice in some situations. He’s blowing it way out of proportion.

Reddit:

On the other hand, the author prefaced all his “this is where submodules break” descriptions with “I forgot to run submodule update”, so I have trouble sympathizing.

Sure, I generally don’t go out of my way to make it obvious that I’m a woman on my blog – you’d have to first click over to the About page, and then click through to either my Google+ profile or my Twitter account. Then again, I don’t know many male developers who go out of their way to make it obvious that they’re male, either. After all, supposedly gender is irrelevant on the internet (Hacker News):

Not to mention that we’re on the fucking internet. There is no gender, race, colour or creed here. Everybody pick a neutral username and, hey, presto! Problem solved.

Sure, I could go out of my way to make it obvious that I’m a woman. I could put my name at the top of my blog or on my About page, or I could mention it in passing in my writing. That’s not something a male author has to do, though. Furthermore, doing so results in harassment and having my writing dismissed/trivialized/tokenized because of my gender. Hence why I don’t (or at least, hadn’t until this post).

The catch-22 here is that if I choose to blend in, then people like the commenters above assume that everything they see was written by men, and use that as an excuse to dismiss the concerns of women in the tech industry – because apparently, we don’t contribute and thus don’t matter. If I choose to not blend in, I’m dismissed as bringing up gender when it’s irrelevant (or worse, harassed by people who’ve decided gender is relevant).

It’s no surprise that when the default assumption is “male author” it winds up seeming like male authors write almost everything. So to the original commenter I quoted, here’s your answer: they’re where all the technical articles you read are: on Hacker News, on Reddit, on whatever other blogs and aggregators you frequent. Just because you don’t see them (or perhaps, don’t realize you see them) doesn’t mean they don’t exist.