Why would women be harassed for blogging about programming, but not for meta-blogging about the experience of being a female programmer (as the OP)? Is one really less dangerous than the other?
I imagine the typical perpetrator in that case is a man with negligible romantic experience, who is not particularly attractive, lives in a social environment with a 10:1 M:F ratio and statistically may well be encountering someone of the opposite sex who actually nominally has something nontrivial in common with them for the first time. The "something in common" part is contingent on actually signalling being a capital-p Programmer culturally (e.g. by blogging about programming), rather than someone who appears to be closer to a social activist who just happens to have a job in programming (and might as well be the secretary staffing the front desk for the purpose of commonalities, as far as the would-be harasser can see).
Grasping at straws inevitably ensues, and there are sufficiently many around that some don't react gracefully when the straws snap.
Sorry, learning social skills, learning to manage your time so you can meet people, etc. is not the job of an employer or a profession as a whole.
I'm sure there's plenty of lonely garbage men (purposely phrased as "men"), but no one's suggesting that the public works departments should be ensuring there's more women in the departments for their men to hang out with and fall in love with.
Didn't learn job skills, wasted a free k to 12 education, made bad financial decisions? Here, let society help you. We'll tax people to help fund a social safety net because there should be a basic standard of living.
Didn't develop social skills? LOL, LOSER! Why don't you try to teach yourself some social skills. You deserve to be alone until you improve yourself.
Crass and perhaps too blunt, but people should be able to get the basic idea of this double standard.
Of course, #NotAllDevelopers; I feel like I'm somewhere in between (but in part because of some effort on my own), and my company has quite a few developers that lean towards extroversion.
The problem in this case is that when someone steps upon a soapbox on the internet, they reach an audience of potentially millions; even if 0.00001% is a bit er, maladjusted, that's still enough for a few people to start making that kind of comment or show that kind of behaviour. Even if 99% of people were well-behaved, the 1% could still cause shit. And that's not easy to deal with.
But one of the modern expectations of a professional work environment is that people can manage how they express their emotions. Screaming and hitting because of anger is not permitted; similarly, harassing and touching because of lust is not permitted either.
I actually don't think that programmers are that much worse than other professions in this respect. We just talk about programmers more than lawyers or soldiers here, because most folks here are programmers or interested in programming.
There is also the issue that what is socially acceptable behavior depends upon characteristics which we do not want to admit. The difference between creepy and acceptable behavior is sometimes not found in the behavior itself, but in things like the race or appearance of the one engaging in the behavior.
What's not ok is constantly commenting on a person's appearance or clothes, making sex-related jokes or comments in front of the person, staring at them constantly, questioning them about their love life or sex life, etc.
A lot of that stuff falls into the "harmless in a social situation" category, but is on the wrong side of the line for a professional environment. But, that is the sort of stuff that is often permitted, tolerated, or insufficiently discouraged by managers, especially folks who perceive work as a social setting, or want to believe it is a social setting.
You'll also tend to find that women who blog about tech tend to hide their gender a bit more or post on community blogs, or their posts about tech will be on a blog with a wider scope.
But, if you restrict your blogging to the arcane aspects of database replication or whatever, then you can "pass" as a man.
This option isn't really available if you are blogging your experience "as a woman in tech" so this self-selects for people who can cope with abuse, are already receiving so much they won't notice any extra, or that think it's worth it to be a visible example to others.
Are women in tech harassed more than "average" women? I wonder if this is true both in real life and online.
There are a great many total dickheads on the internet. Really. It's hard to comprehend just how many utter dickheads are running around out here. The exact reasons why? I've never really understood all of it. Some of it is because it makes them feel like big men, showing off to their dickhead friends; I've seen them come back to crow about it and they seem to get some kind of approval from their peers.
I also edited what I said to remove some of the additional discussion and data, to make it simpler to see where I said it was for peer approval.
I really hate this line of thought. The internet is not a different place to the real world, and the truth is that there are a great many people in your town/city/country/world etc who are kinda obnoxious.
People act differently on it, though.
In certain vague, slightly pointless ways (i.e. "it's just people doing things on a thing" ) they're exactly the same, sure.
The specifics of what is possible in terms of breadth and time are vastly different though.
With regards to the topic at hand - and assuming I am a jerk - I can find 50 different programming blogs and write sexist epithets in the comments in ten seconds flat.
I cannot do that in the real world to 50 different people in that time frame nor with the same lack of repercussion.
For a good account of total dickheads (in a nerdy subculture, no less) in meatspace, see http://latining.tumblr.com/post/141567276944/tabletop-gaming... If this were online, I bet the author would have assumed a gender-neutral / default-to-male pseudonym in a heartbeat.
The effect does happen, but in a far more insidious way.
In technical writing, I imagine you'd just think "I don't want that in the comments [or to deal with moderating them]".
I definitely agree that the answer is to just shut up about being inspiring, and be inspiring. (To any future CS student - not just women/schoolgirls!)
Of course there are plenty of trolls who are concerned with entirely different things, and of course there are MRAs who don't attack women like that, but I'm at a loss about what other groups would be motivated specifically to shut down women who speak about tech or similar topics.