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Comment by msbarnett | Hacker News Reader

> I'm not sure if I can see the correlation between the story being told and the fact that the author is female.

I saw a quip the other day that was along the lines of "Hacker News posters consistently make the mistake of assuming that, because a post shows up on Hacker News, the author is somehow 'making a big deal out of it'".

The "correlation" is that the author, after a spate of sexism stories regarding women in tech, got to thinking about how she got started as a woman in tech, and wrote a blog post sharing the story.

It's a slice of a story of someone's life, nothing more, nothing less. Don't try to read too much into it looking for larger correlations and grand overarching Big Deal Points.

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You're probably right, but the post is titled "Girls and Computers", which kind of seems to imply some deep, and general, theorizing about girls and computers.

> You're probably right, but the post is titled "Girls and Computers", which kind of seems to imply some deep, and general, theorizing about girls and computers.

Or that she's been spending some time thinking about "girls and computers" after the news stories about girls and computers and it made her think of her own story.

That's how I read it, anyways. Obsessing about the "deeper meaning" of a 3 word title and whether or not it is the best description of the content seems a bit pointless.

Article titles should match their content.

I'm not convinced it doesn't, but either way, this is pedantry of the most unproductive sort.

The point is that there was no discernable difference between the genders in approaching computers and learning how to use them.

Yet, even though originally the gender divide did not exist, nowadays it has been reinstated, since coding is seen as a male environment and women in IT are subject to various forms of special treatment, be they good or bad, either way, they are treated differently.

>> In some ways, it is like the very ubiquity of technology has led us back to a world where socially normative gender roles take hold all over again, and the effort we’re going to need to put into overcoming that feels overwhelming sometimes.

Maybe there's nothing to theorize about that's specific to girls? Sounds like my story, as a guy, and that's a subtle but important point. I used to run every program I could find, copy stuff from friends computers that was new and unfamiliar, borrow books from library/parent's friends, etc. Eventually I stumbled onto BASIC and the rest worked its own way out.

Yet I know plenty of kids - male and female - who had a machine just as powerful as I did (some more powerful), had the same access to information I did, etc. and didn't bother with any of that. Why was I so inquisitive and interested in computers to exclusion of everything else? Why did I spend all day and night on them while other kids were experiencing their first drinks, their first relationships, hanging out together, etc.? That's a more interesting question than the sex one, IMO.

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