An example, because you asked: I had a manager tell me I was not doing anything more than meeting expectations because folks at my level are expected to be "fire and forget". Apparently, because we had been having conversations about things going on with my project and how broken the code base was, I was not meeting his expectations of how engineers are supposed to behave.

I had to inform him that just because a great number of software engineers in his experience don't like talking about problems doesn't mean that everyone is like that. Indeed, some of them may be more likely to approach a problem in that way, and automatically treating that as bad is a pretty clear sign of biased behavior!

Note that I'm not saying this particular trap is a 1:1 with gender bias, since there are women who will never trip it and men who will, but you wanted an example and that is one from my life.

(Side note: I was delivering plenty of technical goodness during the period in question. When they can't find anything technical to fault, they invariably turn to something "soft" as described above...)

My original point was that a women that truly loves hacking and is exceptional at it won't have it harder to succeed, which does not mean it will be easy, it will be as hard, because most of the time if you're really good at something where performance is hard to measure you WILL get a lot of trouble breaking through.

My second point is that a women wanting to be a simple, average programmer that nobody knows about might indeed be less appreciated than your average man. But if she want to be a simple, average one than I guess she doesn't love programming, so why not pick something else?

I got the feeling that the article was trying to make us believe that there is a problem that should be solved, but I see no real problem.

Do you disagree?

(replied to my own comment because couldn't see the button under yours)