> Please read all the way it does sound pretty blunt, kinda a rant. I'm a guy. Not a very liberal response. I approach this sort of writing with a stern charit

> Please read all the way it does sound pretty blunt, kinda a rant. I'm a guy. Not a very liberal response. I approach this sort of writing with a stern charity. Asking questions is never wrong. And I even entertain discriminatory assertions that have a compelling basis in reality. This is the charity. But you damn well better be right, or at least not obviously wrong. If you have no compelling reason to believe what you preach -- if even the most cursory investigation would disposes you of a controversial and harmful if incorrect belief -- then you're just a bigot. This is the sternness. So, let us evaluate your claims. Namely, that "you [women] shouldn't complain when it is difficult because you [they] are swimming upstream". I.e., that women are somehow naturally predisposed to poor software engineering. Engineering requires a combination of technical aptitude and clear communication. Let us first consider technical aptitude. It is instructive to consider other fields that over-lap with Computer Science and Software Engineering -- Mathematics (obviously important in CS and SE), medicine (requires systems-oriented thinking), and other sciences (requiring general technical skills). Mathematics is more gender balanced than Computer Science. The most technically difficult aspects of Computer Science are basically applied mathematics. So technical competence cannot explain the CS gender disparity. Medical Doctors are, on average, smarter, better credentialed, harder workers, and even better compensated than software engineers. And yet, the gender disparity among MD's is much lower than among software engineers. Women outnumber men in several sciences, none of which you could reasonably call "pink-collar" fields without completely ignoring a good 20 years of history (let alone 100 years). So, is it possible that women are somehow innately impoverished in the technical aptitude required in Software Engineering? I don't think so. But even if they are, this alone does not explain the gender gap in Computer Science. Technical aptitude does not provide a compelling justification for your viewpoint. That leaves us with communication. A technical genius who cannot communicate -- in code, in documentation, and in conversation -- makes for a dreadful engineer. Perhaps innate communication ability explains the gap between men and women in software engineering? But all the women I know write much more clearly than you have in this post! And surely you are an excellent engineer. So it seems I've run out of charity.