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As a guy, both reading this article and the horrendous comments in this thread I kind of want to put a female avatar picture on my social media accounts. Just

As a guy, both reading this article and the horrendous comments in this thread I kind of want to put a female avatar picture on my social media accounts. Just to see what it's like to be in someone else's shoes...

kpao 9y ago
I'm wearing someone else's shoes every day so I can give you a quick feedback of my experience. I'm trans, blonde, pass relatively well and on the feminine side. I have seen a drastic shift in messages I get from people online. I regularly get mansplained obvious things about aviation, tech, coding on social media. People don't assume I'm the CEO of my company or that I have anything to do with engineering anymore. Glad we hired someone else to do support for us...
colmvp 9y ago
I recall using a very attractive photo of a woman (not a model as that would be too obviously fake) on a forum and asking about salary ranges in a city. The next morning, the thread had over a hundred replies and I even got one private message offering an interview. I hadn’t even linked to my work. That said I think this has a lot more to do with attractiveness and race than gender. Anytime you see someone post a photo of an attractive man holding a cute animal on /r/aww the comments from women are equally extremely cringey and weird.
Caveman_Coder 9y ago
I did this with job applications when I was getting rejected using my real name and sex. I changed it from Joe to Joanna and re-applied. Every single company that turned me down originally called me back when they thought I was a female developer...so from my perspective, their shoes look pretty good...It was an interesting little experiment...turns out my experience was good, but my sex was wrong for the "desired" team makeup.
ThinkingGuy 9y ago
I was first awakened to the problem of sexism back in the days of IRC. The client (or maybe it was the server) I was using truncated nicks to 9 characters, so "ThinkingGuy" became the non-gender-specific "ThinkingG." And the barrage of "a/s/l?"s began...

kpao 9y ago

I'm wearing someone else's shoes every day so I can give you a quick feedback of my experience. I'm trans, blonde, pass relatively well and on the feminine side. I have seen a drastic shift in messages I get from people online. I regularly get mansplained obvious things about aviation, tech, coding on social media. People don't assume I'm the CEO of my company or that I have anything to do with engineering anymore. Glad we hired someone else to do support for us...

colmvp 9y ago

I recall using a very attractive photo of a woman (not a model as that would be too obviously fake) on a forum and asking about salary ranges in a city. The next morning, the thread had over a hundred replies and I even got one private message offering an interview. I hadn’t even linked to my work. That said I think this has a lot more to do with attractiveness and race than gender. Anytime you see someone post a photo of an attractive man holding a cute animal on /r/aww the comments from women are equally extremely cringey and weird.

Caveman_Coder 9y ago

I did this with job applications when I was getting rejected using my real name and sex. I changed it from Joe to Joanna and re-applied. Every single company that turned me down originally called me back when they thought I was a female developer...so from my perspective, their shoes look pretty good...It was an interesting little experiment...turns out my experience was good, but my sex was wrong for the "desired" team makeup.

ThinkingGuy 9y ago

I was first awakened to the problem of sexism back in the days of IRC. The client (or maybe it was the server) I was using truncated nicks to 9 characters, so "ThinkingGuy" became the non-gender-specific "ThinkingG." And the barrage of "a/s/l?"s began...