[saruxanset]

To be fair, there are still some good tech articles every now and then, but this "blog" was so bad it pissed me off for a good hour or so. The author made plenty of unjustified claims, cited anecdotal "evidence" the way middle-school kids do in their essays, and generally sounded out of touch. Is Anandtech so readership-starved they have to resort to such pointless lows?

The author's wife even came to his defense, with a hilariously pathetic post:

i'm a chick. *hoists vagina over head to prove it* and there are two obvious reasons for people to overlook my comment post: 1. i'm the wife of the blog poster, and 2. i've written a couple of articles for anandtech in the past. having gotten that out of the way...

my mind is in shock from some of the responses this blog posting has received. you've got to be kidding me, some of you honestly think that "pinking" up the design of the site will draw in the ladies? i'd have to guess the people saying that haven't found that lucky someone to share their lives with yet. impressive, though, how you can reduce something you know nothing about to a color scheme problem. do YOU actually understand and read the articles here or did you bumble over from the forums in a haze of being lost in the internet, refusing to pull over and ask for directions??

whether or not female readers at anandtech are being represented, they are often being nudged out in the industry as a whole. when the latest nvidia card hits the shelves with a half-naked fairy plastered across the front, the sellers have already chosen their market. don't get me wrong, if it will make playing black and white a more seamless task i have nothing against cluttering up my motherboard with it. but that's not always going to be the case with pre-gender-designated technology or with other women.

in my personal experience, the flaw in the educational system was not the fault of the professors, but of the students. as i worked up the ranks of mechanical engineering, i found the average female presence per classroom went down as the course numbers went up, and the people who made my life the hardest were the many males in the classroom. several of them tried to make me feel ridiculous for gathering members to do group homework, others acted like a pair of boobs clearly made me a viewing object and not a colleague, one of them even tried to rape me! after giving up on the major altogether, i wandered over to the math department and found all of the chewed up, spat out women. and they were significantly more accepting of their classmates after the trauma of trying to make engineering work. some of you posting here sound so much like the guys from solids. it's kind of horrifying.

as for how the site can draw more women... i agree that foundation articles and female writers would be an excellent start. i appreciate people who took this posting seriously and for what it is: a query for reasonable suggestions. it's never a bad thing to include more readers, and the great difficulty will be not losing current loyal readers to the changes. but sadly, right now it seems the reason women don't feel so welcome on sites like this one is staring us in the face on this comment list.