I think that there may be something to the idea of a gender binary as a way of viewing computer interfaces, and the idea that we've only accomplished the masculine.<p>At the same time, I don't agree with it, personally. For example, whenever I do sysadmin work, or watch other sysadmins, there is very much this sort of nurturing relationship--"What did you do? Where does it hurt? Have you tried this? Can you show me what your settings were? Poor computer. :("<p>Perhaps this is no longer true in the new cloud days of servers as livestock-not-pets where you summarily destroy a misbehaving instance, but there was a time where we'd treat sick instances like sick children.<p>In fact, one of the things I very much disagree with is this whole notion of how difficult computers are to work with--command-line based ones especially. In classes or meetups, whenever I'd work with people new to the shell I always make sure to point out that we're about to have a conversation with the computer: we're going to ask it how it's feeling (`top`, `tail /var/log/messages"), what it's doing right now (`ps -A`), who it's been talking to (`netstat -plant`), who else it's working with (`users`), and if it knows anything interesting today (`fortune`).<p>What <i>doesn't</i> help is treating it like some black box that needs to be dumbed down or referring to it as something which requires a special skill set to use, which is a common theme in this article. Another thing I disliked about this article is that while it handwaves a bunch about how masculine computers are and how feminine it could be, it never really describes what such an approach looks like nor why it would be attractive.<p>In fact, I rather resent the implication that femininity is defined as this sort of spaced-out, overly-intimate, scatter-brained, disorganized sort of thing. Contrast author's work, for example, with a mother running herd over several kids and keeping things on time, or a young woman making an evening date with a friend after dressing up and working on her appearance.