I waffled on this when I created my account, but ultimately I want it associated with me and my name, not just a random name that anyone could claim as their own. That said, I've thought about having an anon account simply because I don't want to ask a stupid question and have someone bring gender into it (because, unfortunately, this happens). So I'm in this cycle of where I just browse StackOverflow and use my account to favorite things instead of taking the risk.

I did recently have someone in UXExchange comment on an old answer of mine (which had been upvoted a few times) to essentially tell me I was wrong about everything I said. The post was dated and no one else had replied to the thread in awhile. This same person had tweeted me around the same timeframe inviting me to join their chatroom. I hate assuming gender had anything to do with it, but it seemed odd that both of these would come out of nowhere, especially because telling someone they're wrong on a 2 year old post in this industry is like.. really?

That's an approach some women use successfully (including many of the techie women I know), but in aggregate it seems that either most women aren't trying it, or it doesn't work for them. One entirely speculative guess is that men and women might, on average, have different enough interaction patterns in asking/answer questions that an environment dominated by one gender feels like it, even if the participants' genders aren't disclosed. That doesn't even require any kind of hard biological differences; could be entirely a cultural effect. Thinking about my own online participation, lots of subtle cues go into whether a particular venue, even an anonymous one, feels like my kind of place.

I assume the thinking is they have bad experiences with non-anonymous Q&A and that puts them off Q&A as a whole.

Humans generalise their experiences all the time; how to determine whether a generalisation is valid is can be confusing [1].

[1] http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=407

yea for all i know sans personal comments you are all girls.

time for news.ycombinator.com/gonewild methinks