I mostly feign ignorance, although it's often real. My parents are on Windows, while I've only used OS X and *nix for the past 7 years or so. My husband and I still do major upgrades for them, like moving over their data when they get a new machine, but that's it.

The best part is, because I don't help them, they've had to figure stuff out themselves, and they've gotten pretty good at it. I do get the occasional call, and usually all I have to do is remind them to just keep poking around all the menu options until they find what they want.

It's the main reason I haven't encouraged my parents to get a Mac, because then I wouldn't have an excuse to avoid the tech support. Meanwhile, my husband's parents have a Mac, and he is constantly on the phone helping them out.

Ignorance -- whether feigned or not -- is definitely the way to go.

Maybe this depends on where you are -- or maybe you don't have many friends with young kids -- but I would not say that breastfeeding is "at odds with the norms of public behavior in the USA." My friends nurse in public all the time, and nobody bats an eye. And I don't see any flesh, and the men don't get aroused. It's just normal and unremarkable.

No one refers what a colleague may or may not have done last night? When you go out to lunch with colleagues, no one discusses the possibility that you might be interested in the waitress? At no time do you go to the bathroom and hear a colleague say something off-the-cuff regarding your habbits? No one discusses your car, or how you may be a little too particular when it comes to your organizational habbits?

No. What the fuck is wrong with you?

I am close friends with many of my male colleagues, but there is a difference between a business lunch and a Friday night poker session. It sounds like you would do well to learn the difference yourself.

why do so many people fail to see the obvious.. Women are generally not interested in CS and/or engineering. . . . This could be why men prefer action/horror movies, and women prefer drama/romance movies such as "Sex & the City".

The problem is that it's really not obvious. I could talk about parallel algorithms all night, and my husband has watched more episodes of Sex & the City than I have. He's the one who's more affectionate with kids and dogs, and I'm the one who can't multi-task.

You talk about "forcing" women into CS, but you're the one keeping men and women in their little gender-specific boxes. We're all so much more complicated than that.

It's sexist -- or at the very least, ignorant -- if you never stop and think about why the class has that makeup. Or if you never wonder why you're defending the status quo so strenuously.

Over the past fifty years, women and minorities have made great progress in fields that were previously only open to white men. Why assume that the progress stops here?

The reason nobody gives a rat's ass about gender equality in those jobs is because nobody is envious of those job's salaries.

Not quite. No one cares about gender equality in those jobs because they're women-dominated. Meanwhile, the pay is generally low because they're women-dominated -- it's a pretty vicious cycle of shunting women towards lower-paying jobs, and then artificially keeping the status of them low to justify the low wages. And because the status and wages are low, men aren't encouraged to pursue that line of work. The two biggest examples of this are teaching and nursing.

If what you are devoted to is math or programming, it really helps to be unpopular for at least a period in your life, especially earlier. The same is not true if you are devoted to theater, chemistry, or biology, which you can practice in a more social environment.

But even if your school doesn't have a math team or a programming club, there are a million and one webforums and mailing lists and Facebook groups out there for budding nerds to connect with other budding nerds. The hard part is finding one that's actually woman-friendly.

I think it is easier to be unpopular as teenage boy than it is as a teenage girl.

It depends -- sometimes the attacks (verbal and otherwise) on the unpopular boys are worse than the ones on the unpopular girls. I was an unpopular girl, and managed to stay under the radar. But my school was pretty big on athletics, so nerdy, unpopular guys got picked on a lot.

It's a responsibility and an accountability that very few people of any gender choose to accept. But it is one of those things that benefits from over-confidence, and macho self-righteousness -- something males tend to have much more often.

This is actually a hiring problem on several levels. You don't want to hire the most over-confident and macho person who applies, because in the long run he or she is most likely to make mistakes or not admit to wrong-doing.

Umm, I think there's some context missing to that notion -- men sexually harass men with equal frequency and grace. We simply don't call it harrassment because it's a part of our natural discourse.

For starters, most men stop sexually harassing each other once they're out of college. Secondly, men sexually harassing each other is not actually appropriate in the workplace. If you want to act like a frat boy at the bar, fine, but for god's sake please act like a professional at work.

I'm in a casual, male-dominated field, and I have never seen my male colleagues sexually harassing each other. It would be the height of inappropriateness, and they would have their asses handed to them. I'm sorry if expecting professionalism at work is too much for you.

But in most cases, the difference is being caused by negative pressure. Efforts to improve the working environment for women result in a better environment for everyone, and a higher percentage of women in the field. Not everything has to be 50-50, but if you're many sigma away from 50-50, and/or there's a leakier pipeline for women than for men, it's worth looking at why that is. Computer programming isn't a task that requires vast quantities of upper body strength (the biggest biological difference between men and women). Aren't you ever worried that you're missing out on half of the available talent?