"If I Can Make It Here..."

That's an interesting point. Do you think specific skills in SL have a gender bias - I know an excellent scripter with a female av who has been asked if she is a male in real.

Is scripting seen primarily as a male skill and texturing as a female one, for example?

here is why women are more successful than men

I don't know. I have tried selling original clothes in SL, including t-shirts, hats and dresses. I've tried texture sales. I've tried making furniture and selling it. Building. Landscaping. Selling original and commissioned artwork. Scripting. Avatar accessories, like wings. Whole-sim design and building work.

Some times, even with products by "both avatars" on the same wall of the same store, using the same vending system, the ones offered by my female avatar sold better than similar quality items being offered by my male avatar.

*shrugs*

Well, scripting requires the logical math part of the brain (the computer programming field in RL was dominated by men for a long time and is still heavier on the male side), whereas texturing is more of a decorating type of thing and that is *thought* of as more a feminine thing.

I actually knew a couple in SL that had their housing business set up with him building the house and she did the texturing.

Maybe this would explain why I am very good with Photoshop, but can't script worth a rat's ass.

OMG! I'm a CLICHE!!!!

Neither have you qualifed the type of 'woman'. As we know, some just look like women

The computer programming field was invented by a woman when Augusta Ada King (aka Ada Lovelace) wrote the algorithms of the programing language for Charles Babage's machine.

VERY cool woman. And the poet Byron's lovechild, of course. Witty, eloquent, and SMART.

Oh, also check out Grace Hopper, USN. Another pioneering woman programmer.

I think that is part of why I always found it so odd that it was very dominated by men for so long. My college classes were literally 98-99% male. Maybe that was simply because it took a while for women to start looking past the traditional female careers.

I think women have the upper hand because they have more wardrobe options. So if more women shop and more women make clothes, then more women walk around looking unique and elegant, while men are thrown the occasional t-shirt or spiky leather cloak that would blend in well with either the Village People or Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies.

It becomes something like an "old girl network."

But I like the status quo. Forget Mars and Venus. Men are from Earth - women are from heaven.

Why shouldn't RL stereotypes carry forward into SL? I was great friends with an SL couple who ran a store, she designed clothes, he scripted. One of my alts was a store model there, very fun set of coworkers. The friendship slowly disintegrated after he tossed off in conversation that I must be male because I scripted ... perhaps he thought the grand high occupation of programming was incompatible with barbie dolling? He backpedaled but the damage was done.

But of course, he *was* German and fairly young (she said, tossing off a couple of stereotypes in belated retaliation)

It kinda ruins your credibility when you can't spell Babbage's name correctly.

Pep (And Grace Hopper is most famous for inventing "bugs"; until she got involved all programs were written by men and ran correctly first time.)

Oh pish posh and crap.

Without her, COBOL would never have been developed. She had an amazing influential career.

And she had breasts.

So there.

My sister-in-sl has a way with words.

Ok, so maybe I wasn't at my most eloquent here . . .

The problem is that when you are talking to women you should use the word "breasts", but men don't really get it unless you say something like "boobies" or "tits".

My first job was programming in COBOL.

I don't hold her gender responsible for the horror that was COBOL, after all Larry Wall made the same mistake (designing a programming language around human language) and I see no breasts here:

If you're a cliché, then I'm the opposite! I build houses, I write my own scripts, and I am active in the Linux forum! I'm...

*checks down her pants, afraid of what she might find there*

Okay, phew... I'm not a man... I'm just a freak.

Have you *seen* the television commercials on kid-oriented channels (think Nicktoons and the like)? It's like we have never progressed beyond the 1950's! Girls are still expected to play with dolls (take care of babies) and play house (be the domestic Stepford Wife) while the boys run around with cars and guns and Transformers and everything else! It is, therefore, small wonder that women have such a hard time seeing past their "traditional" roles.

COBOL is a terrible computer language.
It attempts to be "human like" and so is slow and clunky to both write and run. It is mainly used for large legacy systems where people haven't had enough sense to change over to a modern computer language.

You certainly aren't championing the cause of women by telling us she is responsible for COBOL !

C++ . Now there's a "real" programmers language - invented by Bjarne Stroustrup - a man.

A man who didn't really understand "C". God, his reference syntax is grotty as hell. And templates... augh. C++ is NSFW.

Maybe I am wrong but one way I suspect I am talking to a man dressed as a woman is when they refer to breasts as "titties" and "boobies".I do get "boobies" and "bobbies" mixed up.
But English women use "boobs" a lot.
And I do use "tits" when I am in a rush.

Here's a good rule:

Use "breasts" at the Tate Gallery.
Use "tits" at a rock concert.
Use "boobs" when you're amazed at her breast augmentation.

I speak of my own "breasts". It's less "common".

Uh huh.

It's a bit like COBOL. I made the mistake of trying to communicate to them with something based upon human language . . .

I've always liked the idea of a "bosom" myself.

It covers a wide range of usage.

The passionate "heaving bosom" (normally when presented with a "swelling manhood"

and the nice comfy "bosom" that you can snuggle up to on a cold winter's night.

LOLz...well, we understand the word "breasts" but "boobies" is one of the most exciting words in the English language, so if you really want our attention...