females are better at documentation? c'mon...

was this code written by a man or a woman?

I recently became aware that there's a stereotype that women write more "touchy-feely and considerate" code than men, interspersing it "with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it..."

I have my doubts about this sweeping generalization. Nevertheless, today I received some recognition from a colleague for the helpfulness of my written documentation in three places: directly in the code where I documented why a change was made, in version control when I checked in my code changes, and in my bug reporting comments. He told me that all of this information greatly reduced the amount of time that it took him to resolve an issue.

I don't think my documentation skills are due to some natural ability as a woman. I have a PhD, and as Terri points out at CU-WISE blog, documenting your research is a key skill ingrained during graduate school, if you don't already have it.

I guess I should be happy about being complimented for something, but I'd have been happier if it had been about my excellent coding skills. This was akin to being praised for tidy penmanship.