No, no, I don’t mean he XX and XY coding which makes women and men what they are (nor the other 8 or so haplotypes extant which make the classifications really rather confusing). Rather, the difference in hte way in which mean and women code software.

Emma McGrattan, the senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres–and one of Silicon Valley’s highest-ranking female programmers–insists that men and women write code differently. Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They’ll intersperse their code–those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs–with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it.

The code becomes a type of “roadmap” for others who might want to alter it or add to it later, says McGrattan, a native of Ireland who has been with Ingres since 1992.

Men, on the other hand, have no such pretenses. Often, “they try to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code,” she tells the Business Technology Blog. “They try to obfuscate things in the code,” and don’t leave clear directions for people using it later. McGrattan boasts that 70% to 80% of the time, she can look at a chunk of computer code and tell if it was written by a man or a woman.

OK, that’s a little broadbrush perhaps but the basic point she’s getting at seems valid to me. 15 years ago or so I was getting Russian programmers to write code for Californian companies. I was using some extraordinarily good people, those who could and would write their own compilers just for the fun of it. However, getting them to actually comment their code so that someone could then work out what each line was doing (so as to be able to repair or change it) was almost impossible. And that’s why the business failed in the end, for we never did manage to work out how to change that.

Looking back I wish I’d known then what I know now (well, yes, of course, everyone thinks that way, but I mean more than just the usual impossible hopes). For those EQSQ personality tests that you see up at the top there are based on Simon Baron Cohen’s ideas and it’s his ideas that help us to aid our understanding of these areas. That extreme male brain type which is so good at programming is also extremely bad at understanding what it is that other people require or understand. And that’s why so many programmers who are great at writing code don’t understand that you need to provide that map so that others can understand what you’ve done.