The programming talent myth

> I wonder how you can get whether the owner of that E-mail is [...]

Do you want to cast doubt on whether Free Software developers are >80% white males, because these traits are hard to measure for mere online personalities? Just use sampling. Conference group photos would need to be be massively biased -- maybe women, blacks, and cats just don't want to go to conferences?

If your point was why this would happen online, there are ways to keep one or more minorities out of a group without actively selecting at the entrance. Making frequent slurs against jews and blacks in your country club will be almost as effective in keeping them out as checking would-be members' ancestry.

Finally, we were talking about image, which is formed by what is perceived publicly. While there are a lot of female rock stars, not that many female star programmers have entered the public mind, and when they did, it was usually as an outlier.