I've also obviously made mistakes and while the mistake spotlight is shining in your face, it feels pretty magnified, especially if you're one who has previously earned significant technical respect. For three years, I led the group in our company responsible for post-morteming every production issue, and reporting to our business leadership in a weekly meeting every issue that cost us more than $2000. In all that time, and in the rest of my two decades in the field, I don't think I've ever sensed a whiff of "you made that mistake because of your extra X chromosome..." (unfamiliar with Leah Culver, but will google now)
Down in her comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2274993 pamelafox linked a blog post she had written about it being good to be a girl in CS, but that post references a previous one she'd written in which she talks about her experience in Model UN in school, where she found herself doing the same thing. Automatically requiring other girls to 'prove' themselves more than the boys before she had respect for them as a speaker. (That post is here: http://blog.pamelafox.org/2009/10/should-i-defend-my-cred-ye...)
I try to be conscious of it, but again, I know what it's like to be on the receiving end. If this is a bias even other women aware of the problem have and have to consciously fight in themselves, how many others (men and women) don't even get as far as recognizing it?
Definitely not. If she were male (or an unattractive female), we'd never have heard of her to begin with. She would have been just another anonymous low level coder working for Kevin Rose.
"He's the Michael Moore of software." That's what the community says when a man with visibility writes bad code:
It's not an overt thing. There's never any one comment or specific action by an individual you can point at and say, "See! Right there! You aren't giving me equal respect!" but the pressure is definitely there.
Also, the converse is true. Not only do you have to be better, to be seen as equal, anything you do wrong is magnified. Would Leah Culver's "creative" rounding method have been nearly a big deal if she'd been male? I have the feeling that while people would still have joked about it, it wouldn't have been as widespread or for as long.