The blog Making Light recently featured an entry titled Permission to suck, in which  Abi Sutherland describes her job being a software tester who is also the only woman and the only one who isn't a coder.  She would like to feel more comfortable not knowing what she's doing, in the sense of not feeling like she's a failure because she's female, not expecting herself to automatically be just as good as the boys, not thinking that not being as good as they are means she's let her side down.

When I was younger, there were a lot of things I learned or wanted to learn that were "men's jobs" or "boy's stuff," things I either wasn't allowed to do or was never going to get formal training on.  Working with tools.  Electronics.  Building things.  When I was in school, girls took home ec, boys took shop.  Period.  I knew of one girl who was allowed to take shop because apparently her parents raised a stink, but that didn't change the situation for anyone else, only for her.

So, I could learn some of these closed subjects on the sly, by experimenting.  I could watch someone doing it and try it myself in private later.  I could read books, sometimes, though the manual skills of working with tools aren't really easily learned that way.

So I was at a disadvantage.  And the disadvantage was multifaceted, including something that I think makes it harder to ask questions that simply not knowing all about what you're doing:  women, and others who aren't in the "mainstream" of a particular elite, may learn how to do something and not even suck, but they don't always attain the vocabulary they need to sound competent.  Language experts know that you don't achieve fluency in a language by listening.  You have to speak to know if you're speaking right, but that comes with the risk of speaking wrong, and being judged on it.

One of the stereotypes of "women who don't know how to do things" is the woman who refers to tools and hardware as whosits and whatchamacallits.  If no one ever really told you what the tool or part was called, you might be able to figure it out but won't be able to discuss it very well.  You will sound even less competent than you are.  So you'll be even less likely to speak about things you're not supposed to know about.