I think it's more a cultural problem where certain jobs and studies are very polarized and tied to a specific gender. This is not just software engineering/it,

I think it's more a cultural problem where certain jobs and studies are very polarized and tied to a specific gender. This is not just software engineering/it, but a lot more common than you would think, also the other way around. When talking about masters, where consistently over the last 10 years or so, 56% of the students is female here in Belgium, law, medical and chemistry studies are currently 60%+ female and some studies, like language, biology, crime, pharmaceutical are 70%+ female, arts and psychology 80%+ and pedagogy and logopedic/audiologic over 90%. That are pretty huge gaps, and yet that's not something you hear about that often. These stats are taken from multiple reports (in Dutch) from a few universities here in Belgium in years ranging from 2010 to 2013 [1] [2], and one report I only have on paper (all with pretty similar results) Yes there are also many areas where it's more equally divided (surprisingly, mathematics and economics), but I don't think it's necessarily the 'software engineering' field, it's for a large part society. My gf for example studied chemistry, and even if she's a bit of a geek sometimes, she never even considered software engineering/it as a study. And when I asked her why, she said it just doesn't have any appeal to her, although when I taught her to write small scripts in python and some basic HTML she thought that was awesome. And I know quite a few geeky girls just like her, doing stuff ranging from having studied sexology, veterinary, economics, law, chemistry, ... Only 3 of the ones I knew started in software engineering and 2 never finished. One became a cop, the other switched to medical, and the one that finished her degree now teaches mostly math since she didn't see herself writing software her entire career. The only way I see to get more women interested in engineering in general, is to get girls interested from a young age. You can't just wave your magic wand around and wish there's a even a 70/30 male/female ratio when only 10% of the software engineering students in the first year is female, and many of them drop out over the years. [1] https://www.kuleuven.be/diversiteit/pdf/20130927%20Gender%20en%20Studenten%20Openbaar.pdf https://www.kuleuven.be/diversiteit/pdf/20130927%20Gender%20... [2] http://www.ugent.be/nl/univgent/waarvoor-staat-ugent/diversiteit-en-gender/beleidscel/pers-en-publicaties/mv-rapport.pdf http://www.ugent.be/nl/univgent/waarvoor-staat-ugent/diversi...