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One thing I'd like to ask the women in this forum: If you'd grown up back in the day before tech was cool and techies were (generally) just nerds with no money

One thing I'd like to ask the women in this forum: If you'd grown up back in the day before tech was cool and techies were (generally) just nerds with no money, would you have still been interested in tech? My recollection from my teenage years in the UK in the late 70s and early 80s, emptying my Post Office savings account to buy one of the first batch of 10^5 BBC micros, trekking all over London searching for a Rubik's cube when they first arrived, and then later reading maths at Cambridge was that about 10% of the nerds were female. The female nerds were just as good as the male nerds. It's hard to say how much of that discrepancy was nature and how much was nurture. If we want diversity of hiring across sexes for hard-core nerd jobs (as opposed to overall hiring at Google etc.) then we need to at least start early with the education of young girls.

purpleostrich 9y ago
Yes. My obsession with computers, which did not start until after I met some super geeks after college, has COST me tens of thousands of dollars, more if you count rent for my lab and patents. It has cost me thousands of hours of time when I could've been reading literature, networking, cooking, going to med school, or a hundred other things. It has been worth every fucking penny and minute and the best joy and highlights of my life have been when I learned about a new idea or created a new algorithm. We exist. There just aren't that many of us and we don't glamour blog.
- delhanty 9y ago
  Thank you for reply. >There just aren't that many of us That was my point really - female geeks/nerds existed back in the day before tech was cool. It's just the natural level of interest (NOT ability) seemed to be more like 10% rather than 50%.
  - purpleostrich 9y ago
    It's hard to say. I'd say any natural interest I had in science was ignored or actively suppressed by my family. I think it's no accident that I did not embrace computers until after I was a financially independent adult. If my family had encouraged me and others like me earlier, the numbers of us surely would've been larger.

purpleostrich 9y ago

Yes. My obsession with computers, which did not start until after I met some super geeks after college, has COST me tens of thousands of dollars, more if you count rent for my lab and patents. It has cost me thousands of hours of time when I could've been reading literature, networking, cooking, going to med school, or a hundred other things. It has been worth every fucking penny and minute and the best joy and highlights of my life have been when I learned about a new idea or created a new algorithm. We exist. There just aren't that many of us and we don't glamour blog.

delhanty 9y ago
Thank you for reply. >There just aren't that many of us That was my point really - female geeks/nerds existed back in the day before tech was cool. It's just the natural level of interest (NOT ability) seemed to be more like 10% rather than 50%.
- purpleostrich 9y ago
  It's hard to say. I'd say any natural interest I had in science was ignored or actively suppressed by my family. I think it's no accident that I did not embrace computers until after I was a financially independent adult. If my family had encouraged me and others like me earlier, the numbers of us surely would've been larger.