Yeah, you're right, I wasn't really expressing myself very well I think, which will teach me to start typing before my first coffee of the day :) I actually th

Yeah, you're right, I wasn't really expressing myself very well I think, which will teach me to start typing before my first coffee of the day :) I actually think a lot of the problem is the culturally linked gender roles that society pushes on kids from an early age. The "girls play with dolls, boys play with cars" type stuff. I was always a tomboy and hated dolls, I was far more interested in cars and planes and Lego than more girly toys (though when peer pressure started to become a part of my life I felt left out without Barbies and things). The point being, at my academically-selective girls high school, we had only a tiny computer room (and not much done in there), no metalwork or woodwork or anything like that classes, but lots of sewing and cooking as our "design and technology" part. Us girls weren't really encouraged to use computers much, the only thing that really got me into it was my dad, who was (and still is) an oldskool computer nerd. I'm sure if we'd had more opportunities to do more with computing there would have been more women going into computer-related degrees at university, for example. But these distinctions are things that need to be addressed well before the getting-to-uni part. I just get the distinct impression that to get more women into these sorts of areas they need to be more exposed to them from an earlier age, so it's part of their normal expectations about what they can do with their life, much like becoming a doctor or a lawyer is these days, when in the past these were most definitely male dominated areas.