I don't know that you can call yourself a "failed coder" when, let's be honest, it could be argued you didn't try that hard to be a coder in the first place - i

I don't know that you can call yourself a "failed coder" when, let's be honest, it could be argued you didn't try that hard to be a coder in the first place - it wasn't that you made your living do it but realised in doing so that you were bad at it. I'm not sure bailing out on a high school computing course, because it sucked (I'm not sure being a boy would have made any difference here), is nearly enough qualification to label oneself a "failed coder". I will share this from my own experience of computing courses at school though, and this is admittedly going back to the late 80s/early 90s: they sucked. They were boring as hell. I had a year of IT classes in year 9 and I got crap grades throughout because I was totally unengaged and, frankly, already operating at a considerably more sophisticated level than the course material. I wanted to solve real problems and write video games, not bugger around with word processing and spreadsheets and deeply basic (no pun intended) programming "problems". And that's not (just) being arrogant: it applied to plenty of the other card-carrying nerds in the room, although some of them were definitely better at playing the game and being willing to jump through the hoops. This was in a boys' school, btw. I actually diverged from Comp Sci for quite a while: going into 6th form the schools merged and I realised there was no chance of me getting a girlfriend if I was into computers. Bad decision and, ironically, made no difference in that direction anyway. What it did do was ensure that I didn't even consider CompSci as an undergrad degree. Another bad decision, later corrected with a post-grad conversion course. And so I finally ended up working as a programmer, which is what I'd always wanted to do, despite my best efforts in other directions. Anyway, a roundabout way of getting to the point: clearly there's a lot the industry can do to make itself more attractive to females. I've worked with precious few female engineers over the years but enough to know the good ones are as good as any man I've worked with, and I'm sure a similar distribution of skill applies for women as for men. And this is the thing: as well as making the industry a more pleasant place for women to work, we need more women at the top of the funnel. For whatever reason or set of reasons - which I don't pretend to understand - girls are much more likely to either choose not to study, or drop out of studying, Computer Science. If we don't fix that we are always going to have a gender imbalance: I'd argue that one way to normalise women as engineers is to ensure there are more women doing engineering.