The whole question seems to come from the fact that once there were a number of things women weren't allowed to do and it was deemed a good thing to work on mak

The whole question seems to come from the fact that once there were a number of things women weren't allowed to do and it was deemed a good thing to work on making the playfield equal for both sexes. Turns out, when the gates were opened for one particular activity, many women did indeed want to engage in it and over the decades the gender distribution converged towards 50-50. However, from that, some people extrapolate that if the gender distribution in some field is too far from 50-50, then there must be something in place that is horrible and sexist and blocking women from that field. Even if technically women can apply and graduate, they conclude that the field still has some implied male chauvinist bias against women. Whenever it gets to that level, it's simply not an option that women might not want it that much. Other professions took maybe decades before women started to want them, even if they were already allowed to work as such. We can conclude that women today don't want programming badly enough. Those who do are already enrolled or working in the field. They are few in number but merely because they all had no alternative they could themselves live with. The situation today is that it's not mainstream for women to want to be programmers. It's not wrong, people just aren't sure yet. This is a very different statement that women aren't explicitly or implicitly allowed to become programmers in the contemporary society. Barring a few ploughers, people often don't know what they can want unless they see a supporting example many enough times. If you're a young woman and you don't know what you want to do, you could become a nurse. Many nurses started like that, regardless of whether they actually like their job or not. It might be a few decades forward when enough women get into programming, that the field also begins to appeal to women. It may also never happen, or it might happen to an extent. Maybe roughly 1% of women would like to do programming where as roughly 2% of men want to do it. If so, then eventually roughly one programmer out of three will be women some day, in the average. Thanks for the article writer to voice a loud counterexample that hopefully reset people into confusion about the true state of matters.