> Personally I believe that gender imbalance in this (and other) professions is only indirectly related to gender. History disagrees with you. In the 1960s, pr

> Personally I believe that gender imbalance in this (and other) professions is only indirectly related to gender. History disagrees with you. In the 1960s, programming was considered to be "women's work", like typing, filing and other clerical duties, while men did the engineering bit of actually building the machines. But people began to realize that software was difficult and important, so they decided women had to go. Women were eliminated from the professional by the creation of personality and aptitude tests that were supposed to evaluate whether someone would be good at programming. They invented the idea that being anti-social was associated with programming skill, which is where today's stereotype of the loner computer geek comes from. They also distributed the answers to the aptitude tests within all-male fraternities and clubs. If you believe in a meritocracy that is blind to gender, then you should be in favor of increasing women in the profession. All men who have any pride in their skills should be embarrassed by the lying and cheating that made us the dominant gender in the field.