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(Now that I'm not so sleepy, I'll try to answer this better.) It's much more probable that males and females experience fundamentally different kinds of pushba

(Now that I'm not so sleepy, I'll try to answer this better.) It's much more probable that males and females experience fundamentally different kinds of pushback against learning programming. It seems naive to say that females experience a simple superset of what males experience. In which case, it stands to reason that they probably don't necessarily have a harder time getting into it, just a different set of social obstacles. But I'm no professor of sociology. I don't know these things for a fact. I'm just saying that I approach this topic with a bit of skepticism when someone else (who also is not a professor of sociology) comes out claiming that females have more social obstacles to getting into computer programming than males do.

mtrimpe 13y ago
That's a perfectly valid perspective and it's more than likely that there are indeed both differences and some amount of overlap in the obstacles. What we observe however is that: * in various countries the gender distribution in tech is quite close to 50/50 (-> probably little innate difference) * in the US and Western Europe there are much fewer women in tech (-> probably some cultural difference) * women in tech indicate encountering a lot of social obstacles (-> probably in the form of these self-reported mechanisms) Those observations together make operating on the assumption that the social obstacles for women in tech are stronger than those for men (and working on improving it) a reasonable thing to do. I agree that formalizing that as a 'goal of 50/50' is wrong but the underlying goal, which is the one that is actually getting support, is for the (systemic forces that give rise to) the gender gap to be reduced to an acceptable degree. There will always be things to improve of course as Eastern European countries for example already have much more women in tech than here, but are dealing with stereotypes which steer women towards QA and men towards development. Here we're not at the point yet though, so currently we won't do much harm by letting our main focus can still just be on increasing participation of women in tech, period.

mtrimpe 13y ago

That's a perfectly valid perspective and it's more than likely that there are indeed both differences and some amount of overlap in the obstacles. What we observe however is that: * in various countries the gender distribution in tech is quite close to 50/50 (-> probably little innate difference) * in the US and Western Europe there are much fewer women in tech (-> probably some cultural difference) * women in tech indicate encountering a lot of social obstacles (-> probably in the form of these self-reported mechanisms) Those observations together make operating on the assumption that the social obstacles for women in tech are stronger than those for men (and working on improving it) a reasonable thing to do. I agree that formalizing that as a 'goal of 50/50' is wrong but the underlying goal, which is the one that is actually getting support, is for the (systemic forces that give rise to) the gender gap to be reduced to an acceptable degree. There will always be things to improve of course as Eastern European countries for example already have much more women in tech than here, but are dealing with stereotypes which steer women towards QA and men towards development. Here we're not at the point yet though, so currently we won't do much harm by letting our main focus can still just be on increasing participation of women in tech, period.