Females in the community.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 23 March 2016 at 12:35:59 UTC, QAston wrote:
> And yes, I'm saying that the world of programming has a history 
> of accepting "weird" people. That's partially because we have a 
> clear measurment: either your stuff works or it doesn't. No 
> need for identity wars. Computing was dominated by women after 
> the ww2, it was shifted towards men later on. Maybe it will 
> shift back. Who cares - we all have so much in common as 
> programmers that it doesn't really matter which parts of your 
> body hang down.

Fair enough, but here is some background worth mentioning.

In high school I went to a section that was geared towards 
computers and electronics. We started with 3 girls and lots of 
boys from all over the city. After a year we only had 1 girl 
left, and I don't recall any of the boys quitting. She was a 
cute, natural, bubbly girl, but in order to get an easier time 
she changed into a more silent/serious and mainstream girl which 
made her more accepted by the teenage boys. When we had classes 
with another class with more girls the boys dampened their 
comments... basically the presence of girls made them moderate 
themselves and act less obnoxious towards others (both boys and 
girls). Studies generally say that mixed groups do provide a more 
satisfactory environment. That'a probably true for online forums 
too.

In the army I had the same kind of experience. Male dominating 
and somewhat rough. The women that persists in such environments 
tend to take on less feminine manners too in order to gain 
respect. Although we also had a very feminine, extremely pretty, 
sergeant who did gain some respect, but her first inspection got 
very awkward, the men lost words, stuttered, giggled and 
generally had trouble keeping a straight face. She totally 
enjoyed it! So gender does create very real differences, 
sometimes suppressing (forcing women to become more like men), 
sometimes empowering.

In the academic sector the situation was better. Still male 
dominated, but more general awareness of gender issues. Still, as 
a teacher you can see that one strong female student in a male 
dominated group can do well and take the group leader position, 
but that more average students might benefit from having 
all-female groups.

I have absolutely no doubt that women are just a good programmers 
as men, but in my experience women in informatics tends to 
gravitate towards topics where they get to work with other people 
in addition to the technology. At one department meeting where we 
discussed how to attract more women to the Comp. Sci. department, 
one of the very bright professors said that she wasn't sure if we 
actually would do those women a favour since pure computer 
science is such a dull and meaningless topic... ;-) Of course, 
the gender percentage is not the real issue, the real issue is to 
make the study attainable and enjoyable for all. If only a small 
percentage of all women find it meaningful, then that is quite 
understandable and hardly a disaster, but if they don't even 
consider Compi. Sci. because it is male dominated then that is 
not good either.

Anyway, I think the mixed settings makes for better norm 
formation and interesting interaction, but we cannot declare that 
there should be more women interested in system level 
programming. In my experience that path starts in the early geeky 
teens by kids picking hardware to pieces... So we are basically 
stuck with the discourse of a male dominated community, which is 
not ideal, even for the male participants IMHO.