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Re:VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris ... by rmc on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @08:20AM (#10580811)
I'm not religious, but I should point out that IT isn't the most 'scientific accepting' as some might think it is.

For example: Is IT/open source/tech/programming a meritocracy? If so, how do you explain the massive gender skew? How do you explain how there are scientific studies showing people can be sexist in science (which should be as 'science-based' as IT)?

Many people in tech, confronted with this, will double down. They'll claim tech is a total meritocracy, that women must just be studier at tech etc. etc.

Atheist IT people can be just as closed minded as some bible thumper.

Re:VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris ... by cableshaft on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @10:20AM (#10581537)
It's not 100% a meritocracy, no, although it seems to be more of a meritocracy than other industries.

And a lot of the gender skew starts real, real early. Anyone who took Computer Science in college could see the gender skew in action. I regularly had between 0 and 1 women in my 30+ student classes. They just weren't signing up for Computer Science classes.

And there used to be quite a few female computer scientists, but that trend changed in the 70s. There was probably a cultural aspect to this (i.e. parents or peers influencing their decisions away from computers because computers are for asocial nerds, and you don't want to be a nerd!).

It does appear that the cultural influence is shifting at least slightly in favor of women being programmers again, with nerd/geek culture becoming more fashionable and so many people using computers/smartphones all day long, so hopefully we will see more women pursuing computer science, but the root of the problem is mostly right at high school/college age, not nearly as much in the workforce.