"growing up in a poor country my two options were 1. become a software engineer 2. continue to live rest of your life in dire poverty"
Where exactly? Because frankly, that seems to be highly unlikely.
There seem to be far more female programmers in India and former Soviet bloc countries. Poverty is the obvious link. When you want a well paid job, niceties like role models or what your friends think are less important, and gender ratios become more balanced.
I am from former Soviet block country and there is no surge of female programmers. Also, poor people don't become programmers - only middle class kids do. Poor don't have computers at home and schools don't teach programming. You have to learn from elsewhere.
Yeah, but I've worked in software in Europe for years and my experience has been that if a developer is female, it's a solid bet that she's from eastern Europe or Russia. This is an incredibly strong and noticeable correlation. I don't think there's been a recent surge or anything - it feels like it's always been this way.
Poor is obviously relative in this context. Poor relative to western women.
Curious what you mean by middle class? in the 90's there was no such thing as middle class in India, everyone was poor. From what I read soviet countries like Russia were the same in 90's, sure some people were slightly better off than other but not enough to form a social class. Perhaps things are different now ?
If you grow up poor and don't learn an in demand skill, life will wreck you. Life for unskilled labor is bleak worldwide. And software is one of the only skills where a smart person doesn't need money or connections to be competitive.
This is precisely the reason you would find so many female programmers in south asian and other poor countries.
Its funny to see all the armchair philosophers like Pike come up with some 'Well actually, it's because X' explanations without presenting a single bit of evidence to back it up.