I don't want to speak for my wife, but she has been actively involved in Girls Who Code, and seems to have thought that it was worthwhile. As I understand it, it's more about letting girls know that programming is an option, rather than being about segregating female engineers. I think this is necessary because I have personally seen the assumption that men are engineers and women are support people limit the careers of women who were more accomplished and competent than men in more prestigious engineering roles. From my perspective, there's a lot of bullshit mythmaking in programming that plausibly dissuades many, IMO disproportionately women, from approaching the field, and which seems to have a tendency to funnel women to less prestigious/respected roles tangential to engineering.

Response to parent's edit:

> we're both pretty standard-issue silver-spoon white Midwestern liberals

I can see why you would draw that conclusion, but your assumption is pretty wide of the mark in my case. I grew up very poor in the deep South.

Response to your response to GP's edit. Pretty sure GP was talking about him and his spouse not him and you.

Correct, apologies for the ambiguous pronoun.

I agree about programming being full of "bullshit mythmaking". It is one of the things that annoys me the most about our industry.

Apologies for the ambiguous pronoun, I was referring to myself and my partner.

Oh, understand. Yes, I misinterpreted the subjects of the statement.

[1] edit: oi, changed "understood" to "understand". The former implied that I immediately understood what you were saying. I was trying to say that I didn't initially understand, but do now after the correction... sorry if that caused more confusion.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "bullshit mythmaking"? I'm not familiar with that turn of phrase.

It was my own off the cuff phrase. It's hard to relay the subtleties that I am trying to get across. I think that a lot of career programmers overstate the difficulty of their jobs, and how impossible it would be for people who don't closely hew to the archetype of the genius iconoclast hacker to contribute at all, even when they've demonstrated relevant aptitude and competence. These biases strike me as damaging to the motivations of people who don't look like, or particularly relate to anyone held up as a paragon of that archetype. Also, looking like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, or even Woz, doesn't actually strike me as being relevant to someone's potential as a programmer. That's why I call it bullshit. Because the tech industry selects for people who outwardly present as stereotypical hackers without even doing much to verify ability in many cases, while constantly relitigating the bona fides of people who don't outwardly present those superficial qualities.

Put another way, why have I seen many very good female programmers trapped in lower paying positions like QA and X-Analyst (but doing legit programming as their job) when there are men who are shitty programmers making 50% more and in a social position that gives them license to condescend to these women?

Or to put it the other way, are Gates, Zuckerberg, etc even their own archetypes, or where those labels foisted upon them by the zeitgeist's expectations of their role? And they went along because it was simpler, easier, or more financially beneficial?

In either case, agreed that changing the popular mythos is absolutely a prerequisite to resolving the inequity.

I'm not sure, but my guess would be stuff like "10x engineers", lionizing certain celebrities, and generally downplaying how much of everything is actually incremental work that is the shared success of a great many different people.

I don't think software-development is unique in that respect though, humans tend to want to take a messy reality and make simpler stories with fewer and simpler characters.

On one hand, I dislike the openly "only for girls" activities. It is opposite of integration.

On the other hand, programming and tech in general is already gendered in peoples minds. By people I here mean parents, children themselves, teachers and so on and so forth. Parents will refer to technical clubs as boy clubs (even if some girls participate) or mock boys doing dancing (that one surprised me), grandma will be visibly ashamed and kids themselves will argue about those activities being for boys/girls.

Kinda like with lego friends - too much pink to the point of being annoying, but the fact is that average grandpa is going to buy that toy to a girl where he would not any other lego cause even those gender neutral are clearly for boys in his mind.

My niece wanted a Lego Friends set from me for her birthday. It is not just misguided grannies...

And dancing boys will probably care more about the reaction of girls their age than about ashamed grandmothers.

The boy in question was 5, at that age he don't care about girls yet. Girls his age don't care about his dancing.

Yes, girls want things that belong to girls. But grandma won't buy boy lego even of kid wants it and ask for it. And definitely not randomly for birthsday or something.

If grandma won't give things that are explicitly wished for, maybe you should have a talk with grandma, or only wish for money in the future. Your sample size seems to be 1.

I must admit I also have mixed feelings about the disapproval of boys doing girlish things. The adults doing so might actually save the boys from embarrassment later on.

You might see that as proving your point, but there are different expectations from society to men than to women. The assumption that expectations should be equal is just that, an assumption, because there are differences (wombs, physical strength). So men can not simply opt out without issues, and neither can women. The expectation that men should literally do the heavy lifting makes sense, for example.

In one of the better turns of phrase from my college years, my 60s-era professor for "Violence in the Political System",

Question: How do we end civil wars?

Answer: Murder all the grandmothers.

Explanation: In the majority of civil wars, men comprise the bulk of causualties, thus leaving females as the only link between generations. Consequently, it is the grandmothers that teach younger generations to hate and perpetuate violence as retribution from that which was visited upon themselves and their family.

It's stuck with me ever since, and I think it's a good point for thinking about cultural evolution. Even if a new generation were a blank slate and completely compassionate on issue du jour, how is that affected by the historical impulses of those older from previous generations and thoughts?