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A comment on My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer. Parent comment

Re:My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer by zb on Sunday January 16, 2011 @10:34PM (#2111105)
I think that it is important to make software engineering a codified, professional field.

I personally couldn't disagree more, but luckily in this case there is no need to speculate since we have an almost perfect natural experiment available. Virtually all of the other branches of engineering - including the ones which you're presumably basing this idea on - have exactly the same gender imbalance issues as software engineering.

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Re:My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer by jarek on Sunday January 16, 2011 @11:34PM (#2111209)
Yes and no. In Canada, software engineering is an accredited, 'professional' program and discipline; that doesn't seem to have helped gender ratios within software much for now, but nevertheless it's outpaced by stereotypically dirty and male disciplines like civil and chemical engineering.

Sample from one institution: http://web.archive.org/web/20080611075012/http://www.eng.uwa.... Class sizes are around 80-100 except for environmental and geological which are half to third of that.

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Re:My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer by wyclif on Sunday January 16, 2011 @11:44PM (#2111230)
stereotypically dirty and male disciplines like civil and chemical engineering

I spent 10 years as a land surveyor and GIS cartographer, and during that entire time I met one (!) woman surveyor. CE is notorious for this.

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Re:My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer by neutronicus on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:22AM (#2112200)
At my school civil and environmental engineering were in one department, and most of the girls where there for the "environmental" half - or so my CEE friends said, anyways.
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Re:My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer by zb on Monday January 17, 2011 @01:29PM (#2112935)
OK, but that link still shows Software and Computer engineering ahead of Mechanical and Electrical engineering.
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Re:My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer by jarek on Monday January 17, 2011 @02:01PM (#2113021)
True. Clearly professionalization is not the only required step, but the natural experiment doesn't tell you it's not required — hence my "yes and no" reply.
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