Re:Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost
by Crake on Saturday March 23, 2013 @09:38AM
(#5428056)
Plenty of people without any access to programming classes manage to teach themselves. If she was interested, she would have found a way. Just having access to college classes puts her ahead of most of america, honestly. Most people in America aren't lucky enough to have that sort of privilege. (as much as I hate that word)
I don't want to make too many assumptions about someone I've never met, but from here it seems likely that it wasn't an oppressive culture that kept her out, it was the lack of enough innate interest to kick over into actively learning more about it.
It wasn't an oppressive culture
Not offering someone a potential carrer path just because of their gender seems a bit opressive to me.
Sexualised content at tech events just reenforced the idea that "programming isn't for women". Imagine a woman at a tech event where ther'es a lot of straight male locaker room jokes, and the organisers do nothing ans say there's nothing wrong going on, she'll come out of it thinking tech is for men.
It wasn't an oppressive culture or dongle jokes that kept her out of programming, it was just the assumption by everyone around her that girls generally are not interested in computers.