Imagine you are purple.

You are in a room filled with green people and a green lecturer. The lecturer's presentation is nothing but slides of purple people making goofy faces. All evening, everyone who approaches tries to get you to tell a joke. You try and show your new project off, but no one seems to take it seriously.

You object in private conversations afterward, and the green people all tell you they weren't offended--what's the big deal?

There were a lot of threads a few weeks ago about "what to do about all the incompetent programmers". The two problems are related.

It might simply mean that women enjoy a comparative advantage

http://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativeadv...

at doing something else, whatever the something else is, and they are happy to live in a world in which they trade their ability to do what they do to enjoy the benefits of modern computer technology developed mostly by males.

Philip Greenspun's comments on women in science

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

may not be completely apropos, because programming as a career isn't exactly the same as research science as a career, but those comments illustrate that simple guesses about what the problem is just might be mistaken.

There's a woman I work with who was a programmer for years, but now works as a technical writer because she was tired of dealing with the cultural problems she had at multiple companies. I've worked with other women programmers who had to deal with bullshit that I'd never accept due to my white male privilege.

There is another option: programming hasn't done a good job of appealing to women. It's entirely possible that it's not a case of women being shut out, but rather they haven't been sold on the profession to begin with. In short: an image problem.

I know this doesn't apply to the situation we have here with this ruby presentation full of porn, but as long as we are generalizing this specific instance into the "why aren't there more women in CS?" question, I thought I'd throw it out there.

It's not like programming is the only profession with this problem. As a male, I haven't been particularly sold on being a nurse either, despite the fact that (in my area) it pays roughly the same and the few male nurses I know love the flexibility to move around the country almost at will. I just never considered it for a career because of the gender bias regarding that profession held by society, not by the members of the profession itself.

But like DHH, I don't think it's anything to do with male programmers. They act no worse than men in other fields, maybe better.

And I don't think this problem is programming specific. It also happens in math, physics, and a variety of other fields.

So, where is this bias coming from? Who teaches girls to take up girly interests? I think it's primarily their mother.

This ought to change. http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/

In my opinion, the problem isn't with the people in the field of computer science. The problem is with the pipeline. There are fewer girls than guys who explore computing when they're 12. If that can be "fixed", which assumes that it's something to be fixed in the first place, that's probably where it needs to happen.

Is that really the pipeline? If you go in to a 1st year CS/IT class, how many have been tinkering with programming for years? That's a genuine question. I don't know. I just suspect that it's a minority. Possibly as big a minority as business students who have tinkered in business or biology students that have tinkered in biology.

I agree. This is really one of those places where I think to myself, so what?

The only real problem I see is that a guy who goes into the field is going to be surrounded by other dudes, which is one of my biggest regrets with this profession.

Very few engineering schools let themselves get to such an extreme gender imbalance, but if you really were picking between an 80/20 split and a liberal arts school, I'm highly confident that you are much better off for having picked the liberal arts school.

Is it? I see evidence of quite a few groups that are all-female and want to stay that way.

http://tripletsdad.blogspot.com/2008/10/at-home-dad-banned-f...

More women will get into engineering, because of exposure, high salaries, and employer demand.

Likewise, Male engineers will actually meet women.

At Pitt, where I went for undergrad, the count for Computer Engineers/Electrical Engineers was something like 525. Only 38 were women.

On the other hand, if you were well adjusted, you had no problem meeting women outside the engineering building.