This has been particularly evidenced in gaming where mixed development teams come up with games that appeal far more widely to the general audience than the typical all-male FPS product. (Yes, this is a crass generalisation, but I've spent several years as part of women in gaming movements/the IGDA WiG SIG and so on. Male dev teams just don't build stuff that women want to play, for the most part.)

As to the "I'd really like to be a computer programmer, but I can't" -- I'm aware this was a facetious remark, but it's far more insidious than that, really. When I was at school, I was good at maths and physics. I loved logic and 'decision maths' (which was basically algorithms; we studied things like the TSP). I played about with computers in my spare time, ran the school website, etc. What career was I advised to follow? Electrical engineering. Not computer science. I didn't even know you could study computer science until I was looking at university prospectuses for mathematics.

I've never thought "I wish I could $foo, but I can't because I'm a woman". But I have experienced problems due to my gender, on a day to day level it's more stuff like having people change the topic of conversation when you join in the circle, not being asked for your opinion, having to over-justify your techie-ness to 'fit in' which just ends up sounding horribly arrogant.. being deliberately excluded from some conversations, having people make all kinds of stupid assumptions which you then have to correct - no I don't do marketing, no my PhD wasn't in linguistics, and techie people hate being wrong.. not fitting into XL freebie t-shirts properly, not having healthy/vegetarian/non-beer options at CS events (ok guys may well have this too).. etc etc. I don't list career sabotage or anything here because I'm young, I've mostly been in academia and I'm now running a startup, so I'm lucky enough not to have had problems there. (Except when I worked in a computer shop and customers actually demanded to speak to "the computer man", but hey. Their stupidity, not mine.)

On the extreme flipside, and I don't see many women talking about this stuff: being female has been great for getting fast-track opportunities into stuff. e.g. being flown to America to attend the Austin Games Conference as part of a Microsoft women in computing initiative. I do feel sometimes that I was let into competitive schemes partly because I'm awesome and partly due to the fact I'm the only woman applying and it looks good if I get in because then they have Gender Balance. (note, I am awesome, but that little voice of "was it because I'm perfect for the position or was it because I'm a minority" never quite goes away. I imagine others have the same problem in different ways.) However, I'm pretty sure that compared to a male CS major with a similar background, I've had far more opportunity. I feel a little guilty about it, but if I didn't seize it, someone else would -- and I'm actively trying to help change the need for such things in the first place.

This seems like a chicken and egg kinda thing. As a nerd I adjust my behavior when interacting with women and discussing CS-ey stuff, because, in my personal empirical experience they just "turn off" if I "nerd out" too much.

But that same prediction will lead to false positives for women who would get it if I were to nerd out at full throttle.

I think this circles back to how Humans are pretty great at categorizing, and making predictions as time savers, but it can screw us on edge cases.

Cause really the problem I have when women "zone out" during a techie discussion, is not that they're dumb. They don't care, or do, but lack all the implicit knowledge context I take for granted when I rationalize stuff in my head. You'd get the same behavior if a Business Major Frat Boy (oh look more stereotypes, weee!) asked you "So? How do those things really work?"

Just so happens gender is a pretty obvious label to latch onto for making that judgment call of "can I go all out, or not?", a label that can backfire a lot of the time.

I really am all for more girls in CS, because that means more likely hood of working with smart people, and I like me some smarties.

But something in that article made me wonder. When she was interviewing that female grad student there was worry over losing that "culture". It seems like women are just as capable of identifying with that "stereotype" culture. Are we sacrificing that when trying to get that raw percentage up?

"is it just me or do you get your hackles up a bit when there's another woman around" - with several posters agreeing, even though they didn't like it. catfights, drama, bitchfests -- call it what you will but women don't always react well to other women being around. a typical female CS of today, wearing a star wars t-shirt, running gentoo and drinking out of a thinkgeek mug just won't react well to someone who's not of that ilk coming along onto "her" territory.

slight tangent, but interesting to consider.

i think it's perfectly possible to be geeky without turning into a one-dimensional stereotype. a lot of girls who aren't the picture described above still like the odd geeky thing, whether it's lolcats, nintendo cushions, an affinity for linux, whatever. the culture isn't binary, and it's entirely possible to fit in without having to live the entire lifestyle. i should know. i hardly ever wear my star wars t-shirt these days.

I was thinking about it more at lunch, and what really tweaks me is the whole "I do this cause it's a paycheck" vs "I do this because I hearts it" developer mentality.

So maybe that's a better way to express the last point. Assuming that CS culture actively drives women away the ones that are in it, for the most part, really do love it (I know a few "this is just a paycheck" female devs).

So trying to increase that raw percentage might mean "polluting" the pool with "paycheckers" instead of "passion-ers" (man I am a wordSMITH)

(I also say this in full disclosure: I get monies for codes).

One thing is interesting is that there used to be many more women in programming.

And I say that as having been a pimply 15-year-old social reject. Girl.

The rewards in CS are just not as good for the middle-of-the-road people as many other industries. Biotech, for example, is at least as intellectually demanding (if not more), and has many more women.

Let's face it -- programming is largely low-status, exploitative work, where you are like as not going to get outsourced to India (or wherever), outgunned by teenagers, replaced by people who don't mind working 80 hours a week, and managed by people who think of you as a glorified typist, etc., etc.

And many of your best-skilled coworkers are likely to have very poor social skills, whether from atrophy or a genuine medical disorder.

Speaking of outsourcing to India, in cultures where programming is viewed as a respected career path, there are many more women programmers. Among Asians and Indians, specifically.

They don't seem to enjoy it all that much, though, based on my anecdotal evidence.

So, given the issues I raised above, who wants to fix them? Who will bother? Nobody. They will just talk circles about how there must be tons of girls who just long to spend 14 hours a day in front of a computer when they grow up, surrounded by Star Trek jokes lolcats.

I get off on technology, but I've always been different than other girls. I used to get all aggro about it, but as the years have gone and I've grown up, I've realized that's futile. Many women who are in tech jobs just cannot get over their defensiveness and accept that other women wouldn't be just like them, if but for their evil oppressors. I used to think that way too, but it turned out to be bullshit.

Women have different biology, their bodies respond differently, they fall ill to different diseases but somehow it's become taboo to say that perhaps they think differently too, and therefore tend towards different disciplines. The brain is just another organ after all...

An example from a similar field: 90% of NFL Wide Receivers are Black. Does that mean the NFL is racist? Or that black people's genetic heritage skews their speed&strength bell curve slightly to the right so that the top hundredth of a percent is slightly above white's top hundredth of a percent? I tend to believe it's the second.

Please note that I know some nerd girls (mostly from the CS and EE programs), and nothing I say indicates that opportunities should be closed, or discrimination should happen, but you can't look at a number like "15% of comp-sci students are women" and immediately assume something is wrong.

I don't doubt that social pressures are playing a role here, with general pressure to "be pretty, not smart", but I don't think it explains away all of it. I am not putting forward a theory of everything here, just expressing my frustration with general feminism thoughts that everybody is fundamentally identical, except for socialization.

Well, this is going to turn bad I'm sure, I've touched on sex AND race.... but the central argument across all 3 is similar. There are bell curves everywhere in biology, and they are slightly skewed and stretched across different groups. No individual point is enough to make a decision ("you're a woman" doesn't say anything about computer ability, just as saying "you're black" doesn't make them a wide receiver), but on a mass-scale they predict percentages and expectations.

Or that young white men, compared with young black men, are much less likely to see professional sports as their ticket to an upper-class lifestyle, and therefore the folks who focus their efforts on becoming a better football player are predominantly black?

(Note that in the first few decades of the 20th century, when antisemitism was much more prominent, professional boxing was a predominantly Jewish sport.)

I never think that biology should be used to discriminate, since the 90th percentile line of women may be the 85th percentile of men (or whatever skew you want), that doesn't mean that she's not better at whatever task than 85% of men, and hence a good hire. Basically, the macro scale says nothing about the micro scale. But what I wanted to point out was that using macro level statistics and saying "this is inherently wrong" is reading the skew, and not the individuals.

As with everything in life, I'm guessing the real answer is some combination of socialization and biology.

One other ideas has been kicking around in my head, a comp-sci idea even... If you have women being approximately equal members of college (I think they have a slight lead by a few percentages), and you have few women in comp-sci, by the pigeonhole principal, they're the majority in another major. Why isn't there a clamor to get men into those majors? The example of biology was used elsewhere in this thread I think.

The main issue, I think, is not whether women opt more or less for CS, but rather that many many are compelled/driven to opt-out of it. Something is clearly wrong if they can't opt freely without suffering prejudice or without having to, as some say, "grow a thick skin".

Think for a second. If we're talking about adjusting the decor to market to a culture, what culture does it make sense for CS to target? Women? Athletes? Norwegians? Black Guys? It seems to me the alliance between geeks and programmers is quite natural.

You could redecorate the lounge in pink and put plushies everywhere. You might get a few more women who think, "Okay, I guess I could fit in here." You'll get a lot fewer geeks who think, "Thank God, I've finally come home."

Is that a positive tradeoff? Color me skeptical. Go found a Hacker Girls group, dominate the industry, prove me wrong. Until then, don't be engineering the culture.

"CS is mature field and as such will do better if it projects a professional, neutral image" is a hypothesis, nothing more. Prove it with a successful venture -- but I don't think you will. This is still a place where passion trumps professionalism, and an enforced culturally neutral environment isn't the best incubator for passion.

Personally, I think we'll do best by simply being ourselves. And letting the demographic chips fall where they may.

To paraphrase Phil Greenspun (from the "women in science" essay), we need to ask if CS "is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it?"

CS at a reputable university is hard. Seriously, seriously hard. I have no doubt that people who can handle this can also handle the academic rigor of a bio major followed by med school, and they sure as hell can handle an econ major followed by an MBA, or sociology major followed by law school.

So I'd start by asking: what are the women who are able to do CS doing instead, and would it be in their better interest to stop doing that and study CS?

This, I think is the central problem. It seems that most of the really really intelligent women I know have gone into other fields than CS because that's where their interests lie. CS simply wasn't a fulfillment of their interests not some more nefarious discrimination problem.

So it is not really even 50% of the people diversity who create the software. It feels more like 5-10%.

I belong to that 5-10% and I think that among the others there are many who are way more creative than us.

The convergence of "geek culture" and "internet culture" is one of my big complaints. lolcats were funny for about 5 minutes.

Unless you like XKCD, in which case you are a bad person and you should feel bad.

You seem to be implying that geeks only write code because the industry isn't socially mainstream.

Socially mainstream means leaving work at 5pm and going to the pub, that's what "normal" people do.

But the deeper answer is: because western society thought we'd already patched that one. We had a long history of actively discriminating against women. But despite creating a stigma around that sort of behavior and 'officially' banning it, gender representation in our particular corner of society hasn't changed all that much. Not even the modest amount that other sectors have seen.

So the question of "where are the women" isn't only about the women, but about our seeming inability to fix society just by joining hands, singing kumbaya and declaring change.

If we'd gone through the trouble of a social movement to kick an industry bias against, say, stereotypical jocks, extroverts, or guys-who-know-how-to-talk-to-girls, then I suppose people would pay more attention to why those groups are still under-represented too.

As you point out, various personality types are underrepresented in CS. The particular ones that are highly represented are less common in women. There is a reason for that, and yes it's bad, but the personality type distribution among women in general has nothing to do with CS.

PS My theory on feminism is that it said, "Men must reform." And so they reformed some. Meanwhile it did nothing to help women. Hence women are now worse than men.

It's a rather broad resource, but to be honest I'm just starting to get into the subject. My earlier snarkiness was caused by frustration at how quickly people are willing to dismiss feminism or make sweeping generalisations about it, without bothering to learn much about it.

Sorry if I've overreacted, the comments on this article have made me hyper-sensitive.

One thing that does concern me greatly is that there are many women who are interested in science and technology, and especially computer science, who are at some point turned off. It appears to really begin around junior high and high school, and it continues through college.

My concern is that we're losing a lot of interested and bright minds, who might be excited in the course of actually working in technology, who are being turned away for some reason.

I think it's important to try to understand the reasons before we pass judgment upon them.

But it might raise some questions and inspire some solutions that generally makes work in technology more enjoyable. Not just for women; for everyone. Consider the reaction to pair programming. Both women and men just plain tended to like it more. That seems to show that there are many people out there who would enjoy working in technology were it not as solitary. That's a major discovery. And I think we've just scratched the surface.

a particularly keen insight i got from talking to a female college friend (who was a CS major) is that the "women's perspective" might be more relevant than people think even in a supposedly objective field where things either work or don't ... because men and women see the world differently, women might be able to come up with different high-level design, low-level debugging, or software team management strategies that an all-male team might not think of ... of course, i don't have any concrete examples to back up this vague hand-wavy statement, but i think there's something there

Lots of people believe that, but I've yet to see an example. Since we make a lot of decisions based on it being true, I'm troubled that we don't know if it actually is.

However, let's assume that it's true. It doesn't follow that said different is always valuable. It might be good in some fields, irrelevant in others, and bad in some.

In other words, even if "think different" is true, it's not an argument for universal inclusion.

Yes, I know that said "male think" may not be possessed by all males and lacking in all females.

What field are you talking about? I don't believe such a field exists. Not one that is worthy of the name "field".

It certainly isn't user-experience design, where there is obviously no bright line between "what works" and "what does not work", and where the value of a diverse team is easiest to appreciate. ("What, you mean the word processor user hasn't bothered to learn how to use a DVCS from the command line? Were they born yesterday?") But we needn't go that far. Everything that the hardest of hard-core geeks talk about all day long:

  What language should we use? 

  Should I use emacs, vi, Textmate, Eclipse or Notepad?

  Should I use Mac OS, Windows, or Linux here?

  What database architecture is right for this task? 

  Come to think of it, am I even working on the right task?

Even down-and-dirty C hacking requires an endless series of decisions between things which will work and things which might work better on one axis or another.

That said, the self-perpetuating 'Boys Club' stereotype is a problem I care about.

In short: It causes nothing but trouble. It drives away more than just women. It creates stigma and bias and I don't see any positive return from it.

A homogeneous group certainly can be the best team for a given task. I'm only suggesting you have a sub-optimal environment if the only teams you can put together are homogeneous ones.

the smart women pick fields where they're helping others, and the smart men pick fields where they're building or discovering things.

(purely personal observation and might not be indicative of anything as a whole, or my own personal beliefs on the subject.)

[1] Although, there may be truth in the idea that software is written for/from a male perspective, meaning that it doesn't suit women's needs as well... whatever those needs are. Yeah, I'm ambivalent about this point, but I don't outright reject it.

PS I also highly recommend reading The Mismeasure of Woman by Carol(?) Tavris. It provides very clear concrete, statistical, and anecdotal explanations of how and why a woman's experience differs from a man's, and the consequences of the man's experience being an implicit standard. Despite being woman-focused, the book is also pretty rational and balanced about the potential of reverse-discrimination, and does a pretty good job of noting problems without demanding specific fixes.

If I could offer another anecdote and unsupported hypothesis, I suspect our grad program has a better mix because it is more foreign, and foreigners have a different perception of the gender stereotypes surrounding Computer Science than we do. There's a lot of non-Americans on hacker news, perhaps one of them could comment.

It is worth noting that this gender disparity (wrt women programmers etc.) is predominantly a native-born-women issue. Asian immigrant women in the US don't have a similar pattern and as far as I know, the US pattern doesn't exist in countries like India and China -

If you had asked, 40 years ago, "why is the lack of women in math, science, medicine, academia, and leadership positions a problem" this would be more obvious. Since many fields today are more equitable, it is a lot less problematic, although perhaps not for a few folks here and there.

Seriously, everything works out better for everyone in the long run if you value women as people first and foremost. Admittedly doing so reduces your opportunities to make passes at uninterested women. But it significantly improves your odds of success if you do make a pass, and greatly improves your odds of eventually winding up in a decent relationship.

If anything, guys in tech -- the real techies, that is -- are so horribly bad at talking to women that it's being viewed as an alien from outer space that's offputting, not being viewed as a pair of walking boobs. On that note, I definitely agree with valuing women as people. But in my experience, at least, male attitudes towards women in tech as sexual objects are not even remotely a factor. However, the concern that you won't even meet nerdy women if there aren't any women involved in tech is still valid, IMO!

If you wish to continue not experiencing it, then there are quite a few men I recommend not getting to know, starting with Eric Raymond.

If so, it might provide a useful means of distinguishing between the 'Roissy theory' (women are intolerant of low status men) I described downthread and scott_s's alternative theory (women don't want low status for themselves).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=970454

And yes, there is evidence that many women avoid strongly male-dominated environments. For some of that evidence look at the article that started this discussion: http://scicom.ucsc.edu/SciNotes/0901/pages/geeks/geeks.html

EDIT: Just to clarify, you're an idiot and a troll. Your (Devil's advocate) opinion is shortsighted and foolhardy. If you are writing software that "works or it doesn't", you are writing something inane, needless, or redundant. Most of the effort of developing software at this point in time is gathering requirements and designing interfaces. Work which is cut and dry is usually created by unnecessary process or poor choice of tools.