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It is one of the more obnoxious traits of the common computer geek to conflate being good with computers with being intelligent. This kind of attitude only serves to turn more people off. So you're really good at what you're interested in, amazing! ... There are just as many "intelligent/dumb" geeks as there are "intelligent/dumb" lawyers/pilots/bankers/et al, they just choose different things to geek out on (ever seen a lawyer geek out over fantasy football stats)?

So if you want to increase the number of women, you need to cut back on the amount of geek culture in CS environments... But it seems that saying it makes a lot of people upset. Why? Are you afraid that you won't be allowed to be a geek?

The implicit "we should cut back on the amount of geek culture in CS" is where the article gets some blowback.

The original article said that women avoid computing because they are intolerant of geeks. The "solution" is to make computing less geeky, rather than to make women more tolerant. Huh?

If white people avoided basketball because they don't like black culture, we'd tell them (rightly) to suck it up. Yet somehow, the author of this article is comparing geeks to racists.

Not quite a fair comparison:

If basketball was a paid profession, like say, carpentry, that a large number of folks thought of as a career path, then effectively making players be within black culture rightly wouldn't be acceptable.

...then effectively making players be within black culture rightly wouldn't be acceptable.

The analogy is not that basketball forces people to adopt black cultural traits. Certainly computing does not force you to enjoy Star Trek. According to the original article, women have negative views about geeks and don't wish to associate with them.

The analogy is that people who don't like black cultural traits might avoid a moneymaking career in the NBA because they don't wish to be exposed to black people. Here is a paragraph from the article, with "black" replacing "geek":

Cheryan's research offers an explanation: White people don't identify with the archetypal image of basketball players. Cheryan's subjects describe this image as "loud, trash talkin, complaining about their babymommas, drinking 40's and eating fried chicken." The black room conjures this picture in our minds, Cheryan says, based only on the stuff we find lying around (such as posters of Malcolm X and Obama).

Basketball is a paid profession. Just look how much money the NBA teams have. Fewer people see it as their future but many children still grow up wanting to the be next michael jordan..

I think did say something like "an occupation that individuals can reasonably think of as a career path".

A real profession is a self-supervising, self-educating specialty. The model of the professional is the accountant, an individual who, hypothetically, answers to both his supervisor and the strictures of independence imposed by his professional association. Even union carpenters, electrician and plumbers partially fit this description - a qualified contractor, for example, will should and sometimes actually will refuse work that involves not meeting the building code.

Many specialties in this society have lost their professionalism, have lost the independence that provides a lot of the value in their wages. This is ultimately degrades our social relations - it results in people caring about their bank accounts and not their personal achievements (the last bubbles were furthered by the degradation of accountants and real estate appraisers).

I suspect that this process is related to children who would rather be like the people they see on TV rather than being like their mothers and fathers.

Unfortunately, all this degradation seems to be a self-reinforcing process.

Actually I think the focus on gender is misleading. Excessively geeky environments repel non-geeks, whether male or female. The fact that this particularly results in repulsion of women is just due to geekiness being rarer among women.

Those who say "who cares if non-geeks are repelled" seem to be assuming geekiness and programming ability are strongly correlated, but in my experience they seem to be pretty orthogonal, at least for the type of geekiness which leads to putting up Star Trek posters.

Just as in genetics, diversity is good. Thats not the issue people are having with the article.

The article says that CS should change its culture in order to attract more and become popular, conforming with mainstream values.

If you told Stephen Hawking im sorry you cant have that picture of Spock on your wall, instead you have to have this poster of some pop group because thats what society deems acceptable. Do you think that would be well received?

The point is that if you have an interest in a field then you are tolerant of such idiosyncrasies in order to learn.

I agree that programming today has a lot of properties you mention.

What I'd ask is how or why has the 'geek' factor changed the computer field compared to, the 1980s, when there was a notably larger percentage of women in programming.

I think this part of the 'equation' seriously needs to understood if we're going to think clearly about the situation.