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Comment by positivity89 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this was really inspiring. There are probably hundreds of girls/women like this, but they don't make headlines as often. This is awesome.

The youngest sister may even grow up in a world where she doesn't have the same barriers as most women today.

Could this be a sign of positive change?

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There are hundreds of boys like this as well. Geniuses get born everywhere, in different bodies, places, social strata etc. The fact that many of them get lesser chances to contribute to the world is an outrageous abuse of the most precious resource that the humanity has, regardless of why it happens.

And how do you propose we fix that, and more importantly, does your solution scale?

If you can fix that, you can fix any human problem. It is like the P=NP of human problems.

> The youngest sister may even grow up in a world where she doesn't have the same barriers as most women today.

If there are fewer barriers, then you might see growth. Unfortunately this is difficult to tell. Some surveys show growth, others don't:

S.O. survey respondents 5.8% women (2016) - http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016

S.O. survey respondents 5.8% women (2015) - http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015

Google: 17% women (2014) - http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/05/28/google-release...

Facebook: 15% women (2014) - http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/25/facebook-diversity/

12.33% women engineers in tech (2013) - http://qz.com/143967/the-tech-industrys-woman-problem-statis...

10-12% developers are women in L.A. (2012) - http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorikozlowski/2012/03/22/women-i...

International Game Developers Association reported women went from from 11.5% to 22% between 2009 and 2014(?) - http://www.gamespot.com/articles/percentage-of-female-develo...

Why?

In addition to there being fewer women in the pipeline for tech jobs, it's been said that a good percentage of the ones that would've stayed in the workforce were harassed, etc. and left: http://www.vox.com/2016/1/17/10781366/women-technology-sexua...

And then there is the wage inequality problem, shown in the stack overflow survey results- see "Salary by Gender" in http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016

Possibly men are more likely to hire men, which could cause problems with growth in women's share of the market.

Of course there are also problems like having fewer role models when there are fewer in the industry, not having government and schools enabling women via scholarships, funding, etc. as much as they could, or possibly it's genuine lack of interest, but I don't think that's the case.

Development was invented by women, and it would be great if they made up a greater percentage: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-celebration-of-...

Why do you consider a role model in a field of endeavour unrelated to one's sex should be the same sex as oneself? Isn't that just the sort of sexism that you're attempting to avoid??

It seems either women are so different that they need female-centric approaches to programming and aspects, including their role models, must be tailored specifically for them. In which case, that's surely the reason there aren't so many women in tech - that it just doesn't follow the female-centric mores. Or, women and men are alike (ie fit within the same spectrum of abilities, insight and such) when it comes to programming and we should just get on with it and stop pretending people need specific help because of their sex?

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