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Comment by nancye | Hacker News Reader

The chart from this article is worth looking at:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

It wasn't just in the sixties - women's participation in computer science was growing until the mid eighties. As a woman who's helped other women learn to code, all I can say is that the interest is certainly still out there.

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I recall reading a study somewhere that showed by High School, there are about the same percentage of girls interested in computers as the percentage of women in the tech industry. This article seems to present the same hypothesis, that girls are less likely to have access to a computer and develop an interest in programming.

If this is the case, then the gender imbalance has nothing to do with sexism in the tech industry or hiring practices. Google's efforts to hire more women is doomed to failure if there aren't an equal percentage of women coming in the first place.

No one who is serious about this doubts that there are women who are interested in tech and able to acquire the skills. The key question is how many women have this interest, absent any worries about matching the number to men perfectly. Even asking that question apparently causes a very interesting reaction.

One possibility is that a massive number of men picked up coding in the 80's.

Anyone have a graph that shows absolute numbers rather than percentage points?

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