Edit: I wasn't reading closely enough.
So my next question is, what would it take to have more women teaching CS and software development?
Arguments like this always start from the assumption that inequality is a result of failed education. It's like the people making these arguments have never met a boy or a girl. Boys and girls behave differently, think differently, and value different things.
Of course, we should strive to make environments inclusive as possible, and everyone should be free to pursue their (legal) ambitions, but why do we have to assume that any gender imbalance is a result of bias? Women become pediatricians more than other types of doctor. Is that because pediatricians are less sexist than other subtypes of medicine, or because women are naturally more interested in taking care of children?
> Rather, I was frustrated because the course consisted of lone work on exercises that seemed to have little application to the real world, the expectation that coursework required coding and debugging for hours after school threatened my ability to excel in other classes or in varsity sports (in spite of being a textbook nerd, it turned out I was good enough at rowing for a few colleges to recruit me), or to spend time buried in random books.
and
> that girls and women prefer collaborative rather than solo work, that they are more engaged in “things” if they can see the “people” aspect to it, and that they are prone to perfectionism and a fear of failure
I notice an inconsistency here: if women are "prone to perfectionism", why were "hours of debugging" a problem?
... Re fear of failure: computers are brutal. It either works or it doesn't, esp. when you're restricted to "artificial" problems as is often the case in university courses. It forces you to think in a strict and disciplined way (re. the above quote about "debugging for hours"). Yes, it can make you feel stupid because the negative feedback is immediate, and there's a lot of it, especially in the beginning.
Even for me, as a professional developer with ~20 yrs of experience, working with computers consists of mostly noticing just negative feedback. "The code works" is a non-event for 90% of the time. Of course it works, I engineered it to work. The 10% of cases when it is an event is in cases when I've used something new according to documentation and it actually worked! Yay!
However, "the code doesn't work" is an event in 100% of the cases. It requires analysis, drilling, fixing, maybe even leads to a bigger refactoring because a more fundamental issue was discovered, etc.
IMHO, and gender aside, if the person can't endure a constant stream of negative feedback, they should probably choose another field of work.
Seating still for hours, listening to somebody, remembering the whole thing to be able to spit it out the next day is not how little boys should be taught things. And I don't even think it's great for girls, but they seem better equipped to deal with it.
that girls and women prefer collaborative rather than solo work, that they are more engaged in “things” if they can see the “people” aspect to it, and that they are prone to perfectionism and a fear of failure
*editted formatting
A common method of quoting text on HN is prefixing the line with a ">". I personally like also wrapping it in asterisks to italicize the quote.
Like I just said for another comment, that quote doesn't seem to be true just for women or even possibly for women more than men. The few female programmers I've worked with weren't like that. There's guys who will be like that.
I always thought ways of learning best were more on the people and environment (and how it affects the person) than gender by a long shot. I don't see why males wouldn't suffer just as much as women in the issues marked in her quote.
She mentioned it a few times - girls like colaborative learning, not lone-wolf learning, and she also put a link in - https://ncgsblog.org/2016/09/12/how-girls-learn-best/