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I bet the female/male ratio is higher for users of Excel than for R or Python. A majority of programmers are men, but the sex ratio of white collar workers (a large fraction of whom use spreadsheets) is much closer to parity.

There is often discussion about how to have more women in field X. Opening up field X to non-programmers is one way to do so.

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I was once told not to change my source code purely to make my unit test pass. Changing the field to push the ratio towards 50 50 seems similar. I think the real question is: how do we get more females to want to learn to program.

100% this. If people want to push diversity initiatives, go for it, but I think there's no way that leads to real change without starting from the ground up i.e. cultivating childhood interest. Teaching about important women in CS helps break down the cultural expectation of programming as a male thing. In addition, although this is just speculation, I imagine workshops where the participants work to build something practical rather than purely "fun" would appeal to girls. A note-taking or organization or journal or instant messaging application would be great. Something you could use instead of pandering to stereotypes. Maybe I'm wrong about the workshop thing, but I stand by the childhood interest part.

Why is working with spreadsheets not considered programming?

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