Comment by thorwasdfasdf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thorwasdfasdf | Hacker News Reader

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At a company I worked at they hired an young female intern in her late high school years, who made it obvious she didn't really want to be there. Our project manager made sure to tell us to "make programming seem as interesting as possible to her". When I was 17, I would have killed for an opportunity to work at a software company, and so would many other young kids.

It's time for the world to admit, there's reasons why some people are naturally pulled towards one discipline or another.

I have a 3 year old daughter, and I'd love to teach her math and programming. I sat her in front of the computer with me to get her interested and devised lots of fun math based games to play with her. But, no matter how fun I make the material, she's just not into counting things. "daddy, I don't want to count anymore" (after just a few tries) Stories about princesses and reading/writing however, this she can listen to all day long. I'm certainly not giving up on teaching her programming but you have to admit it when certain types make it clear their not into it.

We need to stop trying to attribute that to gender. I loved math as a kid, I thought it was fun. I was on the math team for middle school and high school. I had a computer at home from a young age, and played the math games my parents forced on me. In addition to the game, games. (I am 40 - so things were pretty different as I was coming up. But my family was an early adopter of technology - we had a computer when I was 5. And if I would have had different upbringing the outcome could have been quite different.)

Being a programmer wasn't something that was on my radar at all. I didn't know any. I didn't know it was a job that existed. As I got older it seemed like "computer people" only liked video games, magic cards, scifi books and didn't like to hang out with people. It seemed boring and antisocial - and not like my sort of people.

I probably would have been a great engineer. And while I work in tech, I am a marketer and have worked in more technical roles around software implementation, operations, pre-sales in addition to all of the marketing jobs.

So let's ask ourselves something else - how many people do we lose along the way because of exposure or the way we have socialized what an engineer is, does and likes.

The percentage of women that likes video-games/programming is lower than the percentage of men. That's just a fact. You can try to correct that with lots of outreach and exposure but it's only going to work for some people.

Anecdotally. I've worked at a (hard core strategy) gaming company. Even there, Most of women that worked there, that I knew, did not like gaming at all (if we're being honest).

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