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Comment by convolvatron | Hacker News Reader

yes. but perhaps more apropos I am old enough to have met some of the women programmers (not calculators) from the earlier generation when I started in the 80s. its completely anecdotal, and you may attribute this to many factors, but the likelihood that someone I met was more competent, informed, and/or more clever than I was greater for females than males.

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Well it's not about who is more clever. I think the research shows that its pretty even between men and women after all is said and done. It's about what naturally interests us and there are differences there.

maybe. I just have seen a time when it wasn't unusual to see a highly-regarded and competent woman in software. not that they were the majority. so I'm alot less inclined to just accept that there are important genetic differences that inherently make women less suitable for that kind of work.

maybe team genetic-differences should be adopting the burden of proof

My grandmother was a programmer working at a university, so I know. Nobody here said women aren't suited for that type of work. It is just that when video games became mainstream in the 80's you saw an avalanche of boys wanting to learn to program, and ever since then the field has skewed heavily male, like most other engineering fields where you build things that moves. My grandmother might have been a programmer, but she was never interested in computers as a hobby, it was just work to her.

Note that the number of women entering the field didn't decrease, it was just the number of men increasing so much.

Interesting. Maybe it's video games. This was true for me. If that's the case, we might see a surge of female programmers since more women become gamers than before.

Again, no one is saying women are less suitable. It's a question of how many women are choosing to do this sort of work versus men.

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