Why are there fewer female programmers?

It's not programmers that are at fault for the lack of women in the industry. While there are stereotypes about the geeky programmer, those are rapidly dissipating with most of the populating spending just as much time in front of the computer as a programmer.

From what I've seen and know the programming industry to be like, it's highly competitive and has a "if you can't cook, get out of the kitchen" attitude (which I'm not knocking as a fault). The root of the problem is that society doesn't encourage the competitive side of a woman. Men and women alike see them as being something of a bitch if they are even remotely competitive.

Programmers see everything as a challenge of their mental abilities and women just aren't raised that way. So if you want you want to start seeing more women developers, start encouraging them to be more competitive. That is what the root of the problem is. (Although on that note, don't encourage them to compete with the boys, encourage them to compete with themselves first and foremost. If they compete "against" the boys and lose, it reinforces the idea that boys are better.)

As a guy, most of the time I feel rather embarrassed by suggestions on how to get more women into programming. The ideas tend to be so naive or full of prejudice.

I think that programming should be taught early in school. Not to become proficient with any language or so, but to understand computation at some fundamental level. Alan Kay probably have some very good ideas for how to run such classes.

As it is now, some guys really did get started with programming at the age of 5, or other single digit age, and by the time "ordinary people" reach university age and meet programming, these guys with 10 years of programming pretty much dominate the classes and mess them up.

Try being a newbie in any field and surround yourself with people that have 5000h of experience that give you dumb stares.

If you are "good" and able to pick your field in the science/technical arena, would you pick something that's at risk to outsourcing and flooded with competition? Or, would you pick something that's harder to outsource, pays better and offers a better work/life balance?

I've build systems for years and years, and it would have been WAY better career-wise to be a user of the bloody things than a developer.

I think, as others, it's all about stereotypes. At the University where I study, many girls say "I don't study Engineering because it has a lot of maths and I don't like them. I prefer psychology", but in many events at the Math Faculty there were more girls studying math than boys. A mistery to me.

Because of the quite the same reasons as to why there are fewer female physicists, mathematicians and engineers.

There has been a lot of study done around it.

[PDF] http://rhig.physics.yale.edu/~nattrass/Talks/BNLICWIP/Nattra...

[PDF] http://polymer.bu.edu/hes/nicholson-viewgraphs.pdf

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?tp=&arnum...

The interesting and depressing thing is that I read another statistic noting that women are actually less common in the programming world than previously and this is different than most other previously male dominated fields.

The reasons I can think of: 1) Programming is becoming more a lifestyle and subculture and less a codified discipline. 2) Being a subculture makes the stereotype of programmers more influential than earlier.

Because sitting in one spot for 10+ hours a day reading page after page after page of naked computational logic does not appeal to those with feminine sensibilities.

We're all fucking crazy for doing it, you know.

If languages are designed "by men for men" then I suppose we need some women-designed languages to embody 'horizontal thinking' and all that.