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Comment by msluyter | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to play devil's advocate[1] for a second: why is the lack of women in CS a problem? Whatever the merit of all these explanations -- it's perceived as dorky, low status, overly masculine, etc... -- the one thing I don't see is a strong desire amongst women to be in the field. It'd be one thing if there were barriers like overt sexism (and perhaps there are), or if you often heard the refrain, "you know, I'd really like to be a computer programmer, but I can't because of XYZ..." AFAICT, the real culprit here appears to be self-selection.

Assuming that's the case, who cares? Why all the hand wringing? One downside I see is the lack of a "woman's perspective," which, while admittedly important in many fields, seems mostly irrelevant in a field where stuff either works or it doesn't. The other is a lack of interest in the field overall, but it seems a constant source of debate (see any H1B visa thread) as to whether we have a shortage or a glut of qualified workers.

[1] This shouldn't be read as a position I'm strongly committed to.

EDIT: Criticisms of this post thus far are mostly along the lines of a) a woman's perspective matters more than I give it credit for and b) "works or doesn't" is too simplistic. Fair enough. I admit my argument wasn't particularly nuanced (purposefully), hence the "devil's advocate" label. Questions I would ask are: wrt point a), is this something we can empirically validate? Or should we just assume any gender imbalance is inherently problematic? I'm not necessarily against the latter view, but I'd like to see it addressed explicitly.

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Because computers are so integral to how we as a society are evolving and functioning, and it's been pretty well stated elsewhere that men and women function/think quite differently, having software that powers society that's primarily written by-and-for 50% of the population is generally considered to be a detrimental thing.

This has been particularly evidenced in gaming where mixed development teams come up with games that appeal far more widely to the general audience than the typical all-male FPS product. (Yes, this is a crass generalisation, but I've spent several years as part of women in gaming movements/the IGDA WiG SIG and so on. Male dev teams just don't build stuff that women want to play, for the most part.)

As to the "I'd really like to be a computer programmer, but I can't" -- I'm aware this was a facetious remark, but it's far more insidious than that, really. When I was at school, I was good at maths and physics. I loved logic and 'decision maths' (which was basically algorithms; we studied things like the TSP). I played about with computers in my spare time, ran the school website, etc. What career was I advised to follow? Electrical engineering. Not computer science. I didn't even know you could study computer science until I was looking at university prospectuses for mathematics.

I've never thought "I wish I could $foo, but I can't because I'm a woman". But I have experienced problems due to my gender, on a day to day level it's more stuff like having people change the topic of conversation when you join in the circle, not being asked for your opinion, having to over-justify your techie-ness to 'fit in' which just ends up sounding horribly arrogant.. being deliberately excluded from some conversations, having people make all kinds of stupid assumptions which you then have to correct - no I don't do marketing, no my PhD wasn't in linguistics, and techie people hate being wrong.. not fitting into XL freebie t-shirts properly, not having healthy/vegetarian/non-beer options at CS events (ok guys may well have this too).. etc etc. I don't list career sabotage or anything here because I'm young, I've mostly been in academia and I'm now running a startup, so I'm lucky enough not to have had problems there. (Except when I worked in a computer shop and customers actually demanded to speak to "the computer man", but hey. Their stupidity, not mine.)

On the extreme flipside, and I don't see many women talking about this stuff: being female has been great for getting fast-track opportunities into stuff. e.g. being flown to America to attend the Austin Games Conference as part of a Microsoft women in computing initiative. I do feel sometimes that I was let into competitive schemes partly because I'm awesome and partly due to the fact I'm the only woman applying and it looks good if I get in because then they have Gender Balance. (note, I am awesome, but that little voice of "was it because I'm perfect for the position or was it because I'm a minority" never quite goes away. I imagine others have the same problem in different ways.) However, I'm pretty sure that compared to a male CS major with a similar background, I've had far more opportunity. I feel a little guilty about it, but if I didn't seize it, someone else would -- and I'm actively trying to help change the need for such things in the first place.

Good overview. I think the "thinking different" part is important. Many comp sci problems can be solved in very different ways, increasing the variability of thinking might increase the probability of finding the best solution? Or to rephrase, including women, and generally people from different backgrounds might yield advantages over just hiring the best white/asian dudes.

There's a contradiction inherent with that "thinking different" argument. If you accept that women on a large scale (ie, no individual example, but as a group of millions of people) think differently, then it's not absurd to say that they don't tend towards computing and hard-science as often.

Women have different biology, their bodies respond differently, they fall ill to different diseases but somehow it's become taboo to say that perhaps they think differently too, and therefore tend towards different disciplines. The brain is just another organ after all...

An example from a similar field: 90% of NFL Wide Receivers are Black. Does that mean the NFL is racist? Or that black people's genetic heritage skews their speed&strength bell curve slightly to the right so that the top hundredth of a percent is slightly above white's top hundredth of a percent? I tend to believe it's the second.

Please note that I know some nerd girls (mostly from the CS and EE programs), and nothing I say indicates that opportunities should be closed, or discrimination should happen, but you can't look at a number like "15% of comp-sci students are women" and immediately assume something is wrong.

I don't doubt that social pressures are playing a role here, with general pressure to "be pretty, not smart", but I don't think it explains away all of it. I am not putting forward a theory of everything here, just expressing my frustration with general feminism thoughts that everybody is fundamentally identical, except for socialization.

Well, this is going to turn bad I'm sure, I've touched on sex AND race.... but the central argument across all 3 is similar. There are bell curves everywhere in biology, and they are slightly skewed and stretched across different groups. No individual point is enough to make a decision ("you're a woman" doesn't say anything about computer ability, just as saying "you're black" doesn't make them a wide receiver), but on a mass-scale they predict percentages and expectations.

90% of NFL Wide Receivers are Black. Does that mean the NFL is racist? Or that black people's genetic heritage skews their speed&strength bell curve slightly to the right so that the top hundredth of a percent is slightly above white's top hundredth of a percent?

Or that young white men, compared with young black men, are much less likely to see professional sports as their ticket to an upper-class lifestyle, and therefore the folks who focus their efforts on becoming a better football player are predominantly black?

(Note that in the first few decades of the 20th century, when antisemitism was much more prominent, professional boxing was a predominantly Jewish sport.)

I nevertheless think that the feminist idea that we are fundamentally identical, except for socialization is the best way to think about the world. Because it means that since it's all socialization, we can change ourselves, we can understand each other. If we are hardwired to be different, all our efforts at change are futile.

I think there's a middle ground. By acknowledging that people come in all shapes and sizes and mindsets, you can consciously find people who compliment you or your organization well.

I never think that biology should be used to discriminate, since the 90th percentile line of women may be the 85th percentile of men (or whatever skew you want), that doesn't mean that she's not better at whatever task than 85% of men, and hence a good hire. Basically, the macro scale says nothing about the micro scale. But what I wanted to point out was that using macro level statistics and saying "this is inherently wrong" is reading the skew, and not the individuals.

As with everything in life, I'm guessing the real answer is some combination of socialization and biology.

One other ideas has been kicking around in my head, a comp-sci idea even... If you have women being approximately equal members of college (I think they have a slight lead by a few percentages), and you have few women in comp-sci, by the pigeonhole principal, they're the majority in another major. Why isn't there a clamor to get men into those majors? The example of biology was used elsewhere in this thread I think.

Yes, some fields have a lot more women than men. The thing is that men can choose a lot more freely (although it is true there is prejudice against men in some areas, like male nurses), while women are facing a lot of prejudice, sometimes very hardcore prejudice, like death and sexual threats (and you can find a lot of incidents well documented). Men need not worry about such things if they choose to engage in a female dominated field.

The main issue, I think, is not whether women opt more or less for CS, but rather that many many are compelled/driven to opt-out of it. Something is clearly wrong if they can't opt freely without suffering prejudice or without having to, as some say, "grow a thick skin".

programmers rarely get to decide what is actually being built. it seems like most of the arguments for women in programming seem to suggest that with women programmers, the product of the code (and not the code itself) would be different. in most jobs, this simply isnt the case. women in product management would seem to address the product that the rest of the world sees.

One thing is interesting is that there used to be many more women in programming.

how do you get women in product management though? mostly it seems to be via programming careers/degrees.

i've seen more come in through sales, customer support, mba, or project management.

Yes, and programming used to be an academic thing, done by adult academics, rather than something done by every pimply 15-year-old social reject. :)

And I say that as having been a pimply 15-year-old social reject. Girl.

The rewards in CS are just not as good for the middle-of-the-road people as many other industries. Biotech, for example, is at least as intellectually demanding (if not more), and has many more women.

Let's face it -- programming is largely low-status, exploitative work, where you are like as not going to get outsourced to India (or wherever), outgunned by teenagers, replaced by people who don't mind working 80 hours a week, and managed by people who think of you as a glorified typist, etc., etc.

And many of your best-skilled coworkers are likely to have very poor social skills, whether from atrophy or a genuine medical disorder.

Speaking of outsourcing to India, in cultures where programming is viewed as a respected career path, there are many more women programmers. Among Asians and Indians, specifically.

They don't seem to enjoy it all that much, though, based on my anecdotal evidence.

So, given the issues I raised above, who wants to fix them? Who will bother? Nobody. They will just talk circles about how there must be tons of girls who just long to spend 14 hours a day in front of a computer when they grow up, surrounded by Star Trek jokes lolcats.

I get off on technology, but I've always been different than other girls. I used to get all aggro about it, but as the years have gone and I've grown up, I've realized that's futile. Many women who are in tech jobs just cannot get over their defensiveness and accept that other women wouldn't be just like them, if but for their evil oppressors. I used to think that way too, but it turned out to be bullshit.

Thanks for the insight. Thinking of it, most of the female programmers I've worked with have been of foreign nationality. You're dead-on about the inhumanity of most working environments, and the challenges that we face institutionally.

> it's more stuff like having people change the topic of conversation when you join in the circle

This seems like a chicken and egg kinda thing. As a nerd I adjust my behavior when interacting with women and discussing CS-ey stuff, because, in my personal empirical experience they just "turn off" if I "nerd out" too much.

But that same prediction will lead to false positives for women who would get it if I were to nerd out at full throttle.

I think this circles back to how Humans are pretty great at categorizing, and making predictions as time savers, but it can screw us on edge cases.

Cause really the problem I have when women "zone out" during a techie discussion, is not that they're dumb. They don't care, or do, but lack all the implicit knowledge context I take for granted when I rationalize stuff in my head. You'd get the same behavior if a Business Major Frat Boy (oh look more stereotypes, weee!) asked you "So? How do those things really work?"

Just so happens gender is a pretty obvious label to latch onto for making that judgment call of "can I go all out, or not?", a label that can backfire a lot of the time.

I really am all for more girls in CS, because that means more likely hood of working with smart people, and I like me some smarties.

But something in that article made me wonder. When she was interviewing that female grad student there was worry over losing that "culture". It seems like women are just as capable of identifying with that "stereotype" culture. Are we sacrificing that when trying to get that raw percentage up?

to address that last point, here's an interesting discussion I saw recently on a women-in-$foo mailing list:

"is it just me or do you get your hackles up a bit when there's another woman around" - with several posters agreeing, even though they didn't like it. catfights, drama, bitchfests -- call it what you will but women don't always react well to other women being around. a typical female CS of today, wearing a star wars t-shirt, running gentoo and drinking out of a thinkgeek mug just won't react well to someone who's not of that ilk coming along onto "her" territory.

slight tangent, but interesting to consider.

i think it's perfectly possible to be geeky without turning into a one-dimensional stereotype. a lot of girls who aren't the picture described above still like the odd geeky thing, whether it's lolcats, nintendo cushions, an affinity for linux, whatever. the culture isn't binary, and it's entirely possible to fit in without having to live the entire lifestyle. i should know. i hardly ever wear my star wars t-shirt these days.

Haha, well right we're all different breeds of nerd.

I was thinking about it more at lunch, and what really tweaks me is the whole "I do this cause it's a paycheck" vs "I do this because I hearts it" developer mentality.

So maybe that's a better way to express the last point. Assuming that CS culture actively drives women away the ones that are in it, for the most part, really do love it (I know a few "this is just a paycheck" female devs).

So trying to increase that raw percentage might mean "polluting" the pool with "paycheckers" instead of "passion-ers" (man I am a wordSMITH)

(I also say this in full disclosure: I get monies for codes).

In addition to the criticisms you address in your addendum (women's perspective is important, and "works or not" is too simplistic) consider this: by creating and perpetuating environment that is unfriendly to women, we are reducing the talent pool from which we draw programmers by sightly more than 50%. Even if there was no such thing as "a woman's perspective" (depends on the woman/man in question, I suppose), it is highly inefficient to limit your pool this way. In my opinion this is NOT, in fact, self-selection, not to the degree this imbalance is getting to. I've seen multiple times in the universities I've attended the difference between how things get explained to women and men -- many instructors and TAs, for example, will quickly and subconsciously drop into condescension and use things like cooking analogies when talking to female students. I've heard programmers of all talent levels apply gender-based value judgments to women attempting to enter the field. The worst are "women are bad at logic" -- and there are many who really believe that -- but "you are a woman so you will do the UI as you must be good at visual stuff" is also sexist.

Well, by creating and perpetuating an environment that is friendly to geeks, we are also increasing the talent pool from which we draw programmers among geeks.

Think for a second. If we're talking about adjusting the decor to market to a culture, what culture does it make sense for CS to target? Women? Athletes? Norwegians? Black Guys? It seems to me the alliance between geeks and programmers is quite natural.

You could redecorate the lounge in pink and put plushies everywhere. You might get a few more women who think, "Okay, I guess I could fit in here." You'll get a lot fewer geeks who think, "Thank God, I've finally come home."

Is that a positive tradeoff? Color me skeptical. Go found a Hacker Girls group, dominate the industry, prove me wrong. Until then, don't be engineering the culture.

What, there's no neutral environment that can be maintained? It's Star Trek and cans of Monster, or pink wallpaper and plushies? Come on. With any [insert subculture here]-friendly environment, there's a chance of alienation. We're not asking to adjust the decor to market to a culture, just the recognition that one that plays heavily into the "typical geek" stereotype can be off-putting to _any_ who don't fit.

If the decor puts one off, I suspect the culture will, too. If we change it to attract some specific group, we should be careful that we are not attracting people who will not be happy here.

"CS is mature field and as such will do better if it projects a professional, neutral image" is a hypothesis, nothing more. Prove it with a successful venture -- but I don't think you will. This is still a place where passion trumps professionalism, and an enforced culturally neutral environment isn't the best incubator for passion.

Personally, I think we'll do best by simply being ourselves. And letting the demographic chips fall where they may.

When a field is young and small, it needs to draw the best people from a small pool. "Geeks" worked for this in CS. As it ages, it needs a larger pool, but it can settle for people who are just good, not necessarily the best.

The lack of women in CS is a problem because the CS field is missing out. There are a whole lot of intelligent women that could make important breakthroughs. The field is slowed because half the population is discouraged from joining it.

Exactly what I was going to say.

Would as much code get written if the industry was more socially mainstream? Would it be less but better or just less? There's no denying that the lone geek (male or female) staying up late gets an awful lot done.

Why do you assume 'socially mainstream' == 'less code'?

You seem to be implying that geeks only write code because the industry isn't socially mainstream.

Simply because it means physically spending less time at the keyboard and less time with people who just want to code.

Socially mainstream means leaving work at 5pm and going to the pub, that's what "normal" people do.

Agreed. But not only women are repelled by the geeky atmosphere in the computer science. Many extrovert male people get bored and disgusted too.

So it is not really even 50% of the people diversity who create the software. It feels more like 5-10%.

I belong to that 5-10% and I think that among the others there are many who are way more creative than us.

You don't even have to be an extrovert to be bored by what passes for culture in "geek" circles.

A few examples might make your comment's disdain less grating.

I didn't mean it as an attack, after all there is no accounting for taste.

Unless you like XKCD, in which case you are a bad person and you should feel bad.

Mindlessly repeating internet memes for one (except in Soviet Russia, where meme repeats you). That's at least 50% of internet humor. Obscure references, as well. It's a type of humor that makes no sense unless you're immersed in the culture.

And even when it makes sense it can be pretty damned tedious. (Of course, for the "joke" to be anything other than self-indulgent the reference can't be all that obscure, so what's the point?)

The convergence of "geek culture" and "internet culture" is one of my big complaints. lolcats were funny for about 5 minutes.

There are intelligent men who could make CS breakthroughs, but do other things. Why focus on women? That's sexist.

The easy answer is: because they're missing at far higher rates than 'other intelligent men'.

But the deeper answer is: because western society thought we'd already patched that one. We had a long history of actively discriminating against women. But despite creating a stigma around that sort of behavior and 'officially' banning it, gender representation in our particular corner of society hasn't changed all that much. Not even the modest amount that other sectors have seen.

So the question of "where are the women" isn't only about the women, but about our seeming inability to fix society just by joining hands, singing kumbaya and declaring change.

If we'd gone through the trouble of a social movement to kick an industry bias against, say, stereotypical jocks, extroverts, or guys-who-know-how-to-talk-to-girls, then I suppose people would pay more attention to why those groups are still under-represented too.

Women are treated differently in bad ways, but it's by their mothers mostly. Nothing to do with CS.

As you point out, various personality types are underrepresented in CS. The particular ones that are highly represented are less common in women. There is a reason for that, and yes it's bad, but the personality type distribution among women in general has nothing to do with CS.

PS My theory on feminism is that it said, "Men must reform." And so they reformed some. Meanwhile it did nothing to help women. Hence women are now worse than men.

How much feminist material have you read? IMO your theory is very silly.

Do you have any recommendations on feminist material to read? I have tried, but much of what I found was very silly.

This is a good place to start: http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/

It's a rather broad resource, but to be honest I'm just starting to get into the subject. My earlier snarkiness was caused by frustration at how quickly people are willing to dismiss feminism or make sweeping generalisations about it, without bothering to learn much about it.

What are you talking about? Helping men improve is a great thing. I complimented feminism and took a position claiming it's had significant success. It didn't have the results it expected, but that doesn't make them less good.

It looked to me like you were saying that feminism has/had nothing to say about how women reinforce patriarchal norms, or that it focusses on men's behaviour much more than on women's. That's simply not true.

Sorry if I've overreacted, the comments on this article have made me hyper-sensitive.

I agree, but there's a second half that people need to consider. CS is missing out on women, but are women missing out on CS?

To paraphrase Phil Greenspun (from the "women in science" essay), we need to ask if CS "is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it?"

CS at a reputable university is hard. Seriously, seriously hard. I have no doubt that people who can handle this can also handle the academic rigor of a bio major followed by med school, and they sure as hell can handle an econ major followed by an MBA, or sociology major followed by law school.

So I'd start by asking: what are the women who are able to do CS doing instead, and would it be in their better interest to stop doing that and study CS?

>but are women missing out on CS?

This, I think is the central problem. It seems that most of the really really intelligent women I know have gone into other fields than CS because that's where their interests lie. CS simply wasn't a fulfillment of their interests not some more nefarious discrimination problem.

It's perfectly acceptable for me to see fewer women or men or people of a particular socioeconomic or religious background in one field or another. That alone doesn't bother me, except insofar as it can be a signal to another problem.

One thing that does concern me greatly is that there are many women who are interested in science and technology, and especially computer science, who are at some point turned off. It appears to really begin around junior high and high school, and it continues through college.

My concern is that we're losing a lot of interested and bright minds, who might be excited in the course of actually working in technology, who are being turned away for some reason.

I think it's important to try to understand the reasons before we pass judgment upon them.

But it might raise some questions and inspire some solutions that generally makes work in technology more enjoyable. Not just for women; for everyone. Consider the reaction to pair programming. Both women and men just plain tended to like it more. That seems to show that there are many people out there who would enjoy working in technology were it not as solitary. That's a major discovery. And I think we've just scratched the surface.

Anecdotally, I've found working through and solving a difficult problem together reinforces social bonds. Even introverts crave some form of social interaction. It almost seems obvious after the fact.

I'd recommend _Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing_ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262632691?ie=UTF8&tag=... by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher. They studies reasons why fewer women were enrolled in the CMU CS program, and successfully applied their findings to raise enrollment while maintaining graduation rate. They found that what was detrimental for women was detrimental for everybody, but women tended to be on the margin and so were more severely impacted. One issue was that women were much less likely to have spent a lot of time with computers before arriving. Another was that women were more concerned about practical applications.

Great recommendation, I'm looking forward to reading it. Hopefully this will fill in some obvious gaps in understanding I have on the subject.

> One downside I see is the lack of a "woman's perspective," which, while admittedly important in many fields, seems mostly irrelevant in a field where stuff either works or it doesn't.

a particularly keen insight i got from talking to a female college friend (who was a CS major) is that the "women's perspective" might be more relevant than people think even in a supposedly objective field where things either work or don't ... because men and women see the world differently, women might be able to come up with different high-level design, low-level debugging, or software team management strategies that an all-male team might not think of ... of course, i don't have any concrete examples to back up this vague hand-wavy statement, but i think there's something there

> of course, i don't have any concrete examples to back up this vague hand-wavy statement [that "men and women see the world differently, women might be able to come up with different"], but i think there's something there

Lots of people believe that, but I've yet to see an example. Since we make a lot of decisions based on it being true, I'm troubled that we don't know if it actually is.

However, let's assume that it's true. It doesn't follow that said different is always valuable. It might be good in some fields, irrelevant in others, and bad in some.

In other words, even if "think different" is true, it's not an argument for universal inclusion.

Yes, I know that said "male think" may not be possessed by all males and lacking in all females.

I've heard one classic example. When PDAs came out they could manage one calendar for one person. A woman looked at it and noted that it must have been designed by men who manage only their own schedule while many women manage schedules for multiple family members.

a field where stuff either works or it doesn't

What field are you talking about? I don't believe such a field exists. Not one that is worthy of the name "field".

It certainly isn't user-experience design, where there is obviously no bright line between "what works" and "what does not work", and where the value of a diverse team is easiest to appreciate. ("What, you mean the word processor user hasn't bothered to learn how to use a DVCS from the command line? Were they born yesterday?") But we needn't go that far. Everything that the hardest of hard-core geeks talk about all day long:

  What language should we use? 

  Should I use emacs, vi, Textmate, Eclipse or Notepad?

  Should I use Mac OS, Windows, or Linux here?

  What database architecture is right for this task? 

  Come to think of it, am I even working on the right task?

...are choices between a bunch of options, all of which will "work" in one sense or another.

Even down-and-dirty C hacking requires an endless series of decisions between things which will work and things which might work better on one axis or another.

I've noticed that for some reason the default color scheme for vim seems to color Strings in pink. What is up with that?

Obviously someone thought not enough women were using vim, duh.

Accidentally downmodded you, meant to upmod . Android touchscreen is too small, but I agree. Ugly default color.

Diversity helps in any environment, but it's not a goal I share, in and of itself.

That said, the self-perpetuating 'Boys Club' stereotype is a problem I care about.

In short: It causes nothing but trouble. It drives away more than just women. It creates stigma and bias and I don't see any positive return from it.

What makes you think diversity helps in any environment? I think that homogeneity is a great help for efficiency, which is often important. Diversity has its uses, but it's not for everything.

I was referring to the overall environment, not any and every combination of 2+ people.

A homogeneous group certainly can be the best team for a given task. I'm only suggesting you have a sub-optimal environment if the only teams you can put together are homogeneous ones.

just to add a little more fuel to the fire on this one, i'd like to point out the fact that almost all (but not all) of my highly intelligent, capable friends fall along these lines:

the smart women pick fields where they're helping others, and the smart men pick fields where they're building or discovering things.

(purely personal observation and might not be indicative of anything as a whole, or my own personal beliefs on the subject.)

My personal observation is that last night I stayed up too late reading the linux kernel code. Probably won't help anyone that much.

Validating a datapoint as useless/useful is a later step and does not disqualify the collection of data either case.

In reply to your first point, about women not wanting to go into CS, I would say that in itself is the problem. Programming (or other hard sciences) could be a very rewarding career path, but they're socialized to self-select away from it. I don't think that CS as a field is necessarily lacking an important female perspective[1], but I do think that individual women may be missing an opportunity for the wrong reasons. The self-selection aspect should not be taken as a lack of problem, but rather a characterization of the problem as having more subtle causes.

[1] Although, there may be truth in the idea that software is written for/from a male perspective, meaning that it doesn't suit women's needs as well... whatever those needs are. Yeah, I'm ambivalent about this point, but I don't outright reject it.

PS I also highly recommend reading The Mismeasure of Woman by Carol(?) Tavris. It provides very clear concrete, statistical, and anecdotal explanations of how and why a woman's experience differs from a man's, and the consequences of the man's experience being an implicit standard. Despite being woman-focused, the book is also pretty rational and balanced about the potential of reverse-discrimination, and does a pretty good job of noting problems without demanding specific fixes.

Well, I certainly enjoy the social environment of my grad program more because it has a well-mixed gender ratio. But besides my own enjoyment of my course of study, if we are setting up filters besides "good at computer science" for entrance into computer science, then we are doing ourselves a disservice.

If I could offer another anecdote and unsupported hypothesis, I suspect our grad program has a better mix because it is more foreign, and foreigners have a different perception of the gender stereotypes surrounding Computer Science than we do. There's a lot of non-Americans on hacker news, perhaps one of them could comment.

If the so-called "self-selection" is strongly influenced by societal conditioning, it is worth considering what messages our society sends.

It is worth noting that this gender disparity (wrt women programmers etc.) is predominantly a native-born-women issue. Asian immigrant women in the US don't have a similar pattern and as far as I know, the US pattern doesn't exist in countries like India and China -

I actually agree that it might not be a problem for computer science to not have women in the field. It's really more of a problem for women who want to be in the field.

If you had asked, 40 years ago, "why is the lack of women in math, science, medicine, academia, and leadership positions a problem" this would be more obvious. Since many fields today are more equitable, it is a lot less problematic, although perhaps not for a few folks here and there.

it's also a problem for men in the field who want to date nerdy women ;)

Men viewing nerdy women as potential dating material is commonly cited by women as one of the things they most dislike about being anywhere near tech events and tech people. So I would suggest that you ask yourself whether you, personally, have contributed to women not wanting to get more involved in tech. Because you just might have.

Seriously, everything works out better for everyone in the long run if you value women as people first and foremost. Admittedly doing so reduces your opportunities to make passes at uninterested women. But it significantly improves your odds of success if you do make a pass, and greatly improves your odds of eventually winding up in a decent relationship.

I very much doubt that I, personally, have contributed to this, being as I am on the 'receiving end' so to speak. Anyway, anecdotally, I can't say I've ever encountered this. I mean the last time I got hit on by a guy in a technical context... wait, it's never happened. The closest thing I can think of is getting randomly upvoted on HN whenever I happen to mention my gender in a post, or similar.

If anything, guys in tech -- the real techies, that is -- are so horribly bad at talking to women that it's being viewed as an alien from outer space that's offputting, not being viewed as a pair of walking boobs. On that note, I definitely agree with valuing women as people. But in my experience, at least, male attitudes towards women in tech as sexual objects are not even remotely a factor. However, the concern that you won't even meet nerdy women if there aren't any women involved in tech is still valid, IMO!

If anecdotally you haven't encountered it, then I'm surprised. Most of the women in tech that I've talked about this with have run into it.

If you wish to continue not experiencing it, then there are quite a few men I recommend not getting to know, starting with Eric Raymond.

Do you have data to support the hypothesis that women dislike being asked out by programmers?

If so, it might provide a useful means of distinguishing between the 'Roissy theory' (women are intolerant of low status men) I described downthread and scott_s's alternative theory (women don't want low status for themselves).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=970454

I think that men view most eligible women as potential dating material. If women find that being viewed as dating material at tech events is keeping theｍ from being involved in tech, they must be avoiding much of the other parts of society where they are exposed to men of breeding age.

The issue isn't being exposed, it is being overwhelmed.

And yes, there is evidence that many women avoid strongly male-dominated environments. For some of that evidence look at the article that started this discussion: http://scicom.ucsc.edu/SciNotes/0901/pages/geeks/geeks.html

Yeah, that half of humanity probably has the same opinions and insights that we do. Can't imagine their input being valuable. And you're spot on about software being black and white - either your word processor works correctly or it doesn't work at all.

EDIT: Just to clarify, you're an idiot and a troll. Your (Devil's advocate) opinion is shortsighted and foolhardy. If you are writing software that "works or it doesn't", you are writing something inane, needless, or redundant. Most of the effort of developing software at this point in time is gathering requirements and designing interfaces. Work which is cut and dry is usually created by unnecessary process or poor choice of tools.

I'm disappointed that people (a) don't understand sarcasm, or (b) actually agree with the original commenter. Since no one left any meaningful feedback, I will assume the latter. If you're planning to start a company, thats a poor position to start from.

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