It's amazing how people think that there are all these barriers to programming for certain groups of people which must be overcome. There aren't. Sit down, grab a computer and a book, and learn to code. If you're good at it, you'll get a job, and people will respect you.
If you can't learn to code on your own, you probably don't have the mental skills necessary to be a good coder. (Critical thinking, drive, determination etc).
I do not know whether you are in a position of power, but I note that this argument is often advanced by people in positions of power.
Or are they deleted from the Internet by those in power?
There is nothing to "solve" here. Let people do what they want to do.
The comparison with fashion design is also BS. For one thing, there are lots of male designers (especially the famous ones) and then the number of fashion designers is a lot lower than the number of programmers.
And this is not as irrelevant a choice as whether to play with dolls or lego: Programming is a skill which allows for social upwards mobility like nothing else. Just assuming women (and minorities) don't want that, is a bit too easy.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor...
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/pdf/tab33.pdf
The first thing to note, is that both the number of men and women getting CS degrees dropped: the entire field went from ~42k BS degrees to ~24k degrees. There were about 10k less men, and about 8k less women graduating in 1996 compared to 1986. The number eventually rebounded for men, but didn't recover for women until 2003. So something drove men and women out of the field, and women stayed out of it longer.
The next interesting thing is the number of masters and PhDs per gender. Neither of them dropped (so the percentage of BS graduates getting MS and PhD actually increased!). So it was still desirable for men and women in the field to get their masters and doctorates.
So the question isn't why the number of women plunged, it's what drove both men and women out of CS, and what caused it to grow for men? I would probably hypothesis that CS was seen as a risky degree, so while men are generally less adverse to risk (see all the dangerous jobs they do) and got a degree, women choose more stable degrees (though those interested remained, as I think the number of PhD and Master degrees show). Now that CS is now seen as a stable career, we can see there is more interest to join. Of course, that is only looking at the data cited by what you linked, there could definitely be other circumstances.
I don't know about that. Men consistently study fields with higher income potential than women. The current theory is that when CS started gaining prestige and power, the same thing happened as with all professions that carry power and prestige -- women were pushed out (and by that I don't mean that there was some conspiracy, but society simply started directing women away from CS).
I still feel that saying "women were pushed out" is the wrong way to phrase it. We can see from the data, that both men and women were "pushed out" of the field, with men recovering from the drop earlier. After reading a bit more, it could be that marketing in the 80's (as suggested by the NPR article) negatively effecting both women and men (which was left out of the NPR article) entering the field, but women ended up more effected.
Side note: drops like this have occurred in other fields at different times. Psychology actually ended up losing a lot of men in the 70s, while women increased. I am sure we could find a few other examples as well.
Absolutely. Many researchers compare those shifts with changing attitudes towards certain professions (say, by counting certain words when they're described in the media etc.), with women participation usually correlated negatively with prestige.
In any case, much of the distinction between masculine and feminine professions is traced back to Victorian times. Of course, similar differences have existed much longer than that and in many cultures, but the Victorians elevated the distinction between gender roles into an elaborate system of social codes (e.g. they had certain rooms in the house more appropriate for men to spend time in, and other for women).
Second (and unrelated to the discussion, really), I don't know where you get your assumption that learning to code in college is too late. I've been in this business for twenty years and some of the very best developers I know only learned to program in college. If anything, I'd say that not going to school at all and having a weak background in algorithms/mathematics is a much greater stumbling block for some software achievements than not programming before school, but even that is probably a bad generalization. Excellent developers come from all backgrounds.
IT simply attracts too many people of one kind and interest, and it's detrimental to the industry's output. For instance, we can't attract or keep people with creative design or artistic skills in the industry because of the mono-culture in many workplaces. It doesn't matter if those people are men or women; there are a lot of men who also get tired of working in a hardcore IT environment.
I have a friend who's a nurse; that sector simply can't attract men, even though there's a clear need for male power in some of the more physical demanding jobs. It's not about "equality" or "political correctness"; we need their skills.
I have no problem finding Python developers; but I can't find anybody who can do the design, usable interface and graphics while still having enough coding skills to support the project. We need more diverse skill sets and hence, a more diverse group of people. Not because they are women or black or gay or loopy artists; but simply because we could produce something better.
Projects like these might attract a more diverse group of people than stereotypical coders.
There is evidence which prooves discrimination and unfavorable bias against women in technology. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with creating organisations for women.
Fact is, several DjangoGirls "graduates" who have never done any programming have gotten programming jobs within a year. So apparently, there is some benefit to their on-boarding and motivational efforts.
People who have never done any programming? Attending some course and then getting programming jobs? I don't think this is a great idea.
There is absolutely no barrier to entry here. Learn to code, at home, on your own, like everyone else does. Make an OS. Make games. Publish them. Make open source projects.
If you're not already doing all of the above, chances are you'll make a terrible programmer, and the industry will get more bad programmers - as if it needs more.