astrieanna

If you development/technical roles are all male, then your supporting (manager/etc) roles must be mostly female if you end up with company-wide gender balance. This form of semi-gender-balance is not uncommon; many supporting roles (HR,etc) tend to skew female. As a female developer, I find the technology differential between the genders to be at least as awkward as having a strong but more uniform gender skew across the company would be.

Without any individual behaving incorrectly in any way, it feels awkward to be the only technical female in a company. Having a non-zero number of other women present is better than none, but it's completely different from having a non-zero number of equally technical women. When the information flow of technical information is always male-to-female, it just makes me feel uncomfortable, even though no one is doing anything wrong.

The students were assigned to one of two groups. Each group was given the same list of values. One group was asked to write about the one most important to them. The other group (the control group) was asked to write about the least important one to them and why someone else might find it important.

They were asked to choose a value, not a topic.

If you click through the Wiki to Libraries, there's a list of them here: https://www.love2d.org/wiki/Category:Libraries

The examples Scaevolus lists are all in there.

No one is forcing anyone to do anything. They are providing more opportunities for women to discover that they might like engineering -- more reasons not to write it off before they realize that it's worth fighting for.

I'm kind of confused by your last sentence about being excluded from a conversation.

My points of similarity were about wanting to find someone with this arbitrary, absurd set of surface-level similarities because it would make me feel less different/unique. You don't fit them, which is totally cool, and really doesn't mean anything. Your post sounded a little bit defensive (as I read it), and I'm sorry if I made you feel excluded or anything by listing properties that we happen to differ on.

I guess we just disagree on reasons to do things. The process of solving problems tends to be what interests me, more than the final product. Needing the solution is a good way to make sure a project actually gets finished, but its the process of solving/building that is more interesting to me. If a tool/language/etc is considered hard, then I want to use it because that might mean it's more powerful or it's mind-expanding in some way (for the right kind of hard). I wouldn't phrase it as "because it's there", but I guess that's also reasonable.

I'm not sure that going to a programming workshop for girls as a kid would have made me think what programming wasn't for girls. Coming to a "not for girls" signal involves realizing that they're having the event to increase female participation, rather than just because they want an all-girls event -- like girls scouts being just for girls.

The "for girls" labeling is also for the parents at that age. If you want to have girls signed up, you need their parents to think it's a good idea. Their parents are more likely (I'd think) to be biased that girls probably won't like programming/tech. So they wouldn't think about it as something their daughter would like, except that it's especially for girls. I'm not saying it's great logic, but it seems like it might be a benefit to "for girls" labeling on programming events for kids.

>I liked it because it was hard, and considered hard. >And I didn’t even notice that I was the only female in the >class— a lack of awareness that persisted well into >university.

I took programming classes in high school, and assumed that the hugely skewed gender ratio was just my school being weird. It wasn't until people were surprised/impressed that I was planning to major in CS that I started googling, and discovered that the gender ratio is a thing.

> I simple never fit in with “the girls”. > Because girls don’t do things that I like.

I often feel more uncomfortable at women in CS events than just plain CS ones. Partially, it's because the actual activities are less interesting; I'm there because it's "for women", despite the less interesting/ less technical content. Partially, it's because, after 4 years of CS courses, I feel like I'm in the wrong place when more than 35%-ish of the people in a room are female. Partially, it's because I tend to feel more out of place among women. I don't dress like they do - no makeup, unisex tshirts, more interested in coding than parties - and when I'm in a room full of normal women who happen to do CS, I feel more alone than in a group of CS people. If I'm in the group of people who are supposed to be my minority demographic or whatever, and I feel like I _really_ don't fit in with them, then doesn't that mean I don't fit at all?

I tend to like unpopular/strange pieces of programming (sometimes partially because "it [i]s hard, and considered hard"). I'm used to having different technical interests than the CS/tech people I hang out with. I just feel that a lot more when I'm at a women-in-tech event. Either there's a bigger disconnect or I care more deeply that I don't fit. I view it mostly as a personal insecurity, but I really long for the emotional validation of meeting someone who's female, doesn't care about clothes, and has vaguely similar technical/programming interests. Normal CS groups of sufficient size include people who fit on everything but gender; in my experience, women-in-cs groups provide examples that match only on gender.

why not? There a much better uses of class time -- students asking questions or more engaging interactive activities. Just doing practice problems in class, where the professor is there to help, is a better use of class time than lecture.