lindseybieda

Nursing is a reinforcing of traditional gender roles. It being female dominated is a bad thing to. This wasn't brought up here because this is about a girl who wants to be a programmer not a little boy that ways to be nurse.

You know, I'm tried of this straw man (excuse me, straw person) being brought up every time someone talks about women in computing.

There's a lot of factors retarding the balance. There's been a number of studies on it.

There's the stereotype threat and the common notion that women are bad a math. There's been a number of sexist comments and incidents within the field (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents). There's even a study the correlates geek culture with keeping women out.

There's this thing called the patriarchy, you mighta heard of it. It's not something as clear as the things above, esp. if you have become comfortable within the system. However, it is there. There's subtle unconscious biases from both men and women inside the field (as observed in this study http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract).

Is that enough to convince you? Or do you need more, because there really is an abundance of data to support this.

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents - evidence of misogynistic culture.

So that's why the percent was higher for CS degrees and then steadily declined, there was interest and now there is less http://rarlindseysmash.com/images/entries/degrees.png. Something is happening here.

It's up to everyone in the community to fix this. No matter what their sex or race. It's just a matter of being a more open and welcoming community.

I'm sure there are fellow female (and other minority) programmers reading the comments on this article feeling completely unwelcome in the programming community.

The overall trend right now shows the opposite: http://rarlindseysmash.com/images/entries/degrees.png

this isn't an issue that is going to self correct and people trying to take steps to remedy a problem should not be lambasted by the community.

http://rarlindseysmash.com/images/entries/degrees.png This is a graph that shows the percent of women receiving degrees in each field - you'll notice that there is a peak and then a sudden drop off for computer science. Though, for actual numbers in the 1970's a lot of programmers in general weren't getting CS degrees.

I'm not sure why people still take Penelope Trunk seriously.

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/08/16/blueprint-for-a-wom...

This should be enough to convince you that she is full of shit. She doesn't practice what she preaches and holds very strongly to the status quo.

She actively discourages women from entering the startup world, so no wonder she is annoyed that some people are trying to encourage women.

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/03/05/the-workplace-shoul...

She regards inequality and unbalance as a non-problem and generalizes that all women are the same.

http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/29/woman-problem-what-woman-p...

http://baileybear.hubpages.com/hub/Penelope-Trunk-Brazen-Car...

Listening to anything this woman says seems to do more harm than good.

It's often been considered a problem in the states because there is a lack of women in the tech field. The high presence of booth babes at tech related events is rather disturbing for those few women in the field. I'd honestly be more okay with it if they actually tried to hire attractive in general, and not just attractive women.

Though, at the guts of it, if you have to sell your product with attractive people then you may not have much of a product to sell.

I learned photoshop before I learned to program, because I was really interested in art when I was young so I wanted to learn how to color my drawings in it after I scanned them in. My interests took a large shift since then, but I still can use it quite well.

The more interesting aspect is that Javascript and Ruby are equivalent. At least perl/php/python are related.