🚀 go-pugleaf

blmblm@myrealbox.com wrote:
> As you may know, this is a perennial topic of discussion among
> women in the field, and CS educators.  (I am both.)  The thing
> that's so disheartening to many of us is that the gender
> imbalance seems to have gotten worse over the years, rather
> than better.  When I first started doing things with computers,
> over thirty years ago [1], I was told that it was a good field
> for math/science/techie women

40 years ago, any corporate IT department with more than half a dozen 
programmers would normally include at least one woman, and those women 
were treated as peers. (I wonder how many of those women were wiring 
402s and 407s in the 40s and 50s -- that's before my time.)

> Perhaps our small, smooth brains
> also make it difficult for us to program?

Well, of course, there are some demonstrated mental differences between 
men and women, but it is just as obvious that a great many women have 
the mental wherewithal to be programmers. (In my admittedly 
anecdote-based experience, women are better than men at programs that 
are simple at the high level [read-write-print-repeat], but horridly 
complex in detail [if this is the last Tuesday of the month, except for 
December, and the account is in New Jersey....].)

I think you may be right that it's early adolescence. Almost every 
single one of those female programmers of the early and middle 60s, 
after all, must have been planning to do something else with their lives 
when they were 13.

-- 
John W. Kennedy
"...when you're trying to build a house of cards, the last thing you 
should do is blow hard and wave your hands like a madman."
   --  Rupert Goodwins