This morning i read an article discussing one potential reason there aren't a lot of women coders. Be warned, the first half or so is fairly depressing.
Professor Sapna Cheryan decided to see if one of the reasons that women may not want to be coders is because of the stereotype that's associated with "being a coder". She set up a room to screen potential candidates. The room was filled with partially built systems, Star Wars action figures, half drunk cans of soda, manuals, tech books and magazines. She found that a high number of women marked "not interested".
She then ran a similar screening process in a sterile room and found that the averages balanced out between the sexes. Her conclusion was that the sterile environment was more conducive for women to enter programming. My thought was "no, it was just equally repulsive."
One of the things i like about my given career is that unlike a good many other office based work, there's a goodly amount of "character" in it. Geeks tend to not only recognize that they are different, but revel in it. i'll note that this sort of personality tends to lead to fairly creative thought, something that good coders have in abundance. Coding is problem solving, and that means you've got to be creative in finding a solution.
If anything, the point was driven home by the second half of the article that introduced a bunch of Geek Girls who also reveled in their abnomality and expressed their creativity. Being a decidedly masculine geek, i can tell you that i thought what they had was wicked cool, and i'm sure they're damn fine coders.
Let me also break rank and say something a touch non-P.C. i don't want just any woman in computer science. Hell, i don't want just any man, sheep, robot, beef by product, or squeezy toy to be in computer science. i want someone who's creative, who enjoys challenges, who can share in the humor enough to get why there's a Python extension called "Unladen Swallow". Likewise, i'd find it equally hilarious if someone created a master virtual machine called "Jem" or an orphaned process shutdown app called "Buffy". i could care less (and i do mean this) if they preferred Firefly over Star Wars or Anne McCaffrey over Poul Anderson. What matters to me is how much joy they get out of teaching computers to dance, because the more they enjoy it, the better the code they make.
The "geek" room turned off some of those folks because it was a mess. Then again, being rather deep into the culture, i can tell you that we're growing more than a bit beyond the messy toddler phase. We use soap AND shampoo now.
The last thing i want is for some college to read half of this and decide to make their Computer Science program the equivalent to working at the DMV. Turing only knows what kind of bland, crappy drones would come out of that environment, and i love my vocation more than let that happen.
