| > If in 2019 you aren't programming, you're either not interested in doing so In a very trivial sense this is true-ish. In the US lots of women seemed to have lost interest in computing in the mid 1980s: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when... With a massive change like this, there must be some sort of societal shift behind it. You don't have to buy the article's thesis regarding the concrete reason. But there was something going on in society that changed young women's minds. But "society pressured me into losing interest" is not the same as "I wasn't, our could not have been, interested in the first place". So yes, many women "aren't interested" in the trivial sense of "we had enough discussion threads in HN and elsewhere signaling that they shouldn't be interested, and finally this perception stuck". > If you were in there, it meant you were interested and had wealth to spare. If we agree that in many cases that wealth came from parents, there is no reason to assume that young women had less of it than young men. Unless there were factors like parents saying things like "computers are for boys". From the article above: "In the 1990s, researcher Jane Margolis interviewed hundreds of computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University, which had one of the top programs in the country. She found that families were much more likely to buy computers for boys than for girls — even when their girls were really interested in computers." If you were in there, it meant you were interested (check), your parents had wealth to spare (check), and you were very likely a boy. Anyway, all of this has been rehashed many times before, and we're unlikely to change each other's minds. |