| > I'm not really sure what barriers there are for anyone, apart from the barriers they impose on themselves. So this is a really hard idea to get out to someone, and is the core of a lot of the issues here: a lot of issues women face in technology are issues that men have never experienced. They usually aren't aware that these issues even exist, and probably couldn't brainstorm them if prodded. Here is a thought experiment. You're writing a unit test framework, and the output of your test is like so: http://i.imgur.com/jIsR8.png (sorry for the non-terminalness) You pass this off to your friend to see what he thinks. "How do you tell if the test passed?" he asks. "What do you mean?" "I can't see if a test passed or failed. I don't get it." "What? All the information you need is right there!" Turns out your friend is colorblind. Chances are, you didn't intentionally make this hard for colorblind people. It simply wasn't on your radar. Assuming you aren't colorblind, you go through your whole life discerning the difference between green and red and simply assume everyone else does too! The difference is that when someone brings this up, you don't go "nuh uh! We all see exactly the same way! I don't see what barriers there are for anyone to tell the difference between red and green." Yet this is exactly the response you gave above. (Don't worry, we all do this to a degree). The point is, there are lots of subtle differences that people with different backgrounds view the world through. It's unrealistic to accommodate all of them, but in order to be a better human being you have to stop and listen when someone tells you something that is outside of your experience. So when you say you're 'not really sure what barriers there are for anyone,' well, there are a lot. Especially for women. That's why we need sites like this. If you're interested in a long but very well written piece, I highly recommend Ellen Spertus' MIT AI Technical Report on this subject: http://people.mills.edu/spertus/Gender/pap/pap.html |
FWIW, I said it because I learnt to program alone. Sitting in front of a computer. With books. I didn't 'network', or attend gatherings of other people. I don't see the need for it... So that's perhaps why I'm not seeing any hurdles.