[rbellio]

She isn't upset by the fact that the ladies room was relabeled as a mens room, she was frustrated by the fact that she didn't find as many female peers at the conference. She felt encouraged around other women to discuss technology and wants to encourage other women to become excited about the field.

I have some insight into this. I'm engaged to a mechanical engineer who works in a largely male dominated industry. To this point, I've never heard her discuss another female engineer at her company. We've discussed the issues of women in engineering and how interesting the dynamics are for a woman and I can agree that it would be an enjoyable ideal if there were more women in her field. At the same time, she wants nothing to do with women in her field that are simply there to prove that women can do the same jobs as men. I have to agree with her on this point. Every time I see ads for computer schools encouraging people with no experience to get a degree and flood the market, I shake my head. Why should I want someone with no passion, who simply wants a job, to enter my market and drive down the price of labor?

So, I understand where the author is coming from here. She enjoys the company of her sex and would like to have a larger network of her peers be female. I have no problem with that. I would say, though, to be careful about what you wish for. You want women who are passionate to join the workforce, not just any old gal.

[shadowfiend]

“Why should I want someone with no passion, who simply wants a job, to enter my market and drive down the price of labor?”

Because for every 10 people with no passion who simply want a job, you get one who is incredibly passionate but simply wanted a job. One who didn't realize that hey, this is actually pretty cool stuff, and maybe it's more than just a job, it can be a passion and a career.

I am of course making up the numbers. But discarding someone because they don't care before they've even learned a subject is even sillier than assuming that women don't want to be in tech because they're not interested in tech, rather than simply because they never took to looking into it because of all of the stereotypes (many of them true) about the male dominance of the industry.

[rbellio]

I may not have made it clear enough, but I'm not saying we shouldn't encourage women or non-technical people to pursue technical experience and/or education. I personally prefer to work in a diverse workforce and enjoy sharing my workday with people of different sexes, ethnicities and cultural backgrounds. I'm not sure what stereotypes you're referring to, either, as I personally have worked across a multitude of domains and have not seen any difference in the approach of the professional development world to that of the rest of the market (my last software company was co-founded by a woman in fact).

I'm saying that simply wanting women or any other sociological division of people to be more prevalent for the sake of presence is a mistake. In your example, you say that out of 10 people that are encouraged/trained, you might get one very passionate developer. I know the math is made up, but if you look at this in the other direction, you now have 9 developers that are bad at their job, dislike/don't care about their job or possibly both. This would mean that 90% of the workforce is now comprised of people who are hindering the other 10%. That 90% of the code written is probably poorly executed.

I think that the career of being a developer is attractive enough that anyone interested in pursuing it would see it as a viable option. Segregating encouragement along the line of sex I think does more harm then good though.

[shadowfiend]

We already have the more-to-fewer split of terrible programmers to great programmers. They just mostly happen to be men. That's all. Not having a passion for programming is not an exclusively female characteristic; neither is having an undiscovered passion.

I expanded a bit on my underlying point at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4597547 , and there is an excellent reply regarding early-stage discouragement by nancyhua there as well. I have no interest in a sociological division being more prevalent just because. The problem is they're subtly discouraged from joining our field altogether, and, as others have pointed out in the past, that means we're missing out on a full 50% of potential awesome developers (or whatever other subfield you want to talk about).

Or potentially so. We don't know, because there isn't a truly equal sense of this field being a possibility.

[rbellio]

I just want to say that I think it's great that you're impassioned about this topic. I'm definitely not trying to discourage you from it. My reticence comes more from the fact that this is such a complicated topic for me.

On one hand, I'm all for supporting the goals and opportunities of all individuals equally. When it requires special interest in certain groups though, I sometimes worry that it will create a larger divide. Sexual identity has such a huge impact on us during our developmental stages. The pressures of it don't just stem from adults, but from peers and school as well. I'm of the opinion that rather than singling out individuals by sex, it would be more valuable to expose all of them to it.

This is anecdotal, but I have a personal experience with a program that encouraged more adoption of specific fields by females in my classes. In middle school, a large number of girls were separated from the regular classes to attend special math and science classes. These girls were provided a more in-depth education when it came to mathematics and were given more support in learning the material. It really irked me, especially at that young age. I couldn't understand why these girls were being singled out for certain topics and why I couldn't be involved with them simply because I was a boy. I can't speak to the effectiveness of this program. I do know that a large percentage of these girls ended up in my high school math and science classes which regularly had a nearly 50/50 split, but again, that's not evidence that the program worked.

What it did do, though, was make me realize that I was not an equal. It was probably my first realization that not everyone was treated equally and that there was really no rhyme or reason to why. I saw similar things throughout my years in school, but this one affected me the most. When I hear about the professional female organizations that go to schools and encourage girls specifically to pursue careers in mathematics or engineering, I cringe. I want equality, but I don't know how inequality gets us there.

[shadowfiend]

I think the point of those situations is to make sure they're not under the impression they're alone in domains where, if you don't do specific programs, girls often think they are. Essentially, you create a social support net that may not otherwise be there.

In my view, you're technically right. We shouldn't have to emphasize one side over the other. The problem is we're combating an existing, underlying emphasis. If a balance scale is unbalanced towards one side, you don't balance it out by adding weight to both sides. You have to add weight to the one side until you've restored balance.

Now, I think it's fair to question how much we should segregate and isolate with respect to that. What you describe as happening in middle school is probably not the best approach. I think it would probably make more sense to open a whole class, gender-unspecific, but, again to create that social support, perhaps try to group the girls in the class into one of the sections (assuming there are multiple ones). The problem is, in that case, probably a marketing one. Presenting it as an girls only course may increase the mystery and interest, and, thus, enrollment.