[jeremyarussell]

I think you missed the point on that by a bit. See the point was men don't generally become nurses as often as women, because of the social stigma that it's a woman's job.

The way I figure there is no biological reason why a girl wouldn't want to expand her mental capacities via technology and programming. It's strictly because it's seen as a nerdy guy stuck in basement thing, then the brogrammers came out and people realized it's also a guy-that-views-women-as-objects field. Yeah, those brogrammers really helped the cause.

Went off on a bit of a tangent there. Sorry.

[Ntrails]

Actually, I was intentionally pointing out the absurdity of the blanket statement being made, whilst attempting to apply humour. I did consider being a nurse, when training to help with a family members illness the nurse teaching me suggested I would be good at it. I was not interested, in large part for the exact reasons I listed above.

I would also like to point out that the gender imbalance in nursing is not blamed on the nurses - you yourself describe it as a social stigma.

Fixing societal attitudes needs something rather more than an introspection on the tech industry and why we are full of terrible people. It needs parents and schools to encourage girls to study the relevant areas, it needs schools to get all of their pupils trying out basic programming in a rewarding, exciting and gender neutral environment.

I could be wrong - but to my mind this is a problem in all of STEM and fixing it needs a broad response to treat it as a single issue.

N.B. Women not going to conferences because they are home to a host of manchildren who spend half their time drunk is a separate issue and one deserving of serious attention.

EDIT: I have no idea why some of this seems to be in italics. Sorry :(

[prodigal_erik]

(Asterisks are markup for italics, see http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc for some details.)