[gwwar]

A few points:

1) It's 2013. If you work with men that don't know women are people, find a new job. If they did something excessively stupid or harmful, you should sue them to discourage them from harassing other women. Interviewing is a two way street, you should not only prove that you're able to do a job, but also find out if you want to work with these people.

2) Why learn from asshole managers? The internet exists. Learning a new framework is easier than ever with superb documentation and tutorials. For the fundamentals, some CS courses are fully available online. You can even go back to school.

3) Yes, it is a numbers game. There are a small number of women who major in CS/EE, and from that pool of people there are an even smaller percentage who stick with it and get jobs in tech. Now as to _why_ fewer women are majoring in CS than in the past is something we should be investigating.

4) Seeing that it's mostly men who have jobs in tech, it makes sense that you'll see a small representation of women in VC backed companies.

5) If VC's are unconsciously discriminating against people who don't look like Mark Zuckerberg, what's stopping you from bootstrapping? The costs of starting a software company are smaller than ever.

[simonv3]

On 3) why is it that in a field where people are lauded (especially here on HN) when they drop out of college or skip college all together and are successful, we continue to come back to the "there are less women graduates" argument?

[gwwar]

The lack of credentials are usually forgiven when he or she is a founder/entrepreneur or an early hire. If they happen to be successful (which is rare) why wouldn't we celebrate that? Everyone loves an underdog story.

Now with that in mind, would you hire someone that didn't have a degree?

A degree is a basic filter. How do you prove you have some knowledge about computers and programming? Traditionally it's a degree. If someone already has a bias that women can't program, the chances that she'll land an interview without a degree is slim to none.

In any case, a proper university will teach you the fundamentals. They will give you tools that will help you continue learning in the future, like how to recognize categories of problems, and a general sense of how things are abstracted from high level languages down to the bare metal. Learning "practical" knowledge of current languages/frameworks should be easy after that.

If I'm hiring for an open developer position and they have no degree (in CS/Math/Physics), it's usually a red flag for me.