| There's a lot that can be said about this but I want to give a personal answer to a question that has come up in this thread already, and that comes up often in these kinds of discussions. It's usually framed as something like, "why do we care if there are more women in the programming world or not?" Here are a few answers that are true for me. Maybe these will resonate with some of you. - I often meet women or read accounts written by women who struggle to simply exist in the world of programming without feeling like they are being called out as women all the time. This includes everything from being assumed to be ignorant of concepts to losing out on opportunities to being sexually harassed. As a male programmer, this makes me uncomfortable and unhappy as well--I want my female colleagues to feel welcomed and to equally "own" the identify of "computer programmer" (or software engineer, or what-have-you). Having more women programmers would help this, in many ways. - I think it is possible we are missing out on some brilliant programmers coming into this field who could contribute things we haven't yet conceived of. Having more women programmers is not going to upset the balance in a zero-sum game; it's more for everyone. So having more women programmers could potentially help the world as well as provide all of us with more excellent colleagues. - I would like to have more women colleagues because I enjoy the experience of working with women. Yes, I think women are different from men--but this is obvious if only because women will always experience the world differently from men. So I think having this perspective can only enrich a project and provide a more fertile ground for a successful project or team to grow. I want to add one more thing. I get the sense that a lot of male commenters on HN feel immediately defensive about this subject, and feel like somehow they are going to lose something if they acknowledge that there is anything wrong or anything that could be fixed, or at worst, acknowledge that there is something that they could have handled better in the past. But consider this: working in development, a concept that comes up again and again is software having a "smell." It seems obvious to me that the constant issues that come up relating to sexism in the industry is a very strong smell, albeit within the social fabric of the larger programming community. And it's equally obvious that the defensive, knee-jerk reaction is not productive. Consider, how would you approach this if it was a bug, and just wouldn't go away? If you were a good developer, first you would spend serious time trying to understand the problem and dig into it deeply, before you started writing code willy-nilly, right? |