[zanny]

> what's the "correct" percentage

Whatever numer of people that, barring societal interference, in an isolated vacuum with neutral exposure to all professions, choose the profession based only on personality and aptitude.

Maybe some market pressure towards in-demand professions, but that should be mostly extrinsic to someone in their developmental years until after they are exposed to most possible career paths.

Like the OP mentions, it isn't something that the software industry alone can solve, and IMO, all the affirmative action only does the inverse draw that doesn't actually attract those with a passion, but those for the easy access or money. It require society collectively to get over itself and stop thinking you can't do STEM without a Y chromosome, and it needs to stop demonizing the intellectually curious girls. But that is hard, because the parents of those girls were raised the same way.

[rayiner]

I think people are unnecessarily scared of affirmative action. In the 1960's, law was 95% men. Sandra Day O'Connor could only get a job as a secretary at a law firm despite graduating third in her class at Stanford. After aggressive affirmative action, today the mostly even gender ratio in large law firms is completely self-perpetuating.

I think that teaches us two things:

1) It's foolish to jump to conclusions about the "natural number" of women in programming. If you equalize the ratio and it sticks when you remove the affirmative action, that's the natural number.

2) Affirmative action can work when it comes to gender issues, even if it has been less successful for race issues. I think that's because gender doesn't have heritable socioeconomic status like race. A girl is equally likely as a boy to be born into a family that can say afford college, but that's not true of say blacks and whites.