[kbambz]

Actually, I didn't know what "computer science" was until mid-high school, and I was extremely lucky to have attended one that happened to offer a few extracurricular CS classes (I'd toyed around with HTML and CSS and built a few Geocities sites when I was around 11, but that's certainly not what I'd consider "exposure to CS"). But I don't think that's an issue of gender so much as a failure of the education system to integrate topics of CS into standard curricula.

The "problem" is the girl with straight As in my high school BC calculus class who refused to take CS because "that's hard, I wouldn't be good at it" (true story, and it confused the hell out of me when she said it). The fact of the matter is people AREN'T just "not interested". I really wouldn't care if only 0.2% of the tech industry was female or <insert-label-here>, so long as it's because they either aren't capable or interested. But I don't buy that. We've come a long, long, long way, but we're not there yet. And all the screaming and finger-pointing, such as that which PG has received (misquoted or not), just distracts from addressing what actually matters.

P.S. We actually explicitly argued AGAINST affirmative action in the post. I could go on about that for ages, but I'll just say this: I want to be held to the same standards as any other demographic, be it race, sex, or shirt color, and I don't want to have to question the legitimacy of my failures OR successes. If I thought I'd been given a handout because I have two X chromosomes, I'd be pissed.