[sp332]

Computing is a very young field. It's well on its way to infiltrating our everyday lives, but it's incredibly underdeveloped. Leaving women out of the process of creating the world we're going to live in seems like a really bad idea.

[Jach]

What exactly are the mental differences between men and women that lead you to think it'd be a "really bad idea" if women didn't have any role at all in steering the future? (Last time we let a woman try to steer the future, we wound up with COBOL! (Joke alert.))

Is some force actually "leaving out" women in creating the future? Is there some force that's going to lay the smackdown on people like Jeri Ellsworth so that they never go anywhere?

You've shifted the goal posts a bit with the emphasis on having more women in positions of creating the future. Personally, I'd rather humanity had more people willing and capable of creating a better future, period, regardless of the other details of their identity. I think there's a shortage, and I regret that my own contributions will if anything likely only be financial to those doing the hard work. Anyway, why would the tech field, as a whole, be better off with more women, when most people in the tech field, male or female, actually don't actively contribute to steering the future?

(On your earlier point about income inequality, you might benefit from reading PG's views about that: http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html)

[mkr-hn]

The garbage man and the bus driver see little benefit from the latest SV IPO. How about a program to encourage people to move into higher potential roles and keep an eye out for implementors giving unfair benefit to one gender/class/whatever.

[sp332]

Even as a young white male, I don't see much benefit from it either :) I like your idea though!

[johnbm]

I just don't buy this argument. As others said, it is 2014, not 1990. Women now outnumber men in colleges 3 to 2, and this is somehow not an issue of discrimination or inequality, on the contrary, it is now apparently more important than ever that we eradicate the few areas where men still unambiguously dominate the outcomes.

The only thing that has changed is society's view of computer geeks, which has evolved from pathetic neckbeards to entrepreneurial wizards. And big surprise, now all of a sudden feminists are concerned about all the sexism and rampant harassment that's supposedly unique to tech.

Every conference I've been to, I've seen men falling over themselves to placate and humor the few women that do show up. Sexism? The vast majority is of the benevolent kind, the kind the feminists themselves constantly advocate for. The kind that makes men watch what they say when a woman enters the room, for fear of triggering another Adria Richards. And the kind that pisses off any capable woman with self-respect.

[sp332]

Those are all legitimate problems. But back to the actual topic: why do you think women aren't interested in computer science?

[johnbm]

Because computer science is a lonely pursuit, with long hours, requiring an obsessive focus on abstract problems. I saw women consistently self-select into biomedical applications and chemical engineering, away from the hard theoretical work like physics and comp sci.

On top of that, engineering is one of the fields which has the largest attrition rate amongst its students. It's clear that just thinking you want to be an engineer is not enough to succeed at it.

Add to that the fact that women are inundated with the message that they absolutely should go into STEM, and I think you have a recipe for disillusionment that merely shifts the attrition further down the pipeline. Which is exactly what we find: after 10 years, many more women leave the field than men.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for any woman that does make it in the field, but they've pretty much all been the kind of atypical go-getter personalities that other, more girly women, feel intimidated by.