[slowmovintarget]

The interest part is not nothing. Most women programmers I've known were on their way to something they considered better. My wife, for example, slung C++ and Java while getting her MBA in evening classes. For her programming was a path to earn a living until she got her 'real' job on the executive track. Another woman I worked with only wrote code for a while and moved on to run her father's machine shop. In both cases these women were good at what they did, but saw software development as something to do before the real job.

I interviewed at a company a week or so ago and was very happy to see their lead developer was a woman. I didn't dare bring up the topic in the interview, but I'd have loved to hear if she was aiming for CTO at a later point in her career instead of escaping tech work.

The shame of it is, almost any dev team I've been on is better with at least one capable woman on it, yet so few stay.

[amyjess]

> My wife, for example, slung C++ and Java while getting her MBA in evening classes. For her programming was a path to earn a living until she got her 'real' job on the executive track. Another woman I worked with only wrote code for a while and moved on to run her father's machine shop. In both cases these women were good at what they did, but saw software development as something to do before the real job.

It's been my observation that the bulk of female programmers aren't hobbyists and just program because it's a job and it pays well enough. When they go home, they don't think about code.

There are exceptions (hell, I'm one of them, and I personally know a couple others), but in general, female hackers are much rarer than female programmers.

I'm not sure if it's proportionate to guys or not. There are plenty of male programmers who aren't hobbyists either (think of the legions of VB drones in the '90s). I don't know if the just-another-job to hobbyist ratio is just more noticable with girls because there are fewer of us in general or if the percentages are actually different.

[rmc]

But how much of that "lack of interest" is due to the person not finding the thing interesting, or not finding the industry/their peers interesting? If there are sexists in a group, then people who are the target of that sexism are less likely to enjoy that group. As the number of women decreases in a group, then the remaining women experience more sexism. Negative feedback.

[facepalm]

Well do you have an answer? To me it seems highly unlikely that all the women have been turned away by sexism. I remember the times when programming and computers where considered extremely unsexy and basically made you an outcast and unlikely to get a girl-friend. Computer kids back then would have been very happy to meet a girl who was interested in computer stuff.

[amyjess]

The worst of the sexism comes from other girls.

Nerdy boys largely get ignored by their non-nerdy peers. There's an attitude of "I don't know why anybody would like that, but whatever".

On the other hand, nerdy girls are treated like absolute shit by other girls. Instead of "not my cup of tea", it's more like "eww, that's disgusting, and you're disgusting for liking it". The movie Mean Girls could have been a documentary.

And adults can influence this too. Even well-meaning feminists are more likely to steer young girls towards careers in more "acceptable" professions like business, law, or medicine rather than something down-and-dirty like engineering. And if science is involved, it's likely to be either medicine or a research career in natural sciences (e.g. physics, chemistry).

[rmc]

> The movie Mean Girls could have been a documentary.

Mean Girls was actually based on a book on helping your teenage daughter survive bullying in school ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Bees_and_Wannabes )...

[kazagistar]

There is a large difference between being treated as a professional equal, and being treated as potential meat by sex starved nerds...

[facepalm]

So you say yourself that girls don't like nerds. So who is to blame? And the "treated as potential meat" remark is just sexist from you.

Also those where the days of playing video games on home computers. Professional IT work was decades later.

And boys weren't the gate keeper to the technology either - how should that have worked? Today as then, if you are interested in doing stuff with computers, nobody can prevent you from doing it.

[rmc]

> So you say yourself that girls don't like nerds.

No many women don't like being hit on constantly by people. That's not the same thing as "not liking nerds".

[facepalm]

You are creating a fantasy narrative. I guarantee you that nerds don't constantly hit on girls or women. They are famous for not doing that and being more concerned about their computers instead.

My claim was that nerds back in the days of home computers would have been happy to meet a girl interested in computers. That is a far stretch from the Beavies and Butthead scenario you are trying to create. It's simply normal and healthy to hope for other human beings to share some interests with you.

[bkeroack]

That phenomenon is not limited to women. Corporate software engineering is a pretty dead-end occupation. You hit an income and title plateau quickly, and--especially in the startup world--ageism starts to kick in after that.