Jeni's Musings

You are right that a lot can change to make computing more accommodating to women. You make many valid points.

I won’t rehash those. I will nitpick a bit :).

I take exception to the following paragraph:

“Another tack might be to shift the focus onto those aspects of computing that women feel better at, such as communication and teamwork. In other words, make computing about more than hammering away on your own to create the fastest, most succinct code the world has ever seen. Stress working with clients, producing documented and understandable code and sharing knowledge with others. (In fact, several of the practices of Extreme Programming emphasise precisely these aspects of development.)”

I think computing is about the “hard” stuff and not the “soft” stuff. When I read programming.reddit.com, I don’t want to read about teamwork and communication, except for when these things are part of the bigger picture. Mostly, I want to get to the technical things. I love this field because I love the technical parts.

Teamwork and communication are important. But they don’t constitute computing any more than management theory does.

I once went to a SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network) meeting. One woman, who obviously doesn’t like the technicalities of programming, tried very hard to argue that good software doesn’t need good programmers. I can’t tell you what a drag it was to hear this.

In some cases, the culture of computing needs to be changed. I’m fine with that. But I don’t want the content to be changed.