Jeni's Musings

Hi!

> Why we need to have an equal number of men and women in every job field known to man is beyond me. Women freely choose not to be programmers. That is manifestly not a problem, and certainly not a problem that needs fixing.

This hinges on the definition of "freely". If we're in a society where men have personal access to computers earlier in age and are more likely to have access than women, where a boy's interest in computing is encouraged and a girl's is dismissed, and when interested women are shown sexism, we're clearly not having women "freely" choose whether or not to be programmers.

Along with the excellent references I've seen in this thread so far, people might be interested in the two PDFs of the FLOSSPOLS report, which specifically looked at the reasons for women failing to join open-source communities. While the number of women in the software industry in general is bad, the number in open-source communities (<1%) is close to being non-existent, which makes the kind of feedback loop Jeni talked about -- with few female role models to follow and be inspired by -- a very real and pressing problem.

Thanks for the excellent blog posts!

- Chris.