Women and male engineering?

Women and male engineering?

Developing software is a sort of engineering. Doing that in an open source project usually means "engineering for fun". Few women can find the fun in that - it is difficult, non-routine work, it exposes that you make a lot of mistakes and you have to correct them, why is that supposed to be fun? If there's a fundamental gender problem with understanding why writing free software is a thing you like to do, changing little things won't help. Most women prefer not-so-difficult routine work, where they can excell by being quicker and more reliable than men, which are more easy bored by that kind of work. Math-affine women more likely study accounting than computer science.

Also, we have changed our way to communicate with each others to be more female. Alan Cox and Linus Torvalds recently were bitching around over some TTY stuff. It sounded all like they are lacking testosterone, and working on estrogen instead ;-). Alan Cox even gave the impression that despite the computer said he was wrong, he still ought to be right, because his reasoning is better. And he then said "I'm no longer doing this, look for someone else" and left maintaining the TTY code. Ok, he did sleep over it and build up some testosterone to become more reasonable, but this communication style shouldn't be a barrier to females ;-).