My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 26, 2007 2:28 UTC (Wed) by jordanb (guest, #45668)
In reply to: My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet) by djabsolut
Parent article: My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

> a large proportion of women are not interested in computing or engineering
> due to the nature of the work.

I agree with the previous poster that the low percentage of women in Computers (far lower, by my reckoning, than even the hard sciences) can't entirely be explained by 'the nature of the work.'

But I also don't buy the feminist argument in all these articles that it's caused by an overly 'male' culture in computing. As others have said in response to several of the previous articles in this series, if the problem is that the computer field is too aggressive, or too 'male,' or has too many 'assholes' in it, then why don't you see similar aversion by women to medicine or law, where the aggressive 'maleness' can't be any better---and in fact probably is far worse given that those fields are more attractive to Type A sorts.

I suspect that (as has been said before) the real problem in computers, is the lack of social reinforcement. More women than men need social reinforcement and encouragement to be drawn to a field so many woman (and probably quite a few men, but nevertheless fewer) are prone to aversion from *our* field. The question we should probably be asking is why our field carries so little respect in society. Bad portrayal by the media? Not enough professionalism? Something different entirely? I think we can attract more woman to the field but it'll have to come about by improving our image.