Increasing participation of women in Free and Open Source Software (opensource.com)

Yeah, different people are different, within genders more than between genders.

My sister and I were brought up by the same parents. She likes to cook; I'm a bit afraid of it. We're both good at public speaking. I really love _The Left Hand of Darkness_ and she couldn't get into it. She is a good swimmer and plays golf, and I prefer handball and hiking. She has a head for languages and speaks Kannada and Hindi and some Spanish; I have utterly nonfunctional Russian. So, yeah, it's okay that not everyone is born with the urge to make muxes and demuxes out of LEGO. Some subset of us will someday show some interest in STEM, some earlier and some later, and it's important to nurture and not block those people -- to give everyone the chance to grow in that direction.

And people also change over the course of our lives. When I was a teen I was TERRIBLE at social skills and she was "the one who can make friends," but now I've caught up and I socialize really quite well. :) So, don't be surprised if your middle daughter takes up software in her thirties, or your eldest daughter starts a business and has a specific goal that gets her tinkering, etc.

That goal-oriented thing is interesting. I know a guy who majored in history - never wrote a line of code till he was in his late twenties. He was interested in helping work on the environment. It turned out that one way to help address deforestation was to track satellite imagery and see when pixels turned from green to brown or black. Along the way he's learned Python and now he's a reasonably competent programmer -- because he got a goal, a reason to start to learn the relevant tool. If you look at the successes of the Archive Of Our Own and Dreamwidth projects, you see several middle-aged people contributing -- people of all genders coding for the first time -- because for the first time they see a reason to pick up an IDE, to make functionality they genuinely want, and because they can help others thereby.

It really is true that girls are less likely to be encouraged -- in ANY way -- to tinker with software or hardware. You have three daughters, and you've tried encouraging them, and one of them has shown an interest, and you've nurtured it. Yay! You may say "But it's only one out of three. :(" But of course there are families where one-third of the daughters would be interested in pursuing these interests, except that the parents and uncles and neighbors say "that's not going to get you a husband" or "you have time to do that and you don't have time to babysit your brother?" or "but you don't really need that computer, your cousin needs it" or "no of course you can't go to that hacking thing, good girls don't do that sort of thing" or "you think they want you in that program? you're going to make a fool of yourself in front of all of those guys" etc. etc. etc. And then the throughput is zero.

We've never had a society where -- from birth to retirement -- the average girl and the average boy has experienced about the same amount of genuine encouragement in STEM. Let's try it!