Data point: My mother was a programmer back in the 1950s. She wrote numerical programs that simulated missile trajectories... in octal. She thought it was great when she got an assembler.
I don't recall her ever saying anything about discrimination on the job. The thing she griped about was being told by a math professor that math was no place for a woman.
Maybe there are some gating effects happening that steer women away from trying technical fields? It seems to me that, within most software places, you belong if you know your stuff. Nobody cares about your race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or other basis for "discrimination". We care if you can code. (If you can't code, and got the job as a token person-of-that-color/gender/sexual orientation, then we usually have a problem with that, but that's not the same as bias against that color or gender or sexual orientation.)
That's the way it's been almost everywhere I've ever worked, and I've been in software for 25 years.
So what I'm trying to say is, there's almost always room for some introspection, but maybe we're too hard on ourselves? Maybe the lack of women in software isn't really the software guys' fault?
I don't recall her ever saying anything about discrimination on the job. The thing she griped about was being told by a math professor that math was no place for a woman.
Maybe there are some gating effects happening that steer women away from trying technical fields? It seems to me that, within most software places, you belong if you know your stuff. Nobody cares about your race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or other basis for "discrimination". We care if you can code. (If you can't code, and got the job as a token person-of-that-color/gender/sexual orientation, then we usually have a problem with that, but that's not the same as bias against that color or gender or sexual orientation.)
That's the way it's been almost everywhere I've ever worked, and I've been in software for 25 years.
So what I'm trying to say is, there's almost always room for some introspection, but maybe we're too hard on ourselves? Maybe the lack of women in software isn't really the software guys' fault?