For quite a while, I have been thinking about this issue. Recently, MHacks (University of Michigan's hackathon) made it aware that they were devoting more efforts to bringing more women to their event. Also in the news is Paul Graham's comments about the gender gap in tech. After reading articles (https://medium.com/p/e034a09248c1) and observing discussions in facebook groups (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1384252878496456/), i'm bringing this conversation to the genius hacker news community. Please answer- what do you think needs to be done to bring more women into technology, programming, and CS related fields?
Hypothesis: As long as "technology" is considered playing with "in-animate" objects, you won't eliminate the gender gap.<p>Women are empirically more interested/specialized in "animated" objects (ie, living things and social relatinships), due to human physiology/biology and social operant conditioning.<p>The premise that such a (non-uniform) distribution is unethical, unproductive, or un-natural lacks evidentiary data to support it.<p>It may very well make (biological or evolutinary) sense; condider a port-folio effect from social-pair bonds (m,f) with reproductive potency.<p>In plain english, a team of two specialists may be more powerful than an aggregation of individuals as "jack of all trades".<p>These are not easily or trivially dismissed complications.<p>Also, notice this dimensionalization is not along the axis of a "social problem", in the game-theoretic sense, like the prisoner's dilemma.<p>The only assumptions are two: non-uniform preferences, and non-linear returns to scale from learning-by-doing. neither of these seem overly controversial.
How many female friends do you have that are into tech or enjoy programming or have taken it up as a hobby? How many women in engineering classes or computing science courses? Relatively less than men by a big margin.<p>Of course there's going to be a gender gap, because the pool is already filled with men. I've worked with women developers and they are perfectly fine like any other developer. Yes, there were more men than women. HR has more women and they are not at all interested in tech.<p>Gender is not an issue, it's that relatively compared to men, women seems to be less interested and hence making up a smaller portion of the job pool. I mean does software development need to be segregated like washrooms too so that we can have more women? If so, please do it.<p>Nobody is suppressing women from getting into technology field. How can you change the nature of the entire gender so that they fit this gap? How can you change evolution and gender specific social expectations?