The Manly Task of Programming
 

In thread http://www.programmingforums.org/for...ad.php?t=10046 it was pointed out that professional programmers are mostly men. Can anybody give a good reason why that is so?

Does it come from the days when computers were huge ungainly machines taking up a wole basement?

Programming was done with punch-cards that could weigh hundreds of pounds for large programs?

Then there was the weight of stacks of tapes and disk platters?

Well, these were a few questions my dad brought up. On the lighter side of things, can you write a Python program to figure out if the author of a thread is male or female?

My experience is that women programmers are more common in the end of programming I call "bank programming." Information management, and so forth. I've known a couple of really good ones and some not so good, same as men.

It's kind of sad when you look at things from an even wider scale. A great deal of the "science" fields in general are male-dominated.

My significant other is currently working through a Computer Energering degree and she's the only female out of her class. It provides very interesting but also frustrating challanges.

Can you imagine the shoe being on the other foot? Imagine being in a large class where you're the only male person...EVERYONE knows your name dispite the fact you may only know a few people, and you fade in the backround and stand out all at the same time.

And then getting out into industry and having to face the same thing. A man needs to leave work eairly from work to pick up their kid....who notices or cares as long as they have permission? If a woman (pehaps the only woman) does the same...her absense is more readily noticed and any number of misconceptions may start to bubble up...just as an example.

I really don't have an answer to how how it became a male dominated industry, but it's up to us guys to help create a comfortable and productive enviroment where women in sciences can feel at ease and not intimidated by a room full of testosterone. :)

Brang it on! :D

I'm pretty sure a great deal comes from the left/right side brain things. Whichever side involves the use of math, will also be related to programming. Men are said to be stronger in this area, although current studies are leading to prove things to be turning around ...

Well, I think it is to do with the genders' innate abilities for different things.

I'm at college at the moment in an "all boys" school (not secterian or anything weird though) but we have an "all girls" counterpart down the road so we still get to know each other and stuff. Most of the girls I know from the girls' school are the ones who are very academic and ambitious. The one who is top of the class in her school (in maths), achieves only the same sort marks as a fairly good male student at our school, in things like maths and chemistry. But, as expected by most people, more of the girls beat us in history, english literature, biology, French (non of these are my choices). Women, in general, find the more abstract subjects more interesting. Therefore, computer science and programming are definitely not areas most women would want to get into (I know some of you will say that programming needs imagination and creativity and abstract thought, but it doesn't really seem that way to most people, does it?).

Certainly, everytime I try to teach my best friend's girlfriend ("Headgirl" at their school) how to count in binary on her fingers, she loses interest pretty quickly until we get to number 4 :D

Do you mean once you get to number four? *confused*

No, I mean until. Just try counting in binary on your fingers ... *waits for Sane to get it* so yes, even though she's 17, she's still immature enough to giggle at that.

(I read somewhere once that geeks should all be able to count up to 31 on one hand ... was I misinformed? :P)

Ah middle finger. Good game. :p

A bit off-topic but you should to see this: http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/coder/6a20/

Wish the shipping wasn't so expensive to the UK ...