When She Codes, The Revolution’s Coming

I have one to offer, though I will admit it is reasonably controversial in various dimensions (e.g. sexist, etc.):

- I am /of the opinion/ that young women have greater social intelligence and nuanced sensitivity than young men.

- And, that (IMO) here in America there is a prevalent negative social attitude towards nerds/geeks/intellectuals.

- Matters have certainly improved since the realization that "nerds" can become tycoons, and some are recognized. But it should be noted that this does not indicate a change is societal attitude towards geeks. Linus Torvalds is not a household name. Zuckermann is well known, but he is a business success and celebrated for his business (and yes, social), and not technical, acumen.

- The field, in my experience, is one of the most meritocratic in existence today in our society (which is the primary reason I continue a professional practice). I would code for fun, regardless.

- But, it is certainly true in my experience that the workforce was and remains preponderantly male, although it seems to have improved (but see below).

The summation of above considerations gives support to a thought that is further reinforced by a consideration of the female colleagues I have worked with over the past 20 years:

Every single one was either an immigrant (1 Israeli, 1 Romanian, 1 Pakistani, 1 Brazilian, & recently quite a few Indian and/or Russian/Eastern European women), or, the designated brainiac social minority group that themselves celebrate cerebral members, e.g. Jewish and Asian Americans, etc. In fact, my first female coworker (who happened to also be my boss/team-lead) was a Cooper Union grad and a Chinese American.

Finally, let me tell you a very simple human fact: most of us men in the field would probably be very happy to have a more balanced work environment. So the thought that we would go out of our way to discriminate against women flies in the face of both personal experience (I interviewed and selected the Israeli and the Romanian as the de facto CTO of a startup in '89), and my general understanding of my fellow male geeks.

(Also, note that I made an effort to reach out to a fellow geek (female, of course) that I only know via her github projects. She confirmed that "agism" was what concerned her most.)

None of this is to offer a conclusive explanation, but I am of the strong opinion that:

when the day arrives that (American) society adopts the same social respect/capital towards its cerebral members that it currently affords business, media, and sports personalities, will be the day that will see young cerebral women make the (intelligent and thoughtful) choice to enter into the field (and related fields, such as Mathematics) in greater numbers.

(End opinion)

That's simply not true. Countess Lovelace was a brilliant algorithmic wrangler. She was one of the first of her time to realise that any mathematically definable problem could be reduced to a series of true/false branches and that from that a machine (mechanical or electronic) would be able to make calculations of almost any type.

She also was behind a lot of analysis of stuff like log table errors.

This is probably more the definition of a Systems Analyst, but that job doesn't exist anymore, so we would regard her as a coder.

Oh, I'm all for everyone tinkering, that's practically a sacrament. But

> If we allow the future of the web, software, hardware, video games, etc. to be conceptualized, created and maintained by just one sector of the population, it’s impossible to expect that it will serve the needs of the entire group.

and

> We recognize the power of diversity and want to seek ways to attract more women and girls in to the tech industry – for their own personal benefit and the overall potential of the industry.

suggest the goal is to substantially change the face of the industry. And the existing filter is entirely inadequate for a large number of candidates only moderately interested.

That's simply not backed by evidence. It was Charles Babbage who most likely wrote the first "program" not to mention he created and thought of them without any help from her. Her role is greatly exaggerated and usually baseless. It's like if you credit me about with the invention of search technology if I say something like that will power the search of everything.

If she were a man, I doubt we would be mentioning her, just like the man who her set of notes were based on (with the program done by Babbage in the appendix). Either way, it's not all that important as I don't think anyone in computer science was influenced by this work, Babbage included. He is a historical interest and ahead of his time.