This is Not ok

Low afro-american/hispanic participation can be explained in large part by lack of high quality education, lack of computers, etc. There is some residual, but nothing like the vast disparity that exists for women despite a lack of acceptable reasons.

I think the point of those situations is to make sure they're not under the impression they're alone in domains where, if you don't do specific programs, girls often think they are. Essentially, you create a social support net that may not otherwise be there.

In my view, you're technically right. We shouldn't have to emphasize one side over the other. The problem is we're combating an existing, underlying emphasis. If a balance scale is unbalanced towards one side, you don't balance it out by adding weight to both sides. You have to add weight to the one side until you've restored balance.

Now, I think it's fair to question how much we should segregate and isolate with respect to that. What you describe as happening in middle school is probably not the best approach. I think it would probably make more sense to open a whole class, gender-unspecific, but, again to create that social support, perhaps try to group the girls in the class into one of the sections (assuming there are multiple ones). The problem is, in that case, probably a marketing one. Presenting it as an girls only course may increase the mystery and interest, and, thus, enrollment.

Who said Augusta shouldn't have male-only members? The point is that IT departments shouldn't behave like private clubs. The industry behaves like a private club, but it isn't a private club.

You have some very interesting points.

My mom always says(Who had a working career of almost 30 years), that working women live in a world of their own. Her sisters never went to work. She always found that amazing, that a few individuals can spend their whole life doing nothing. Yet now when you talk to my aunts they live in their own world where they have every reason in the world why not working is right. When they both talk about it, men and their influences rarely pop up. Its always discussions about work life balance, stress, affects on kids and own physical and biological selves.

In my opinion the bigger struggle in empowering women will not be to counsel men, but women themselves. Most women who don't go to work do for their own reasons, and not because men don't want them to work. If you can convince women to come out of their comfort zones, take risks, try and even taste failure at times. Let me tell you women will be far well off.

But there are always going to jobs which are going to very demanding for women. There are also security issues with respect to working and traveling late nights, pushing very tough long work hour schedules. Most of those clots will dissolve slowly with time.

Remember in ancient times, women used to work in fields with men all the time and that generally used to do a lot of work more physically demanding than what most women have today. If it worked fine then, it can now. But the transformation will be slow.

How is that a barrier? Extremely problematic? What the heck?

First, note that it's my impression that logic and action are more dominant with men. Based on my experience on life, women, men, and relationships, logic and action seems to strenghten men's inherent identities. Men feel manly when they build stuff and solve problems, and that's generally essential to a male identifying himself as a man. This applies to cocky behaviour and winning women, too.

Now, women can certainly do both. I know women with high capabilities in logic and action such as my wife but the thing is that women often choose not to: their identities are enforced by other things in life. Unlike with men, for women it's not essential to exercise logical problems in order to be a woman. My wife doesn't rediscover her feminine identity in solving problems and fixing stuff eventhough she has done and succeeded in that before we met. My daughter is more interested in fixing bicycles and learning to use the tools in my toolbox than my son is, but it's the other things that she already does that she's using to learn how to grow up to become a woman.

Thus, I suggested the especially masculine trait of enjoying logic might contribute to the gender bias of programming as it seems to contribute to the gender bias of other activities, too. (Or it might not, but I didn't happen to suggest that.)

It's not a barrier, however. It's choosing not to drink, even if brought down to the water. And that's perfectly okay!

This might just be too much to accept for people of naivete. Men and women are different and there's generally no way around that in the long run.

EDIT: Back to the topic: programming doesn't give a squat about whether you're a man or a woman. It only requires logical capabilities and the willingness to use them. It doesn't dictate where the willingness comes from and for what I know, my fellow programmers don't give a rat's ass who wrote the code. They would accept women where they accept men because gender isn't a criteria in communicating with source code.