Okay, so it isn't a meditation about perl, but it is something i spent some time meditating about, so I figured it should go here.

There has been some recent discussion about Abigail's gender (a topic not ultimately worth a nanofortnight's attention), which led to the topic of the dirth of female programmers. In particular, sierrathedog64, said that "something not very good for women is going on", which got me to thinking. What is this "not very good thing"? There isn't some programmer boys' club, standing firmly on a glass ceiling, and if there is, I haven't seen it. As a matter of fact, one manager I spoke to (who sincerely regretted accepting his promotion) said he'd hire a woman over a man with the same credentials, because they tend to outperform.

Why, then, are there so few female programmers? Well, I've spoken to a few women about it, and all but one (who is a programmer herself) find the idea of spending the required amount of time in front of a computer extremely distasteful, generally citing preferable activities. So programming is simply not an attractive activity to women (in general). In fact, the female mind is apparently predisposed away from programming because of its tendency to multitask rather than superfocus, among other things (I'm being very vague because I don't remember where I read about this, nor exactly what it said).

So is this bad? I don't really see why, since it isn't a survival-of-the-species matter, and there isn't a conscious anti-woman effort. Programmers will be programmers, male or female, as long as there are contraptions to play with.

~Cybercosis

nemo accipere quod non merere

In reply to Female Programmers-WOT by Cybercosis

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.