Two comments from a male feminist.

First, there are a higher fraction of women perl programmers than you'll find in "the perl community." My boss, my officemate, and the other person who reports to my boss are all women perl programmers. They don't live to program, and they have more important things to do than hanging out on perlmonks or going to boston.pm meetings... In monastic terms, for them, programming is an occupation, not a vocation. This bears out one of the things Cybercosis said above, about women finding other preferable activities; and Abigail's comment about women possibly "hiding" in the perl world. I'm not certain this is really a problem. In contrast there are plenty of women programmers, if you look in the right places, such as in biotech (see above comment about my boss, officemate, and co-worker). I would say the number of women who program is going to increase considerably in the next decade as more schools offer CS/biotech degrees. Which is definitely a healthy sign.

Second point: It is worth pointing out that "women tend to do X and men tend to do Y" is a simplistic statement which ignores the fact that the range of behaviors within each gender is much greater than the difference between the genders.

If you asked 100 people on the street about their behaviors along particular traits that are typically considered "masculine" or "feminine", you'll find that many traits typically described as "masculine" or "feminine" are carried by both men and women. (*)

So, I think it's important to say here that the wide range of behaviors among men and women does not biologically predispose women as a whole away from programming, or men toward programming, only inidividuals (of both genders) who happen to be wired in a certain way.

(*)If you're interested in measuring your own "masculine" and "feminine" traits, there's a clever test called the BSRI which compares your responses to 60 questions, some which are typically considered "feminine" or "macsuline" (and some filler questions). (Can't somebody be maculine and feminine? Or neither?) 

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-DA
> perl -MPOSIX -e'$ENV{TZ}="US/Eastern";print ctime(1000000000)'
Sat Sep  8 21:46:40 2001

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In reply to Re: Female Programmers-WOT by da
in thread Female Programmers-WOT by Cybercosis

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