An interesting post by Susan Sons illustrating some of the reasons women do not become hackers in the same proportion that men do:
Looking around at the hackers I know, the great ones started before puberty. Even if they lacked computers, they were taking apart alarm clocks, repairing pencil sharpeners or tinkering with ham radios. Some of them built pumpkin launchers or LEGO trains. I started coding when I was six years old, sitting in my father’s basement office, on the machine he used to track inventory for his repair service. After a summer of determined trial and error, I’d managed to make some gorillas throw things other than exploding bananas. It felt like victory!
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Twelve-year-old girls today don’t generally get to have the experiences that I did. Parents are warned to keep kids off the computer lest they get lured away by child molesters or worse — become fat! That goes doubly for girls, who then grow up to be liberal arts majors. Then, in their late teens or early twenties, someone who feels the gender skew in technology communities is a problem drags them to a LUG meeting or an IRC channel. Shockingly, this doesn’t turn the young women into hackers.
Why does anyone, anywhere, think this will work? Start with a young woman who’s already formed her identity. Dump her in a situation that operates on different social scripts than she’s accustomed to, full of people talking about a subject she doesn’t yet understand. Then tell her the community is hostile toward women and therefore doesn’t have enough of them, all while showing her off like a prize poodle so you can feel good about recruiting a female. This is a recipe for failure.
[…]
I’ve never had a problem with old-school hackers. These guys treat me like one of them, rather than “the woman in the group”, and many are old enough to remember when they worked on teams that were about one third women, and no one thought that strange. Of course, the key word here is “old” (sorry guys). Most of the programmers I like are closer to my father’s age than mine.
The new breed of open-source programmer isn’t like the old. They’ve changed the rules in ways that have put a spotlight on my sex for the first time in my 18 years in this community.
When we call a man a “technologist”, we mean he’s a programmer, system administrator, electrical engineer or something like that. The same used to be true when we called a woman a “technologist”. However, according to the new breed, a female technologist might also be a graphic designer or someone who tweets for a living. Now, I’m glad that there are social media people out there — it means I can ignore that end of things — but putting them next to programmers makes being a “woman in tech” feel a lot like the Programmer Special Olympics.
