Be careful what you wish for
As always. Just to be sexist for a minute, is the lack of women in tech down to us cavemen putting them off, or are they just not interested & enthused by the subject?
I was down at the computing museum at BP last year, looking at the Harwell Dekatron computer. There was a school party there with quite a few girls, and the presenter, as a form of encouragement, was showing them pics of the early days with quite a few women in the team. In those days a lot of programming was writing code on sheets marked off into boxes with one character per box so that punch card operators could punch it up into a card deck. I did wonder whether the women were designing the algorithms or just writing the code on the sheets. In those days, 'writing code on sheets' was seen as a perfectly reasonable job for a woman, and they may well have seen it that way too, as just another sort of clerical function. These days that just doesn't wash, so girls generally don't want to do that stuff, and I wonder just how many of them really are enthused by the process of algorithm design as a prelude to the process of writing code.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
