[Edu-sig] Question ?

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Sun, 18 Apr 2004 11:08:48 +0200, Gregor Lingl writes:
>
>
>Gregor Lingl schrieb:
>
>>
>> I my opinion (and in my experience) programming
>> has much to do with exerting power, i. e. making
>> something else (a machine) do exactly what I
>> want it to do.
>
>If this were true, do you think it could be
>one reason why there are so few women in the
>programmer's community?
>
>(or: what most women like and prefer to do
>apparently must be the opposite of programming?)
>
>Gregor

There are too many other factors involved.  But one very significant
one is that women believe that programming has to do with _math_
and not with _langauges_.  (This is upside-down, and confuses
computer science with programming, but there are a lot of misconceptions
about this.)  It is interesting to consider what may happen when
women finally find out that they have been mistaken, as apparantly
has happened in the Ukraine, where a friend of mine says that the women
programmers slightly outnumber the men 'because it's nice, well-paying
work, indoors, with no heavy lifting :-) '.  Women test out better
at language skills, on average, than  men do.  And we are all using
computer languages designed by men.  Not enough women in the field
means not enough women computer language designers.  In fact, I am
the only one I know, and I only design 'tiny languages' for special
purposes -- or rather I justify it for the special purposes, I
do it because it is _fun_.  But don't look at my chromosomes hoping
for the next great language.  Would I do nothing else for the rest of
my life, Guido would _still_ be a better language designer than I am.

But I think, if we want to beat Python, getting a whole lot more women
in as language designers would not be a bad start.

Just an idea,
Laura