| Follow @mairin
Boston, Massachusetts USA
Máirín is a senior principal interaction designer at Red Hat. She is passionate about software freedom and free & open source tools, particularly in the creative domain: her favorite application is Inkscape (http://inkscape.org).
Authored Comments
"Women are not interested in IT, so change IT to suit the interests of women?"
No. Women are plenty interested in IT. It's the limited environments in which they can practice it that are the problem. A number of studies have been done on this. Here is one summary of a small selection of the research:
http://phys.org/news180024084.html
Hi Hans, you missed the point. It's not about whether women do or don't naturally enjoy programming. (They do. Women were in majority in programming in the 1940's / 1950's. E.g. it was women who worked on the ENIAC. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing#Timeline_of_women_in_computing_worldwide for more highlights)
It's about whether or not there is a problem, and there is. It has nothing to do with whether or not women can code or enjoy coding. It's about 1,000 papercuts that make it extremely and needlessly difficult in order for them to do so.
"Given the fact that even in the most optimum work circumstances (in your own place, where nobody can see you - or: women only coding project) women do not code, I can only conclude they do not want to code. Period. The rest is only circumstantial."
This is a lie. Where do you get this information from? What women-only coding projects are you familiar with? Plenty of women code on Dreamwidth, for example.