[COFF] Women in computing

[Larry McVoy]

I support more women in CS but you read stories about the 
good old boys club at Uber and elsewhere and I think you have
your answer.  If you are female and are going to get judged 
by your looks rather than your talent that's not going to be
a big draw for women.  It's kind of hard to turn that off,
getting guys to stop doing that is about as easy as getting
women (well most women) to not swoon when they see a baby.

I have no idea what went south, when I was at Sun, SGI, Cobalt,
there were plenty of women engineers.  And that was in the 
kernel groups which were pretty hard core.  30% sounds about
right, would have been nice to have more but it is what it 
is.

There was certainly plenty of hanky panky going on but even
us nerdy engineers knew "no" meant know unless you were in
the middle of a massive flirt session.  We were pretty nerdy
so I'm sure there were plenty of signals that we missed, guys
seem good at that and nerds are exceptional at that (ask me
how I know.  Sigh.  I'd love to get a second chance and be
25 again with what I know now).

On Sat, Feb 16, 2019 at 07:35:53AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
> All, I'll kick off the conversation restart here on the COFF list with the
> original link.
> 
> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/magazine/women-coding-computer-programming.html
> 
> Cheers, Warren
> _______________________________________________
> COFF mailing list
> COFF at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm