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The Hidden Engineering Gender Gap
ifindkarma writes "Joyce Park, CTO of invitation site Renkoo.com, has written a two-part essay exploring why there is no pipeline of self-taught female engineers entering the tech industry via Open Source or other individual efforts. In The Hidden Engineering Gap, she asks why there are so many self-taught male software engineers in startups, but no similar pool of women. In A Modest Proposal, she discusses a potential short-term fix to the problem: a one-year, co-op, certificate-granting program for women set up and sponsored by Silicon Valley companies."
What's hidden about it? I am a heterosexual male who just recently finished my B.S. in computer science and I can certainly say there were almost no distractions whatsoever in any of the engineering classes I took. The gap does not qualify as "hidden" in my opinion.
julie@ElRambo:~/src/omgponies-0.3# ./configure /usr/bin/install -c
checking for a BSD-compatible install...
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for gawk... gawk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking whether to enable maintainer-specific portions of Makefiles... no
checking for g++... g++
cheking for penis... ERROR: Penis not found.
Please, its a compliment: Who would you rather trust your system with? The clean-shaven guy from ITT Tech who knows how to install Windows and that's pretty much it? Or the bearded overweight dude from his mom's basement from whom Linus stole the original source code (or so he claims?) Bearded dude for the win!
In a Dwarven way.
"It's true you don't see many Engineering women. And in fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance, that they are often mistaken for engineering men!
And this in turn has given rise to the belief that there are no engineering women, and that engineers just spring out of holes in the ground!"
(Blatant Two Towers Gimli reference)
Boobs & Control. That's what it comes down to. Men - easily controlled by boobs. Even when not on a full "control" level, chemicals released in the brain increase chance that the man will act/react favourably when there's a hint of boob. Computers - see, they're not so bothered. Even when they're pushed right up against the screen, they just go "they're not gonna work on me, now enter the correct license key or I'm shutting down". So men, they like computers because they can control them. Women, they can control men without even trying, and controlling people's much more fun, so why'd they need computers?
Maybe if we could get computers to recognise and respond to boobs, some kind of "boob input device" or something, more women would be interested in working with them? After all, if men can be controlled with boobs, but computers could be controlled with boobs, keyboard AND mouse, then computers could be controlled much better than men - who lack the keyboard and mouse interface - then the computers are going to be much more fun!
I'm a genius!
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia