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The Hidden Engineering Gender Gap

Posted by kdawson on from the tech-needs-women dept.

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."

2 of 807 comments (clear)

  1. Hidden? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  2. it's all configure's fault by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    julie@ElRambo:~/src/omgponies-0.3# ./configure
    checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
    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.