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."

Comments

Simple

[JasonEngel]

Computers are a significant means of escape for social misfits without a sex life. Since even an ugly woman will find it easy to get laid with the proper application of alcohol and sufficient display of willingness, there's less need for women to escape in this manner. The same behavior seen in men usually ends with said men in jail.

Gender Polls

[unchiujar]

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/coffee-lounge/643 3-sex-call-wow-sounds-wrong.html?highlight=call+po ll http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/coffee-lounge/524 63-gender-poll-2006-a.html http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/coffee-lounge/805 53-gender-poll-2007-a.html http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/poll.php?d o=showresults&pollid=1099 http://www.gridter.com/cgi-bin/survey/survey.cgi?s urvey_name=survey http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=287852&hi ghlight=gender+poll http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/index.php?showto pic=8935&hl=gender+poll By the way, some females might be tetrachromats http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy [wikipedia.org] I demand a program so I can be one too !!!

Wow.

[JoshJ]

238 people (16%) of those polled said there were too many distributions. I am far too lazy to count the number of distributions there that got 0 votes, but that list certainly doesn't help matters. How many of those are defunct, extremely targeted (Damn Small Linux and Edubuntu for instance), or otherwise intentionally unsuited to the typical linux user? I also note that they include BSD distributions on the list, so they should have said "Free Software poll" instead of "Linux poll".
KANOTIX 36 0.02
Ubuntu 357 0.24
Fedora 121 0.08
Debian 188 0.13
KNOPPIX 36 0.02
2X 1 0
Arch 3 0
BackTrack 1 0
"BIG LINUX" 1 0
BinToo 1 0
CentOS 1 0
CRUX 1 0
FreeBSD 12 0.01
Freespire 5 0
Gentoo 98 0.07
GentooTH 2 0
Gentoox 3 0
Grafpup 4 0
Knopperdisk 2 0
Kubuntu 11 0.01
LFS 2 0
Mandriva 71 0.05
MCNLive 4 0
MEPIS 48 0.03
Mint 2 0
NetBSD 4 0
"Novell SLE" 8 0.01
nUbuntu 1 0
Olive 1 0
OpenBSD 14 0.01
openSUSE 71 0.05
ParallelKnoppix 8 0.01
PC-BSD 5 0
PCLinuxOS 4 0
Quantian 3 0
"Red Hat" 30 0.02
redWall 12 0.01
ROCK 2 0
Sabayon 8 0.01
Slackware 73 0.05
SLAX 3 0
"SME Server" 4 0
Sorcerer 1 0
"Source Mage" 56 0.04
StartCom 10 0.01
"Symphony OS" 21 0.01
"Ubuntu CE" 64 0.04
Ututo 7 0
"White Box" 2 0
Xandros 10 0.01
Xubuntu 7 0
Zenwalk 5 0
ZoneCD 16 0.01
This is the same chart with all the 0's taken out. I'll do a bit more numbercrunching on this, and will reply to my post with a couple of links to charts and stuff in a few minutes.

Re:facial hair

[ThosLives]

please, it's not stealing if you make a copy!

I know it's not entirely the point of this thread, but:

What is "stolen" in this example isn't the code; it's the credit for the work. Credit is a scarce resource; information is not.

Re:Skipping the real problem

[Gigahurt]

The fact he can't spell skew proves he's in engineering!