I'm not sure why I'm doing this in the 21st century but....
Most people on this forum are reasonable folk, and have a sense of reality and balance about them. However, a small number of the comments drove me to this. And partly because I know women who have received such rampant discrimination within IT that it is utterly shameful. And I do mean significant verbal abuse and belittlement.
The industry has a history of writing women out of history - https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2017/aug/10/how-the-tech-industry-wrote-women-out-of-history
Ours isn't the only one. Women flew spitfire aircraft from the factories to the airfields for deployment.
We all know about Ada Lovelace being the first, "programmer," and that we owe the very term Debugging, to Rear Admiral Grace Hopper whose involvement in compilers and COBOL are legend. Margaret Hamilton who was director of the software engineering division at the MIT instrument lab and developed the software for the Apollo space program. Jean A Sammet who was also involved with the development of COBOL
Here is an article on 10 women who helped make Apple great - https://www.computerworld.com/article/3041874/apple-mac/10-women-who-made-apple-great.html
We attribute a gender to our cars as a whole, but we wouldn't assign a gender to the engine, or the brakes, or the door, etc. ... and just the same, the human brain doesn't have a sex either - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYpDU040yzc
Some of the differences in behaviour and emotions are down to hormones. We are chemical engines, and just as we can take downers, uppers, pain relief, our bodies have their own drugs. The pleasure drugs of endorphins and adrenaline refresh every 20 minutes typically, after release into our systems. The testosterone and oestrogen balances are responsible for large changes in our bone structure... and continue to affect our emotions. Here is an account of Nicole and Jonas... born twins... and hormone blocking stopped Nicole going through the changes that her brother went through - https://youtu.be/rzbtSeVZeEE?t=13m55s
We like to think about things in binary - actually, the human race is not binary. As many as 1 in 100 people differ from the commonly believed standard, but because much of this is underneath clothing, no one knows about it... and people are happily thinking that there's a massive line between men and women. Truth told... there isn't. http://www.isna.org/faq/frequency
We were actually doing quite well in equality in the middle of the last century, but then the marketers worked out that by enforcing gender stereotypes, that they could make money by segregation and selling more - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JDmb_f3E2c
Long story short... women in IT is a thing, and always has been a thing. Get over it. - and if you're a bloke that's getting angry at all this evidence and historical account... here's my advice to you ... take up knitting... seriously, it's a man thing these days - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/10552983/Mens-knitting-is-it-the-new-yoga.html
Biting the hand that feeds IT
