Women in IT
In my 20 years in college and the working world, I have only met one female sysadmin (self-taught, as one tends to be), a few female programmers (and they didn't remain as programmers) and a few female DBAs (almost all of whom are Indian, Chinese or from the former Communist Bloc).
Those women I know who studied Computer Science in the 90's have gone on to work in the Civil Service (but not at the codeface, so to speak) or become technical analysts, writing documentation, user stories and generally being responsible for the translation of business logic in technical documents. None of them, that I know of, have stopped what they were doing on account of motherhood.
I suppose, if I had to summarise in general terms, all of these women seem to chosen fields where there is much more human contact than there is at the codeface.
One last point: when I was stuying science in the 1990s, roughly half of the students overall were female in both first year and fourth year. The proportion of women to men was much higher in the biological sciences and conversely lower in the physical and chemical sciences. Computer Science was about one third women. The Engineering faculty was even worse. they had about 10% women, if what I was told was correct. Excluding the students of Computer Science, the dept of Mathemathics, however, had more women than men.
To what extent is this nurture / social influence and to what extent is nature? Is the whole engineering aspect so unappealing to women?