She didn't say "all women", she said "many women." I attend the University of Texas at Austin. I started out as a CS major, still am, but no longer want to work in the field. One of the reasons was the fact that although I'd taken AP CS courses in high school, I still felt looked down upon because I'd first been exposed to and developed an interest in CS "late". This attitude came from my peers, the companies that attended our career fairs, and even from my first exposure to the online tech press/blogosphere- I remember reading an essay by Paul Graham wherein he essentially implied that if a woman hasn't started coding by 13 all hope is lost for her. The only people I didn't get that impression from were (most of) my instructors, but that wasn't really enough, especially in the 500+ person intro classes I was in at the time.
Incidentally, like many women in CS, I was encouraged to look for role models among other women in my department and in the broader tech world. Dear other technical college women, if you're reading this: Don't. In my personal experience, successful women in the field are much, much more likely to have had parents who were programmers and to have started earlier. All the women who were pointed out to me as role models had this background. It was only when I started looking to the successful men in my program that I started to find people who had first learned to code in their sophomore years and decided to stay. I have my own theories as to why that imbalance exists, but the simple truth is, I could have learned a lot more about how to "catch up" from those men than the women I was pushed towards.
Incidentally, like many women in CS, I was encouraged to look for role models among other women in my department and in the broader tech world. Dear other technical college women, if you're reading this: Don't. In my personal experience, successful women in the field are much, much more likely to have had parents who were programmers and to have started earlier. All the women who were pointed out to me as role models had this background. It was only when I started looking to the successful men in my program that I started to find people who had first learned to code in their sophomore years and decided to stay. I have my own theories as to why that imbalance exists, but the simple truth is, I could have learned a lot more about how to "catch up" from those men than the women I was pushed towards.