48% of the class of '06 at MIT were female (up from like 2% back in the day) and most of them were serious hackers. Yet today almost all of the girls who didn’t go to grad school are working for either a large corporation or an investment bank.
With the whole goddamn responsibility of keeping humanity alive on top of them undoubtedly there’s a genetic disposition for women to be more risk averse. Math and programming are relatively precarious. That though probably is easily overcome, since women have clearly been extremely competent in pretty much every other field now for decades.
So the problem has to lie in social conditioning. Cultural expectation and etiquette has always been the most powerful destroyer of potential in both men and women. Tradition is THE enemy.
(Heard this joke? Why do baby boys wear blue and baby girls wear pink? Because they don’t have a fucking choice.)
With the whole goddamn responsibility of keeping humanity alive on top of them undoubtedly there’s a genetic disposition for women to be more risk averse. Math and programming are relatively precarious. That though probably is easily overcome, since women have clearly been extremely competent in pretty much every other field now for decades.
So the problem has to lie in social conditioning. Cultural expectation and etiquette has always been the most powerful destroyer of potential in both men and women. Tradition is THE enemy.
(Heard this joke? Why do baby boys wear blue and baby girls wear pink? Because they don’t have a fucking choice.)