[Haskell-cafe] Re: Are there any female Haskellers?

Leon Smith writes:

On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 1:56 PM, Jason Dagit wrote:

...

 For some reason it started out as a male dominated field.  Let's assume for cultural reasons.  Once it became a male dominated field, us males  unknowingly made the work and learning environments somewhat hostile or unattractive to women.  I bet I would feel out of place if I were the only male in a class of 100 women.

Is this really true? I've heard rumors that in the early days of programming, that women were in the majority, or at least they represented a much greater proportion of programmers than they do now. I seem to recall that this started to change sometime in the 60s.

One thing I observed of the Computer Science Tripos in Cambridge was that the absolute number of women doing the course didn't change much, but the size of the course increased over the years. This suggests that men went into it because it was trendy, but for the most part women went into it because they found it interesting (and the proportion of women in the general population who find it interesting was roughly constant). This was twenty years ago, and I don't know if the subsequent data supports the hypothesis. Another (provocative) observation is that most of the women programmers I've known were good at it and thought they might not be, but most of the men claimed to be good at it but were not. -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk http://www.chaos.org.uk/~jf/Stuff-I-dont-want.html (updated 2009-01-31)