[SGVLUG] OT: Why aren't there more women in tech?

[Dan Kegel]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 8:43 PM, Christopher Smith <cbsmith at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 3:44 PM, Dan Kegel <dank at kegel.com> wrote:
>> It occurs to me that the very tone of the discussion we've
>> been having in this thread might be offputting to many women...
>
> <sarcasm>
> There you go leaping to conclusions.
> </sarcasm>

Ah, should have included some data.  Um, maybe this:
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2751860/
which says
"Boys were more likely to be cyber bullies, while girls were more
likely to be cyber victims."
which suggests men might want to avoid discussion styles
that verge on abuse.  (I'm having unpleasant flashbacks to
old linux kernel mailing list threads between two mail kernel
developers.   At one point I even asked
a senior kernel maintainer about one abusive thread, and he
just shrugged and said that kind of nastiness was expected.)

It looks like the general question of why there are so few
women in engineering has been the subject of much study:
http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/cwsem/GenderDifferences/
There are no easy answers, I fear.
- Dan