I also find it very weird that an entire industry went from being female dominated to male dominated and everyone defends it saying "it's always been this way! Equality isn't about enforcing even ratios!"

Well no, it's not, but when you have these situations, where the number of people who could do something is vastly different to those that stick it out as a career, and those that do talk about systematic intolerance and abuse, there is a problem there.

I agree that getting more women into tech is a solution, but this always operates under the assumption that women actually want to be in tech.

There are women out there who would make great programmers / sysadmins / etc, but never finish the process of becoming one, are dissuaded from ever starting, or flat-out quit the industry after N number of years, simply because of the barriers put in place by men assuming that the field is only for men.

It's also possible that some of the pressure comes from other women , not just men. A woman might be considered weird by other women for wanting to hang around in an environment dominated by geeky men.

I know tech women who have been called dykes by their female pier group in the same way male nurses might be accused of being gay.

This is simply how humans operate, probably because it has survival value and is more a function of evolution than prejudice.

It's not a difficult assumption to get past anyway, talking knowledgeably about something a recruiter would probably not know or even wearing a tech related T shirt would make people change their assumptions.

The only way to solve that particular problem properly would be to have more women in tech.

An actual barrier would be a company or a CS programme deliberately discriminating against women by not employing them. Now I'm sure this does happen in some cases and would be difficult to gather evidence of because any company admitting to this practice would be open to law suits. Another example would be of creating a workplace that was somehow misogynistic in some way, but I actually find that more common in other industries than in tech.

OTOH , many universities seem to actually discriminate in favour of women for CS, in some cases lowering entry requirements on giving a priority on placement. They still tend to end up with 80%+ men though.

One observation I have made about women who work as developers or in an engineering/science field is that the majority I have met have tended to be chinese. This makes me wonder if there is in fact a stigma attached to western women going into tech but I don't necessarily think this stigma comes from the inside.

The pervading attitude of The heavy use of logic is a masculine trait is a rather good example of at least one barrier. Do you not see how that statement is extremely problematic?

First, note that it's my impression that logic and action are more dominant with men. Based on my experience on life, women, men, and relationships, logic and action seems to strenghten men's inherent identities. Men feel manly when they build stuff and solve problems, and that's generally essential to a male identifying himself as a man. This applies to cocky behaviour and winning women, too.

Now, women can certainly do both. I know women with high capabilities in logic and action such as my wife but the thing is that women often choose not to: their identities are enforced by other things in life. Unlike with men, for women it's not essential to exercise logical problems in order to be a woman. My wife doesn't rediscover her feminine identity in solving problems and fixing stuff eventhough she has done and succeeded in that before we met. My daughter is more interested in fixing bicycles and learning to use the tools in my toolbox than my son is, but it's the other things that she already does that she's using to learn how to grow up to become a woman.

Thus, I suggested the especially masculine trait of enjoying logic might contribute to the gender bias of programming as it seems to contribute to the gender bias of other activities, too. (Or it might not, but I didn't happen to suggest that.)

It's not a barrier, however. It's choosing not to drink, even if brought down to the water. And that's perfectly okay!

This might just be too much to accept for people of naivete. Men and women are different and there's generally no way around that in the long run.

EDIT: Back to the topic: programming doesn't give a squat about whether you're a man or a woman. It only requires logical capabilities and the willingness to use them. It doesn't dictate where the willingness comes from and for what I know, my fellow programmers don't give a rat's ass who wrote the code. They would accept women where they accept men because gender isn't a criteria in communicating with source code.

Besides, if programming ability could be accurately quantified, there wouldn't be a constant stream of articles on how difficult it is to separate the wheat from the chaff when hiring.

The heavy use of logic is a masculine trait ...

OK, this is Poe's Law territory. You're trolling us, right? Because otherwise you just wondered aloud what possible barriers there could be to women joining our field and then exposed yourself as one of them.

- the tendency of people to assume that boys are better at math, encouraging boys and discouraging girls

- the tendency for people to encourage young boys to play with spatial & logic toys such as Lego and for girls to play with dolls

>There are women out there that get interested in tech but society pushes them away because it's not feminine

I'm not sure if it's societal pressure that is the deciding factor for young women they picking a field of interest.

It's worse than just females in tech, it's OMG men and women are different! Eeek!

I kinda like the difference myself. Not because I don't want women in tech, but because women should be able to pursue whatever they want that makes sense when you consider their differences from men.

I assume this makes me a bad person.

I think the first and most urgent job is to change cultural assumptions amongst the insiders. If they are thinking that outsiders aren't biologically inclined towards living in a keep, not qualified to maintain a keep, &c., that's a huge barrier, a moat if you will.

So we remove that. The next problem is that even with the moat gone, the outsiders fear being uncomfortable inside, whether from being one of a very few outsiders amongst a lot of insiders or from other outsiders resenting them moving into the keep.

I think it's important to remove those sources of discomfort and to actively encourage outsiders to consider moving inside so that we get all of those who woud like to come inside but fear unpleasant consequences.

After that, I don't think we need to try to convince people who like living outside to come in. Let them be happy outside! But I do think we should remove barriers to coming inside and encourage coming inside to counteract any fears of negative consequences for those who would otherwise like to come into the Keep.