This is a problem I've personally never understood well. Of all fields, the CS (I mean "software") field seems particularly eager to have female representation. Women generally score well in math and logic tests, perform well in school, etc. Anecdotally some of the better students in my CS undergrad coursework were female. In some industries (e.g. gaming), getting women into the development side of things would revolutionize the industries by opening the market to 50% of the population by producing products that cater to that demographic.
It just seems that fewer women enjoy doing the kinds of things you have to do to be successful in this particular field than in some other.
That's not to say there aren't women who participate in the field, but I've found, anecdotally, that they tend to view it as paycheck instead of passion (and maybe not insignificantly, the lions share appear to come from Asian countries with those country's concepts of work ethics and good jobs fueling most of those women). I think there are far more males who, for whatever reason, feel passionate about learning to build software.
Related, I've found anecdotally that most "geek girls" I've met are not as much into the substance of geekdom as they are into the image of geekdom. I've met lots of women with Pac Man t-shirts and binary watches at Anime festivals who couldn't give a rats ass about clock cycle counts for MOV operations on different revisions of the 80486 chips, but I've met lots of guys in the same clothing who owned aged dog-eared copies of Intel's multi-thousand page CPU Guidebooks (and read them for escapism).
For guys, seeing another guy dressed out of the ThinkGeek catalogue is a powerful signal of relevant knowledge, an ice-breaker of sorts as to how to relate. While there certainly are real geek women, their cultural appearance doesn't necessarily provide the same signaling. So when a geek chick shows up, the conversation switches basically to something less geeked out (at least in my experience) out of politeness.
I suppose this has two sides to it, the geek chick isn't then immersed into the kinds of topical discussions about xyz algorithm so she doesn't learn about it which cascades into never really getting as good as the boys, but to the boys, they learned about this on their own, in isolation, because they enjoyed it, and can't understand why anybody has to really be "coached" into becoming a geek.
full disclosure, I met my wife in a programming course, and she most definitely looks at it as paycheck
It just seems that fewer women enjoy doing the kinds of things you have to do to be successful in this particular field than in some other.
That's not to say there aren't women who participate in the field, but I've found, anecdotally, that they tend to view it as paycheck instead of passion (and maybe not insignificantly, the lions share appear to come from Asian countries with those country's concepts of work ethics and good jobs fueling most of those women). I think there are far more males who, for whatever reason, feel passionate about learning to build software.
Related, I've found anecdotally that most "geek girls" I've met are not as much into the substance of geekdom as they are into the image of geekdom. I've met lots of women with Pac Man t-shirts and binary watches at Anime festivals who couldn't give a rats ass about clock cycle counts for MOV operations on different revisions of the 80486 chips, but I've met lots of guys in the same clothing who owned aged dog-eared copies of Intel's multi-thousand page CPU Guidebooks (and read them for escapism).
For guys, seeing another guy dressed out of the ThinkGeek catalogue is a powerful signal of relevant knowledge, an ice-breaker of sorts as to how to relate. While there certainly are real geek women, their cultural appearance doesn't necessarily provide the same signaling. So when a geek chick shows up, the conversation switches basically to something less geeked out (at least in my experience) out of politeness.
I suppose this has two sides to it, the geek chick isn't then immersed into the kinds of topical discussions about xyz algorithm so she doesn't learn about it which cascades into never really getting as good as the boys, but to the boys, they learned about this on their own, in isolation, because they enjoyed it, and can't understand why anybody has to really be "coached" into becoming a geek.
full disclosure, I met my wife in a programming course, and she most definitely looks at it as paycheck