Women & Programming

It is really sad to read about all the great things that humans can do collectively, and take the credit for themselves for something as stupid as gender or sex.

Specially when you hear about what happened in the computer science field. I personally didn’t know that women were so involved in the field that in fact a very big chunk of the programmers of the time were female. And that progressively due to discrimination or some stupid thing like that, women were becoming less interested in pursuing a career as programmers.

Speaking from experience I know my fair share of women who are really smart, some even smarter than myself. And it is sad and frustrating to think that women like that will never even consider a career as programmers because of the discrimination.

This also applies for all fields of engineering as gender roles tend to influence the girls to do girly things as playing with dolls and so on. Which in some sense is not wrong, but, I believe that if any body show a desire to study maths or computers, regardless of their gender, we should encourage them to do so because it is way better to have engineers than a lack of them. Besides women aren’t stupid by any means. Due to their meticulous nature and special ability to pay attention to details is that they would be better at debugging and looking for mistakes in code or math formulas or procedures or something like that.

In fact at the beginning of the article it comes an interesting fact that the idea of break-point for debugging code, was actually the idea of a woman.

In conclusion, as a culture we should encourage all people to enrol in math and computer related subjects, regardless of gender. Not let history define the future of science because if women in the past were way better than some men at the time. Why now that shouldn’t be true?