Last I heard on the matter, what actually happens is girls growing up are told they are bad at math and treated like as if they are, and that makes them be bad at math (the same result happens if any other group, poor, black, blue eyed etc, is told, directly or otherwise, they are expected to suck).
edit: Though, there is always the chance some of them will still do well in spite of being pushed not to.
TiagoTiago nailed it, that’s EXACTLY what happens :yes::no:
Happens where? Maybe in the USA it does but not where I live which is why all this blabber seams so pointless to me. `murica!
EDIT: It seems that the more advanced your country is the more (imaginary) problems you have.
Maybe if they weren’t busy gluing society together they’d have time to code 
Guys really keep them busy with our messes and when it’s not that, it’s getting hit on and what not. Best way to get the ladies on this is to show them what’s in it for them. No one’s interested in holding hands in unity and the like just for the hell of it. Same as guys. Guys know what they’d use 3d for, but no one’s really making an effort to sell it to the awesomer gender. Guys are more visual, girls read for a reason (Yeah, ladies know they’re better eye candy than guys, so what’s really there to ogle at?). (If most were, most guys would lead very lonely lives) Also, I blame society for this situation. Guys don’t think about this, but the world sells things to ladies (advertising) in a very degrading manner. Almost as though saying: “This is what you are not. This is what you could be if you buy this.” So most girls wind up drawn towards things to better themselves when there is NOTHING wrong with them. On the contrary, this is how things are sold to guys: “See this? You want this. It tastes good. You owe it to yourself to try it.” (Nothing degrading, just teasing and letting you mull over it) -look at commercials and see which categories they fall in. This will never end because 1: someone makes money from this. and 2: Very few break free from this mental trap, and when they do, they just want to forget the whole “broken world” thing instead of helping those still in the trap. ~It’s complex~ Part society, part the likes of different people (both male and female) and a whole lot of other stuff as to why different groups of people do and do not do some things. Sad thing is, the one person to really push the envelope might not be in the guy group, but the girl group. If that person doesn’t try this, then well, who do we (guys) have to blame? We have more to lose by not getting girls in on this. ends convoluted rant
I saw recently this video with the great Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about this same issue.
Not exactly about programmers, but about women in science (and black also).
Yes, it’s true. When I was a kid, and I got an answer right in math class, the teacher would grab my bottom lip and staple it to my forehead. I made right sure I never got another answer right again! 
women tend to be able to do most things men can, just as well.
I’d say women make worse inventors/entrepreneurs than men though.
Since it would be inhumane to make a scientific determination of the validity of these hypotheses using a control group and an experimental group everyone is free to come up with their own crackpot theory!
If we did math in the same way we would just ask a group of people what their opinion was about the outcome of a math operation and just average the results, instead of actually calculating it. So if you asked five people what 2+2 was and four people said 4 and one person said 5, the official answer would be 4.2. Although if 3 people said 3 and three people said 5 the official answer would be 4, showing that the statistical method of doing math is just as good.
23% of all programmers are women? I think it must be more like developers in general, including graphic artists etc.
In this world there are jobs that are male-dominant, female-dominant and (kinda) neutral. Software development and maths/physics has been male-dominant from the get-go which is why women have a hard time breaking into it. The ones that do often has to deal with sexism both in school and later on in the workplace if they even endure it through school in the first place.
This of course varies from country to country, some are more extreme than others but to deny that it happens at all would be lying. I live in Sweden, we are one of the world-leading countries when it comes to gender-equality and human rights. Yet I have seen it happen personally where the girls in my programming class were treated like complete idiots who needed to be held by hand through the whole course by the teacher, even when many of them were more capable programmers than me. None of them pursued a technical career after that.
That sounds like a bad teacher.
“Clothes make the Man.”
Mah, it’s just a discrimination with intent to be good (another authoritarian approach).
What S.Kierkegaard described very well - when instead of pointing out equalities ‘we’ start to discriminate based on differences (i.e. Merchant of Venice) and as my ancestors showed me to be the Philosophy of Life & Prosperity:
“Don’t be an artist be an engineer, or an officer, or… best of all… become a priest. There’s church on every hill.”
This kind of mind set is very well and still in use today.
Well… Fuck that!
Brain is a brain. Human is a human. Do not get wrapped up in concrete covered glass boxes full of anal stench.
Society is sexist & Man are scared! It’s society of Dumb & Hasty (Passionately Primitive), that diminishes value of mental powers & human achievement based on materialism, capital, faith, sex, color, looks and even smell.
We don’t use word Patriarch in vein and nobody directs to God as to Female, Mother. In our language, ‘good’ words are of male sex (God, Wind, Lion, Elephant, Planet, Universe, Cosmos, Cloud, Thunder, Sky…), on the other hand majority of words meaning ‘bad’ are of female sex (Pain, Ache, War, Death, Illness, Disease, Darkness, Night, Dirt, Punishment, Beast…).
Worst is to be Broke, Stupid, Sick & Ugly!
*ps
Just some squirting of my mind.
Basically i think that women do not like the company of ugly, nerdy men who wanna be their god-father figures or are just plain ‘pussies’. That’s why they go to ‘prosperity’ schools (economy, administrative, architecture, design, law, bio…) They are ambitious nowadays, yet still part of same retardation. Society of developed countries is weak, selfish & evil.
Mix!
The problem with stumbling on studies is that it tends to be a selective process.
This thread is becoming a shithole, showing the worst worldviews and views on genders all around… prejudices and generalizations everywhere, it’s disgusting to read.
No. Not a single studie says that. What those studies say is that men TEND to be better at math than women. That doesn’t mean, that every man is better at maths. And it also doesn’t mean that no woman is able to be better at math. Disgusting prejudices.
Men and women are of course different! But just because a gender TENDS to be better at certain things, it doesn’t mean that individuals of a gender can’t be good at things which their gender is said to be worse at.
That is generalizing things. Humans tend to generalize, but in todays society we should be able to overcome this…
No, it musn’t. And again, ugly prejudices.
Maybe you are coming to this conclusion because of your own experiences, but let it be said that not everyone shares those. I personally know nearly as much female programmes as I know male programmers. But than again, this doesn’t mean anything.
Edit: I don’t think anyone has to do anything to “encourage” female programmers to support blender. It’s not an important issue. Let’s just be good to each other and treat everyone fair and like an human being and everything will be fine.
What?!
IMO differences are mostly due to conditioning. As a kid, I never believed the crap about “boys do this, girls do that” and enjoyed all kinds of child’s fun regardless of stereorypes. Oh, and I was one of the best in my math and physics classes in school, so there. I’m female.
Quick tip for making females more welcome in male dominated communities: be nice, don’t be a jerk, don’t single them out, just treat them like normal human beings.
Teach children and expose them to everything, regardless of sex. Please understand that people are all different, unique individuals that all have to explore their interests and learn and grow - and their disposition toward any topic is not based in sex.
Threads like this are stupid.
First of all I think that the amount of sexual dimorphism in humans is so little that its impossible to come to the wide sweeping conclusions about specific genders that some have come too.
The comments about women and maths are some of the more troubling. I used to work at JETa fusion research center in Culham, and there were plenty of female physicists and mathematicians working there. Roughly %50 of graduates recruits are femalelink.
I also think that gender is a none issue when it comes to programming for an open-source project because most of it is done behind the anonymity of a genderless username. Yes as that “username” starts contributing more code other users might get to know the person behind the username, but the code contribution is going to come first.
What is inhumane about treating girls like you treat boys and shield everyone from negative stereotypes? (the control group obviously would be the rest of the world)
Conditioning goes both ways but somehow boys get excluded from this “equality” movement. It just rubs me up the wrong way.