This thread reminds me very strongly of a discussion back a long time ago, on Usenet. Might have been before the Great Renaming, or else only shortly after. Mid-'80s sometime. People were going back and forth about the gender inequity. The focus of that debate was on the world-class hackers, the folks everyone else knows and respects. Gosper, rms, Gosling, that sort. They were all guys. Pretty overwhelmingly still are, there may be the odd exception, but at the cutting edge this is still one of the most remarkably male-only businesses out there. Easier to find major, important female politicians, or businessmen, or lawyers, or doctors, or pretty much anything else, then hard-core software engineers. The only offering I recall from that previous debate that had real explanatory power and matched up well with peoples' experience, was that the apprenticeship for this craft, where people really learn the important meat of the field, is typically a place and time where folks get really, really obsessed: somewhere in the late teens or early 20s, circumstances (often college) leave the obsessing types spending nearly every waking hour concentrating on computers, for a span of years. This tends to weed out the folks who aren't already more or less social rejects, and that in turn leads to a real gender bias, in our society. -Bennett