I’ve been thinking this post over for a week now, and I don’t have any helpful answers, but I do think these are questions that need to be discussed and researched. If I were looking into it, I’d want to start by looking at information about gender differences in math and science education at the middle and high school levels, because I think some of this starts there. I don’t buy the “women don’t want it” argument, because I know too many women who love technology, but I do agree that society defines certain occupational areas as more appropriate for one gender or the other.
Girls Suck at Math comic from xkcd at http://xkcd.com
I recently had an interesting conversation discussing women in the tech fields. This led from the person I was talking to having previously had a conversation where people were lamenting the (limited) number of women in the tech field and trying to figure out what to do. Out of that conversation came an intriguing comment: Is the reason we do not have more women in tech fields because there is a lack of interest in the type of work it would entail? There are layers of assumptions found in this comment. The biggest one is that there is a natural difference in what men and women want to pursue in life. The other more subtle one is that there are a different set of skills that men and women have. Part of what I want to discuss today is why jumping…
View original post 1,598 more words
Sourcerer 