Thread by @relizarov

This twitter is for programmers and we need to have a serious talk. Software engineering has a global problem that we must solve. It is the scarcity of women working in our field. You cannot ignore or deny this fact. I can even see it right in my twitter analytics /thread

Our world is increasingly relying on software, virtually every business on the planet is short of software engineers, yet half of population is AWOL from this job market. This is bad in itself, let alone all the other woes it causes.

It does not have to be this way and we could have lived in a better world now. The chart below shows changes in fraction of women majoring in different fields over time. All went well as more women were getting higher education... until ~1980s, that is.

What happened in 1980s? Personal computers had happened. That was great, but somehow computers started to be marketed as toys for boys, even though quite an equal number of girls and boys were fascinated by them back then.

It might seem that countries that did not have market economy with its shops and ads back in 1980s are immune to this problem. Indeed, there is even BBC article claiming that Russia is (still) good at attracting women to tech. Proof link: bbc.com/news/business-…

Reality is far from this story, though. It may not be as bad as elsewhere and in particular before 5th grade you'd see almost equal number of boys and girls studying math and programming, but drastically changes after that. Toxic, male-dominated culture starts to exert its toll.

All the "evidence" that somehow girls are intrinsically less interested, have different brains etc had been discredited many times over -- all fake. It is culture and peer-pressure that forces girls to abandon programming, social cues that our daughters get while growing.

And it is not just the girls we shall raise to love programming, boys need proper schooling too. It is when my daughter, participating in a programming contest, gets a remark that "girls are stupid" from the boy sitting next to her, that is what hurts her motivation the most.

Globally the situation is so dire that it calls for drastic measures. Don't you dare to cry "discrimination" when women get quotas on a tech conference, as only by applying reverse discrimination we get any chance to repair the catastrophic damage that was done back in 1980s.

Don't you dare to cry "unfair" when a woman's contribution gets chosen to be highlighted in a big multi-year team-work effort that might have had only a tiny fraction of women participating. Women need these role models to follow the most.

Yes not all diversity measures are equal. When you teach a class of students and they are 50/50 male/female that is a diversity. But when they all apply for a summer internship at a big tech company and only female students get invited that is not a good approach to diversity.

I would not even get started to rant about the medieval practice of separate education for girls and boys. Just don't do it, please. Choose better future for your kids, where they grow cognizant of unique talents every person possesses regardless of their gender.

The more you expose people to the actual diversity, like making sure you have a fair number of women at a tech event, the fewer stereotypes people acquire. Especially kids. Kids should the primary focus of our efforts to build a better future.

My personal "hidden agenda" with this thread:
1. Attract more women into programming
2. Thus create more competition for jobs in the field
3. So that incompetent men can no longer get a programming job
4. Which gets us better and safer software. Yay!