The thing you’re not going to like, and you’ll probably censor my comment for saying, is that the eccentricity of a lot of the top performers is part of what drives women away. Many women don’t want to be around weird guys who don’t bathe and can’t make eye contact. You’re probably fine with it, and some women do like geeks, but most don’t. And given the enormous importance placed on conformity and social skills in mainstream society (excessive in my view…we took the ‘cool’ Bush over the ‘geeky’ Gore and look what happened to our country) I think the weirdos should have at least one refuge.

Sorry, this is something I’m passionate about even though I am no longer even considering a computer science career.

I even had hopes of getting a comp sci minor. What prevented me, however, was that I had been constantly stunted in math and so I didn’t have the background to pass calculus. My only other option was to take a no credit pre-cal class and then retake calculus. Taking a no credit class is pretty much a waste of money, and since my first year comp sci class fulfilled my science requirement, I went on to do a minor in Classical Myth and Religion.

In the end it’s worked out — if I had gotten a programming minor, I might have fallen back on that, rather than seeking out schools in Japan that offer video game planning/design courses. But I do wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn’t had been discouraged from math at every turn, or had had the will to fight for a proper math education, and had been able to do a comp sci minor.

maybe women don’t like to work with people who treat them like crap for stupid reasons and abuse them. naaaah… we must just be shortsighted and dumb.

I really wish that articles like this would focus less on “how can we let women know how cool CS is?” and more on “gee, maybe we should, you know, look at changing the overall culture of CS?” Because I think the latter is more of a problem than the former.