kasia in a nutshell

A savvy conference organizer would read your suggestion as:

"jack up the conference fees and use the extra money to hire escorts to attend the conference as eye candy".

Oh, I don't know, that didn't work so well for e^3, did it? It's still mostly just men and lots of booth-babes in skimpy clothes.

The idea is to get more women interested in going to the conferences for the sake of the conference not as eye-candy!

i don't know if i recounted this story on your site before, but this might be part of the problem:

the local paper reported that women were refusing to use the university's computer lab because male geeks were spending days on end in there without taking breaks to take showers. the stench was unbearable.

i suppose Geeks with Jobs are more fastidious, but it sounds like the scene is hostile to women from the bottom up!

That's definitely true at some geek-style-meetings I went to, but not so much at the popular conferences, like say, JavaOne. The one discouraging thing about being a woman at a geek conference is being treated like a zoo animal. Down to people taking snapshots of you (w/o asking first) and not sitting near you in sessions.

I've been to sessions where every single chair except the ones right next to me were occupied. And I shower regularly! At least once a month!

The issue is the number of women in the industry. In the early 90s universities were graduating men and women in CS at approximately equal rates, but the number of women earning CS degrees has dropped off dramatically since then. When I left the academic world in 04, women made up less than 5% of the freshmen CS classes.

Research into WHY women don't go into CS suggests that barbie dolls and ponies are only part of the problem. Many women are turned off by the Uber-geek culture, where college men do NOTHING but work on their computers all day: the do homework on their computers, work for hours on "personal projects" like writing their own web-crawler, and THEN unwind a little with some computer games. In short, the typical CS major spends ALL his time at the computer, which most women simply don't want to do. (True or not, this is the perception).

As a consequence, women find it very difficult to develop any kind of social support structure with people in their major. When the study group completes the big assignment, the guys bond over World of Warcraft, while the lone girl says "I just can't LOOK at a screen anymore" and goes looking for friends.

Another issue is ... well, boys will be boys. College age males, and CS majors especially tend to do a lot of "posturing" - they strut themselves and razz each other in some intellectual equivalent of a pissing contest. Most women find this behavior irritating at best; it becomes untolerable when you're the only woman, on the outside, with no interest or desire to participate in the ritual, and yet no one else is there to bond with. Most women, in a sense, become lonely even though they're in a crowd of people.

Yet ANOTHER issue is that women in CS typically don't see computers as an end in themselves, but a means to an end. Most women in CS aren't really interested in computers, but rather want to USE computers to solve some other problem of interest. People with that perspective don't often end up at computing conferences, where the computing is the alpha and omega.

paul, that leads me to think it terribly ironic that "macho" industries like construction and fabrication will probably end up being more equitable than the computer industry.

the lives of workers in those fields tend not to revolve around the instruments of the trade but around the people they work with.

Yes, Paul, because obviously women can only function in social situations and are completely unable to asimilate into a major that requires the use of computers as more than just a tool... in fact women by large don't get as excited about technology as guys do!

Guess why.. I seriously doubt it's genetic (cause if it is, then I'm a bigger freak than I'd care to admit). If you're thinking the barbie-and-pony-filled nurtute, then you'd probably be right.

I think that CS is some sort of wierd special case. I did math as my major, and although woman made up about 20-30% of the class, they were well integrated in to the class social structure. Maybe it's because "real" math still has to be done with pencil and paper.

Well, as I said, the RESEARCH has suggested those factors - in particular the research of Joanne Mcgrath Cohoon. A lot of what I reported isn't my opinion, but the result of several extensive studies that included interviews with the women themselves.

That is, I'm not making this up.

For further reference you can check out McGrath Cohoon's book:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262033453/sr=8-1/qid=1141744183/ref=sr_1_1/104-2552032-6312759?%5Fencoding=UTF8

or try and find some papers she's published.

http://www.people.virginia.edu/~jlc6j/

as a man, i'm not afraid to admit that i'm infinitely more interested in the people in my business (programming) than in the tools.

when i can switch off this demonic machine and go out into the "real world" i do.

but maybe that's why i'm not a great programmer.

"Although that would do away with the one huge perk of being a woman at a geek conference. The bathrooms are always clean and empty. "

just like Rush concerts!

I guess I had it both ways as a kid. Mom and Dad bought us toys from both ends of the gender aisle. They didn't want us immersed in that sparkly pink world. I was especially lucky when dad brought home circuit boards with LED's for me to play with.

In college, lack of other women in my classes didn't bother me at all. I studied with both guys and girls.

I *hate* the feeling of being a creature from another planet as well as being ogled. When I started my first engineering job, I kept a picture of a guy friend on my desk to ward off the guys who heard there was a new girl in the building and came by to inspect.