Bro Grammers

In today’s world, it should come as no surprise to hear from editorials or others that software development is not too far from being a boy’s club. Unfortunately, for some reason the technology field which lacks a great amount of women, appeals more to the male mind-set; it’s easy and cheap.

The public’s opinion is that the education system might be to blame. They tend to believe that Universities and basically all other schools for that matter, should help the female students develop more of an interest in computing. At this point though, that is not what’s going on. To be honest, enrollment amongst university computer science programs have increased about ten percent since last year, but overall enrollment of females are down.

A different group of people believe bigger companies should supply some of the much needed encouragement as some companies are already doing. One great example is Etsy, whom to some lucky women, provides $50,000 in the form of scholarships to send them to New York City for its Hacker School Training program. While that is a great opportunity and all it doesn’t really address the true problem. More and more women are becoming less interested in software development, and not just that but they are basically being pushed away perhaps as much as the older crowd as well.

The women who genuinely are attracted to programming may honestly rival any male counterpart. In most cases when they often get hired over the males, the females, sometimes end up in hostile work environments that are generally male-dominated. Subtle sexism, is sadly something that is well known amongst women working in the field. In some environments women say striking friendly relationships with men is hard because it is hard to simply get into the men’s circle. Once in the circle it is hard for women to deal with certain sexist jokes or comments that male coworkers might have; and if women didn’t just shrug them off they would be labeled as having a bad attitude or...