Last year I had the chance to go to San Francisco to attend the Apple WWDC. I won’t talk about the conference itself, except to say that one thing struck me about it that I still think about. In a conference with about 5,000 attendees, there must have been a maximum of maybe 250 women attending, about one-in-twenty. I think that’s being generous too.
Of course this bias amongst software engineers is no surprise to anyone in the industry, but I think addressing this deficit should be given some sort of priority. I have my reasons and it has little to do with principles of equality. Simply put, software engineering needs a gender balance so that we can get better at what we do. I’m going to use gender balance to generalize my points, but the argument applies to just about any division that we apply to ourselves as humans; race, socio-economic status, etc. as software engineering is basically dominated by white males.
The Unlettered Gentleman 