One thing I have noticed is female journalists, who chose not to do CS themselves, but feel very strongly that other women should go into CS. Not even that they wish they themselves could go back in time and get into BBC Micros. It's a curious phenomenon and I wonder if it's really driven by anything other bandwagoneering.
Do you not root for your country's athletes at the Olympics, and wish that more people would enroll in X so that your country would have a shot at a gold medal?
I don't think that's a scalable analogy. Programmers aren't an elite, really, among professionals. Anyone smart enough to be an accountant or a doctor or a civil engineer is smart enough for 99% of programming jobs, and many of them, for any programming job. Even someone who ended up as a journalist could probably handle the helpdesk or doing QA or websites.
So if it's not so difficult, and there are already a lot of women as doctors and lawyers, it's normal for women to say that they wish that the social barriers that prevent women from getting in the field from an early age would should be broken. It's not a question of bandwagon, it's a question of equity.
But what are these barriers? No-one seems to know, and in these articles, they always say it's because "geeks" have no social skills and poor personal hygiene and that drives women away. Which is nuts, to imagine a conspiracy of men to keep women out by the cunning strategy of not being "cool" enough (!) Not to mention sexist as hell.
And once again, they aren't wishing things were different so they could have done it...
> Do you not root for your country's athletes at the Olympics, and wish that more people would enroll in X so that your country would have a shot at a gold medal?
This might be the wrong audience to ask a question like that. :-)
(My own answer: no, of course I don't root for my country's athletes at the Olympics or care whether "we" have a shot at a gold medal.)
