Why is women so not interested in working with computers and other technical stuff? Technical, by the way… If you just work with software, I don’t feel like it is very technical!

In my experience, there is no real advatage between being a girl or a boy when it comes to math, logic or programming. However, girls solutions when it comes to programming tends to be more… should I say feminine? They are just a bit different, and girls approach to a programming problem is often that nothing is impossible, and that if you look hard enough, you can find a simple solution to a complicated problem, while boys sometimes look for coplicated solutions to simple problems. They do it because it is fun – girls and boys thinks different things are fun about programming.

For me, it is fun to mix math, logic and programming. It is fun to realize that what would be tedious to do for a human only takes a few lines of code in a loop to get done.

But why are all girls so extremely uninterested in the making of programs? The girls I know share my desire to get the computer to “just work” whenever a new program is installed. Windows XP was a religious experience for me. You just installed it and everything just worked! “Plug and pray” became “plug it in, ant it really works!”. Because who wants to spend hours getting something someone else should have fixed for you to work?

Girls tend to be interested in using computers, but why are they never even curious about why they work the way they do?

Maybe it is like Marghareta Eriksson says?

Det är en skräckkurva vi haft. Jag tror att just kvinnor försvunnit från datautbildningarna eftersom det inte varit etablerat att de ska läsa teknik. Har man inte med sig de tankarna från barnsben och om arbetsmarknaden är kärv, framförallt för kvinnor, så väljer man att läsa något annat.

That girls just are not thinking about technology from childhood? I mean, not everyone had my father, that let me stand around asking questions when he was fixing the car, computer or whatever. Not everyone was in a big garage watching a parent build busses and played with various contraptions… Not everyone was given a rubber hammer, nails and frigolit pieces when they where three and tried to build a replica of the familys boat with it.

Hummm… What WHERE they doing? When their radio broke, didn’t they open it up to pieces to try and find what was wrong? What did they do when their tamagotchi broke?

Is the difference due to some attitude their parents had? That is so sad, in that case. I hope not. Somehow I just hope that girls really are that different to boys and that they are not being forced to be someone they are not by their parents…

Anyway, I should stop now and go do some girly stuff with Sofie; knitting and such. =)