Most of the time, it's best to just steer clear of the whole issue of the gender gap in the IT business because like the "digital divide," it is largely a politically-motivated issue with little practical effect. This, however, deserves some credit for at least being more honest and informed than the typical feminist crap about eeeevil sexist pigs who salivate at the thought of denying women, who ironically might be potential significant others, a fabulous career in the IT business. Still, it misses some important points and contradicts itself.
My observations for the reasons behind the self-taught engineer gender gap lead me to conclude that individual women are not taking advantage of the opportunities available to them to retrain themselves through self-study of programming and possibly participation in the Open Source movement. For whatever reasons - and they are probably far more complex and multivariate than I could possibly touch on here - women are not self-training themselves as software professionals at nearly the rate of men.
Faced with this unpalatable conclusion, we can choose to blame the individuals; we can choose to put our faith in long-term efforts; or we can choose to treat the symptom without necessarily fixing the root causes. By "treating the symptom", I mean we should simply attempt to help as many women as possible become paid professional members of engineering teams. I believe that the best way to accomplish this goal is for the denizens of Silicon Valley to start a small school or certification program. It would not be a degree-granting program, but something closer in spirit to one of those post-baccalaureate programs for aspiring medical students who did not choose a pre-med major.
The candidates would ideally receive a combination of classroom tuition focused on new technologies not yet taught well in universities - currently that might include Web, mobile, and IM - plus on-the-job training for which they would be paid as an intern by the hosting company. At the end of a year, the student would receive a certificate showing demonstrated competence in one of the engineering subfields, and with a modicum of job placement assistance she would be ready to take her place as a junior engineer. She would be able to rise or fall to the level of her own competence from there.
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Read the rest.
Ok, let the critiquing begin...
The author of this piece deserves credit for recognizing that the lack of self-taught female engineers is at the center of the issue, if one wants to call an issue. However, this is not an issue that can be overcome by merely tossing in some new educational formulas or pushing for more internship opportunities to be made available. The important question is why do girls really not like to do these sorts of things on their own, without the "loving support" of authority figures behind them. That is where men and women part ways on this. The men tend to naturally just go explore, whereas women will not without having help and support behind them.
As she noted elsewhere, women tend to be very credential-oriented which is a personality trait that runs counter to the do-it-yourself mindset that is behind men and women who are self-taught in engineering fields. Formal education is built around a rigid structure, and unfortunately engineering is a very fluid, dynamic sort of profession to be in. The information that you can get from a formal education or from the equivalent on your own is invaluable, but it is only the first step. Much of what I have had to routinely use on the job were skills that I had to learn on my own, without support from others or only the support that should inherently exist within the context of a team working toward a final product. No mentor, no professor, no instructor, nothing that formal or pervasive. If you aren't prepared to have to be a "lone-wolf," you are not going to make it when you have to go find answers to nebulous questions on a deadline.
The reason I choose to blame the individuals is that we are no longer living in the 1950s. Feminism has won the majority of its battles, and the only ones left are the ones that run up against human nature itself. There has never existed a society like ours that so thoroughly embraces the idea that women can enter "male professions," and that provides them with the supplemental education and assistance needed to get started. Countless books have been written on how in many, maybe most, areas of the country, boys are now being neglected by teachers who focus intensively on preparing their female students.
There are those who blame sociological factors such as the claim that men don't want intelligent, educated women. My own experiences being around large numbers of intelligent, educated men put the lie to this absurd claim, and I have yet to see any concrete proof to suggest larger trends to the contrary. Rather, I could far more easily envision other women being to blame for this, as girls are much easier targets of bullying than boys in general, and "geeky" subjects are very target-rich environments for "mean girls."
We can talk about "opportunity costs" all day, but the fact is that there is no way to determine how much an influx of new female engineers would contribute. There is no way to determine how well they will be placed, how well they will be utilized by management, how well they will grow as engineers and any number of other variables that affect the productivity of the industry. The most likely impact it would have in the short term would be to dillute the wages of all IT workers and engineers, men and women alike.
I don't know if this is a national trend, but in the DC area, it is common for women to be railroaded into management positions if they have strong technical educations. It is this sort of approach, the practice of really pushing women where their interests, talents and experiences may not yet be, that does a real disservice to women who want to be engineers. It is precisely why you don't want women to be given the special boost, if you want them to succeed. Managing engineers requires engineering experience, and if that experience is cut short by management fast-tracking, the women who are targeted will enter management with significantly less experience than their male counterparts which will, not surprisingly, make it harder for them to advance in the long run.
Personally, I don't think it would contribute anything to the profession or the women in it already, to bring more women into software engineering or any other engineering profession in order to "correct" the disparity between men and women. If anything, it'll probably just make more women miserable and irritable at work because they were pushed into a profession that is not for them.