Without fail, every week or two there's an article posted here on Slashdot about how there need to be more female engineers, or female programmers, or female SETI students or whatever and we need to coerce them to join typically male dominated fields. All of this in spite of the fact that there's nothing really stopping them from doing any of this.

Are the engineering schools going to deny you when you score well on all your math and science tests? Are mommy and daddy going to stop paying for the education if their daughter decides to go the route of an EE or something?

Now someone will come along an argue that society is just preventing women from tapping into science related interests, and that they all really want to do it. Except that now you're encouraging a specific career path for them instead of being open minded to simply letting them explore all possibilities available to them and deciding their own interests.

Is it not also possible that they've evaluated these paths and decided they were not interested in them? My dad never tried to teach me how to work on cars or anything in spite of being a professional A&P. Not until I straight up said to him, "I want to learn how to work on cars." And since he always worked on our fleet of vehicles, I got to join in and learn that. I also messed around with sewing on my own initiative. My mother and sisters know how to sew, I gave it a shot. It did not interest me all that much. Now I'm an EE student because I discovered programming at the age of 11, and realized it's a relatively easy 'science' field and that I would learn much more going into EE, which I already have.

Being able to maintain your own care can help a lot if you aren't financially well off. I have an '03 VW Jetta TDI Wagon that I bought with 239,000 miles on it, and I've been able to fix every problem it had (and to be honest there haven't been many) all by myself. I diagnosed changed my own thermostat when mine failed, which would've probably cost me a pretty penny instead of 30 or 40 bucks in OEM parts. I had to replace the glass in one of my mirrors once. It took me about 15 seconds to connect the heat wires and snap it into place. The dealership quoted me $50 to do what was quite literally 15 seconds worth of work.

I'm also not convinced that auto makers can't do things do make cars more easily repairable by amateurs, and this idea of a car that's too complex for someone with the ability to fix is not an economically viable one from my standpoint. As a college student, I can't afford to spend $300 to have some dolt in a dealership replace my alternator and do it wrong when I can do it myself at the cost of a little time and have it done correctly.

As a final note, I've worked in the automotive industry among design and RMA engineers, and a lot of them aren't half as smart as they think they are, and even the OEMs get confused at how to work on their own crap, and I know having seen mechanics reports in a return material analysis lab that the people doing the repair work don't always know that much about the vehicles they're working on anyway, even with dealership and OEM support. We've had electronic power steering gears returned with the dealership claiming there was a power steering fluid leak. Seriously.

That seems to be the premise behind every single "There aren't enough female programmers, engineers, etc.." post that pops up here on Slashdot every couple of weeks.

As others have said, none of that is really true anymore. Going on what someone else said, I would point out that in my university (where I am pursuing a degree in Electrical/Electronic Engineering as a male) the only EE related clubs are those focused around women. Having said that, EE classes at a small university are a sausage fest. Larger universities in my experience at least have a few, and none of us students discourage the women from participating.

I think it's time we face it, women just don't give as much of a shit about the same things men do. We have different interests as a general rule. And for the record, if you're being discouraged from pursuing something that truly interests you, that's a problem for anyone, not just women.

This article would explain my situation, however, while I was working as a co-op at an engineering company. I worked with 3 different female EE degrees that were all part of my department. Knowing through experience how few women there are in EE classes, I never understood why they made up nearly half of our team.

I'm going to sit here and speculate on why. First of all, I taught myself C at 11 years old, and I'm 25 now. In the past 14 years, I've obtained a pretty good idea of what programming is, and of course spent plenty of time messing around with and administrating my own systems. I'm sure this isn't an unusual story to hear on slashdot, I'm sure many of you made a similar journey. But here's the problem, after talking with friends who had taught themselves how to program and do it well, and had gone through schooling for that subject, I realized there weren't heaps of new things to learn. Almost all of the schooling would be rehashing things I already knew.

So where am I going with that? Programming is a relatively easy subject to pick up on your own. You can just start messing around and get immediate results. You don't need a huge buildup of theory before you can start applying the stuff, either. If I can start coding in C at 11, it isn't that hard. And I'm definitely not one of those people who had a PhD by the time he was 14 either. So this doesn't really surprise me at all, the degree has very little practical value to someone who is already confident in their abilities with these kinds of things.

It was actually because of this that I chose my major to be Electronic Engineering instead(still working on it). The material is more challenging to me, and most of it isn't stuff that I've done already. It's not as easy to learn on my own (though it could be done. I even made a list of textbooks used in the 4-year school I want to attend in case I decided I wanted to go that route). I'm not sure how everyone else here feels about it, but I think programming is easy shit. Using computers is relatively easy shit. Just because you don't have to spend as much time making that foundation, I think it's a lot easier to get away without getting a degree in it. Maybe this is due entirely to the fact that it's easier to self-teach, rather than it being an easy subject in and of itself. I know many of you wouldn't agree with the latter statement. Once you know it, why have someone try to reteach you?

Well to be fair, I wasn't comparing Debian to RH. Though, when I last used RedHat, that was back when 9.0 came out (either 8 or 9 was my first distro back in the day when it at least seemed "cool" for the desktop), I would say that I much prefer Debian's package management.

But you raise a fair point, I had forgotten about the fact that RH has that whole enterprise loonicks thing going on. After looking up what "FAI" is, I can see how having something like that working would be pretty dandy, and practically essential for hundreds if not thousands of servers in a datacenter. Package management I suppose will play less of a role if you aren't constantly changing things like I might do on my personal desktop, but like I said, I've never run a high volume server.

Rather, the intent of my post was to say "Why the hell can't they ditch this shit for free stuff? Either way it's going to cost them money, but maybe open-source(which is usually free-as-in-beer) software could help mitigate that in the future."

Linux? Debian, maybe? Though I'm not sure what the preferred 'server' distro would be... Or maybe unix, perhaps FreeBSD? I know that's wildly popular as a server OS, but I think Debian is much easier to use than any unix variant I've yet tried. There's plenty to choose from. I guess the question would be how the costs to change over compare to the costs to just keep Windows Server.

Forgive me, as I've never run a high volume server before. Just small ones that I've not used far beyond basic personal stuff.

Well, it's true that I don't play a lot of games these days. I spend a lot more time pursuing my goals in life, so I don't have hours and hours to just sit down and immerse myself in all sorts of high end games. I tend to stick to a few that I like and play them from time to time, and DX 11.2 isn't required by any of them, or even the new title(s) that I'm interested in which are still WIP.

Other than that, I spend the vast majority of my time on Linux with KDE 4. Even moreso with Minecraft working on multiple platforms due to Java. The only new title I'm currently interested in is Planetary Annihilation, which if I recall correctly, will support a Linux port. So I guess my care-o-meter about this announcement is somewhere around zero.

I will say this, though. The user interface style that was developed, with a task bar and normal start-menu (not this metro start screen crap) was developed and refined over a period of 20+ years or so now. It's available across many operating systems and kernels. It's there because it works rather well. If you ask me, this touch-centric crap that Microsoft is pushing isn't much good beyond tablets and phones, where your primary mode of interface is your finger on a screen.

So, tablets and phones came along and a new interface style was designed that worked better with almost-exclusively touch-screen interface devices... Then Microsoft decided that *everything* should use this interface. I'm not interested in relearning how to use my Desktop's or Laptop's interfaces. Screw Windows 8. If I found a part of my computer's user interface to be highly inefficient, requiring a redesign to solve the problem, I'd be very aware of it. I hate wasting time. But the stuff before Metro in most cases doesn't give me that impression. Metro does.

So there's my possibly subjective rant. But hey, the article asked.