Women and Programming Contests (Score 1)

There were at least 5 females present (not including coaches) although 2 of those were reserves. I was one of the female reserves. Personally, I think there are two main reasons that this competition has few female participants (I can't say anything about blacks): 1) Females in general are still taught logic weakly and late. Many males are, too -- don't get me wrong -- but for various reasons females seem to be more at risk for this and less likely to pick logic up on their own. (If you want to discuss nature vs. nurture with a biobehavioral anthropologist, I'd be happy to volunteer.) You can argue what skills exactly this contest tests, but no logic-impaired VB code monkey and no undergrate student who is barely passing Computer Organization (the class I TA) has the logic skills to solve even one of those eight problems in less than 5 hours. 2) The nature of this competition is ... well, competitive. I spoke to one of the other females there -- her team always works together on one problem at a time. She felt quite warm and fuzzy about this method, but realistically it didn't work so well for her team. I think this highlights some of the discomfort that normal females feel when considering joining the team. In order to make the team at our school (UCF), you compete at a local contest. I've dragged several females to the practice locals in the past two years, but none of them have come back for the real local. They gave various excuses which mostly boiled down to "it's too stressful". I find the competition fairly stressful myself -- especially because most of the good programmers I've met tend not to be people who are real easy to get along with -- but I've found that the absolute rapture of fast and furious (but not unstructured) coding makes up for the stress and the strong urges to choke your teammates. Besides -- I admit it -- I love to beat the pants off guys. I guess what I am trying to get at with point #2 should actually be two separate points, one of which ties in to point #1 ... First, females in western culture in general do not value high competition as much as males do, and this contest is high competition. (Again, I am willing to debate the roles of genetics and environment as factors for this, but I think you must admit that right now this trend is generally true.) And secondly, the males who do compete are enough to turn anybody off. *grin* No offense to you guys (especially my team) -- but hackers have a culture all their own, and it's not one most females feel comfortable joining. As my co-workers (males all, and team members or ex-team members) often say, 90% of all programmers suck. It just much more noticeable with females because you only have 10 total to start with. That being said, I would like to point out that there *ARE* females who program and program well, and there *WERE* females at the contest, and you guys were mostly to shy to even talk to me. Hell, I did my best to hit on Waterloo and Donny wouldn't even go to Mystery Fun House with us. *frown* So before you go complaining about the lack of cool hacker chicks you need to get enough courage to talk to the ones you already know.