Excellent article. Forced me to think more deeply than I had previously. Your background, experience and insight make your analysis highly credible. The anecdotal example of your two children is useful. But perhaps not compelling. Maybe your daughter, by the age of 9 years, has absorbed some cultural “norms” from the mass media.

Whenever this topic comes up, I think of Margaret Hamilton, Grace Hopper, and the many gifted women software engineers I have worked with over the last 30 years. (Just to clarify: I didn’t work with Margaret Hamilton or Grace Hopper.)

I think there’s a bit of “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” in some people’s analysis. “Look how few women programmers we have in the work force. That must be because women are somehow genetically less able to code.” I don’t buy it. The guy from Google was an example of this kind of privileged faux-sciency rationalisation. “I studied biology at Harvard and there is scientific evidence that women are less able.” Nah.

I hope that if we change our culture — and I think that is slowly happening — more young women will feel coding is something they can do without being judged negatively by their peers or society.