A fascinating piece by VIKRAM CHANDRA in the Wired magazine:
Chandra observes:
“The proportion of
programmers in India who are women is at least 30 percent. In the US it's 21
percent...
In India, women feel
at home in engineering. One 2013 study of Indian engineering students asked
whether they ever felt left out in an academic setting. About 8 percent of
female engineers reported such feelings, while almost 20 percent of male
engineers sometimes felt left out. In another study, female students described
the culture of computing as one that prizes meticulousness, intelligence,
sociability, and mutual assistance. In workplace interviews with both sexes,
sociologist Winifred Poster found “a pervasive conviction that women and men
have similar mental abilities to do technical work” and so “an assumption that
technical work itself has no gender.””