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Comment by kiba | Hacker News Reader

2) Women are encouraged to work hard. Men are encouraged to be talented. This is true of teachers, parents, peers, and managers. Coding is something that requires more talent than hard work (at least, to get started); due to the high barrier of entry.

I disputed the notion that programming required "talent", whatever it means. Learning to program isn't rocket science, but it required a lot of dedication and patience.

Some women choose to have more personal time, rather than staying up till 3am coding.

I thought coding until 3AM in the morning is the definition of personal time for programmers.

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> I thought coding until 3AM in the morning is the definition of personal time for programmers.

I do not know about most programmers but personally I stop coding at 10pm. Any later and I'd be damaging a well balanced sleep pattern and writing sub-standard code.

Instead I think the cause is something similar. Girls historically did not spend a significant amount of their free time on computers. Interestingly enough I think that is changing. Nowadays thanks to facebook both genders spend a vast ammount of time at the keyboard.

Whether that will result in more female programmers I'm not sure. With video games the natural next step is to try and make your own. Facebook does not have this natural migration path towards programming.

Facebook is just a tool for most people. Sure, increased exposure to computers will attract more people, but not a huge amount more. My younger brother uses facebook a lot, but has no desire to program.

> I disputed the notion that programming required "talent", whatever it means. Learning to program isn't rocket science, but it required a lot of dedication and patience.

The dichotomy between hard work and talent can be a false one. What I'm talking about is teachers rewarding girls for solving easy questions without any fuss, and rewarding boys for solving hard problems. Programming requires hard work and talent, but it's seen as talent by outsiders (i.e. 99% of the people most high-school students know).

While codeacademy and learn-x-the-hard-way may help lower the barrier, learning to code has, historically, been really bloody hard.

But what passes for talent is very often times just a hard, critical eye directed into one's self. In other words, asking, 'how can I do this better?'

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