A flare up on Women in Software

Julia Lerman has posted again on the whole Women in Technology thing - brought on by this post by Ted Neward (and a bunch of others she links to). It really is a curious thing to me. My wife is a software developer, and she likes to point out what a great career software development is for women (meaning what, exactly?). Well, the fact is that many (not all, but many) women end up taking a "time out" in their career when they have children. This time out can be a complete break from the field or reduced hours.

The truth of the matter is, software is a (relatively) easy field to keep up with - the state of the art simply hasn't advanced all that much over time. Picking up the changes, even after a few years out, just isn't going to be that hard (seriously - if you were a Java developer 4 years ago, just how hard would it be to get going with C# and .NET?). So it's kind of confusing that more women don't choose this field. The options for flexible work hours are better than a lot of other fields, part time hours are fairly easy to accommodate, and time out of the field isn't going to get you hopelessly outdated. This tells me that the problems are cultural - and strongly so, as they override a lot of things that ought to make the field inviting. I'll be looking for Julia's comments from the BOF she says she'll be running at TechEd 2004 - maybe some answers will come out of that...