Victoria Times-Colonist Apr. 25/2003
Sloppy and smelly male students who work for days on end without bathing are turning off would-be female students in the computer labs at the University of Victoria.
Even people who work in computer science at the university are not surprised that women are repelled. So the university is spending $30,000 to recruit and retain women in the field.
Uh, how? $30,000 worth of noseplugs and room freshener?
The 10:1 ratio of men to women in computer science is (drum roll) . . . all the men's fault!
If the women were as deeply interested in programming as the men are, they wouldn't notice. In fact they'd be pretty ripe themselves.
A letter writer to The Globe and Mail some years ago collected a lot of grief when he made the reasonable observation that women mainly used computers only as a tool for the task at hand.
Men were much more likely to tinker with them, whether that meant fiddling with the screen preferences or digging deeper into the system itself.
One outraged woman wrote in to say: "I've just finished installing a CD-ROM drive and a new sound card and I had to edit the AUTOEXEC.BAT file and..."
These are certainly praiseworthy accomplishments, though I doubt I'd be bragging about them to, say, a bunch of assembly-language purists.
I was most impressed with one guy I met in a Fidonet programming echo, who wrote a complete telecom package in GW-Basic, just to see if he could do it.
"It works okay, but it kinda sucks as far as speed goes," was his verdict.
This is why they invented the Internet. In cyberspace, no one knows if you're a dog or if you just smell like one.