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No one encouraged me to be an engineer either (doctor? yes. lawyer? yes. engineer? no.). I'd wager that many people here were actively discouraged in some way from going down the path of technology or entrepreneurship.

Most nontechnical parents who see their son or daughter spending countless hours on a computer just think that he or she is wasting his or her time.

(That last sentence would be a good place for those mythical gender-neutral English pronouns.)

Your parents aren't the only ones responsible for encouraging you. I'm sure your interest in technology originally came from some inner drive. But a hacker can only get so far without a community of peers, whether it be your colleagues in college or others at meetup groups or friends on IRC or others on Hacker News. These communities become the crux of not only your technical development, but also your motivation. I've seen more than a few girls in college give up on computer science because it was harder for them to make friends in class or join a group to do problem sets with. There is definitely SOME problem here.
> Most nontechnical parents who see their son or daughter spending countless hours on a computer just think that he or she is wasting his or her time.

I definitely encountered that. The same parents who called me lazy for sitting in front of a computer from ages 14-18 are now quite happy with how things turned out--a day job with a high salary and a startup in the works lol. You never know what that kid could really be up to...!

Thank you for that; it definitely provided a perspective that I hadn't thought of previously.

However, I don't know that I agree that if people were encouraged the same that it would somehow make the balance 50/50 or even remotely close to that. Of course, my perspective is limited to personal experience.

I have a lot of geeky girls in my family and I know a lot of women who are geeks, and they've all been interested in other geeky pursuits - medicine, psychology, civil engineering, EE, chemistry; none of them have had a remote interest in software specifically. Why? Because it was too boring for them.

Maybe we should bring it on ourselves to make the work seem more interesting if we really want to try to bring some balance to the gender mix.

I think Fran Allen (the only female interviewee in Coders at Work) made the point that you see more and more women going into Earth Sciences, Biology, Chemistry... Even Engineering and Maths have more balanced gender ratios than CS. Her opinion was that it was because those fields are perceived to be more socially relevant, wheras a lot of people think CS is just about making games.

I don't know if I agree with her totally (I think the negative perception is more a conflation of IT with CS - people think CS is more about using Powerpoint than an intellectual pursuit) - but there is definitly a case for fixing the public perception of Computer Scientists.

It may seem boring to them, but we know that it isn't - at all. To me, chemistry seems boring. It's a problem of perception.

I can easily imagine a society where 90%+ of the programmers are women, where programming is thought of as a typically female profession, requiring skills such as accuracy and conscientiousness.

No one encouraged me. Period.