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Following up on my last post; none of what I said there about women in technology was particularly new. But, trying to be more constructive...

I think history offers an interesting parallel here. Feminists criticized historical texts as being dominated by white men (which they were). The retort was that, in fact, historical events had been dominated by white men, and historians should not be criticized for writing about the truth. (The parallel being my own argument that women aren't particularly discriminated against in computer science, but rather they are not particularly attracted or naturally inclined to the field.)

Feminists responded to this in various ways:

One particularly pernicious group then went and denied there was any such thing as "truth" (the poststructuralists). Those people were intellectual bullies and hypocrites. I hate them. I'm not talking about them.

Another group tried to find the women that were left out of history, like Amelia Earhart or Cleopatra. Frankly, this was a rather pathetic attempt, because the old school historians were right, history had been dominated by white men.

A third group of feminists actually did something great, when they realized that the Great Women of History weren't going to provide a real alternative to the Great Men of History. There have always been women, but the way we looked at history didn't include them -- history based on battles and monarchs and contemporary historical accounts. To really look at the history of women, you had to look at the history of the people, not the history of the leaders. This kind of feminist history actually can speak a great deal about men -- about all the men who were left out of history just like the women had been. It talks about life through the ages, instead of just events. This history doesn't just serve to highlight women in history, but provides a whole new kind of history, and I think has been very influential on the entire field, and in a very positive way.

To bring this back to computer science, it may require the same kind of redefinition of the field, and a radical reconstruction of the field. In the same way, this wouldn't benefit just women, but it would open up computer science to a whole new segment of people, men included. This is nothing new, really -- this is the dream of Logo, or the Dynabook, or a number of ideas of subtlely popularizing programming. Certainly it's not an easy path, and we can't simply will it to happen. But the result might be a "humanized" computer science.

One could argue that we're already moving in that direction, but not due to the idealists. But I'll leave that for yet another day.