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Misbehaving has an interesting post up about girls and software development - the part that grabbed my interest was the last paragraph:

Mary also said that they're working to encourage social program. She said many studies have shown that peer programming is popular with girls but this is not being used in instruction - schools privilege individual work. I wasn't aware of that, and I'd love to know whether readers here have that impression too - do women prefer peer programming? Are you aware of work on this?

The reason this stood out to me is conversations I've had with my wife. She works in a development/production shop - she and her co-workers are working on software that goes into production almost immediately. The shop is nearly all women, and she tells me that they pass work back and forth quite frequently - most of the people there are familiar with most of the projects. This sounds fairly similar to pair programming - although they don't formally work in pairs, they collaborate and cooperate regularly.

Now, back to that article - the question is, do women prefer peer programming? I don't know, but the anecdotal evidence I've seen points that way. My daughter - who's hardly a programmer - also seems to like to collaborate on projects. She spends a lot of time on Neopets, a site that is aimed primarily at pre-teen girls. The girls work with virtual pets, set up shops and communities - and this requires some level of HTML skills. I've noticed that my daughter and her friends like doing this, but they like doing it together - unlike the stereotypical male "web geek" who codes by himself, accompanied only by coffee or Mountain Dew. It would be interesting to see more data on this.