A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
Most of the theories I&#x27;ve seen about the women-in-tech gap don&#x27;t resonate with my experience because there was a very obvious &#x27;women-in-tech&#x27; gap in about... 5th grade? in my (typical, I think) American elementary school.<p>It was nerdy boys, almost entirely (I remember one exception), who wanted to stay after school playing games on the iMacs in our classroom, and I am pretty sure that it would only be the boys in my class who might have, for instance, received and gotten excited about a copy of &quot;C++ for dummies&quot; in ~2000 (granted, the book was terrible and I didn&#x27;t really start coding for 6 more years, but the spark was already there).<p>Sure, video-game-interest is not the same as going into tech, but it correlated a lot as I grew up -- these kids ended up being the ones who were, like, coding on graphics calculators or in HTML&#x2F;CSS a couple years later. There were a few more girls involved by then, but the ratio was still very skewed.