It's not programmers that are at fault for the lack of women in the industry. While there are stereotypes about the geeky programmer, those are rapidly dissipating with most of the populating spending just as much time in front of the computer as a programmer.
From what I've seen and know the programming industry to be like, it's highly competitive and has a "if you can't cook, get out of the kitchen" attitude (which I'm not knocking as a fault). The root of the problem is that society doesn't encourage the competitive side of a woman. Men and women alike see them as being something of a bitch if they are even remotely competitive.
Programmers see everything as a challenge of their mental abilities and women just aren't raised that way. So if you want you want to start seeing more women developers, start encouraging them to be more competitive. That is what the root of the problem is. (Although on that note, don't encourage them to compete with the boys, encourage them to compete with themselves first and foremost. If they compete "against" the boys and lose, it reinforces the idea that boys are better.)
Your analysis fails to distinguish between programming and other competitive fields, such as law and academic science. But the proportion of women in those fields is increasing, whereas it's decreasing in programming.
I'm not saying competition is the only cause, just that it's a root cause. I haven't heard your claim before, so if you have numbers, I'd be interested to see them.
As a guy, most of the time I feel rather embarrassed by suggestions on how to get more women into programming. The ideas tend to be so naive or full of prejudice.
I think that programming should be taught early in school. Not to become proficient with any language or so, but to understand computation at some fundamental level. Alan Kay probably have some very good ideas for how to run such classes.
As it is now, some guys really did get started with programming at the age of 5, or other single digit age, and by the time "ordinary people" reach university age and meet programming, these guys with 10 years of programming pretty much dominate the classes and mess them up.
Try being a newbie in any field and surround yourself with people that have 5000h of experience that give you dumb stares.
If you are "good" and able to pick your field in the science/technical arena, would you pick something that's at risk to outsourcing and flooded with competition? Or, would you pick something that's harder to outsource, pays better and offers a better work/life balance?
I've build systems for years and years, and it would have been WAY better career-wise to be a user of the bloody things than a developer.
I think, as others, it's all about stereotypes. At the University where I study, many girls say "I don't study Engineering because it has a lot of maths and I don't like them. I prefer psychology", but in many events at the Math Faculty there were more girls studying math than boys. A mistery to me.
In grad school, I was a member of the local student chapter of SWE (the society of women engineers) [1][2]. One of the studies they came up with had the implications that boys were steered towards engineering, while girls were steered away from engineering [3].
Part of the problem is that engineering and IT aren't cool for most values of "cool." I personally don't think that it is a problem, let alone something that needs to be cured. However, I also recognize that I'm not everyone.
1 - I'm tired of hearing about "well, what about the society of men engineers" as engineering is so overwhelmingly populated by men, almost every engineering organization is "SME".
2 - Why did I (a man) join? Mostly, my lab partner asked me to join because they didn't have enough students and were in danger of being decertified as a student club/group/organization.
3 - The numbers I remember were along the lines of: 95% of women who enter engineering have a family member or close/influential personal friend who is/was an engineer. With men entering engineering, the number is 60%. Also women engineers drop out of engineering at twice the rate of men dropping out of engineering.
The interesting and depressing thing is that I read another statistic noting that women are actually less common in the programming world than previously and this is different than most other previously male dominated fields.
The reasons I can think of:
1) Programming is becoming more a lifestyle and subculture and less a codified discipline.
2) Being a subculture makes the stereotype of programmers more influential than earlier.
Because sitting in one spot for 10+ hours a day reading page after page after page of naked computational logic does not appeal to those with feminine sensibilities.
I don't know about that - while I was a huge tomboy growing up and wouldn't consider myself to have "feminine sensibilities", most of the female programmers and computer techs I know are very girly.
From what I've seen and know the programming industry to be like, it's highly competitive and has a "if you can't cook, get out of the kitchen" attitude (which I'm not knocking as a fault). The root of the problem is that society doesn't encourage the competitive side of a woman. Men and women alike see them as being something of a bitch if they are even remotely competitive.
Programmers see everything as a challenge of their mental abilities and women just aren't raised that way. So if you want you want to start seeing more women developers, start encouraging them to be more competitive. That is what the root of the problem is. (Although on that note, don't encourage them to compete with the boys, encourage them to compete with themselves first and foremost. If they compete "against" the boys and lose, it reinforces the idea that boys are better.)