Female Programmers

For some reason there aren't many female programmers. Girls - at least in my country - are increasingly better at math and physics. Girls are topping the national results of test and more girls get into university than ever before. Yet, so few girl programmers.

My theory, based on growing up as a girl myself, is like so:
While girls are encouraged to study, girls are not encouraged to actually do anything that revolves around math and physics, or engineering. Draw a pretty pony is ok, but build a pony with Mechano, or worse, god forbid, build a vehicle! Girls needn't bother their pretty heads with that. In other words, gender stereotypes.

Now, children and teens (as a general) are not aware of that they are being subjected to stereotypes; children just assume that whatever the adults teach them is how things are. If noone tells a child she can work with computers, make her own programs and apps, she won't know she can do that.

Even with gender stereotypes, girls can become programmers. You want a nice horse game? Or a pretty princess app? Go for it! Do what you think is fun! Use all that studying math you've been doing pick up programming! The internet is full of teach-yourself-how-to-program tutorials. If you can follow a photoshop tutorial on how to put on makeup on your pictures, you can follow a programming tutorial.

Most girls I've met who takes an interest in creative processes and/or IT ends up as self-taught web-designers (I myself started out there too). A frustrating business even as a girls since it's over-saturated, and these girl normally ends up just making stuff for their own blogs. Blogs which they earn more money from than the actual coding of it, and that's still not a whole lot.

So I was thinking, maybe I should address that issue myself later when I'm done becoming a programmer myself. It's nothing radical, but I thought I could perhaps hold some information meets for girls and tell them what kind of world is available to them. Tour some schools. It'd be some extra work of course so I dunno if I can actually do that, but it really would be nice if there could be some more girls picking up programming or engineering.