Women, Men and Programming: Knowledge, Metaphors and Masculinity

Some 25 years ago, I took a mandatory course in programming as part of my engineering program. At the time, I found programming very dreary, and something that only nerds could enjoy. I had little sympathy for my (primarily male) classmates who seemed obsessed with programming problems and told stories about waking up in the middle of the night with the long sought for solution to a particular problem and writing it down on whatever empty surface that was at hand. Some twenty years later, I was back at university, doing a PhD in HumanComputer Interaction, and decided to do a course in java programming, constructing user interfaces. To my great surprise, I was completely and utterly enraptured. I found programming great fun, creative, and virtually addictive. In fact, I so much enjoyed ABstRACt