[J3] [EXTERNAL] (SC22WG5.6222) Fwd: [SC22] ISO Gender Action Plan Survey

[Steve Lionel]

On 6/2/2020 6:25 PM, Bill Long via J3 wrote:
>   While the WG5 effort is good-intentioned, I fear it is focused at the wrong end of the career pipeline.

This is not a "WG5 effort" - it comes from ISO. If that's really what 
you meant, then OK.

Here's something I wrote in 2016 
(https://stevelionel.com/drfortran/2016/10/02/doctor-fortran-in-thirty-eight/) 
when I announced my retirement from Intel:

"When I was mentally composing this piece, I wanted to write about what 
was the biggest change I had seen over 38 years. At first I thought 
about software complexity; how in the past it was common for a single 
developer to be responsible for an entire product or large component but 
that’s extremely rare today. But one day I looked around me at a Fortran 
team meeting and I realized that almost half the developers in the room 
were women – remarkable! In 1978, women were very rare in software 
engineering. Females were not entirely absent – I remember working with 
Nancy Kronenberg, Kathy Morse, Ruth Goldenberg and Audrey Reith on VAX 
and VMS – but it was then mostly a sea of white males.

Today, technology companies are being pushed to hire and retain more 
senior women and “underrepresented minorities”. Intel has made major 
commitments in this regard and I see a lot of forward motion. Perhaps it 
is true that Intel as a whole has a lot of catching up to do here, but 
the Intel Fortran team has always had a sizable number of women 
developers and, with recent hires of several bright, young women, going 
into 2017 the team will be more than half female! It’s not just Fortran 
– all around me I see women in leading technical roles, and I’m delighted. "

I agree that we need more women and "underrepresented minorities" in 
software development, and there are certainly a lot more than there were 
40 years ago, but their representation in standards efforts seems low to 
me. I applaud ISO's attempt to get a handle on the problem and try to do 
something about it.

Steve