90% of BuddyPress developers surveyed are male.

Do these numbers surprise you?

There is something really important going on with this question.

Today, we know immediately & intuitively, that the doors to technical computing roles are wide open to females, and the Welcome! sign kept nice & shiny. Yet there are just this side of 'no takers'.

What many will not know, is that deeply-entrenched & massive cultural & institutional biases at the beginning of the digital computing era, as "mainframe" computers became the foundation of modern banking & financial enterprise (half a century or so back) already existed in favor of females, for those roles.

Many will know, that the word "computer" was common for generations, before the electronic, digital machine arrived .... and that this "computer" was in fact a human person. This goes well back into the 19th century, at least.

Although it was 'ok' for a male (or at least 'certain' males) to be a computer, the standard, the norm, the expectation and the preference, was that computers would be females.

As the early mainframe 'big-iron' computers were being integrated into large-scale corporate, academic and governmental settings, following World War II, managers sought to fill the new computerist employee positions with the females who had been performing the numerical & computational roles, traditionally.

But 'for some strange reason', that didn't happen. Experienced female computers moved on to other employment settings, and big-business et al had to scramble for under-qualified & inexperienced personnel, to interface with the new digital environment. They 'ordered' eg flunky mail-room males to sit down at what was a fairly elite task which would normally be unavailable to them, and learn it.

Old photographs of elite scientific research teams often show a healthy female representation. Typically, their role was that of the computer. Likewise, photographs of 19th C business & office settings often show women proudly at their mechanical calculator stations. Typical secretarial training, for females, included computer skills ... because it was expected of 'girls', and one would be uncompetitive, without the ability to meet that expectation/opportunity.

But when the digital equipment came along, and stored programs became the means of harnessing the new computing-machine .... females fled. They were not pushed out, or displaced. They declined the new role that 'everyone' fully expected would be theirs.

Why this was - and continues to be - the case, is an important mystery.