Ask HN: Would Databases be different if more women would do programming?

Given that women composed a very large part of the history of Computer Science, I don't see their influence missing from the foundation layers. It's in more of the recent (30 - 40 years) time period, where we haven't been innovating nearly at all, where the influence of women is particularly lacking.

I think the more interesting thought experiment is if there is a correlation there. A lot of women leave this industry because the people in power tend, on average, to have limited emotional intelligence and lack the nuanced viewpoints of maturity, and that they perpetuate those power structures on to others with those same limitations, so you have stasis.

The bigger question, then is, how would databases and programming languages look if we had more people with complex and nuanced emotional frames, who can collaborate and hold ambiguity? I think the answer is very compelling. These lost years (30 - 40 years) might not have had to be lost at all. Sadly, we'll never know.

The idea that men and women organize information differently in their brains seems like an enormous assumption to me. I've seen far more variance between individuals within a gender - and similarities between individuals across gender - in terms of how they process information than any pattern of difference between genders.