WHEN I GOT started in this field 57 (ugh!) years ago, one of the things no one ever worried about was its gender balance. It simply wasn't on our radar all those years ago. Why? Well, for one thing, there were no academic computing disciplines-they wouldn't appear for another 15 years-so it didn't matter how many women were taking coursework in the field because there was no such coursework. But perhaps more importantly, there simply wasn't a shortage of female software practitioners. In the cubicles of the companies I worked for back then, my recollection is that around 50 percent of our programmers were women.