I am not sure I am qualified to answer and hope for a few comments from female Smalltalkers I usually feel quite uncomfortable in this topic. Just recently I asked an honest question on Twitter about how to market our product to both women and men (and any other gender, ftm) without making things sound "overly politically correct". This question alone was countered by the argument that the question per se is sexism, because it is unrespectful. So by asking the question, I felt like being attacked as a chauvinist. This is not helpful at all... OTOH, if I just say I'm male and can't comment, I don't help either. So what can I do? In the case of Smalltalk, I guess there is not so much gender-specific that can be done. As a small community, we can hardly get more women into IT. Woman who already have a foot in IT and need to decide what language or technology to use probably first look at a few alternatives that can offer value for their goal. I'd suggest this is not gender specific ;-) Here we should focus on questions like "what can Smalltalk offer to make current projects faster, better, easier, cheaper, funnier"? Smalltalk excels in a lot of areas, but not much in the ones that are attractive to young developers these days. People need to build cool mobile applications to make money. Their web applications need to make a great impression next to AngularJS, Ember and such. We cannot really show much in that area, can we? If our technology isn't helpful for them, people (of all genders) will look elsewhere, no matter what nice a community we are. So I am not sure we have gender problem. Looking through our diverse mailing lists and forums, I don't think I can find much traffic that would shy women (or gay, or transgender people) away. I think the active Smalltalk forums are helpful, welcoming and almost completely free of any offending comments compared to other IT communities. I hope our female community members feel the same and feel welcomed and supported. I would be surprised if they don't. If not, I hope they speak up and help us work on it. Our main problem is that we are working in a technology that is great in all things code quality, refactoring, elegance, maintainability, testing, explorative research and such, but we have poor support for most of today's mainstream technologies. This is what keeps our community small and doesn't help in attracting women. Sorry if this again is ignorant towards the problem (like my Twitter thread), I didn't intend it to be. I think we should first ask ourselves what would be needed to attract more people into the Smalltalk niche, and am relatively sure our community is friendly und supportive already. I am not sure if programming courses exclusively for girls would be helpful. Here in Germany, some schools tried to separate classes for Math and Physics, and thus help girls find their fascination for these among girls, but the results were not really game-changing. The theory behind that was that girls might shy away from saying something in class because the boys would make fun of them if they give wrong answers. But it seems that was not the problem. Joachim