>There was a program on TV a few weeks ago that talked about differences
>between male and female brain functions... (yeah, interesting eh? ;)... but
>one thing it did appear to show (from medical and experimental data) was
>that the majority of women find it considerably harder to visualise 3D
>images/objects/space than men.

Odd, in light of the fact that I was taught that women were better at
spatial relations than men. Of course, they seem to routinely change
their findings on this topic...

But POV-Ray is the intersection of two geek (not a perjorative) fields:
computing in general, and specifically math. Women are underrepresented
in computing and math (and engineering and hard sciences in general)
mostly for social reasons, IMO; there's still the perception that somehow
these fields are ones women are not suited for, and a lot of times women
spend so much time being not taken seriously even when they /are/ good in
these fields that they just stop participating in them.  This is based
primarily on personal and purely anecdotal experience, of course, but
overall the general consensus among my female geek friends (and even some
of the male ones) is that people see a resume' with a female name and
computing experience and think 'overglorified secretary'... in the face
of that, it's easy to get discouraged. In other words, we have a hard
time being taken seriously. Pretty much everyone I know locally doing
computing for a living agrees that this is a widespread problem of
perception. If you're female /and/ you're self-taught, getting a job is
extremely difficult. If you can /get/ to the interview stage... well,
that works better. Hell, even in web design, which is not precisely a
highly technical field, men seem to get taken more seriously than women.

Er... pardon my soap box. I'll just put that back away now.

Anyhow, I'm female, and I'm into POV-Ray. Admittedly, I'm not all that
good at it yet, but that's a matter of practice... I like it not just
because it's cool to be able to do 3D stuff but also because the computer
draws better than I do. :)

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