> Why do professions need to aim for 50-50 but not non-professional hobbies?
The logic is (from certain points of view at least) - if programming is a desirable occupation, both for individuals, and also for us as a society, then if we have something that "artificially" restricts the amount of programmers - we want to get rid of that something.
In other words, if it really is true that we could have twice as many programmers, that's better for society. If some segment of the population is far less represented in that profession, it could be for a number of reasons, but it's certainly some indication that there might be many potential programmers who are missing out on a possibly valuable profession (and who we as a society are missing out on being programmers), and this is possibly "fixable".
The logic is (from certain points of view at least) - if programming is a desirable occupation, both for individuals, and also for us as a society, then if we have something that "artificially" restricts the amount of programmers - we want to get rid of that something.
In other words, if it really is true that we could have twice as many programmers, that's better for society. If some segment of the population is far less represented in that profession, it could be for a number of reasons, but it's certainly some indication that there might be many potential programmers who are missing out on a possibly valuable profession (and who we as a society are missing out on being programmers), and this is possibly "fixable".