individual personality and programming style. Of 20 girls, 14 favored the soft approach; of 20 boys, there were four who followed this route. In case material on college students taking a first programming course, of the 15 women, nine were soft style programmers; of 15 men, four. What we say in this chapter about gender, programming, and intellectual style is based on the analysis of these cases. But we believe that what is most important is not any statistical association between gender and programming styles, but what lies behind the styles and behind the resistance of our intellectual culture to recognize and facilitate them both. In our culture, those who use hard approaches don't simply share a style, they constitute an epistemological elite. Here, we focus on the soft approach; the canonical style is well known and well defended. But implicitly, our discussion of soft approaches is a discussion of hard ones; it contributes to the deconstruction of the latter as the way to do things. It also situates it: the supervaluation of the hard approach owes much of its strength within computation to the support it gets in other intellectual domains. To state simplistically a position we shall elaborate in the following pages: "Hard thinking" has been used to define logical thinking. And logical thinking has been given a privileged status that can be challenged only by developing a respectful understanding of other styles where logic is seen as a powerful instrument of thought but not as the "law