How about the fact that, a decade out of university, all of my programmer friends have moved into management or other fields?

Where's your data?

What's wrong with managing programmers? If you really want to, I'm sure you can contribute some code as well.

There's nothing wrong with managing programmers. It was just the assumption that I didn't want to "get my hands dirty" because I was female that bothered me.

I don't know if it's common for project managers to contribute code in other companies. At husband's company, it is pretty much unheard of for for a project manager to write code. Project manager tends to be more of a technical writing/managerial position in his company. There's nothing wrong with that. But I have no wish to be a full time technical writer/manager.

At a company such as Microsoft, you can become a software architect. This means you can focus on the major design issues and have developers implement your design. You can write code, but you don't have to write that much.

As you grow older, you will want to write less code and focus more on software architecture and management of programmers.

Ah, ok. That makes more sense, although it is quite different from what my husband's company considers "managing coders" to be. That does sound more in line with what I want to do long term. Thanks for giving me a different view.

There's nothing wrong with it. See my original post.