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Comment by WhitneyLand | Hacker News Reader

Great work doing this and good luck. Have a couple of ignorant questions:

1). Is it correct that there is no consensus on say, the top three reasons that females are under represented in computer science? It's frustrating that so many lay people voice just opinions and anecdotes. Is the real research starting to agree on what are the most important factors yet?

2) Some people say genetics is one reason females are underrepresented. For example they say, maybe on average females simply tend to be less interested in the subject. Is there any data that actually supports, or excludes this notion?

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Nope. There is no consensus. Sociology, psychology and biology are all intertwined as part of the reason so conclusions are heavily based on interpretations (therefore open to bias).

I think the closest ones to the truth are those who explore the early years and how they relate to the careers they will choose.

For example this study[0] on neonatal babies (meaning not yet influenced by culture/society) concluded that males are more interested by mechanics and females ate more interested in faces; reinforcing the idea that females are more social oriented and males more exploration oriented.

By the way, one of the reasons there is no consensus is the controversy that generates reaching any conclusion that is not "it's just that society is sexist"

[0] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163638300...

There is a nice norwegian documentary about, that we are kind of brainwashed that genders are equal, and that the reason for underrepresentation is nurture, but in the movie they hint at different studies, that it is not solely nurture, these is really a lot in our genes too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E577jhf25t4 (it has english subs)

Or just check this part https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E577jhf25t4&feature=youtu.be... if you don't want to watch the whole ~40min documentary

1) No real consensus, but IIRC the percentage of women among new hires in many big companies is about the same as percentage of women graduating from CS, which hints at where the problem definitely isn't (sexism when hiring).

2) I read about some statistics that women are less likely to be engineers in countries with high standards of living(e.g. Sweeden) compared with countries with lower standards of living (e.g. India). If true, given that engineering jobs are paid better, that would imply that once money isn't the main motivator, women either show less interest in engineering, or prioritise other things (e.g. people-facing jobs, or work-life balance).

For point 2, that's what they said about medicine, law, pretty much any other male-dominated field you can name. Even if there's a difference in interest among adults, why should that difference in interest be due to genetic factors rather than cultural differences in how we raise boys vs girls and how teens are peer pressured?

Edited to add: by the way, back in the 50s and 60s, computer programming was female-dominated.

That's actually not true. There is a graph that's often used to support this point [1]. But using a better graph, we can see that CS is in line with engineering (CS is definitely more "engineering" than it is "science") [2].

[1] https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2014/10/21/womencoding_wide...

[2] https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/p/7/005/06b/02d/33fe648.jpg

Might be representative of the west. Good number of females are seen in Indian companies. But they usually drop off after getting married.

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