>> Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).
> If this were true, shouldn't women's interest in CS be going up now that the web is all about feelings/aesthetics/social?
It's the managers and marketing people that decide to make a website feeling/aesthetics/social oriented, and the graphics designers and artists and content writers that figure out what needs to be done to do that. From a CS point of view, a feelings/aesthetics/social website and a cold/ugly/inhuman website are pretty much the same--it's just a different set of assets they are given to display.
> Programming, in my view, is actually in the middle in the "people versus things" spectrum. It's much more about people than, say, math. And of course, 45% of math majors are women, so I'm not sure how that fits into the author's theory.
We like to pretend that CS and math are similar, or even that the former is part of the later, and perhaps that is even true when by "CS" we mean what, for example, Donald Knuth does. But for most of us working in industry, even if our degree says CS, we are really more technicians than scientists. I would expect the influences and abilities that might make one choose math and the influences and abilities that might make one chose CS at most schools to be fairly different. (At schools where the CS program is highly theoretical and rigorous, I'd expect more overlap).
Has there been any research on the kinds of math that male mathematicians and female mathematicians tend toward? There's quite a bit of research showing women are better at verbal tasks and men better it spatial visualization tasks. I wonder if that translates into men tending more toward geometric kinds of math and women toward symbol manipulation kinds of math? (I'm using both "geometric" and "symbol manipulation" very loosely).
(Math preferences are kind of weird anyway. There is a fairly strong documented correlation between whether a mathematician is an algebraist or an analyst, and whether that mathematician eats corn on the cob in rows or a spiral. WTF?)
BTW, I'm still not convinced that people are asking the right question when they ask why aren't there more women in programming. I think the right question might better be why are there so many men in programming? Looking at the Wikipedia article on "Sex differences in cognition" [1], and the one on "Sex differences in emotional intelligence" [2], and just concentrating on the ones where they cite reasonably solid looking peer reviewed research, it looks to me like women actually come out ahead overall. What I mean by that is that the things women are better at seem to be things that will be more widely useful. E.g., good verbal ability helps with far more jobs than good spatial visualization.
I'd expect that in an ideal world that is free of discrimination, where people are limited in careers only by what they are interested in and their abilities compared to others competing for the same jobs, women would have more viable choices than men.
I suspect that programmers can be broken down into two groups:
1. People who are reasonably well rounded and have a variety of serious interests. They are into programming as a means to an end. It is a tool that can be used to help with their other interests. They might enjoy programming, and strive to be excellent at it, but it is not the main focus.
2. People who are interested in programming itself as their main interest. What their programs actually do is not all that important--it is the challenge and complexity and cleverness of the code itself that matters.
My guess is that the first group is going to have a much closer to balanced male/female ratio. The second group, for reasons similar to why males are much more prone to autism, is going to be overwhelmingly male. I also guess that this second group is fairly large, and this accounts for a non-trival amount of the male/female imbalance in programming as a whole.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_emotional_i...