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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this whole thing.

Until recent years all developers I met were socially awkward men, me included.

These are not the kind of people I would attribute any power to "crowd out" anyone.

To me it seemed that they started doing computer stuff, because no one, including women, wanted to have anything to do with them.

The "cool", way more aggressive, kids wanted to do sales, law, finance, management and stuff.

Computers were new and complicated, a unsafe bet for people who were so good included into society.

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This is an aspect that has always been bugging me as well. There is this implied notion that for men, it was ok or even encouraged to be nerdy and spend all their spare time in front of a screen.

In my experience, committing to this lifestyle meant being socially crowded out. Some people were unpopular to begin with and sort of found refuge in the computer world out of necessity, some of us accepted being unpopular/uncool because we did not care.

One possible explanation, but potentially an offensive one, and only based on personal experience: fewer women were willing to make this sacrifice, at least in school. Interestingly, this was not because boys would be unwelcoming but because other women would judge them harshly for stepping out.

On a related anecdote, I frequently observed girls in school downplaying their math abilities in front of their friends - not because men judged them, but because they did not want to stand out in front of their friends.

I suppose the interesting question is why they felt this way, and I would not wager to answer it. I just think the theory 'men are not letting women into tech' simply does not hold up in the formative school years.

Only very recently (since the social network movie) there has been this glorification of tech in combination with the startup lifestyle.

I would argue that boys and girls today still have this attitude, and now Radio Shack has died (and in that context, isn't Raspberry Pi such a blessing?). It's hard to persuade boys and girls that math and science are cool. It's also unfortunate because a lot of parents think that throwing an iPad in front of their kid will make them more technical, when the characters coming over YouTube / Minecraft are just cancer.

>Until recent years all developers I met were socially awkward men, me included.

+1 - that's how I remember it too!

I asked the following 12 days ago [0]:

>One thing I'd like to ask the women in this forum:

>If you'd grown up back in the day before tech was cool and techies were (generally) just nerds with no money, would you have still been interested in tech?

>...

I didn't get any replies though ...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14956137

I just replied. We exist.

In my case, I did not get exposed to programming or computers until I was 24 yrs. old, though chance employment.

This is how I remember it in the UK, too. Computers were incredibly uncool and only people with zero interest in being cool were willing to invest their time in learning about them. If anything, these people were crowded out from lots of other domains and picked computing because it was the only place which would accept them.

Now everybody is trying to turn this around, and imply a conspiracy to "[create] the now-familiar stereotype of the computer programmer as a reclusive, eccentric man".

The stereotype wasn't created be a shadowy group of men to exclude women. That is absurd. Why would sexists block women from programming, while letting them into plenty of other more high status jobs?

Reclusive, eccentric men have difficulty finding jobs in sales, law, finance and management, and technology is one of the few jobs where they can make a difference.

The stereotype wasn't created be a shadowy group of men to exclude women. That is absurd. Why would sexists block women from programming, while letting them into plenty of other more high status jobs?

Well, we should be careful with claims like that. Think of the gender of most of the secretaries at all the jobs we've had. And little things, like if you're in a relationship, how often do you do the laundry and dishes?

More directly, women really weren't allowed to become the things they wanted to be until the 70's. We like to act like that was so long ago, but that's one grandpa's lifetime. Not even a very old grandpa.

I'm not saying it's due to systemic sexism, just that we're talking about a group of people whose very recent ancestors were denied opportunities we take for granted. They must have faced enormous social pressure to conform.

That is my point though: as sexism reduced women joined high status industries to take jobs that require high verbal intelligence. They didn't join programming despite it being a high growth industry: why?

I'd source this but what I'm discussing is just a Google away and a bunch of studies are never going to convince anybody.

Anyway, my point is that the narrative of the article goes against my lived experience. One is allowed to believe their own eyes.

Scott Alexander made this point for you and in great detail, with many citations: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

And little things, like if you're in a relationship, how often do you do the laundry and dishes?

I've been in a relationship for 3 years. I do literally all of the dishes, all of the cooking, all of my own laundry and my GFs laundry more often than she does. I'm also the only one who vacuums. I'm probably selfish here: caregiving and housekeeping can be very rewarding.

We like to act like that was so long ago, but that's one grandpa's lifetime.

But there is no reason we have to do things like our grandfathers. Change can be hard, but it's also incredibly liberating to do what you believe is right without worrying about so-called "social pressure". Change comes from the inside out.

There was a really interesting nerds vs feminists war on Scott Aaronson's blog a few years ago:

> I believe that “the problem of the nerdy heterosexual male” is surely one of the worst social problems today that you can’t even acknowledge as being a problem

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2119

A couple of things.

1. Programming didn't start in the 80s or 90s. It started in the 40s-50s, and we've been doing it for seventy years now. When you were (by your own admission) a socially awkward boy interested in PCs, there were 50-year-old professional programmers working in banks, defense, aerospace and other industries whose programming culture was very different, because they didn't have computers at home at all, and all of them were first exposed to computers in college at the earliest.

2. When historians and sociologists say terms like "crowd out", they do not mean there was any conscious intent behind it, let alone ill-intent. They describe social dynamics. Also, since the eighties at least, professional programmers in the industry have had a lot of power -- whether you felt it or not -- as evident by the size and influence of the tech companies where they worked.

I think number two is a very important point. My problem is that the entire media, including this article, is using it with ill intent to paint men as sexist.

But that's the point. The term "sexist" itself, at least in its scholarly meaning, does not imply intent. Sexism is a feature of a social structure where women are granted significantly less power than men. The prevailing hypothesis -- which has a lot of supporting evidence -- is that we are all sexist, men and women alike, merely by virtue of being socialized in a sexist society.

When people first discovered microbes and claimed that people were spreading diseases by, say, not washing their hands properly, they did not mean that people were spreading disease intentionally, but it was nevertheless a fact that they were. But to understand why, you had to know about germs (which are invisible to the naked eye, and were only known to those who study the subject), and you had to be proactive in order not to spread diseased.

While that would be a nice narrative, I don't think it matches reality. If it did, the people outraged by apparent sexism would be trying to educate the sexists instead of getting them fired.

Certainly such people exist, but they're drowned out by the outrage machine that's trying to take away their livelihood.

I find it funny how the few of men whose livelihood may have been affected by unfair allegations is compared to the millions of women who are harassed while earning their livelihood and/or pushed away from earning one, every year, for centuries. Frankly, I'm amazed at how level headed the "outrage machine" is given at how much bigger the real outrage should have been. Also, those who want or are willing to be educated have plenty of resources at their disposal. The evidence is so overwhelming that there can be few if any those who are exposed to it and yet remain unconvinced. At this point, it's mostly diehards that are left, and the reason they are left is precisely because they don't want to see the evidence. Dawkins doesn't really think he can educate all evolution deniers on apparent evolution, and we don't think we can educate all those who wish to perpetuate sexism.

Your analogy to evolution is a textbook false equivalency. That you think the evidence for your narrative is as strong as the evidence for evolution is frankly absurd.

And your patent acceptance that outrage is a legitimate response to these scenarios highlights exactly the problem with how this has been playing out. Suddenly your comparison to Dawkins falls apart quite spectacularly.

> That you think the evidence for your narrative is as strong as the evidence for evolution is frankly absurd.

It really isn't, but seeing how adamant you are not to study the topic, I have no idea how you'd know whether it's absurd or not. But you are forced to declare the subject absurd, as that is the only thing that can justify, in your mind, not even bothering to examine it with any care (as, I assume, you consider yourself otherwise curious), which is what you want; namely, you don't want to see the fossils, and I really can't make you.

> Suddenly your comparison to Dawkins falls apart quite spectacularly.

Oh! You got me there! But one should bear in mind that creationism isn't what condemned millions to dependence and humiliation. A wise man once said that it's easy to remain cool-headed about other people's problems.

A 1987 study found 700 out of 480,000 Earth and life scientists don't believe in evolution. Are you suggesting these gender topics have a comparable consensus ratio? If so, evidence of this consensus should be trivial for you to produce.

So go ahead, I firmly believe attacking the strongest opposing argument, and I'm only interested in facts. Pick what you believe is Damore's weakest evidence, just one point, and show me the evidence of consensus contrary to Damore's position with a ratio on the same order as above. Then I will happily acknowledge that your analogy to evolution is 100% faithful.

> But one should bear in mind that creationism isn't what condemned millions to dependence and humiliation

A humiliation and dependence that none of the outraged people actually lived through. It's amazing that women could put up with the insane discrimination and sexism to achieve gender parity in so many other male dominated fields, like law and medicine, all without needing the outrage machine, but they are somehow powerless against a bunch of nerds who, by and large, just want to play with cool tech.

Frankly, it makes one question whether outrage is really a useful response at all.

> Are you suggesting these gender topics have a comparable consensus ratio?

Uh, yeah. A comparable ratio of social scholars are convinced that sexism is a major cause of the power disparity between the sexes.

> If so, evidence of this consensus should be trivial for you to produce.

It is. Like I said, it's on fucking Wikipedia!

> A humiliation and dependence that none of the outraged people actually lived through.

Really? You must lead a charmed life. Do you have any idea how many women experience sexual harassment at work every year in the US alone?

> It's amazing that women could put up with the insane discrimination and sexism to achieve gender parity in so many other male dominated fields, like law and medicine, all without needing the outrage machine, but they are somehow powerless against a bunch of nerds who, by and large, just want to play with cool tech.

Ha! Are you aware of the "outrage machine" (or "political action", in the professional academic jargon) that was required to get us to the point where women are even allowed to practice medicine or at all (or to vote)? That achievement wasn't gained by "putting up" with anything. You think "this is outrage?! Take a look what it took to get women the right to vote in Britain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette#Early_20th_century...

I always find it funny (and indicative of a complete ignorance of the subject) when people think that feminists today have taken it too far (of course, conservatives often acknowledge the justice of past progress yet claim that this time it's too much).

The fight with nerds isn't the longest or hardest -- far from it; it's just the most recent.

> Frankly, it makes one question whether outrage is really a useful response at all.

That is a good question, but one that history can thankfully answer. Yes, it turns out that outrage can be extremely effective. Of course, it's hard not to be outraged in the face of injustice (just look at how outraged some people were after Damore's firing, even though this is a truly rare occurrence, and he did cause a scene that required the CEO of Google to cut short his family vacation).

> Uh, yeah. A comparable ratio of social scholars are convinced that sexism is a major cause of the power disparity between the sexes.

That's not the claim being disputed. Either you're trying to participate in too many threads and losing the context, or you have serious reading comprehension problems.

> It is. Like I said, it's on fucking Wikipedia!

Show it. You keep saying this, yet your comment history cites no specific link showing this consensus, and particularly for the topic we're actually discussing, not the topic you seem to think we're discussing.

> Do you have any idea how many women experience sexual harassment at work every year in the US alone?

Every single one. But that's a false equivalence to what we were talking about.

> Take a look what it took to get women the right to vote in Britain:

Now look at the effect these actions actually had in convincing people. Public opinion only turned in their favour when world war I started and they ceased all violent activities and showed how they could positively contribute to society by stepping into traditional male roles.

> I always find it funny (and indicative of a complete ignorance of the subject) when people think that feminists today have taken it too far

Yet another straw man. Saying it's taken too far today does not entail feminists didn't also take it too far in the past.

> That is a good question, but one that history can thankfully answer. Yes, it turns out that outrage can be extremely effective.

It also led to the election of Donald Trump. Yay for outrage!

Like our other thread, it's clear you have some particular axe to grind and instead of addressing my specific arguments, you're shouting down some imaginary opponent. This is an unfortunate tactic employed on both sides, and I frankly don't have the patience for it.

> This is an unfortunate tactic employed on both sides, and I frankly don't have the patience for it.

Obviously, I think this is exactly what you're doing...

Your claim of rampant sexual harassment causing women to leave the tech industry does not seem to hold merit.

https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2008/2/5453-women-and-men-in-...

https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/NSF_Stemming%20the%20Tid...

That's not at all what I claimed. There is rampant sexual harassment, not just in tech but in many fields, but we should have been horrified indeed to learn that sexual harassment is so pervasive as to drive a large percentage of women out. What we see is that culture drives away a significant portion of women.

Minor problem: that's EXACTLY what the media and outrage engine is specifying.

That's not what I see, so I guess both our views on what the media and "outrage engine" are doing are very much shaped by our political views.

https://www.google.com/search?q=sexist+google+memo&source=ln...

What am I supposed to see here? (Are you, by any chance, be confusing the word "sexism" with the word "misogyny"?)

You're supposed to see that the media considers it to be malevolently sexist. Redefining the terminology so that "sexism" somehow is a neutral term is, for lack of a better phrase, "not an argument".

I don’t see it. I certainly see many references to it as a bad thing that needs addressing, just like germs are a real and serious problem that needs fighting, but that doesn’t mean that the people who spread germs do it with the intent to cause others harm. So I don’t see “malevolent sexism”, and I don’t see references to Damore as a misogynist.

> 1. Programming didn't start in the 80s or 90s. It started in the 40s-50s,

Programming in the 40s and 50s was very different from programming in the 80s or 90s and it's disingenuous to conflate them or suggest that they are the same.

True, programming back then was much more mathematical and required stronger analysis skills and rigor.

This is just one anecdote, but I'd like to share my personal experience. Fitting in with the typical boys who took computer classes in high school was really difficult and unpleasant. I'd been using computers and writing code longer than anyone there thanks to parental encouragement, but as a girl that didn't matter.

Girls in the class got picked on all the time. I got nicknamed "secretary" and singled out every class by the other nerds, getting told to go be a secretary because I could type fast, should input their code for them instead of writing my own, etc etc. People pulled classic bully moves like pulling my chair away when I went to sit down. I felt more bullied by them than I ever did by other kids. In my personal experience, the socially awkward computer boys were actively unwelcoming to girls, and awkwardness did not preclude meanness.

This resonates with my own experience as well. I have been programming since I was 10 in a country where I was the first of my peers whose family got a PC. I got bullied both by the "jocks" and by the "nerds." The jocks bullied me because I was a nerd while the nerds made fun of my ambitions and disparaged my looks. Fun times!

The "socially awkward" archetype of a computer programmer I think is mostly a western (probably American) cultural artifact. For instance I have worked with a lot of Indian immigrants who are programmers and I don't find the correlation between social awkwardness and the people doing programming.

While programming might be appealing to socially awkward western/American men , I don't think one should go from that to concluding that they're the only people innately drawn to it.

The "socially awkward" archetype of a computer programmer I think is mostly a western (probably American) cultural artifact

It was around that time in the 80s that "the nerd" or "the geek" became a staple movie character. Computers up 'til then had just been a piece of industrial machinery like a lathe or a microscope. Now they were associated with "losers". Richard Pryor in Superman III. Revenge Of The Nerds. Etc etc.

And by and large society was perfectly happy to relegate computing to these losers and shun them. Noone cared about the demographics of these losers, either, it was not "problematic". It's only recently when the geeks have built something that took over the world, that people are saying, hey, I didn't do the work or make the sacrifices but I deserve the rewards. That's where we get "brogrammers" et al.

The article posted a few days ago suggested that people from places like India are pushed into tech for financial reasons, being one of the few options to escape extreme poverty. Because of that there is also a more equal distribution of men to women.

Whereas Americans have far greater choice when it comes to being able to sustain oneself, and thus tech is not a top choice of – well – anyone, except among those 'socially awkward men'. The harsh reality, and one that is difficult to imagine for the small few of us who actually enjoy this kind of thing, is that tech is a highly undesirable career path for most people. Men and women alike.

But the tech worker gender gap is much higher in the US than it is in India, so isn't this evidence of exactly what the parent comment is implying? US -> computers associated with nerds and social outcasts for a long time, now we have a big gender gap in CS degree holders and tech workers. India -> computers much less stigmatized, now we see a lower gender gap there.

>>The "socially awkward" archetype of a computer programmer I think is mostly a western (probably American) cultural artifact.

This conveniently condenses to one word - "Nerdism".

And this isn't restricted to Tech or the US.

The "socially awkward" archetype certainly existed in New Zealand.

It is same in Japan.

I don't think it's a stretch to imagine the socially awkward men you've met in the field aging into slightly less socially awkward older men tasked with hiring new developers. When hiring, it seems a small logical jump that they will higher more people like themselves (socially awkward men) and avoid people who differ. It's a pretty commonplace dynamic and an easy trip to fall into.

What surprises me is how hard people are resisting recognizing this dynamic, and insisting the current state is somehow the "natural state".

I have not citation but from the recent articles on HN, is the problem not that they are not enough female CS graduates to hire from? The crowding out is happening in high school and college.

"insisting the current state is somehow the "natural state""

This is a strawman, nobody assumes this is natural in any way.

The point is, yes we want more women in the field, but the awkward male nerds that are there right now aren't the main problem.

Better look at the hiring managers and what society "shows" women every day.

Damore's argument was that the current state was because "biology".

Nope, the argument was that the current state was caused by both social and biological effect, and that it is harmful to insist that the cause is entirely, or mostly social. Honestly we don't really know how large are contributions from social and biological effect.

>>Until recent years all developers I met were socially awkward men, me included.

Actually this true of any area of work that is kind of relatively new with progress and overall scene changing very rapidly.

What you see in Tech, there are plenty of such examples in early Industrial revolution or Renaissance.

Most people only want to get in because their either want a job, or they think there is an element of easy money. Its only when the effort vs return equation becomes clear and you realize its way harder than you thought - The 'make it easy for me' chorus grows.

> Until recent years all developers I met were socially awkward men, me included.

> These are not the kind of people I would attribute any power to "crowd out" anyone.

These are also the reasons the SJWs and other bullies from the regressive left have had such an easy time finding footing in the software development world lately and continue to do so.

> Until recent years all developers I met were socially awkward men, me included. These are not the kind of people I would attribute any power to "crowd out" anyone.

The "crowding out" happened in the 1960s. Like the article points out, the stereotypical image of a computer programmer as a "socially awkward man" did not exist before the 60s. The creation of that very image is what led to "crowding out". And now, you are mentioning the same self-fulfilling prophecy.

> Computers were new and complicated, a unsafe bet for people who were so good included into society.

That's precisely the main point of the article. The reason why programming was left to women. Then men just took over when it was field tested and proven to be a profitable business. Doesn't matter how awkward those men were, they were still men.

First, that's not true. https://i.imgur.com/pkZPrOI.png. CS was a third women in the mid 1980s, dropping to under 20% today. Twenty years ago, the Space Shuttle's software team was quite gender balanced: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff.

Second, nerds can do a perfectly effective job pushing women out of the profession without being aggressive or having social power. We do a lot to gender the profession in ways that has little to do with the work. Think about all the references to hiring "cowboy coders" and "code ninjas." We emphasize hiring the lone gunman coder who learned to code in their basements, while the job actually is highly collaborative and team oriented.

>Think about all the references to hiring "cowboy coders" and "code ninjas."

From my memory since the mid 1980s, those references came in somewhat later - about the time tech became cool and there was money to be made.

Maybe something about the macho culture of game programming once it reached significant mass?

> Second, nerds can do a perfectly effective job pushing women out of the profession without being aggressive or having social power. We do a lot to gender the profession in ways that has little to do with the work. Think about all the references to hiring "cowboy coders" and "code ninjas." We emphasize hiring the lone gunman coder who learned to code in their basements, while the job actually is highly collaborative and team oriented.

If the casual use of innocuous phrases such as those are "pushing" women out of the software development profession, then I would conclude that either:

a.) women, on average, have fragile psyches and avoid working in rough-and-tumble environments where phrases such as "cowboy coder" (the horror!) are tossed around. They need an environment where speech is tightly controlled so as not to upset them or scare them off, or

b.) an overwhelming majority of women tend to not be interested enough in software development as a career to pursue one.

I'm going with b.

So, they're engaged in other STEM fields at 2x-3x the extent they're engaged in CS, despite the fact that those other fields are often more intellectually rigorous and challenging and despite the fact that most of those fields are dominated by computers and software --- in fact, many of them are even more challenging from a CS perspective than computer science itself as it is practiced in the industry, which is mostly about connecting database rows to HTML forms --- but despite all that, you're convinced that women just "tend not to be interested enough in software development"?

> So, they're engaged in other STEM fields at 2x-3x the extent they're engaged in CS...

That statement is so broad as to render it utterly meaningless. I don't doubt it applies to medicine, for example. But does it apply to automotive or mining engineering?

And even if it did apply to every non-CS STEM field, that still would not preclude the possibility that women, as a group, are simply not as interested in CS to the same extent men are.

Earth sciences. Chemistry. Biochemistry. Math (for Christ's sake). Astronomy. Statistics. Evolutionary biology. Neuroscience. Molecular biology.

All double-digits better (some have actual parity) in female representation than computer science, which shares its gender disparity distinction with only two other (generally defined) STEM fields: ee/mech engineering and physics.

Nobody is disputing that women are less interested in working in CS than men. They clearly are. What is obvious to some of us is that the reason for that disinterest is that the field is hostile to them. It is hard to explain otherwise how something like three times as many women might obtain post-graduate mathematics degrees --- a pursuit that is more intellectually demanding and less lucrative than computer science, which routinely pays six-digit salaries to people immediately out of school simply to wire database rows up to HTML tables.

tptacek I agree with you that software needs more women, I think it would be good for women, and good for software. And contrary to that recent memo I think we should do more to encourage women to join CS.

I think it's really important to get the cause right because if we fix the wrong problem we'll be spinning our wheels instead of getting women to join tech. And I haven't been entirely convinced the gender gap is due to sexism and hostility in the workplace because what my female friends and developers say doesn't jive with that theory.

When I ask my female friends, who are very smart and would kick ass as developers, "why don't wanna you wanna join programming? Pay is great you could double your salary in two years", they usually say something along the lines of "I don't think I'd like it" or "sounds boring to sit in front of a computer all day".

And when I've heard my female friends talk about leaving programming its never been because someone made a slightly sexist comment once every couple of months. They all talked about how that was annoying but didn't really bother them. But they usually said that sometimes they fantasize about a job where they get to work with people more, and make a positive impact one they could see like therapy and teaching. (granted the female developers I know work for large companies with powerful HR departments so the level of sexism probably isn't representative of the startup scene)

I'm curious if you've had a very different experience. Do the women in your life like to program but have been turned off from doing it professionally because of perceived or actual hostility and sexism in the workplace?

What resources(ideally empirical) would you recommend to convince someone who was skeptical but open minded to the hostility hypothesis that it's true? Do you think this hypothesis is tentative but likely or do you think the evidence is so overwhelmingly in support of this hypothesis that it's an open and shut case?

> They clearly are. What is obvious to some of us is that the reason for that disinterest is that the field is hostile to them.

Oh yes, hostility manifested by half-century old magazine ads or phrases like "cowboy coder." If they're allowing their career paths to be altered by innocuous stuff like that, or what a teacher might have told them, I don't think they want it that badly.

There are no qualified women banging on the door of the software development profession demanding to be let in. The door is wide open to them, and it always has been.

No, sorry, I'm not going to play Calvinball. You directly challenged a statement I made upthread, and now that I've taken the time to clarify it, you've decided to respond to an earlier comment I didn't write. If you'd like to keep discussing this with me, you're going to either have to rebut what I said, or acknowledge it.

> No, sorry, I'm not going to play Calvinball. You directly challenged a statement I made upthread

Could you clarify? In every one of my replies to you in this thread, the part I quoted came directly from the post (of yours) to which I replied. And where did I directly challenge any of your statements? I think you have me mixed up with someone else who responded to you.

You claimed that my statement about greater female participation in what turns out to be most of the rest of the stem fields was "so broad as to be meaningless". I responded in greater detail. You re-rebutted Rayiner's original comment without acknowledging mine. Acknowledge it or rebut it; don't pretend you didn't see it.

> You claimed that my statement about greater female participation in what turns out to be most of the rest of the stem fields was "so broad as to be meaningless". I responded in greater detail.

Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that you thought naming a handful of other STEM fields along with a rough participation ratio made your premise any more meaningful.

You seem to think that, from the fact that women participate in other STEM fields at a greater rate than CS, you can infer the reason they aren't well-represented in software development. To you, it's "obvious" that "the field is hostile to them." And others who share your view have defined "the field" so broadly as to include boys in jr. high school computer clubs.

Well, to me at least, it's "obvious" that your logic there is faulty.

I think you missed some subtext. That list of fields characterizes pretty much the whole of "STEM". It's not a "handful of other fields".

> I think you missed some subtext. That list of fields characterizes pretty much the whole of "STEM". It's not a "handful of other fields".

Even a full accounting of all STEM fields would not make your logic any less faulty.

Are you acknowledging that I have effectively provided that accounting? You should, but it's not clear to me that you have.

> Are you acknowledging that I have effectively provided that accounting? You should, but it's not clear to me that you have.

Well, I think its noteworthy that you distinguished statistics from mathematics, but apparently felt automotive engineering (which I specifically asked about) to fall under ME, and you didn't comment on mining engineering, which does not fall under EE/ME.

But for some reason, you seem to think it's meaningful, so I'll acknowledge that for the purposes of this discussion, you have indeed effectively provided that accounting.

And I stand by my earlier response, to wit, that even a full accounting of all STEM fields would not make your logic any less faulty.

Thank you. Now, to avoid what would otherwise be a special-pleading argument on behalf of CS, you'd have to explain what innate preference would lead women to avoid CS despite:

* The fact that the other STEM fields are usually more intellectually rigorous than CS.

* The fact that some of those STEM fields are in fact the intellectual foundation for CS (Daniel Bernstein has an old quote about how mathematics is fundamentally the "easiest" of the STEM fields, and has as a result advanced much further into the frontiers of human knowledge than the other field, which creates the impression that it is more forbidding than it actually is).

* The fact that almost all of these fields are dominated by computers; in fact, I know professors in bio fields who do more hardcore programming than the typical CS grad does (to wit: they're sometimes forced to write things in C, even in 2017).

* The fact that many of the STEM fields that feature significant female participation are more "things"-oriented than CS, which, as it is practiced in the industry, is largely abstractions wrapped around human social interactions.

* The fact that the rest of STEM, in which women excel, feature large amounts of long-term solo investigative work, while CS as practiced in the industry is universally a team pursuit which has been recognized at least since Fred Brooks as being overwhelmingly about communications and coordination skills.

If you'd like to broaden the analysis outside of STEM --- for instance, to observe how much other professions impinge on personal lives, make demands of home life, have poorer work-life balance, have utterly inflexible hours and workplace location requirements, and require short-notice travel, and still have nearly 50/50 participation of men and women, we can do that too.

It seems plainly obvious to me that there's not much of an argument for an innate female aversion to computer science that wouldn't contradict these observations. When you have to gerrymander an argument around inconvenient facts like that, we call the result "special pleading". Can you make a clear argument that won't be that thing?

Tptacek, you're the one that seems hung up on the whole STEM aspect. Let's leave aside the fact that STEM is just an arbitrary grouping of fields that happens to include both doing research to find cures for cancers and hooking up database rows to HTML forms.

Your logic seems to be:

1. Women are well-represented in many STEM fields other than CS or software development.

2. These other fields often involve use of computers and software development.

3. Therefore, it logically follows that they SHOULD also be well-represented in CS and software development.

4. Since they're not, it's "obvious" that "the field is hostile to them."

I think that's ridiculous. Women, as a group, can, and do, pursue just about any career of their choosing in the US. For years, efforts have been made to lure them into STEM fields, including CS/dev, in greater numbers. For all of the pontificating from feminists, I have yet to encounter a single documented example of a qualified woman who is banging on a closed door demanding to be let into the profession, that is being denied entry. That woman, like Santa Clause, is mythical. She doesn't exist. Of course, I can't prove she doesn't exist any more than I can prove that Santa Clause doesn't exit. But neither of them exists.

Her existence can be proven by a single example. But for all of the years of male-blaming in regard to this issue, no one has yet provided such an example.

No, it's not OK for you to collapse 6 (10, if you want to stop "being hung up on STEM") bullets into a single "These other fields often involve use of computers and software development" bullet. That's a bogus argument with another name: the "straw man".

Once again:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but your logic seems to be:

1. Women are well-represented in many STEM fields other than CS or software development. (I don't dispute that, or the bullet points you provided to support it.)

2. These other fields often involve use of computers and software development. (I don't dispute that, or the bullet points you provided to support it.)

3. Therefore, it logically follows that they SHOULD also be well-represented in CS and software development.

4. Since they're not, it's "obvious" that "the field is hostile to them."

I think that's ridiculous, for previously stated reasons.

You literally just repeated the identical straw-man argument. I'm correcting you: that is not my argument.

What other STEM fields are you referring to?

Using CS as a tool to solve other problems is a different proposition than the study of CS itself. I don't see why they'd have to be connected in people's minds in the way you're suggesting.

For instance, undergrad math enrollment is almost at gender parity, but postgraduate math study has similar gender ratios to CS. This is because you need an undergraduate degree for teaching and other careers, and so the interest in pursuing math for maths sake appears to be much lower among women. This could be for a number of reasons, some of which might be fixable to improve ratios, but some may be innate.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

Wrong on both counts. Mathematics PhDs are issued at a ~70/30 ratio, substantially higher than that of CS PhDs (and way higher than CS undergrad degrees) --- this despite mathematics being among the small number of heavily gender-segregated STEM fields.

Further: almost nobody practicing computer science in the industry has a PhD. There are, believe it or not, places where having a doctorate is frowned on. For the degree that actually matters --- the bachelors --- math has as you say something approaching parity.

Tell me again about the innate limitations women have performing in STEM.

> Mathematics PhDs are issued at a ~70/30 ratio, substantially higher than that of CS PhDs

It drops from ~50% to just under 30%, where CS degrees hover between 18-22%. Frankly, that's not "substantially higher than CS".

> Tell me again about the innate limitations women have performing in STEM.

No one is making that claim except people like you who love tearing down absurd straw man arguments. Please read more carefully and stop making assumptions.

You've ignored one argument in favor of hinging your entire argument on a double-digit improvement in women's participation in mathematics not being "significant"?

What argument have I ignored exactly? Your CS PhD argument has bearing on anything that I've said as far as I can see.

Finally, it's not a double-digit improvement, but of course we can quibble endlessly over how meaningful that exact number is, but it's irrelevant. The number is still piss poor compared to undergrad enrollment, indicating that women don't pursue higher math degrees for various reasons.

The link I initially provided cited evidence that they're interested in undergrad maths because of opportunities it provides outside of pure maths. It's not apparent that similar opportunities exist for CS undergrad degrees, which would be one explanation for the disparity in undergrad math and CS. So I'm still not seeing how anything you've said bears on this at all.

Certainly graduate maths have more women than does CS. So what? What exactly do you think this proves in light of the above?

For academia/public this may be true, but these jobs were always balanced.

> CS was a third women in the mid 1980s, dropping to under 20% today

This is a profoundly misunderstood statistic.

1. Programming in those early days was considered more secretarial work,

2. the greater sexism in other jobs made CS more palatable, ie. women took what jobs they could, not necessarily the ones they wanted; this same trend is why Iran and other oppressive countries have such high female enrollment in STEM

3. Female enrollment gained slowly, but male STEM enrollment sky rocketed in the 80s. You can't point to a huge spurt of interest among men and use that to say that obviously those men somehow prevented the same growth in interest among women. There are clearly other factors in play.

All of this and more is fully documented by Scott Alexander: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

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