CS education works best for people who already know how
to code before they begin. CS teaches the theory behind a
practice in which they assume you already have some
skill. Women are less likely to already know, because
they don’t play video games as much.
We don't have significantly more women in CS than other countries, I think.
In my admittedly anecdotal experience (at a college way below the level of CMU), introductory programming classes had a classical bimodal distribution. There was a cluster of grades at 30 (people who weren't interested in programming) and another cluster at 80 (people who coded as a hobby and already knew nearly everything the class had to teach).
More generally, however, enthusiasm for video games makes kids keenly aware of the hardware that makes it possible. (Even at the age of ten, kids will get into console wars citing which has the faster processor, etc.) Having that technical background from an early age, however rudimentary, makes gamers more likely to feel comfortable with programming.
Doesn't that count as positive for girls.
An analog to your statement would be: "I like movies" often translates into "I want to work in the film industry"
> An analog to your statement would be: "I like movies" often translates into "I want to work in the film industry"
But that's actually true, with the most desired movie-inspired career being actor/actress. The difference is that people give up this idea a lot more easily, because they realize that the odds of being a movie star are incredibly low. Analogous to liking rock music and wanting to be a rock star.
Also, something to think about: since the founding of the uni I got my MSc degree from, less than 3% of first-year students were women. You could count them with your fingers. The problem starts really, really early in a kid's education.
Playing games other than twitch-shooters also feels a lot like programming in many ways: you have to discover the rules, features and limitations of the system and work within them to reach your goal, and all of these tend to be rather well defined.
I can only speak for myself, but video games were indeed what birthed my interest in computers, and later on in programming.
Casual games typically don't make you think, "Can I run this?" or "How would this be better if I had better hardware?"
One further point - maybe the 40% number is a recent phenomenon and it will take time for it to translate into more women entering computer science.
This is absolutely what pulls kids into games. What pulls kids into knowledge about computers is the realization that better hardware means they can play "better" games. This means they wind up with a pretty good conceptual map of computers at an early age. That gives them a huge advantage at programming over someone who just sees computers as a black box.
Nowadays most videogames are played in consoles, which are effectively black boxes (except for some very experienced hackers).
I'd wager that people (kids) get interested in programming by using technology and wondering, "Hey, how does this work?" I'd further bet that this occurs far more often in connection to video games than, say, Word or Outlook, since video games are fun and creative. For the past few decades, far more boys than girls play video games. Hence, by college, more young men have been exposed to programming than young women.
Now, with the advent of the web (which is more or less gender neutral) and social gaming, I expect to see an increase in the number of women getting into programming over the next decade. Nowadays, it seems to me that there are more "fun" things that programming has made possible which have yet to be skewed towards the Y chromosome.
I don't know if that's as true nowadays, but back when I went off to school in '97, video games were essentially the only way a kid could get exposed to computing in a way that was fun, interesting, and challenging. They directly led to my interest in programming.
You must act in a system with lots of arbitrary, human-made rules and must figure out the rules and how to use them to your advantage.
The difference to other games - board or sports - is that figuring out the rules is usually part of the game. They are never - fully - explained to you.