Pinkifying to appeal to young girls...absolutely need more of this. Almost every engineer I've ever spoken to on the topic had Legos or some other toy that involves combining building blocks of some sort into a larger whole when they were a child. We absolutely need to pinkify these toys to build engineering instincts in young girls if we want to see them gravitate towards engineering careers in later life.
As a girl, my favorite toys were legos, blocks, and the toy cars that sadly were more often gifts to my brother than to me or to us both. Ideally all three together (racing cars down the hallway on ramps built from blocks and lego? Win!)
None of them were pink. None of them were dolls. None of them involved families or housekeeping or kitchens or flowers.
But then, I was one of the lucky ones who didn't have pink things and "pink is for girls" and "girls should play with dolls" pushed on her from a young age.
Just make the toys unisex and be glad when any of your kids play with any of them instead of looking askance at your daughter when she reaches for the legos or your son when he picks up a doll, and they'll be fine. Legos are girls' toys too, regardless of what color they are.
But then I got to know parents who were trying to actively discourage their kids from like princess garbage, but they couldn't stop it because the kids learn from their friends. I'm no child psychologist, but there's probably some age where what their peer group thinks is more important to them than what their parents have introduced at home.
I don't know how to avoid that when having kids myself besides being careful that I'm not plopping them into a school full of girls who are being told which things they should and shouldn't want to play with.
And talk to them about it. If they're hearing one thing from their friends and another at home, they will experience cognitive dissonance, and they will wonder about it, even if they don't know to ask about it.
Edited to add: pinkification and genderization of toys seems to have accelerated since I was a kid. Entire aisles of toys in pink boxes instead of a single shelf of barbies. The explosion of Disney princesses hasn't helped either. (I remember being a teenager going to see The Little Mermaid and my mom explaining that it was a big deal because it was Disney's first animated feature in decades.)
I think maybe to some degree people are subconsciously frightened that women are now able to wear anything men can wear, do anything men can do. The reaction is to make sure that there are still differentiators between men and women (because, OMG, how can you interact with a person without being able to define you understanding of them based on gender? [never mind that we do it all the time in places like HN]) - and the easiest way to do that is to make sure the girls are pink! That way you can tell them apart!
"Research shows that sales and profits go up when we make girls' toys pink."
"Okay then, make girls' toys pink!"
Anyway, my guess is that whatever strategy would encourage the majority of women to go into programming isn't necessarily something women on hacker news would like, because women on hacker news are part of the self selected minority who already buck gender trends. You don't need pinkification because, if you were the type of person who did, you wouldn't be here.
I'll just note that some of us who might have been most attracted to the profession would be turned off by pinkification, and that we may be harder to recruit into recruiting efforts that we perceive as ghettoizing. I quit a women's organization dedicated to a specific technology because all the meetups they organized seemed to be oriented around manicures.
Someone mentioned above that law and medicine have evened out (or even begun to invert) their gender ratios over the past generation. They didn't do that by pinkifying the profession - by giving little girls pink stethescopes or gavels. They did that by changing expectations of who turns out to be a doctor or lawyer - the expectations of both children who hadn't yet chosen their profession and of the adults who guide their choices; choose whether to admit them into study programs; and eventually hire them.
You touched upon something that's critical to the whole issue: the perception of traditionally female stuff as inferior. The feminist movement has come a long way getting women through the door and into traditionally male-dominated fields. What still remains as an enormous challenge is the elevation in status of traditionally female roles and norms.
For as long as we think of silver and black and blue as high status and pink and purple as "ghettoized", we have a problem. Just as we have a problem that nursing and teaching are low status compared to other professions.
For as long as we consider care work to be inferior to business work, women will never be truly free.
For reasons that I'm not even going to attempt to speculate upon, a non-trivial number of young girls really like that stuff. Pretending it's not true, or casting judgement on the morality of this won't change the fact that it's effective. If it helps spark children's creativity, imagination, and passion for building things, then that's great in my book.
So every child is different. I think it is a matter of presenting opportunities to our kids in ways that are most meaningful to them as individuals.
Perhaps not all or even most girls, but definitely some are. As long as the gender-neutral versions are available for girls like you were, what's the problem with having more targeted options for the girls that are different? The point is to get these kinds of toys into the hands of girls in whatever way possible so that they don't miss out on this crucial developmental stage.
Personally, I've accepted that it's very hard to convince people of this. It's like Ouija boards and divining rods. People just consistently fail to catch themselves at it. And they often get very upset when you suggest that they might have bestowed their own gender stereotypes upon their children (not least because they believe those stereotypes to be damaging). I've lost count of how many friends have told me how their daughters always make a beeline for the barbies section at the toy store etc.
Well- they're kids. That's how sophisticated their understanding of gender is. What do you expect? We don't think twice about correcting other "natural" behaviours that we consider damaging ("don't talk to strangers", "wash your hands before eating" etc). So why is this "natural" tendency to follow gender stereotypes sacred and unassailable?
But, like I say- I despair of ever being able to get my point across to others about all this. If I ever have kids, we'll see how much better I do. 'Till then I just let it go.
The professions you listed primarily rely on memory and pattern recognition which don't differ too much between the sexes.