Do you really believe that the general perception of programming/IT is "sexy"?
I conclude that doctors, bankers, marketing executives, writers, poets, dukes, slaveholding Southerners, vampires, werewolves, and Catholic priests are all seen as more desirable than engineers are.
"And over here is Duke Smith, Lord of Databases, who rules over over data warehouse, and whose rippling pecs shine like the morning dew..." uh, sorry, got off track there.
I am female, and have never read a Harlequinn romance novel. None of my female friends have read them, either. None of my older female relatives have read them either. (I'm not saying some people aren't reading them. Just that they're like daytime soap operas: Cheap enough to make, and popular enough to survive, but not necessarily relevant.)
Must be something wrong with my friends and me. Lately many of us have been crushing out on guys who work at coffee shops.
But my point is this: There is such a thing as sub-culture. This means not everybody likes the same stuff. To put it in start-up terms: it's the long tail... of attraction.
This is 2010, people. :D
#dowatchalike
Material like that will cater to it's audience. Then the only question is, who is it's audience and do they represent a significant portion of the greater whole we are trying to study.
The Long Tail taught us that the single most popular thing still has less people into it than not into it.
Medicine and Law has more prestige.
* your family & friends will be able to grasp what you do
* on average, in those fields you can have a much greater positive impact on other people than you can employed developer
* your field is insulated by the need for education - you don't have to worry about 16-year-olds who think working 20 hour days is fun
* codes of professionalism (whether or not they're slavishly followed)
* regulatory boards that can and do eject bad apples
* very hard to outsource to India or other destination du jour
* law firms and medical practices don't go boom and bust as often as tech firms do
I'm a female developer and I honestly don't care... but then again, I've made myself impossible to compete with. I'd also gnaw off my own leg before working in a corporate tech environment.
Let's face it -- the movie that sums up the life of a corporate developer best is _Office Space_. The IT Crowd doesn't make it much more appealing.
Meanwhile, lawyers and doctors and biotech and all sorts of other fields where there are more women -- they get the awesome shows and movies.
Further, everything you just said applies equally well to any sort of professional engineer (i.e., the kind where you get certified) or to actuaries. Those fields exhibit a lack of women similar to CS.
After listening to a med student and a pharmacy student discuss what they've been doing while on rotations, I'm not entirely certain this is true.
That's it! We need the IT port of House!
And, thanks to economic protectionism, a largely guaranteed source of white collar income. Programming is much riskier.