A professor at U of Washington who's been been teaching for 32 years wrote an essay in response to James Damore's (Google-Memo guy) firing, saying that tech's culture is too silencing of opinions, and wrote an article using the thesis that there are fewer women than men in CS because women are less interested in CS than men [1].

In this article, 6 women in prominent CS roles each wrote essays in response.

1 is professor at the same school, says his thesis is wrong because the numbers are changing to be closer to equal (On a intro-to-code website for students K-8, genders were split 55/45 boys to girls).

2 is professor at the same school, says the gender gap happens because by not expecting girls to be programmers, then girls don't expect it of themselves, and when they do they don't get offered as much help, so it becomes self-fulfilling.

3 is PhD alum from the UW and lead data scientist at a startup, says girls often don't like CS because they feel unheard or taken advantage of, and that the article is a mean but ironic example of women's opinions being ignored. She also insinuates that the professor should be reprimanded for writing it.

4 is professor at the school, says discrimination (sexual harassment, unequal pay, condescending attitudes) are rampant in the field and make it hard for women to stay motivated.

5 is undergrad alum from the school with high honors & PhD student at Cornell, says girls lose interest because they're frequently undermined. She also thinks the wrong people get recommended to CS at a young age (e.g. kids who like computer games but not kids who like math). She says having supportive parents and good role models is necessary.

6 is undergrad alum from the school and software engineer at Microsoft who TA'd for the original professor, says it's hard to stay confident because the field is male-dominated, and that articles like these make it worse.

Everyone agrees that the issue is very complicated, and says so in their essay.

[1] https://quillette.com/2018/06/19/why-women-dont-code/

edit: removed names of the responders

I can't tell if this is meant to be parody.

The first essay is a bit high-level, but the second lays out some pretty specific, straightforward ways that women get the short end of the stick in the CS field:

> It is more common for men to get credit for collaborative work than women, something I experienced when a student wrote in a publication draft that an idea of mine originated with a collaborator — even though progeny of the idea had never been discussed.

If you don't care enough to read that far and then assume that this means there's no "real reason", I think that's the definition of willful ignorance.

Each woman has a different opinion, summarizing would alter the authors' statements.

I suggest skimming

It's worth reading through, I'd recommend it. It doesn't take long.