Women equal men in computing skill, but are less confident

> Computing was originally a female dominated field

From allyshack's source:

> sitting at tables and doing math laboriously by hand

Yea thats not computer programming or electrical engineering so please don't conflate that with modern computing.

> as computing became a more prestigious field more men entered it

No, as men invented electronic computers the armies of female laborers were replaced with a smaller number of overwhelmingly male engineers and programmers.

> Girls are socially discouraged from showing interest in stem

And now we get to the patriarchy arguments. No; women have much easier and more personally fulfilling life options than sitting behind a computer screen all day, and so they chose not to.

All of these feminist arguments have been made and rebutted hundreds of times here on hackernews and anywhere else that allows critical discussion of feminism so it gets very tiresome after a while and should probably fall under flamebait at this point.

There is a paradox that with increasing gender equality, fewer women get into STEM. That indicates that women are in general not so interested in STEM if they have a choice.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

The major shift occured during the 1960 compared to 1940. What kind of prestige occurred in computing during that time that elevated the status of programmers?

The period when computing was originally a female-dominated field is quite known for something else. It was the world war 2. Men was sent to the front line and there existed a major lack of labor resource. Ballistics calculations and cryptography was very labor intensive, and unsurprising a lot of those position were then held by women.

Comparing the job market during the second world war with a few decades later does not make much sense. Still I am interesting in hearing what kind of prestige was given to programmers that supposedly triggered this change in the job market.

Most of these examples only explain why there's a difference at all but not why it's so severe. If anything most of the 4th example could just as easily be explained by a mix of interactions with female coworkers being higher risk for male employees (limiting equally charismatic women's ability to network by comparison) and the reality that if you spend a decade giving money to gendered industry initiatives people are going to attribute that gender's success to those initiatives and not merit (don't ask for tokens if you don't want people to assume you're a token).

> However, as computing became more and more important and presigious a field, more men entered it

Anecdotally, almost all of the male programmers I know (and I know many) entered the field because they thought technology was cool, out of interest in the field or they enjoy the problem solving challenge. Almost all of them tinkered with computers and programming in their own time before entering the field and many still do outside of their jobs (not to improve their job prospects, but because they find it fun or interesting or intellectually stimulating). Incidentally, almost all of the (far fewer) female programmers I know entered the field for the same reason.

My conclusion, perhaps wrongly, is that more males are interested in computing than females.

Aren't nursing and teaching essentially 90% female?

I had a CS Prof who ran a bunch of Women Who Code type meetups. His observation was that the idea that in order to be a software engineer, you have to devote your entire life to it was the biggest turnoff to many of the women. You have to always be working on a side project, always going to meetups, engross yourself in the geek culture in order to feel like you can do the job. For many women it was just too much of a hassle.

He advocated for tearing down some of these cultural norms as the best way to be more inclusive.