UK society has decided that girls are not destined for IT and that needs to fucking stop.
Women outnumber men as graduates, in medicine, in law. What is the difference between those fields and IT?
Women outnumber men as graduates, in medicine, in law. What is the difference between those fields and IT?
This is probably not the answer anyone wants... but in medicine and law, you need a university diploma, or it is illegal to do the job. So you can simply set quotas at schools, and thus shape the future workforce.
In IT, many people do not have formal education. So even if you would set 50% (or even 100%) quotas at schools, it wouldn't necessarily achieve the same change at workplace. I suppose people are aware of it, so they don't even try this way.
If you want to fix gender ratio in IT using the same strategy, the first step would be to make it illegal for people without diploma to program computers. Then you can restrict the number of men at workplace by limiting the diplomas.
Of course, if you would want to fix gender ratio in IT using a different strategy, you could e.g. listen to Damore and make overtime illegal, perhaps require companies to provide part-time jobs, and otherwise remove things that women actually try to avoid.
I'm not sure about the UK but law and medicine in the US used affirmative action to address sexism in the profession.
There were class action lawsuits that required law firms, law schools, medical schools, and hospitals to accept women doctors and lawyers. After sexism was recognized as a problem law schools used affirmative action to admit gender-balanced classes and law firms hired equal numbers of men and women.
STEM subjects didn't have these interventions so it's unsurprising that sexism is more of an issue than in other fields.
I'm not sure what changed, but its seen as something that a career minded middle class girl _should_ do. it certainly wasn't any sort of legal discrimination.
I'm not sure of the exact stats, but the slim majority of first year doctors in the UK are women
Now this is the million dollar question. I don't have a succinct answer. I _suspect_ that a strong part of it is that IT is notorious for having handsy/abusive colleagues. but that cant be the entire reason, especially given Law's reputation.