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Comment by wfleming | Hacker News Reader

Women's representation in CS was highest in the 60s and has fallen pretty consistently since then (starting to rise a bit recently as the industry has started to see the gap as a problem). The general prestige and economic rewards of CS, on the other hand, have risen considerably in the same time period.

If a demographic's involvement decreases as the subject becomes more rewarding, it seems more likely to be because external forces are discouraging them rather than any inherent lack of interest.

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This might make intuitive sense but isn't supported by the research: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox

That article goes over some problems with the initial study, and some issues replicating (although the follow up study did find a similar effect). Hardly seems like a slam dunk, though, and given those issues it seems the effect is likely weak if it does exist.

More broadly, I question how effectively "endogenous interest" can be accurately measured without risking a lot of confounding factors from the broader society. I didn't read the original paper, maybe they tried to account for that, but I can't really see how you reliably could. People's interests don't exist in a vacuum, they're tangled up in their upbringing and society. If they'd done a similar study a century ago they might have found women having a high endogenous interest in being homemakers.

I don't think you could separate them at all because things like gender roles are down wind from sex roles and societal upbringing and nobody is brought up outside of social conditions to act as a control.

The important question is whether passionate people are being kept out of industry en masse. My gut says it probably happens on an individual basis but I don't see why it would happen systematically.

Hope I don't like a fossil, because I wasn't born back then, but wasn't this due to skilled typists being primarily female - and thus naturally qualified to be computer scientists? If you go back further in time, they would've been flocks of human calculators:

https://www.history.com/news/human-computers-women-at-nasa

How is CS being represented in this case? A 1960s CS syllabus would, at best, have amounted to typing classes, punch cards, FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, and a bit of EE (a male-dominated major) on the side. All of this would have been learned largely for secretarial work in offices or academia. Nothing to do with kernels, operating systems, computer architectures, building killer apps or web-based services as it would today. Sixty years ago, computer science was just white-collar labor.

There are three reasons computers became popular in the first place: proliferation of open hardware standards with the S-100 bus, cheap computer kits, and software portability that came with Unix and CP/M clones. So anyone who knew how to build/buy hardware could program what they want on it. No need for a time-sharing system or a college degree. At that point the only limitation was time, money, and inclination.

I disagree with your final statement. It wasn't external forces artificially depressing a demographic so much as it was natural interest becoming a more prominent limiting factor.

Maybe, but why aren’t more girls interested in computing in the first place? If it was just a workplace issue we’d see a lot more college admissions of women in CS programs, who then would drop out or change career later due to those issues.

I don’t think computing is seen strictly as a gender-restricted job like, say, mining and teaching, I wouldn’t expect much friction in the way of a young girl to be potentially interested in it and begin a career.

It just doesn’t happen that often, however. Does it have to be someone’s fault?

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