Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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Here's the problem with that line of argument. What makes programming a masculine field?

Today, 50% of people who get degrees in law, medicine, or accounting are women (up from basically nil in the middle of the 20th century). Is there anything more "masculine" about looking through a hex dump to debug a program than there is about poring through Excel spreadsheets to tie a deduction to an expenditure? It's all dry, analytical detail work at the end of the day. If anything, going by the usual stereotypes, programming is more suited to women--it requires a lot of patience and involves a creative aspect.

Is it a matter of mathematical ability? Possibly, but that doesn't explain the disparities you see. The differential between men and women among people with perfect SAT Math scores is 65:35. At the 700 level, its 60:40. Even if math skills are the most important thing, they don't explain the gender disparity among programmers (though it might explain the gender disparity among Fields medalists). If ~40% of all engineers were women, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation.

I'm not trying to say programming in it's nature is a 'masculine' thing but the things that draw people to programming tend to be things men seem to enjoy more. There are industries that tend to draw men and there are industries that tend to draw in women (but not exclusively with either).

The article suggests that women are not 'doing well' in the tech industry because men are holding them back while completely ignoring that fact that many, many more men that are interested in tech, than women. Many women are just not interested in the field and never even make it to the scenario the author suggested.

My point is that there is nothing about programming that should make it more appealing to men versus women, given that a very similar field, accounting, has an equal representation of men and women.

Because accounting and law has an fairly even split between men and women then every other field (where physical differences don't come into play) "should" have similar representations too? Are male hairdressers trying twice as hard as their female counterparts to get to the same place? There is nothing about styling and cutting hair that should make it more appealing to women versus men. And yet we see huge imbalances there.

> Because accounting and law has an fairly even split between men and women then every other field (where physical differences don't come into play) "should" have similar representations too?

No, but when fields that are very similar in terms of intellectual demands have dramatically different gender representations, there is reason to be suspicious about what is really driving the disparity.

A good example is teaching. There is no reason teaching should be more attractive to women than men, yet in the U.S. most teachers are women. But this disparity is entirely cultural--in some countries there is not only no stigma against male teachers, but a preference for them. Isn't it valid to ask why social structure is keeping men out of a solid, socially useful career?

Men are about five times more likely to have autism than women, and are also much more likely to have autistic tendencies (mild autism, aspergers, whatever DSM wants to call it).

It seems to be accepted that these characteristics are beneficial for coding.

So why wouldn't a 50/50 split in CS be evidence of discrimination against men?

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