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Comment by SteveDeFacto | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, society's gender roles are a result of our biology and not just dogmatic stereotyping. The truth is that women are biologically more interested in social occupations. It comes down to the way humans evolved and the attributes which make a good mother. Men are biologically more interested in thing based occupations which is why there are so many men in science and technology.

Note the behavioral effects of autism which is known to be the result of an extreme male brain (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12039606). The ratio of women born with autism is 1 to every 4 men. By simply measuring traits that indicate the levels of testosterone during gestation they can even accurately predict SAT scores (http://www.livescience.com/7290-finger-length-predicts-sat-p...). There was an interesting Norwegian documentary which covered this topic pretty well (http://youtu.be/AZoRihmI1Ug).

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Then let's make STEM look more social when career choices are made.

Isn't that what conferences, hacker/maker spaces, 'women in STEM' lunches are doing? My sister who was interested in math and physics in high school had a female teacher/mentor that had competitions and math clubs. Half of the participating students were female (including me). That was a major encouragement that got me into computers. It took until I was done with a degree in history for me to realise that humanities don't pay (well), and I like computing. Neither my sister or I are very social (she has autism and I have social anxiety). What would have helped is less 'social' and more mentoring and available resources, which I am seeing being more and more available than what I had in high school.

Going out on a limb here but are both your parents high-achievers? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2064478/Autism-lin...

Not particularly (as hard as it is for a child to say about their parents). My mother has ADHD, and only diagnosed 2-3 years ago, which caused issues in school and work and any other ambitions. We're pretty sure my father has autism, but getting him formally diagnosed would make no difference. Due to him being in finance during the recession, he had trouble adapting to the new career environment.

I think they are doing a pretty good job of that currently and not only that but they offer a huge amount financial incentives through grants and scholarships for women. Anything related to STEM will require a huge amount of alone time in order to learn the required skills. The idea of sitting in front of a computer writing code or solving math problems all day is probably about as appealing to them as any type of customer service or child care would be to me.

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