The racial gap is present in almost all faucets of American life. That suggests a society wide issue.
The gender gap is fairly unique to the tech industry and it is pretty extreme. My graduating class at Illinois for EE was 95% male.
The gender gap is fairly unique to the tech industry and it is pretty extreme. My graduating class at Illinois for EE was 95% male.
The gender gap is every bit a society wide issue. When I was in middle school and high school, I didn't know a single girl who was interested in technology. This says that this issue begins when girls are young and is either something imprinted on them by society or something that is innate.
I haven't seen anything that suggests that our industry is more able to solve the gender gap than the race gap. Both of these problems have complex causes that extend far outside of the scope of what one industry can fix, but I don't see any reason to fixate on one at the expense of the other, which is exactly what we're doing.
>The gender gap is fairly unique to the tech industry...
This isn't unique to the tech industry at all. The gender gap is present in numerous blue collar professions--some of which pay very well (electricians, plumbers etc...)
>...and it is pretty extreme. My graduating class at Illinois for EE was 95% male.
And I'm sure you can find many equally extreme examples that demonstrate the race gap.
There are other gaps as well. Rural vs urban, rich vs poor, single parent vs 2 parent households. Yet none of these receive anywhere the press that the tech gender gap does.
There are well-known differences in brain structure, such as the portions of brain used for language. Women have an edge in verbal reasoning, while men in spatial.
Male IQ has more variability than female IQ, resulting in more men in both the top and bottom percentiles. This may explain why more men are executives, and why more men are homeless (that's just my suspicion). Studies have also found that male IQ is higher on average by (variously) 3-5 points. From my personal observations, men are more likely than women to focus intensively on one activity, to the exclusion of all others, like skateboarding, or surfing, or computer programming, or gaming.
Men weigh more than women, have more muscle mass, have 40-60% more upper body strength, and 25-30% lower body strength, though with training the gap narrows to 0-8% (so perhaps this difference is more cultural). Men outperform women in most athletic areas, though perhaps not in distance running. Women live years longer than men and have lower rates of mental illness.
Women and men earn equal pay when you control for the job worked, the hours worked, and the amount of experience. I believe a study showed that single male and female professionals with no dependents, equal time in the workforce, working equal hours, earned equal amounts. The pay gap arises because slightly fewer women work high-paying jobs, they work fewer hours per week / take more time off, and drop out of the workforce at higher rates (e.g. stay at home parent).
A good summary of research and sources are available in Wikipedia articles like "Sex differences in intelligence" and "Sex differences in psychology". Certainly do not take my word for any of this, and please correct me if I'm wrong.
Personally, I think we should make sure that every person is judged based on individual merit, and be encouraged and supported to pursue what they're interested in with no preconceptions. That's what equality means to me.
Anybody who does not think this is a significant problem, has no business participating in the creation of products for any human to usw in their lives. None.