Remembering some of these women, and the early history like this, is very relevant today to show that that's nonsense.
I interviewed at a company a week or so ago and was very happy to see their lead developer was a woman. I didn't dare bring up the topic in the interview, but I'd have loved to hear if she was aiming for CTO at a later point in her career instead of escaping tech work.
The shame of it is, almost any dev team I've been on is better with at least one capable woman on it, yet so few stay.
Also those where the days of playing video games on home computers. Professional IT work was decades later.
And boys weren't the gate keeper to the technology either - how should that have worked? Today as then, if you are interested in doing stuff with computers, nobody can prevent you from doing it.
No many women don't like being hit on constantly by people. That's not the same thing as "not liking nerds".
My claim was that nerds back in the days of home computers would have been happy to meet a girl interested in computers. That is a far stretch from the Beavies and Butthead scenario you are trying to create. It's simply normal and healthy to hope for other human beings to share some interests with you.
Nerdy boys largely get ignored by their non-nerdy peers. There's an attitude of "I don't know why anybody would like that, but whatever".
On the other hand, nerdy girls are treated like absolute shit by other girls. Instead of "not my cup of tea", it's more like "eww, that's disgusting, and you're disgusting for liking it". The movie Mean Girls could have been a documentary.
And adults can influence this too. Even well-meaning feminists are more likely to steer young girls towards careers in more "acceptable" professions like business, law, or medicine rather than something down-and-dirty like engineering. And if science is involved, it's likely to be either medicine or a research career in natural sciences (e.g. physics, chemistry).
Mean Girls was actually based on a book on helping your teenage daughter survive bullying in school ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Bees_and_Wannabes )...
It's been my observation that the bulk of female programmers aren't hobbyists and just program because it's a job and it pays well enough. When they go home, they don't think about code.
There are exceptions (hell, I'm one of them, and I personally know a couple others), but in general, female hackers are much rarer than female programmers.
I'm not sure if it's proportionate to guys or not. There are plenty of male programmers who aren't hobbyists either (think of the legions of VB drones in the '90s). I don't know if the just-another-job to hobbyist ratio is just more noticable with girls because there are fewer of us in general or if the percentages are actually different.
Modern women are statisticaly less interested in programming. That's because boys 20 years ago got c-64 or PC because they wanted to play games, and girls 20 years ago got barbies.
Turns out barbie doesn't have the same side effects.
Ex communist countries worked differently.
That's what most of games were about in 8bit and 16bit times, so boys were interested in them more than girls (because of natural inclination and social norms), so there's more boys than girsl in IT right now.
This will change because there's more gaming girls now, and there are other reasons to have computer.
Natural inclination is unnecessary to the story. The burden of proof is on you to prove that it exists in the first place.
> Testosterone-related differences in aggression in the non-delinquent sample were studied as well. None were statistically significant. The only difference manifested was that adolescents with higher testosterone were more likely to respond more vigorously in response to challenges from teachers and peers. The vigorous response finding is consistent with our assertion that testosterone is linked with aggression only when it is part of dominance behavior.
> Using measures that incorporated self, peer and teacher ratings, Tremblay and his colleagues discovered that testosterone levels at the start of puberty were linked to social dominance a year later but not to physical aggression. Dominance was not related to current aggression or aggression over the previous three years. On the other hand, body mass was a predictor of physical
> Although research provides considerable evidence that testosterone is associated with dominant behavior, correlation does not prove causation. If the administration of testosterone was followed by an increase in dominant behavior, we would have a stronger case for asserting a causal relationship. Two experiments support the idea that the link is causal. In one study with a double-blind, randomized, crossover design, young men were given doses of testosterone or a placebo. Subjects were paired with a fictitious subject and told that each member of the pair could, by pushing a button, reduce the cash flowing to the other member. The subject was told that the other individual was reducing the cash that was flowing to the subject. Subjects receiving testosterone rather than the placebo pushed the button significantly more times (Kouri, Lukas, Pope and Oliva 1995). A second study with the same design was conducted with men aged 20 to 50 years (Pope, Kouri and Hudson 2000). This time testosterone was administered over a six-week period. Subjects participated in the same experiment. Results indicated that those who had had the treatment pushed the button many more times. These studies put us in a much stronger position to claim that testosterone stimulates dominant behavior.
That's just one study, but there are a lot more.
And, using common sense, how many cultures do you know, where women play team sports, and men don't? Where girl play war and boys play home?
I'm all for allowing to ignore social roles, I'm not good example of stereotypical men myself, but let's not ignore evidence that's all around us. It would be enormously unlikely, that biological differences between sexes, and behavior differences were just accident.
Of course social influences have big part, but they don't explain everything.
And there's a reason that men made games, and women didn't, when both were present at first in programming. I doubt it's just because of social reasons.
Though while this might be large enough to be considered statistically relevant, nothing I've seen suggests a natural bias strong enough to account for more than a fraction of the mis-balance we see in later life in the science & technology arenas, so social pressure (even "accidental" pressure due to, as you suggest, the "toys" parents and other family buy), both at a young age and as kids progress through school, are presumably the larger factors by quite some margin.
There are natural gender biases, mental as well as physical, that are not caused by external cultural pressure, and to completely disregard that would be a mistake. But I think (caveat: going by my experiences here rather than any scientific study) in most cases that the difference between the average man and the average woman is smaller than the range of differences within each gender (so if you consider only the bulk of the population it might be valid to consider us identical overall).
Research is of varying quality. We see some terrible research comin from actual professors in real universities. Here's one example of someone at a prestigious institution who has anti-science viewpoint: http://wjh.harvard.edu/~jmitchel/writing/failed_science.htm
So, when companies like Mattel (or whoever) do research into the colour pink and girl's toys we should probably be a bit wary about the conclusions they draw, especially when they don't release the full data.