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.
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.
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.
Ex communist countries worked differently.