Well, no. It became male-dominated when it became a subject of tinkering, so one could do that at home. Now that it's established that it pays good, it started to gain attention from women.
Might be projection on her part - there are professions she could see herself wanting to do, because they paid well - Assumes all the men are the same.
My parents wanted me to be in Finance, Accounting or in Medicine because those jobs paid well and had prestige. I went in Software Engineering because I tinkered with programming since I was 13.
I'm sure she'd be similarly offended by reading same sexist remarks from the article, switching genders:
"Why men make gifted coders"
"Liukas believes that the profession only became dominated by women after people realised that it was well paid and highly creative."
Secondly when you talk to any journalist you have to be ultra careful they don't twist what you say into some thing that fits their agenda or their own biases.
Ugh, you were so close to making the right point.
1. It became a subject of tinkering.
2. Boys are socialized to be tinkerers.
3. Girls are not socialized to be tinkerers.
4. It became male dominated.
The fundamental, underlying problem is with the way girls are socialized in the home to be pretty caregivers instead of intelligent problem solvers.
"We offer the hypothesis that toy preferences reflect hormonally influenced behavioral and cognitive biases which are sculpted by social processes into the sex differences seen in monkeys and humans."
So yes, there may be some biological/neurological biases, but that they are then socially reinforced, which is exactly my point.
And last I checked, one of the things that makes humans humans is our ability to grow beyond our basic wired-in instincts. So I fail to see how that article can be seen as a pass for what is clearly a cultured gender bias.
Your 4-point history is also off because it implies there was a gender neutral computer science that was then taken out of balance by socialization. The only thing you seem intersted in addressing is that girls aren't encouraged to tinker with things - that in and of itself is a fair point. You don't need to create a false history and a false biology to address it.
Focusing purely on socialization, while it will make you friends, will also prevent you from seeing the other reasons STEM fields are predominantly male.
Which is exactly the case.
During the 60s and 70s, computing programs were far more gender balanced (still biased, but nowhere near as askew as today), in part because coming out of World War 2, women were far more likely to have been in the field, for the same reason they were included in manufacturing and other previously male-dominated professions: the men were at war.
The extreme male gender bias you see in computing today is a result of a regressive trend whose seeds were sown in the 80s and 90s, corresponding with the PC revolution.
I agree with you that home computers where the turning point, but it has nothing to do with being "sexy", but with the gender roles prejudices in families, which heavily biased who got computers for birthday and Christmas, while before it was purely an academic activity, therefore more accessible to women (by that time).
By now it should be clear that by "sexy" I mean "desired to profess".
All combined, "the 'sexyness' theory" doesn't need to explain why at the peak 38% of the CS workforce were women. It's not meant to explain anything, it's meant as merely an observation that it's untrue that men only got to IT when it paid well. It was the opposite: IT was already a male-dominated field when it started to pay well.
That said, back in '84 when women still composed a good chunk of the workforce, programmers and system analysts earned $60-$100k/year (2015 dollars), which is close to the current average ($80k in 2013).
So it seems to me that it already paid well when it became male-dominated - even if that wasn't the reason it did so.
If you in for tinkering, you will move on to something else once the clots of curiosity are gone.
Short rely because on phone did not read article her