I don't think it's cognitive dissonance if two different groups believe separate things. Only if one group believes two conflicting things. Being wrong (whichever side that may be) isn't cognitive dissonance.

More likely both sides are right to varying degrees. It doesn't have to be black and white, nor are those two issues mutually exclusive.

This is too rational to be correct.

Women are not applying for IT jobs en masse, and certainly not as much as men. That might be because we have issues with our current education system or because we need to do a better job as a society to remove gender bias from the conversation; but that's not up to the entrepreneur to fix. Really, I think it's a bit unfair to point at someone building a company and shout "Cognitive dissonance!" if what they are telling you is that they are not getting applications.

there were less than 5 girls on my computer science class, so unless woman are claim that they should have the job without education. I can totally see the reason why there is a gender diversity in IT?

This data point isn't super useful without telling us the total size of your class. 5 out of 5–10 is great, 5 out of 25–50 might be realistic, 5 out of 100+, not great.

I'm from a class of 30. There were 2 women. This is in Ireland though.

same here (tough we were 32 guys and 3 women). - germany, still have relationship with teachers, they barly see more than 3 girls/30 in 5 classes per year.

Why is a computer science background necessary for an IT career? I know many, many IT professionals who did not study CS in college.

"IT Professionals" is a broad label. Maybe we can think of getting a 'degree in a field' as a proxy-variable for 'interest in the field'. What's astonishing to me is through the 60s, 70's and into the mid-80s, computer-tech interest in female cohorts tracked with science, law and medical fields. Then it flattened and fell, while female participation in those other three fields continued to expand at the rates they had before. (So, what happened in 1985?)

This Planet Money episode attempted to tackle that question: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

Their tl;dr answer is that video games happened, and they were marketed exclusively to boys; that's what created and drove the cultural rift.

Thanks for that link. My original sighting of the phenomena used the exact same graph, but made no attempt at being explanatory. I have since then, been searching, but failed to re-find a copy of that graph to stick into my files. Now, thanks you you, I have! Thanks!

Maybe it is not strictly necessary but someone with a CS degree is obviously going to be the preferred hire.

Firstly, that isn't true. Huge numbers of people learn to write code as part of a degree that isn't CS - for example, if you want someone to develop a GIS startup you'd be better off with a geography graduate who can write decent code than a CS graduate who probably doesn't have experience of GIS.

Secondly, if you hear "startup" and think "developers" then you're ignoring at least 50% of the work necessary to make the business a success, all of which can (and often should) be done by someone without a CS degree. There's a lot more to tech than writing code.

Fair points for sure. I would agree with this.

No, but also yes.

To me the pipeline is not about "women entering the field". It's about fixing the whole pipeline from the beginning — getting a more diverse group started with tech and computers early, say elementary school, and then seeing (hopefully a high percentage of) those groups go on to eventually enter the field professionally. And just like an accelerator reaching successful exits, this whole process takes a long amount of time and we are only right in the middle of it.

Well, those aren't exclusive options. It makes sense that fewer women would enter the field if they think they're going to be subjected to rampant discrimination.

For the next four years, companies can forget about "diversity".