I can believe that. But I would never argue it's orthogonal to interest. I would be fighting a losing battle if I argued men and women have exactly the same interests. IMO a 50/50 split is not going to happen naturally, and it won't be self sustaining. As we've already seen, the way to get closer to 50/50 is to peer pressure women into it. Whoopdee doo. Progress!
The biggest bias women in tech face IMO is impostor syndrome.
I wonder if anywhere has tried running a female-only CS path (e.g. at a private non-coed institution) long enough to generate its own identity/culture, and then what would happen if you "transplanted" some of those teachers and students into a mixed-gender situation.
Could that "prime the pump", providing a cultural anchor point for more females in the mixed-gender place?
I think making computer science assignments and quizzes fun and less intimidating is a very different idea from the extreme of macho nursing.
Your article shows that teachers were making girls feel unwelcome because they didn't understand the cultural in-jokes. There's a big difference between cultural predisposition and predisposition towards a skill. I find it really hard to believe that programming and problem-solving is something men are just generally better at compared to women. If we measure problem-solving ability by IQ, then women are just as capable as men, though it looks like there are more males than females on each side of the spectrum of extraordinarily good at problem-solving and extraordinarily bad. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intellige...