Medicine or law used to fill rooms with men, but like most other fields, that changed in the past few decades. The question is, what is the differentiator with CS that has led to the severity of the current imbalance?
> The wage gap for pharmacists has shrunk significantly because the profession has changed.
> In the 1970s, pharmacies were primarily independent and self-owned businesses. A single pharmacist might be responsible for keeping his or her shop open. The pharmacy would need to be open typical business hours; the owner would need to be available to do that.
> Now large chains own most pharmacies. And while you might get nostalgic for the mom-and-pop shops, you should know this change has been undeniably good for female pharmacists’ earnings.
> The majority of pharmacists are now women. And their wages have grown faster than those in other professional roles, like lawyers or doctors.
> Bigger pharmacies hired more pharmacists, and customers essentially saw the workers as interchangeable. Most patients don’t care about seeing a particular pharmacist — they just want to make sure they get the right medication.
> This meant it wasn’t important to be around 9 am to 5 pm — a shift from 6 am to 2 pm would do the pharmacy just as much good. And nobody accrued higher hourly wages for working exceptionally long hours.
And speaking of doctors, the article has this to say:
> You see this shift happening elsewhere too. Primary care doctors, for example, have shifted away from running one-person practices to joining larger, multi-doctor offices. In these situations, doctors become more interchangeable: When I go to my medical practice in downtown Washington, DC, I usually just want a doctor who can solve my problem — and I care less about which doctor is doing that.
The short version is that the Walmartization of professions has resulted in them becoming more amenable to women. If you want to correct the imbalance, a lot of programmers who think of themselves as auteurs are going to have to accept moving to a shift work model where individual professionals are interchangeable and might as well be anonymous. Startups are going to have to suck it up and accept that environments where employees are expected to work more than 8 hours per day are actively hostile to anyone responsible for rearing children (another thing the article points out: most child-rearing in the US is performed by women, even when both parents work).
[0] http://www.vox.com/2016/8/1/12108126/gender-wage-gap-explain...
So, I have doubts about the reasoning displayed in this article.
That seems a bit harsh.
I've seen this first hand in the legal industry. Business generation has shifted from getting a call from your golf buddy to formally pitching your team/strategy/rates. Meanwhile, 30% of GCs and new partners are women. Not a coincidence.
I don't know if that's really true. A lot of pharmacist jobs are essentially retail sales roles.
Or I guess women just won't join startups?
And startups aren't the only places where women work more than 8 hours/day.
There are 7 episodes but here is some of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70
Bascially, Norway is/was the most gender equal country in the world according to some index, yet the gender disparity in jobs is still very high. Apparently, the more advanced and gender equal a country is, the greater the disparity. The host of the documentary goes and finds some real scientists and they agree that biology plays a role.
Are we actually going to do further research even if the result is uncomfortable? If we find that biological differences are pushing girls to play with dolls and boys to play with trucks, are we going to stop pushing women to go into STEM fields?
Well that's facially not true: women receive more than 40% of the bachelors degrees in physical sciences, mathematics, and biological sciences.
> The host of the documentary goes and finds some real scientists and they agree that biology plays a role.
The issue I have with the biological evidence is the half-assed conclusions people want to draw from them. For example, it's pretty well established that women place a higher value on social connections than men. So that explains it, right? That explains why Silicon Valley, golden land of open offices built on software for advertising and chatting with your friends, has such a hard time attracting women! And that also explains why medicine and accounting, detail oriented left-brain jobs without much of a social component, attract a high percentage of women?
There is also evidence that women place a higher value on concensus and cooperation. That explains why programming, which involves working together to build things, has a much harder time attracting women than law, which involves being the proxy for acrimonious disputes between people.
I hope you place just as much skeptism on the research done in social sciences. Watch the documentary, not a single social science researcher in the doco had any evidence what so ever. They simply dismissed the any research that ran counter to their views.
> For example, it's pretty well established that women place a higher value on social connections than men. So that explains it, right? That explains why Silicon Valley, golden land of open offices built on software for advertising and chatting with your friends, has such a hard time attracting women!
That makes little sense. Having an open office is not going to make the people on opposite sides of the office get up and talk to each other if they really don't want to. And why would the act of writing social software be more social than writing other types of software?
> And that also explains why medicine and accounting, detail oriented left-brain jobs without much of a social component, attract a high percentage of women?
I am not a doctor or an accountant. I won't make assumptions about those professions. This may simply be the overlap area between men and women where these professions have things that appeal to both men and women almost equally.
I'm not suggesting individuals stick to their gender roles. If you want to go and do something, go do it. But I am suggesting that using employment numbers as a proxy for equality could be very wrong and encouraging one gender to do one thing or another could be a waste of time.
Remember, in the countries where gender equality is the best, gender sterotypes are still prevailant and the numbers remain stable. At the very least you have to question the idea that gender roles are enforced by society or that our ideas of what an equal society looks like is wrong.
There is no rational "biological" explanation for why women would somehow be "biologically" averse to CS while pursuing degrees in a closely related field at much higher numbers. There is no "biological" explanation why women's interest in CS would drop dramatically over just a few decades.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2015/01/27/wo...
Programming can be social, though it often isn't. But the basic job is changing machines. While in law the task is to affect people.
In my "things you can't say" speculation, I think the socially awkward guys on the spectrum who dominate the profession are not very attractive for women to be around. Being the only woman in a room full of men can be quite different depending on what kind of men.
You're looking at the two professions at two different levels. Changing machines is what the programmer does, but the end result is people communicating with each other. The end result of legal work is affecting people, but the actual job is down in the weeds of comma jockeying. Especially on the transactional side. There is nothing people oriented at any level about implementing obscure credit structures dreamed up by some finance nerd. But there is no shortage of women willing to do that work.
> I think the socially awkward guys on the spectrum who dominate the profession are not very attractive for women to be around.
That is not consistent with what I've heard from talking a lot of professional women. Women in finance aren't talking about how great the 85-15 ratio is just because Goldman hires a lot of frat guys.
She made the observation that she enjoyed working in a male-dominated work place more so than the female-dominated work place and gave several reasons relating to social dynamics.
Not only is it tiring to be a minority, but it is also much easier be in a profession that incorporates ones own gender identity into the work culture (a phenomenon that has become very common in the last 50 years). A man or woman who enters the opposite culture has two choices (as a study said), leave or assimilate a work culture which is opposite to their own. Data show a rather clear trend for both groups, which is that most leave after a short time, while many of the remaining tries to find a subgroup within the profession where they can create a local majority.
10% may just represent those that have yet to leave, or who for many reason aren't affected.
But you don't really need a CS degree to be good at developing software, especially for the myriad of other roles in a team that aren't low-level coding. Let people study what the hell they want, then pick the smartest ones and teach them. By shifting the recruitment focus from on algorithmic and data structure knowledge to other types of problem solving ability, you have a larger and more uniform talent pool to recruit from and you'll get more usable software (i.e. the usability increases, not the amount of software). If you keep doing this and the industry is balanced, CS degrees should follow. If not, you already have a solution.
I became a programmer because I was doing this thing for fun and all of a sudden someone started throwing money in my direction. I later became a farmer (another male dominated profession) under the same conditions. In fact, every job I have ever had in my life was a result of doing something for fun resulting in someone wanting to pay me to continue to do it. But if I start doing legal-related things for fun, I'm never going to turn that into a job as a lawyer.
What if males are more apt to do something that allows them to fall into jobs? If the programming profession were regulated like the legal profession, you may not get any more females wanting to be programmers, but you would eliminate all the males who simply fell into the position. A thought.
Having worked as a tech guy in a law firm there are many differences between programming jobs and legal jobs.
A huge one is tech is 10x more diverse and frankly it's a big turn off for many women. Many women place a premium on the social side (just like the much derided brogrammer) and frankly at most companies the social side is far worse than at the average law firm.
Diversity in culture.
Diversity in language.
Diversity in education.
Diversity in pay.
Diversity in location.
Diversity in religious belief.
For example my boss has no tertiary education and 2 of my coworkers only speak broken English.
So what's left are bad reasons. Women who are logical/mathematical go into medicine or law instead of programming because frankly it sucks to be the only woman in a room full of men. It gets tiring.
And even if you get into the realm of "things you can't say." The ratio of women to men in the SAT Math in the upper ranges where you'd expect most programmers to score is like 40/60. I think everyone would be ecstatic if 40% of programmers were women.