There are multiple factors, but basic discouragement, starting from childhood, is a big one.

100 years ago, when writing could make you a decent living, women were constantly discouraged from writing. Here's Virginia Woolf's character Lily in To The Lighthouse, dealing with nagging doubts:

"Then why did she mind what he said? Women can’t write, women can’t paint—what did that matter coming from him, since clearly it was not true to him but for some reason helpful to him, and that was why he said it?"

At roughly the same time, women were often employed as "computers" -- that is, people who did complex mathematical calculations. It was thought that women were good for this more tedious math, thus leaving men free for the higher math to which they were more eminently suited.

So, to review: When writers could support a family, women were discouraged from being writers. When math skill was not connected with a good salary, women were accepted as being good at math.

Nowadays, very few writers can make a living, while mathematically-minded coders can. So today's generally accepted wisdom is that girls are naturally good with words (which doesn't pay), while boys are good with math and computers (which does).

The fact that women aren't in coding isn't a bug, but a feature. Remember the Eniac? Programming that was brutally hard, and it was all done by women, and there does not seem to have been a particular amount of money or glory in it. Now there's both, and that's why women are discouraged from joining in the lucrative boys' club.

Once code starts being written by robots and the average developer can't find a job, then you'll see the field fill up with women.

Where do you see women being discouraged from programming? Because I see the opposite everywhere.

Good points. Being female puts a person at a disadvantage in certain ways, and particularly makes it more likely that teachers and parents will believe that the easier path of study is preferable to the one that requires more challenges, particularly in mathematics and science.

This does likely have an impact on how many female programmers we see today.

Men are disadvantaged in other ways, such as being taught to suppress emotions and to prefer aggression to problem solving. Many men are permanently damaged by this and the effects harm their employability and relationships for their entire lives.

I'm not suggesting there is equality/equivalence or that large-scale social biases and patterns don't disproportionately effect some people. Just making the point that there may not be an ideal and we may always be trying to correct for various excesses. One notable excess is the pressure put on working parents, which are asymmetrical and backward for both sexes in many ways.

It's not the general wisdom, it's a fact. But not a simple one. There's an experiment (heard of it from an philosopher women talking about women in philosophy) showing that girls perform as good as boys in math, BUT, if asked to color a drawing before the math test, they perform less. Which means, I think, that we don't live in a void of emotions. Men tend to be more aggressive and a hard problem requires aggressiveness. Unfortunately this comes with a shown tendency towards sociopath behaviour, Angular vs React thingy. :)

Women, on the other side, go towards sadness and depression and anxiety. Which is hard on coding. Speaking from my own experience, as a white male.

All in all is unfortunate. Coding is a tiny thing in developing software, and I personally believe that it's much, much easier to work with women. But when they are surrounded by 90% men teammates, I can imagine that it's hard to be a woman in IT.

    Being able to ignore social pressures and just be yourself is definitely a benefit of privilege

That's not privilege. That's the benefit of being on the aspie end of the neurotypical<->autistic spectrum.

It's a lot easier to ignore (or even be unaware) social pressure and focus on tasks for hours on end when you have less dopamine in your brain than your peers.

This whole "everything is a privilege" argument is pure nonsense most of the time it's trotted out.

While you have correctly identified a trait of those who graze the autistic spectrum, you also appear to have discounted the possibility of being able to ignore social pressure otherwise. I think you are kind of proving the point of the person you are responding to. To me it came off as if the comment made you uncomfortable, and you responded in a way that is, in my opinion, short-sighted. I believe what he meant is that often times with privilege, people don’t feel the need to defend a certain viewpoint - because they aren’t negatively affected by it.

Disclaimer: I grew up poor as dirt in a house of 7 children, so I’m definitely not speaking from experience as far as being privileged goes. I never graduated college, I just read regular old books. I do have a younger brother who struggles with a slight case of autism though, and he has no interest in computers whatsoever. In fact his life is somewhat in shambles. Also, the term “asperger’s” has been deprecated.

I'd like to add though that I disagree with the parent comment about privilege putting people ahead in the moral sense. I believe that some of the most compassionate people have grown that way through hardship.

> I believe that some of the most compassionate people have grown that way through hardship

This is very true, and all of the most dedicated physicians I know were inspired as children to pursue medicine because of some situation they were involved in involving the health of a loved one (or their own health).

> putting people ahead in the moral sense

Compassion is not the only relevant aspect of morality. The way I'd argue my point is that one of the big reasons we can all sit back and think about how to make the world a better place is because our basic needs are met. Over time, as humanity has overcome basic scarcity and basic fear, we have been able to look outward and prioritize things like making the world better for others.

Someone who is privileged is more likely to have had an excellent teacher explain the labor movement or the holocaust, and is more likely to have vacationed to places where other ways of life (including far subpar standard of living) can be observed, or even gone on a humanitarian school-cation to help people in need. Experiences like this help to break a person out of his/her safe little world and help create an understanding of broader issues, problems, and opportunities.

Meanwhile, the middle class kid's family got a nice new TV allowing a great view of music videos and action films.

This is not about blame or credit. A person alive in 2017 America is more likely to think slavery abhorrent than a person alive in 1830 America. This isn't because there is something superior about modern people, it's because economic prosperity offers the luxury of thinking about others more empathetically.

There are always outliers, people who are morally ahead of their time or unusual for their class. Nothing about my argument in this thread applies to them. I'm talking about the average person.

Thus the average privileged person is simply ahead at the age of 18 relative to those from more humble backgrounds or from decades past.

What scares me most is the large percentage of Harvard and Stanford grads who go into investment banking and similar careers. Those are fine choices for someone whose goal is to "level up" his/her family's wealth status in a single generation, but they are not the sorts of careers chosen by people who had the chance to develop moral clarity and self-actualization early on. It suggests a great deal of cynicism or timidness that should really not be the result of the best education in the world.

Enough extra privilege to spend some of it being unpopular. Fascinating angle.

That looks like a perfectly sealed argument. You're popular - surely it's privilege. You're unpopular - you have so much privilege you can even afford being unpopular! Society loves you - clearly privilege. Society shuns you - you're so privileged you can take on the whole society, clearly you have the whole privilege in the world!

If any outcome leads to the same conclusion, it usually means the argument is faulty, or at least redundant.

No. The privilege part is that you can be unpopular and still be safe and successful.

To the less privileged fitting in just right can be a matter of survival.

The problem here is that survival while being unpopular is taken as the evidence of existence of privilege. So whether you are popular or not, both is the evidence that you are privileged.

survival? Have we all been transported to Bartertown?

It is very similar to the concept of political capital.

I think you've got a valid point. I would add that genetics plays a part. I grew up the same way, but my family didn't have much money. However my parents were former athletes and ensured my siblings and I took part in a regular physical activity (in one form or another) from a young age. I think that staves off some of the aggression -- if you don't look like they could just give you a knock around regardless of your demeanor.

That and I was often told I looked angry or sad while I spent my spare periods or lunches reading. Woops.

I think this at least applies to younger ages.

edit: wanted to add, I'm sure this changed some time ago. I'm referring to the 90's and early 2000's in particular.