Later in the document he goes on to point out that gender disparities are greater in more liberal countries (e.g. great disparity in US than Iran, greater disparity in Finland than in the US). Interpreting this as our culture being somehow more oppressive (and then Finland's even more so) requires an "impressive level of intellectual contortion" - if anything it seems to be evidence that there are differences in preferences, and therefore greater freedom -> greater divergence.

The Forbes site you reference cites a Quora post, which quotes a Wikipedia article. What the Wikipedia article actually says is that 373,415 out of 1.5 million engineering students in Iran are women, which is 24.9%, not 70%.

This is not that different from the 19-20% of engineering degrees awarded to women in the U.S.

One in four (26%) Iranian researchers is a woman, which is close to the world average (28%). In 2008, half of researchers were employed in academia (51.5%), one-third in the government sector (33.6%) and just under one in seven in the business sector (15.0%). Within the business sector, 22% of researchers were women in 2013, the same proportion as in Ireland, Israel, Italy and Norway.

Quoting this UNESCO report: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002354/235406e.pdf

Looks like Forbes preferred to quote anonymous response on Quora instead, clearly considering it more authoritative source. After all, this is what distinguishes established press from amateurish projects like Wikipedia - they do thorough research and rigorous fact-checking before publishing something. Don't they?

The most popular in 2013 were social sciences (1.9 million students, of which 1.1 million women) and engineering (1.5 million, of which 373 415 women). Women also made up two-thirds of medical students.

Also, practicing researchers probably would be much better metric than students - if the student graduates as STEM major but then does nothing of the sort, then it's not really so relevant for participation anymore. If we had such situation in US, we would reasonably ask what is preventing those student from entering the labor market and consider situation where the distribution is 70/30 outside of university and 25/75 on the labor market abnormal.

There were two very interesting discussions with similar sorts of intellectual gymnastics when I was there, one involved whether or not getting rid of bottled water helped the environment and the other how the phrase 'free tibet' was such a trigger for Chinese nationals.

Increasingly identified as "Engineer's Disease."

Because, unsurprisingly, they're also not very liberal with regard to women choosing their field of studies. Frequently, their parents decide for them.

As someone coming from Eastern Europe, that is sometimes the case, but it's not the biggest factor, which I believe is that life's harder there, and smart women chose whatever is going to give better income and job security. When women are free to chose whatever, because they believe their life will be fine regardless of whether they get that higher paying job in IT or that fun degree in Literature, they chose according to their real preference.

I know very little about gender issues in Iran, admittedly, but I would be very very careful making any social/cultural conclusions driven on a material from totalitarian and semi-totalitarian regimes where decisions of members of society are not free. I mean, how do we now that 70% figure is a result of a cultural choice and not some governmental program driven by whatever ideas the ruling caste has? You can not say it is about culture if it could be just a direct or indirect result of some or other edict from Powers That Be.

Update: also looks like 70% figure is a complete baloney, not based on anything but anonymous Quora postings. Wikipedia has different data (see my comment above) on par with data in other countries. If somebody has any respectable source for the 70% figure please quote it.

18% percentage of graduates correlates quite well with the percentage of women in tech roles at large American-based corporations. Especially if we take in account the explosive growth of the field, which makes the numbers dominated by recent grads.

Google, 20%, https://www.google.com/diversity

Microsoft, 17.5%, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/diversity/inside-microsoft/d...

Apple, 23%, https://www.apple.com/diversity

Amazon, ???, https://www.amazon.com/b/ref=tb_surl_diversity/?node=1008009..., no "tech-role" category.

Facebook, 19%, https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/fb_diversit...

A whole different discussion could be had around ratios within the foreign-born slice of the workforce, which further skew the numbers one way or another. Alas, I could not find the data.

Edit: I am not allowed to comment anymore, so this Eintagsfliege (mayfly) will die now. Bye.

Furthermore, your comment essentially only exists for you to cast doubt on the opposing viewpoint while bringing up common reactionary points of view that also have no evidence. You have no evidence that women in the United States "study literature or gender studies for fun" [1] or that "women just study something to meet men to marry". Not only are these ideas incredibly flawed, but you appear to have brought them up for no other reason that to further cast suspicion on the parent poster without actually addressing any of their claims. You just threw out ideas that people are likely to get up in a huff about.

[1] While I majored in CS in college, I also pursued a minor in critical theory. The people in that classroom were not taking those courses "for fun" any more than programmers took to their classes. They felt it was incredibly important to be able to dissect the immense amount of media we have in the world today and what it means. What are video games trying to say? Or modern films? What ideas do these share with bedrock pieces of literature that we've studied in critical theory again and again? Is it really so bad to enjoy that? Furthermore, gender studies is filled with people itching to try and discuss (and come to good conclusions about) THE VERY THINGS WE ARE ARGUING ABOUT RIGHT NOW. Isn't the fact that we spend so much time discussing such things nowadays evidence that it is a very real and important thing to study and discuss?

1. Iran was but one example of the uneven rates of participation in science. Of course there may be many interesting reasons for this. There are many reasons for most things.

2. Parent didn't actually jump to many conclusions as far as I can tell. You may be projecting. What conclusion did they make based on the 70%?

Finally, your list of factors that might influence the % of women studying science in Iran is weirdly general. Are those factors more prevalent in Iran than other places? Literature and gender studies are not alternatives to "useful" fields of study, they are useful. Culture matters. It's not just fun, it's hard and filled with contradictions and challenges. But you are right that it's not lucrative, and becoming less so. Maybe studying the arts is not so big in Iran as other countries and the sciences are more of a default choice?

Now maybe I'm the one projecting, but it feels like you want parent commenter to discount the 70% on the basis of some weak hypothetical guesswork about possible reasons to do so. This is how cognitive bias works. Answering the 70% question is interesting, and we should see what we can learn about it, and how that compares to our instincts.

I believe "useful" in this context refers to having a higher chance of being able to land a job with a decent pay.

It's not unheard of parents of non affluent families trying hard to convince their children to pursue career paths that would give them certain economic self sufficiency rather than something they might like more, when economic success in that field is (perhaps incorrectly) perceived as a gamble.

[1] The beauty of your vagueness is that it allows someone to inject whatever they believe is the "real cause" of the problem in the United States, perfectly allowing them to project their own bias upon your post as well. It also makes it difficult for someone else to counter it since they're not entirely sure what you're trying to say at all. An intriguing approach I must say.

All of them in it for the love of science and engineering.

I read the whole thing differently than you did. What is the conclusion you are objecting to?

Because they prefer to become nurses than CS working in front end.

I think you should think beyond CS and think about careers. There are things more cooperative and empathic than CS.

> If this were true, shouldn't women's interest in CS be going up now that the web is all about feelings/aesthetics/social?

It's the managers and marketing people that decide to make a website feeling/aesthetics/social oriented, and the graphics designers and artists and content writers that figure out what needs to be done to do that. From a CS point of view, a feelings/aesthetics/social website and a cold/ugly/inhuman website are pretty much the same--it's just a different set of assets they are given to display.

> Programming, in my view, is actually in the middle in the "people versus things" spectrum. It's much more about people than, say, math. And of course, 45% of math majors are women, so I'm not sure how that fits into the author's theory.

We like to pretend that CS and math are similar, or even that the former is part of the later, and perhaps that is even true when by "CS" we mean what, for example, Donald Knuth does. But for most of us working in industry, even if our degree says CS, we are really more technicians than scientists. I would expect the influences and abilities that might make one choose math and the influences and abilities that might make one chose CS at most schools to be fairly different. (At schools where the CS program is highly theoretical and rigorous, I'd expect more overlap).

Has there been any research on the kinds of math that male mathematicians and female mathematicians tend toward? There's quite a bit of research showing women are better at verbal tasks and men better it spatial visualization tasks. I wonder if that translates into men tending more toward geometric kinds of math and women toward symbol manipulation kinds of math? (I'm using both "geometric" and "symbol manipulation" very loosely).

(Math preferences are kind of weird anyway. There is a fairly strong documented correlation between whether a mathematician is an algebraist or an analyst, and whether that mathematician eats corn on the cob in rows or a spiral. WTF?)

BTW, I'm still not convinced that people are asking the right question when they ask why aren't there more women in programming. I think the right question might better be why are there so many men in programming? Looking at the Wikipedia article on "Sex differences in cognition" [1], and the one on "Sex differences in emotional intelligence" [2], and just concentrating on the ones where they cite reasonably solid looking peer reviewed research, it looks to me like women actually come out ahead overall. What I mean by that is that the things women are better at seem to be things that will be more widely useful. E.g., good verbal ability helps with far more jobs than good spatial visualization.

I'd expect that in an ideal world that is free of discrimination, where people are limited in careers only by what they are interested in and their abilities compared to others competing for the same jobs, women would have more viable choices than men.

I suspect that programmers can be broken down into two groups:

1. People who are reasonably well rounded and have a variety of serious interests. They are into programming as a means to an end. It is a tool that can be used to help with their other interests. They might enjoy programming, and strive to be excellent at it, but it is not the main focus.

2. People who are interested in programming itself as their main interest. What their programs actually do is not all that important--it is the challenge and complexity and cleverness of the code itself that matters.

My guess is that the first group is going to have a much closer to balanced male/female ratio. The second group, for reasons similar to why males are much more prone to autism, is going to be overwhelmingly male. I also guess that this second group is fairly large, and this accounts for a non-trival amount of the male/female imbalance in programming as a whole.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_emotional_i...