Playing video games and having the desire to make my own was a huge factor for me getting into tech personally. I had a subscription to "Nintendo Power" magazine, and I still remember reading an article in there about a programming school called "Digipen", and just being enthralled by the concept of going there and building my own games.
In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't have the patience to stick with game development. My career is probably better off for it. My real gateway into a tech career was when I got put into a Cisco networking class by accident. I learned there that Linux live-boot usbs were excellent for getting around permissions restrictions on school computers. I also learned that the school firewall could be bypassed by using IPs instead of hostnames. I never looked back from there.
This theory is advanced convincingly in a Planet Money episode -- the graph here is incredibly striking, and for me strongly challenges any talk about the gender gap being primarily genetic/trait-base:
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
The shift from tracking progress with other STEM fields up to >35% female workforce participation in 1985, then suddenly breaking with their progress and going in the other direction is astounding. That's a clear exogenous change, nothing 'trait-based' could occur on that timescale.
The only other vaguely plausible explanation I've heard (but am unable to find anymore sadly) was a suggestion that in the late 70s, IBM changed their recruitment guidelines for programmers to rigidly select for what we'd now call autistic-spectrum / raw analytical personality types, which biased hiring towards males. According to this theory, other companies just followed IBM's lead, and this triggered the paradigm shift.
However that doesn't really explain why there was another massive dip from a fairly stable 10yr rate of ~26-27% down to ~18% in 2003; I can't recall anything particular in the news around then but wonder if there was another scandal or news cycle highlighting negative experiences of women in tech.
>, and I would be shocked if there isn't a strong correlation between interest in video games and computers in general.
Video games are marketed more to males but that didn't stop females from participating in large numbers.[1]
Why would "male marketing" dissuade females from computer programming but at the same time, it doesn't affect computer gaming?
https://www.google.com/search?q=more+women+play+video+games+...
[0] http://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/
So "early on", we're talking about 1960s/1970s advertisements for mainframes of IBM, DEC, VAX, Burroughs, etc and the 1980s ads for personal computers like IBM PC (original), Apple IIe, Commodore 64, Radio Shack TRS-80, etc.
If we want to blame early period "marketing" for women's lake of interest in computer _programming_, we have to also explain the counterexample of early marketing for PacMan, DonkeyKong, Missile Command not having the same decades long suppression of female computer _gaming_. The video gaming magazines and its ads in the 1980s/1990s were heavily male-dominated. (Arguably, the videogames ads were more male-themed than mainframes' ads. The videogames' ads often had abundant cleavage and skin. The mainframe ads did not.)
I don't buy that. If you include mobile games, women outnumber men but female mobile game developers don't.
I don't think there's a causation between video games and programming. Correlation, sure. But not causation (Cod is insanely popular among non-programmers)
A company that had internalized misogyny to such a degree that it couldn't function. All companies are sexist.