Re:Autism and gender imbalance in tech
by theptip on Sunday August 06, 2017 @10:05PM
(#14944817)
It's really hard for me to believe that this is the driving cause, but I cannot come up with a better solution.
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:
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.
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.