How do we fix this? I don't think the silicon valley startup will ever appeal to women. Live in a closet for three years for a 10% chance to make a million dollars. Those odds only attract people with an appetite for risk. Mostly, unsurprisingly, young men. The problem with that is that silicon valley represents the field.

To get more women we need to change the image of the profession. I'm of the opinion that females just don't want to do software development and that decision is made really young.

Anecdotal, but I know plenty of guys that tinkered with PC's as young as 10 years old, and zero women that did so. It's seen as a boy thing, like cars.

That's my memory of it anyway, boys got pushed to go into STEM the second they showed any aptitude, girls were just sort of expected to keep it up.

My wife is more educated than I, with a masters degree. But she wanted to stay home, work part time, and not have our kids raised by a third party.

The traditional family structure for Homo sapiens has strong biological and environmental roots, which in turn caused "societal traditions". Changing that in a few generations seems quite unlikely.

I think the change we need to make is less about the profession and more about the people in the profession. We need to make it a field that seems open to women. Currently it isn't. I don't have a daughter, but I'd be very hesitant to suggest to her to go into the SW field.

BTW, my sister tinkered with PCs as a kid. It is interesting that she went on to get a degree in statistics and me in computer science. She works in policy now, and me in CS -- despite the fact that both of us had very similar achievement paths through HS. To this day she is better at most maths than I am, but most people seem to assume I'm better (at least when it comes up).

If we're serious about fixing the ratio it needs to be done with policy and young, well before students graduate highschool.

One of the examples in the podcast expands on the viewpoint that computers are for men and that idea is ingrained even to the level of the family, so computers are kept in the sons bedroom so incidentally the daughter had less access to it.

Its not suggested by guidance counselors to females when looking to select electives in junior high school.

So if they are seen as a male hobby or interest, at a time when what your peers think is so important, girls are less likely to want to venture into that area and be outside the norm.

What happened in the 80s was likely because computers went from being for business to being a hobby with the home computer [0]. I would imagine that because men dominated technical professions at the time most computers were bought by men, which then shared their interests with their sons [1]. Programmers like John Carmack and Linus Torvalds is born around 1970 and would be teenagers when home computers became available [2]. Games went from adventure quests and puzzles to shooters like quake and duke nukem. Social settings like mailing lists became more important to learn programming through open source. So the cycle continues.

Of course just like girl, boys probably didn't know what the profession actually meant. They wanted to be programmers because of things like video games, but ended up making business systems.

How do you fix it? Many CS programs are antiquated and changing the curriculum to software engineering doesn't seem to help much to attract a broader group of people. If the large companies are serious about this, they should do what the banks did and train smart people with more generic backgrounds.

[0]

1977 Atari 2600

1977 Apple II

1981 Sinclair ZX81

1981 BBC Micro

1982 Commodore 64

1983 WarGames (movie)

1983 Nintendo Entertainment System

1985 Amiga

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_home_computers

[1]

"When I was 5 or 6, my parents got me a Commodore 64."

"My dad left his old Atari (2600 Junior, I think) in my room and I found basic on there towards the end of grade school."

"1982-83 (grammar to high school age): My parents bought a word processor in the 80's that you could also program."

"In 1982 my Dad brought home a Sirius microcomputer for his work."

"My dad brought home a 386 IBM-PC so he could learn AutoCAD."

"I got started with BASICA on a Tandy 1000. My dad had a newer computer at the time but he certainly wouldn't let me use it."

"I'm not sure if this counts; the birth of my hacking started on my dad's lap, doing amateur radio."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1015879

[2]

"It was his maternal grandfather, Leo Toerngvist, a professor of statistics at the University of Helsinki, who had the greatest influence on the young Linus. In the mid-1970s, Toerngvist bought one of the first personal computers, a Commodore Vic 20."

http://www.linfo.org/linus.html

We would have loved it if anyone did, alas that wasn't the case. I'm glad things have changed and you're no longer an outcast if you're a geeky kid; I feel that I paid a big personal price for being that way inclined, but later on there was a payoff in that it was easy to get into programming as a career, when the Internet started happening in the mid late 90s.

If my next kid is a girl, she'll have no shortage of computer science ahead of her. My son's already way deep. :)

The interesting thing, to me, is that you can't look at those 10-year-olds in isolation. My experience mirrors yours and, yet, if you look back further, I'll bet you find that those 10-year-old tinkerers almost all have some history with Legos or other such construction toy that, very early, started building the guess-fail-iterate problem solving model that I believe is so important to computer aptitude.

One of the side effects to being "good with computers" is that you end up getting asked to do a lot of tech support. Over the years, I've seen so many people who are so afraid of doing something wrong that they can't figure out how to do what they want despite being otherwise intelligent enough. They don't realize what's perfectly summed up here: https://xkcd.com/627/

Some of the most important and least controversial efforts to address gender diversity in tech are the people trying to make better toys for young girls. As I've heard it stated, we have a shortage of engineers, not a shortage of princesses and our toy aisles should reflect that.

This SMBC comic sums up the issue perfectly: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1883

On a side note, I've also noticed that the bulk of my female classmates in college and the bulk of my female coworkers since then have been either Indian or Chinese. It might be worth exploring why Indian and Chinese women are more willing to work in tech than western women.

Still, it proves that a better gender ratio is definitely possible in the US as well

I don't know that you can say that financial success is more important in those countries, but I think you can say that tech is a more viable path to that financial success in those countries since careers like finance, law and medicine (the stereotypical high-paid professions in the US) mean working in their own country rather than coming to the US. If you're primarily motivated by money, as an American, there are surer paths to getting it than writing code. But as a foreigner that wants to work in the US (and therefore make more money), writing code is one of the best ways to do that.

If you dont believe me ask them yourself, but make a clear distinction between immigrant and first gen.

https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-resu...

The arguments that there are fundamental differences between men and women doesn't seem to prevent much higher proportions of female programmers in India, or Romania, or China.

As Adam Grant says, while there are some (small) differences between men and women, they're "not biologically determined"

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/differences-between-men-women...

Suppose that the much higher proportions of female programmers in poorer countries might be because their choice is more limited; there is way more incentive in a poor country to want to land a fairly secure and well paid job, because you risk starving if you don't.

Going for a liberal arts degree (or similar) in India, Romania or China would then be discouraged.

Conversely, in the West, people are more free to pursue whatever profession they may like, because they most likely won't starve if they do.

I'm not saying that this would be the only explanation for the gender gap, but I do think the explanation involves many more factors than 'computer games in the 80s'.

I personally think it's naïve to dismiss inherent biological preferences entirely, especially since there are many studies that corroborate that they _do exist_.

> I personally think it's naïve to dismiss inherent biological preferences entirely...

"naïve", huh...

So, Adam Grant is one of the world's foremost experts in this area. Did you read his fully-sourced article, linked from my parent post, that refutes this exact "biological" point?

The problem is that many people seem to forget that the difference applies to averages, and therefore mean very little on an individual level.

In other words, it's not far fetched to assume that a part of the gender gap in STEM/CS is because of biology, since an average trend would influence said gap. Conversely, it's incorrect to claim that a specific woman is more ill-suited doing STEM/CS than a man, just because she's a woman.

Also, I didn't go through all the references, but Adam Grant (at least indirectly) cites the 1995 study by Steele & Aronson which has been proved to be of shoddy quality. Like everyone else who denies any possibility of biology influencing how people think, he seems to have a political axe to grind. I therefore consider his opinions somewhat unreliable.

Regarding the quality and replicability of stereotype threat studies, that came in vogue after the seminal Steele & Aronson 1995 paper:

https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/tag/does-stereotype-t...

https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/04/07/hidden-fig...

https://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/12/30/is-stereotype-threat...

I think Scott Alexander makes one rather poor argument towards the end of his debate with Grant.

> I agree this is surprising. But let’s also not claim it supports the sexism theory, unless you think people in computer science became more sexist between 1980 and today for some reason.

Attitudes change precisely that quickly. Look at the massive change in attitudes towards homosexuality.

Then look at the way computers were marketed directly at boys in exactly that period https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-resu...

The way I read it, Grant claims that the decline can't have a biological explanation, Scott agrees but counter-claims that it does not necessarily follow the reason must be sexism then, and then goes on to provide a plausible non-sexism explanation. Are you reading it differently?

Regarding the article you referenced, I'm not sure I understand how it supports the sexism theory either. Up to about '83 women CS share rapidly and steadily increased (indicating decreasing sexism, I presume?), then Apple started marketing to boys, video games producers started marketing to boys, and because of that sexism within the industry immediately and dramatically increased? Or is it "sexism increased, and that caused Apple and video game producers to market to boys"? What's the narrative here?

More object-level, or nitpicking, if you will - the Apple ad they referenced didn't actually market "to boys" - nobody would buy an Apple II for a boy in 1985, it was too expensive, around $5K in today's money. The ad merely used a boy as the lead character, and no, mischievously pressing a button on the girl's keyboard does not constitute "teasing girls' computer skills".

Alas, I knew no girls who were into this even the slightest.