Right on the nose. And in fact, the proportion of women in computer science was tracking with other sciences until the mid-eighties, when it started to dive, while women's representation in other sciences continued to climb. One of the more glaringly inconsistent observations with Damore's claims. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

Except that CS isn't a science, it's engineering. And it tracked down to the level of other engineering fields.

http://news.janegoodall.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/perce...

So the mystery is not why it went down, it was why it was higher initially.

Hmm, Computer Science is most definetly a science (which shares quite a bit with maths as expected). A lot of algorithms and data structures you use under the hood when doing engineering were born as a paper in academic CS sphere.

Of course, most CS graduates don't do science, but actual engineering work. That doesn't make CS any less of a science though, it just means that most people employed in private companies don't do it.

And thus employment of CS graduates should be compared with employment of Engineering graduates, except in the case of Academia, where it ought to be compared with other sciences.

My bad, I should have been more precise: natural science, which is part of a "liberal arts" education.

"Academic areas that are associated with the term liberal arts include:

Arts (fine arts, music, performing arts, literature)

Mathematics

Natural science (biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, earth science)

Philosophy

Religious studies

Social science (anthropology, economics, geography, political science, psychology, sociology, Linguistics, history)"

Note the absence of engineering disciplines.

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

Vs. engineering or engineering sciences.

See for example how Stanford groups things (CS is part of the "School of Engineering").

https://registrar.stanford.edu/everyone/enrollment-statistic...

And then note the difference in enrollment in "chemistry" (the science) and "chemical engineering"

https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/membership/acs/welcom...

Is the difference you're trying to paint perhaps a US only thing? I've never heard of this type of differentiation.

The exact delineation of "liberal arts" seems to be a US thing (not sure about "only").

However, in Germany we also have "Naturwissenschaften" and "Ingenieurwissenschaften".

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenieurwissenschaften

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturwissenschaft

So it's a common distinction: figuring out how nature works vs building stuff.

You explained it yourself. It was initially a science, and in the 80's it became engineering and now, a get-rich scheme. Each era attracts a different set of people.

I mean, whatever propensity to mathematical-logical thinking, or being interested in working with things not people, we attach to software engineering, aren't these qualities useful even more when doing math and physics?

Lots people from math and physics have jumped over and become decent, some even great, software engineers. Not many software engineers have successfully switched over to math or physics.

So if gender is not so much an issue for a successful career in, I don't know, algebraic topology (math) or quantum field theory (physics), it surely should be less of an issue in software engineering ...when talking about whatever effects there may or may be at a biological level. So if it's not such a big issue in academia, the problems in software engineering must be more about what kind of workplace culture has grown around in software engineering, not the proposed underlying human biology.

The question is not whether you can or will be successful, the question is what you prefer to do.

One answer:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...

you might be interested to read this article where author touches on societal variation a bit: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...