So why isn't female participation coming back up? It was higher in the 1970s and 1980s than it is now.
The reason female participation isn't larger is because of the education / training part of the pipeline. Having a welcoming workplace doesn't suddenly spawn people with skills wanting to work there.
Rather than being about a male-dominated "lone coder", Microsoft's guarantee of a private office means two things:
1) that a private office is a benefit to their target employees, and
2) that most companies at the time did not have a private office
Otherwise, they wouldn't advertise it as much. In more recent times, I don't think that Facebook's push to open offices is as employee centric as Microsoft's push to private offices. Instead, I think Facebook (and Apple) are trying to save money, since an 8' x 10' office in San Fran costs an employer anywhere from $8,000 / yr to $30,000 / yr. So, it would have less to do with providing benefits to their employees and more about their own bottom line.
Based on that, I'll say that measuring actual work in cognitively focused fields is difficult if not impossible.
The entire premise of compensation based on or a requirement built around a given minimum or maximum hours of work is crazy when the actual work that happens is mostly cognitive and not literally constructive. A job of that type practically demands a salaried payout and advancement based on overall project success/contributions (which might be incredibly fuzzy to measure and difficult to prove or compare as facts).
> "We’re now in an era where computer scientists are no longer universally considered to be ‘80s-style loners, but the structure of workplaces is still often dominated by the manner of thinking that was created by them (see also: “move fast and break things”[1])."
> "It was a manner of work utterly unsuited to everything we know about how women thrive and excel."
> "(Does the idea of being a lone hacker appeal to some women? Sure. [...] Population-level differences cannot be used to judge the abilities or inclinations of any individual.)" [Emphasis mine.]
The author's implication is that women (in general) are not as amenable to a lone environment as men are. I did find it frustrating that the author was not explicit about this. The piece concludes with:
> "Women succeed when they are in learning and working environments that address the biological realities about how women operate best. But, clearly, there’s a lot of misunderstanding around what this means."
But then the closest the piece gets to helping with the misunderstanding is to link to https://ncgsblog.org/2016/09/12/how-girls-learn-best/
Perhaps the author belives that individual work on unambiguous projects is amenable to women. The explanation you've offered excludes this possibility.
> I was frustrated because the course consisted of lone work...
> Despite the cargo shorts and the loner attitude, I learned like a girl..
> Instead of a lonely computer lab...
> The rise of the archetype of the lone, antisocial hacker...
> Does the idea of being a lone hacker appeal to some women?
> Computer scientists are no longer universally considered to be ‘80s-style loners...
I take this as the emphasis of the piece.
E.g, take a look at Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. These guys - and they were almost invariably guys - were nothing if not sociable, at least with eachother. What they were not is mainstream (there's a hipster gag in here somewhere but it's just too cheap and easy).
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had partners, and later teams. They might not have been the easiest people to deal with but "antisocial"? I don't think so.
I suppose in the 1980s it became possible to become a lone hacker simply because you actually could have an affordable computer at home in your bedroom. Even then though, there was a lot of socialising with other hackers at school (and a lot of bragging).
Programming, at least in my experience, has never been an exclusively solo pursuit (although I wouldn't go so far as to describe what a lot of what went on at my school as "collaboration").
Caroline works in an area (digital advertising/marketing) that involves lots of collaboration and working with people. I'm not sure there's just about any field in engineering or science in which at least individual contributors do the same degree of working with other people as opposed to working through problems individually.
Although she mentions it, I think Caroline also glosses over the shift that happens in the 80s a bit too quickly. She writes:
>The ’80s did see a masculinization of computer science as a field, but I think it’s simplistic to assert that it happened because pop culture pushed PCs as “for boys.”
I don't actually think that's the argument--or to the degree people do make that argument it's the most pertinent one. What did happen with gamers and the rise of the PC is that people who were interested in coding as a profession were increasingly expected to have started learning things on their own and to enjoy it as a hobby. This isn't really true to nearly the same degree of any other STEM field. Although I can't prove it, this seems to me the most logical explanation for why women entering CS peaked around that time.
That's an interesting point. When I was in college, programming meant spending hours in a crowded, noisy terminal room, that was definitely a social atmosphere. The students certainly interacted and collaborated, plus the advanced students helped the beginners.
One evening, I was sitting in my dorm, and my roommate came in: "There's a pretty girl down in the terminal room. Maybe she needs some help." Okay, I kinda knew what to expect, but went down there anyway. The "girl" was the top CS student, very sharp, and a friend of mine. I told her what happened, and she laughed.
The propensity to take risk seems to be quite a low-level drive, and we definitely see strong hints that hormones can have a measurable influence[1] on risk tolerance in both men and women.
If you look past ourselves in the animal kingdom, males are far more likely to engage and risky and aggressive behaviors because males that don't take large risks by and large won't manage to reproduce.
And what is riskier than expending a lot of effort and time on individual work with 'ambiguous and unclear paths to success'?
Gates also didn't work alone a lot of the time.
I would appreciate if someone clarified the argument that the author is making above, because as it reads, she's implying that women don't excel when tasked with individual work involving "ambigious and unclear paths to success". That certainly isn't how she meant it to be interpreted, right?