In Math and Physics in high school and college, you can just study what you're supposed to study, do the problems you're supposed to do. You can mostly do that in CS too, of course, but that's not ubiquitous. In CS you're programming, and when programming you're running into bugs and devising work-arounds. Some stuff does not work like it's supposed to. Sometimes the best implementation for a purpose is a clever but not-quite-correct shortcut that's way faster. Some of my CS classes had automated code submissions testing and grading systems, and some students managed to hack the system in novel ways, and were given full points for doing so. My experience in school is that the smartest girls studied a lot more, and the smartest guys messed around a lot more. CS is programming and programming is a lot of messing around.

My dangerous 2c ;)

I think it might be useful to ask: In what ways are Math and Physics are different from the programming field? I think the requirement to work together on larger projects is different. What is the gender distribution of physicists working at CERN?

My experience in school is that the smartest girls studied a lot more, and the smartest guys messed around a lot more.

Sounds about right.

CS is programming and programming is a lot of messing around.

Is it? Back in the day, there were CS professors who proudly declared they didn't like programming.

I still agree that CS being "less social" is a huge factor. But have to admit it seems like there's some other factors too, and I think the "less social" and "wild west" combo is pretty significant.

I actually think this is probably wrong. Back in the day there was a higher percentage of women in CS. It's possible that in absolute numbers there are as many women today in CS as there was then. That's because there's probably a lot more people in CS overall.

I also think it's likely that back in the day most college-educated programmers had EE degrees, not CS degrees, so what you'd really want to look at is the percentage of women in CS and EE, not just in CS.

The professor I was thinking of was a woman, actually.

This is only an anecdote, but it's not obvious to me that mathematics isn't more social than CS.

But another point: pay attention to the distinctions we're drawing, because "computer science is less social than other STEM fields" is not the same argument as "computer science is more forgiving of antisocial behavior".

The latter statement is one I could easily be convinced of! We all know about dev cultures that thrive on toxic behavior, and a lot of us have seen firsthand how homogenized groups of developers have mistreated people from outside their narrow social experience. A lot of this is well-studied human behavior: you pay a different kind of attention to the only woman on your team, or the only black person, than you do to the nth 20-something male nerd from central casting, and that can cause people to falsely attribute things to the outsiders.

I think a part of the problem is that the programming field is immature and flubby with ideology masquerading as principles. I think the programming field inadvertently trains us to become ideologues and engage in behaviors reminiscent of sectarian religious conflicts of the past.

and a lot of us have seen firsthand how homogenized groups of developers have mistreated people from outside their narrow social experience...that can cause people to falsely attribute things to the outsiders.

Sure. I think one such event at Google recently was widely covered in news media, though it was ideological narrowness, not social narrowness. I saw a whole bunch of false attribution across social media.

The second is that programmers are perceived(rightly or wrongly) to be more lacking of social skills than other equivalent professions.

i.e. the office versus silicon valley

This guy actually put some pretty decent work into researching this - he found that women dominate "sociable" STEM fields like veterinary sciences and obstetrics, while men dominate the "cold" STEM branches like surgery and computer science.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

Unless math is "warmer" than CS --- it isn't --- this explanation doesn't hold much water.

"Women are around 20% of CS majors, physics majors, engineering majors, etc – but almost half of math majors" ...

"I was totally confused by this for a while until a commenter directed me to the data on what people actually do with math degrees. The answer is mostly: they become math teachers. They work in elementary schools and high schools, with people.

Then all those future math teachers leave for the schools after undergrad, and so math grad school ends up with pretty much the same male-tilted gender balance as CS, physics, and engineering grad school."

I found https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/fraction-p...

Vs

https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajor...

Over 40% undergraduate degrees go to women, while less than 30% of doctorates.

Science Magazine, "Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines", vertical axis is PhDs, 2011 numbers.

If nothing else at this point I think we can put a bullet in the "they just want to be math teachers" hypothesis.

I have absolutely no idea whether that matches reality for enough people to make any kind of a difference.

Many people who major in math are aiming to become math teachers, so yes.

I recall a paper I read in grad school which found that programmers actually had more need of interaction than other fields. As jdavis notes elsewhere, accounting and bookkeeping employs more women nowadays. I also note that very early on, computer programming was seen as a desirable job by women. Is there a common thread between computer programming in the very early days and accounting and bookkeeping today?

And I don't think it's hard to find serious CS people who can trace other malign influences from "homebrew hobbyist CS" in our field. We're basically a field that experienced a bizarre and potent deprofessionalization a few decades ago, and then rebuilt back up from that. Forget about the social and equity issues and just look at poor engineering practice, a lot of which is traceable to programming cultures that emerged from hobbyist computing.

Do you have citations? I do think you're onto something here, though I don't think it's necessarily the best idea to vilify men or the masculine. Anthropologically speaking, didn't the subculture of hobbyist programming come out of the subculture of model train building?

Would you like to try asking me that again? It's also OK if you and I just don't try to have a dialog on this thread.

Glad to hear it.

I'm happy to keep talking to you about this stuff, but I will not do that if you're trying to trap me in some weird ideological conflict about the persecution of men.

Well, likewise. I don't want ideological conflict, though sometimes I feel it's foisted upon me. I'm also quite open to the idea that something in the subculture of programming could be pushing women away. Please don't take my mention of vilification as an accusation, and my apologies if it came across that way. I don't think anyone can deny that the whole area of discussion has a history of someone vilifying someone else, so I think that steering away from that is useful.

When have I ever tried to ideologically trap you? If there was ever anything ideological I'd associate with you, it's this phrase about, "the social compact." (Not that I'm absolutely against redistribution. It just sounds like reparations between sovereign powers from centuries ago.)

You implied that I did. I'm shutting that down hard. Thanks for acknowledging.

Like I said: I think our field is weird in that home computing deprofessionalized it. I think programming methodology also deprofessionalized. I don't think it's a weird observation to make that our field stagnated or even regressed and that a lot of practices and technologies we work with today are (a) rooted in the 1970s and (b) ignore decades of subsequent research.

Since you can trace a lot of badness in our field back to home computing (which: to be clear, was a very good thing! life is complicated!), I find the "we're male dominated because hobbyist computing in the 1970s was an insular and chauvinist culture" explanation pretty powerful. I think all these things feed into each other, too. There can be more than one explanation.

I never said that you did. You only impute that from the juxtaposition of the sentences. I only said that vilification wasn't such a good idea. Given that we are talking about the potential downsides of "an insular and chauvinist culture," I think it's useful to say one should be circumspect about vilification. Assume incompetence before maliciousness, and all that.

You implied that I did.

Not at all. You are stating that I implied that you did, however, and that's simply not true, which I have stated above. In this, you are implying that I am a liar. Let me "shut that down hard." I've already apologized so either provide your evidence, or be calling me a liar.

(a) rooted in the 1970s and (b) ignore decades of subsequent research.

Aww, hell. Also ignore research from the 60's and from common practices of just 5 years ago!

I think all these things feed into each other, too. There can be more than one explanation.

Are there other de-professionalized fields?

Again, part of my claim is: this is not really a surprising or weird argument. It's pretty obvious from the recent history of the field. You can argue that it doesn't have as much explanatory power as I'm giving it, but I don't think anyone can reasonably argue that the underlying phenomenon didn't occur.

Popular Music? Fiction writing? Journalism? Creating video content would qualify. (Possibly relevant: YouTube's audience is mostly male, while Tumblr's is mostly female. IIRC, the audience for video pornography also tends to skew male, while written erotica skews female.)

The home computing revolution was a weird inflection point.

Basically, it's the start of when computing went from a tool for accounting/administration/bureaucracy to also broadly encompassing media. Many of the de-profesionalized fields I mention above are associated with media.

Again, part of my claim is: this is not really a surprising or weird argument. It's pretty obvious from the recent history of the field.

I do think you're onto something.