One of my female Computer Science professors used to brag about how she didn't code.

It's not uncommon for academics to stop coding at some point in their career. They basically become managers.

Why isn't it ok that they just aren't interested in it? Women have agency and intelligence and if they want to do something then they can and will do it.

I find this whole obsession with "Women in X" to be suspicious because nobody is interested in gender disparities in other fields and starting up "Men in X". So it's not a generic effort to understand a gender disparity, it is a specific directed effort to force women (who have agency and freedom) to go into a field that they don't really seem that interested in. Blaming men for women not taking CS degrees either directly or indirectly IMO denies womens agency and is totally unnecessary.

I think women are doing what they want to do, and they largely don't want to take CS it seems. Maybe if society stopped nagging them about it the situation might change organically.

I've been in more than one professional situation where I was made uncomfortable with how a co-worker or manager was referring to female candidates/co-workers. I'm not talking about good-natured joking around on the job or even flirting, but rather something that in retrospect I can honestly say was discrimination. I also recall that in those situations, I was in no position to do anything about it so it's not like speaking up would have helped... more likely I would have been shortly out of a gig myself.

The puzzling thing is that many of the proponents of the "sexism => gender disparity" hypothesis seem to regard digging deeper into their claims as sexism. It's almost as though they think "not being sexist" demands that we only sample/write-about/etc those women-in-tech who have horror stories about workplace sexism and anything else is "denying their lived experiences" or some such.

For example, when I try to understand why women in medicine and law in the 80s and 90s were so much more successful than women in tech today, proponents of the discrimination hypothesis come after me like I've committed some grievous moral infraction.

I can recall someone who did that before he became my manager.

Or that they should leave the field so that some more deserving woman could take their place?

I know a man who was told almost exactly that by a professor. (Minus the woman specifier.)

So, "you should leave this field so someone more deserving can have a place"? When you take out the gender qualifier it doesn't seem so ominous.

This is not a problem that's unique to STEM or CS or anything like that though.

>another talked about being encouraged to drop out so a more deserving man could take her place... that's not lack of interest, that's actively discouraging those who want to be here

Again, I don't see that as a problem thats particularly tied to CS or programming or STEM or whatever. I'm not saying its not a problem but thats simply a general problem. I mean a woman could literally name any field and state those reasons and it would have the same impact, and be equally as bad, but those aren't problems specific to the field of STEM or CS or programming or whatever.

>I've been in more than one professional situation where I was made uncomfortable with how a co-worker or manager was referring to female candidates/co-workers

I've literally been in the room when my boss made weird sexual comments to a female coworker. We looked at each other wide-eyed like neither of us could believe this was really happening, and it was like something out of a training video it was so stereotypical. She thought it was weird but it didn't really phase her, she just let it pass and didn't call him out on it. I think he was just socially weird and didn't realize how his comment would be received until he saw our faces. Nobody said anything and we just carried on with our meeting. She seemed to just take it as "this happens occasionally" almost like encountering road rage on the highway, like I'm not going to give up driving because some people are annoying. I think she took this type of attitude.

These things happen and the level of behavior control/policing that would be required to eliminate such occurrences would be onerous. The cure would be worse than the disease in my opinion. Particularly heinous harrasment can already be dealt with in the legal sphere. I don't want to hand wave it away but, I don't think it can be eliminated in a practical way TBH.

A quick google search turns up groups for and mainstream media discussion of men in nursing and men in teaching.

Is it "suspicious" that one that you as an engineer see the most of is the one that (a) involves your own field and (b) involves a currently-extremely-prominent-in-media-overall field (fake news, election meddling, self-driving cars, Uber, etc)?

It just isn't a thing that registers much for the non-engineering people I know.

I have no idea how much I'd see discussion about men in nursing if I was a nurse. I know a few (women) nurse, it's something they've mentioned occasionally, same with teachers. But in both cases, you see much less of anything about those fields in the news right now.

That doesn't follow. The obstacles the women who succeeded in CS perceive aren't necessarily the same obstacles that drive women who don't succeed in or who don't pursue CS. Sometimes these will overlap, but not necessarily.

Clearly the obstacles faced by women who succeeded were insufficient to deter them, so we need to know what obstacles were successful deterrents.

For example, my mother had me at 18, and managed to struggle through college anyway. The reason she was even able to go to school is she had 2 sisters that could take turns babysitting me. If she had 1 sister, it wouldn't have been tenable. If she didn't have a family, same.

So she's very much aware of how difficult it was to get through college, and she readily says "if it weren't for your aunts, I would never have a degree."

I'm skeptical of this sort of claim. The sexism barriers in medicine and law were much higher, yet women persevered and achieved gender parity despite them. I don't think women are so easily deterred as you seem to imply.

That said, of course it's still worthwhile to eliminate overt sexism of the sorts described in the article, but I don't think for a second it will change the gender ratios by very much. The sort of sexism described is unfortunately everywhere.

One quote from the article is Anna Karlin's where she says "Hence, when they get to college, fewer of the women have been exposed to the excitement of CS," and just that sentence alone is enough to show the bias there. I think we can gather that CS isn't inherently exciting except to a specific sort of person hence why most people choose not to pursue it. I would personally rather hear viewpoints from women who were on the border in college choosing their major or even girls in high school. I want to hear their mindset, not necessarily someone who assumes what others may think.

> The women are responding to an essay about why women don't want to code. As women who do want to code they're exactly the right people to ask.

How are they "exactly the right people to ask"? They're the exact opposite! Can you see the backwards logic in your comment? If you want to know why someone's doing or not doing something, ask them, not the people who chose opposite.

You couldn't prove such a hypothesis wrong by talking to women who don't want to code.

The argument at hand is if the 20% representation level is a result of discrimination and bias in the field, or something else.

I’d rather see some explanations from women who chose not to code. That helps with understanding where the blockage is.

Something must have been lost in translation...