> But there are fewer women in software now than there were 30 years ago.

That's not true. Firstly, it's more like 40-50 years ago.

Secondly, there are far more women doing software development, but the gender ratio is dramatically different.

Thirdly, that's because male interest exploded with the advent of personal computing the 80s.

Lastly, "programming" as a profession used to be regarded as an offshot of secretarial work, which was dominated by women.

The facts around women in STEM are polluted with a lot of bizarre narratives.

Okay, so TWO generations. Big deal. It still dismisses the "born that way" nonsense argument.

"'programming' as a profession used to be regarded as an offshoot of secretarial work, which was dominated by women". Which begs the question of why women dominated secretarial work (and still do), while as programming became a more respected and better paying profession, it became male-dominated.

> Okay, so TWO generations. Big deal. It still dismisses the "born that way" nonsense argument.

It really doesn't. Unless you seriously think punch card programming is the same as modern programming, or that the fact that only women were secretaries that did programming somehow provides data on the relative strengths and inclinations of women and men for programming work at that time.

Look, it's clear that you have no idea of the breadth and depth of data available on this subject, and a trite "sexism/oppression" narrative explains hardly any of it. For instance, the fact that as a nation becomes more egalitarian, the gender disparities in STEM increase, ie. Nordic countries have worse gender disparities than here, despite having less sexism, and oppressive countries like Iran actually have gender parity in STEM fields.

If you want to actually learn about this subject, I suggest reading: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018...

The fact is, there's good evidence that women are naturally less interested in STEM-like fields due to a well known psychological attitude on things vs. people. That attitude explains facts like why medicine and law have achieved approximate gender parity overall, but surgery is still dominated by men, pediatrics and family law is dominated by women.

Why are you assuming I have no idea of the data available? Because I question the default narrative?

I do find it interesting and noteworthy that gender disparities have grown in STEM while shrinking in other fields. But I believe my explanation accounts for that - that STEM has become more prestigious, which draws men, which forces out women.

The "well known psychological attitude" is begging the question, which seems par for the course on responses here. Is this psychological attitude biological, or social? And if it's biological, how do we explain significant changes in professional proportions that have happened over a mere one or two generations? It seems like a very poor explanation for what you're asserting, contradicting your own stated facts.

If it's social, however, we're back to my explanation - as the prestige of formerly female-dominated careers rises, they become more attractive to men, to the point where men dominate them. It's a much simpler explanation, with no contradictions.

> Why are you assuming I have no idea of the data available? Because I question the default narrative?

Because you're throwing out wild, unsupported speculation to salvage your narrative, and the original post of yours to which I replied had at least 4 elementary factual errors.

> But I believe my explanation accounts for that - that STEM has become more prestigious, which draws men, which forces out women.

That's not an explanation at all. Why would prestige drive away women? Just because there are men there? Or you think men drawn to prestige don't want women around? Or you think men just flood into any field that has some form of prestige thus drowning out women? So then why aren't the careers they left suddenly dominated by women because all the men left for more prestige? And where are all these men coming from since we have rough equal numbers of men and women? Why are janitors and dangerous jobs dominated by men since those aren't prestigious?

The fact that you think this explains anything or is free of contradictions is frankly bizarre, and just reinforces my point that if you're really interested in this field, you need to more read more and speculate less.

> The "well known psychological attitude" is begging the question, which seems par for the course on responses here. Is this psychological attitude biological, or social?

Likely both, since there's plenty of evidence of things vs. people in toddlers, and this innate preference no doubt gets reinforced and magnified.

In the end, your scoffing at the original poster and "subtly" implying that he's sexist for a remark that is actually well grounded in facts is exactly the problem with debating people on this subject.

Yes, there is sexism in STEM, just like there is in most other fields, but sexism didn't keep women out of medicine or law, they just pushed through and staked their claim. The fact that women haven't done this for STEM which is far less of an old boys' club already suggests something else is at play, and the fact that the same trends are seen across disparate cultures already suggests strongly there's a universal component.

Sexism kept women out of medicine and law for centuries. It's only very recently that this has changed. Women were not even admitted to Harvard Law School until 1950.

I do think there's a universal component, though, as sexism is seen across virtually all cultures.

> Sexism kept women out of medicine and law for centuries. It's only very recently that this has changed. Women were not even admitted to Harvard Law School until 1950.

You're equivocating. You know very well that the type of sexism that kept women from working in virtually all professions, including law and medicine, is not the type of sexism we're discussing now.

> Sexism kept women out of medicine and law for centuries.

Have you noticed how this is inconsistent with your prestige argument?

> that STEM has become more prestigious, which draws men, which forces out women.

Is it competition that is forcing women out, or men ?

> as the prestige of formerly female-dominated careers rises, they become more attractive to men, to the point where men dominate them

What do you mean by dominated, is it the number of people, or is it something else ?

Are you trying to say that once a career path becomes female dominated, men should stay out ?

"Programmer" used to be the title that goes with using a keypunch to turn a flowchart into a deck to submit to the operator. That job had low status because it sucked, for the same reason that spending all day typing someone else's words sucked. Eventually we could afford to automate that job away. "Systems analyst" and "programmer/analyst" are the titles for independent design work we should be comparing to today's developers.

But you're not comparing the same thing generation to generation. The job of developer has changed massively, the number of developers, the expectations, the salary. Sociaety has also changed, and not just in culture but in income distribution, etc etc.

If tomorrow we say that you have to do 30 chinups to be a waitress, and the job will involve regular fistfights then we count the number of waitresses by gender and say "it must be cultural", we're kind of missing the point. Or if we say "OK now waitresses make 200k and are respected" and watch the numbers shift.

"The job of the developer has changed massively".

What, pray tell, has changed that made the job more attractive to men, and less attractive to women? You need to be able to answer that question if you're going to make a causal assertion.

I wasn't around two generations ago to make the comparison but I imagine that with the higher income has come much higher expectations that you'll be in the office for 12 hours a day and weekends. You also have much higher wealth in western nations which correlates with higher ability to seek jobs that fit your preferences. Back in the day most people didn't go to uni and had a much smaller choice of positions. There are hundreds of ways the world and job are very different, and you're flipping the argument to say that I have to assert the one specific causal link. If you're proposing an argument "it's misogynist culture, as evidence compare two generations ago". Then it's more the case that you need to demonstrate that the conditions and job are the same, for your link to be valid. Or that all the ways they're different are irrelevant, which they're just obviously not.

> Back in the day most people didn't go to uni and had a much smaller choice of positions.

Not the parent and I wasn't around either, but I think accessibility of education counters your point, not supports it.

More egalitarianism should in theory be more favorable to women.

Back then I imagine it was much harder to program without access to university computers and education materials.

More women get higher education than men compared to 35 years ago.

More incentives (monetary and otherwise), combined with lower barriers to entry should also be favoring the supposedly disadvantaged.

And yet the drop in F-M ratio since late 1980s has not been overcome last time I checked.

More egalitarianism should be favorable to women /if/ you assume a priori that they are mostly disadvantaged through lack of access to education/resources, and the real expected outcome distribution is 50-50.

If you assume that there are underlying differences in interests and aptitude, more egalitarianism allows these differences to be expressed more since women are more free to eg. choose a career working with people, like medicine or law. http://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-girl... It also raises the bar for inherent aptitude to get into/(the top of) a career, since you're competing against a much wider pool of talent.

The point I was making to the parent was that his point "cross-generation drop in ratio proves it's cultural" doesn't hold up, because there have been many changes across those generations, you're comparing apples to oranges.

Nonsense. I don't know where you work, but where I work, 12 hour days and weekends are clearly not the norm. We put in 40 hour weeks like any other profession.

I first learned to program 35 years ago. It wasn't fundamentally different then. Hell, we still use programming languages that were in wide use 35 years ago, like C and the unix shell. The kind of thinking required hasn't changed.

So, based on my 35 years of experience, the conditions and the job are basically the same. So again, I challenge you - how is the job different now?

The parent conceded we're talking 50 years not 35 years, and my point wasn't only that the job is different but that society is different.

how is the job different? The pay is much higher and so are the entry requirements, that's the biggest difference. You don't get assigned to program punch cards as part of your secretarial role, you have to actively get educated and good to choose it as a career.

I think there's far more places now expecting crazy hours but that's anecdotal I don't have numbers on it. But the languages are different (mostly), the tooling is different, the deployment is different, the scale is different.

One big change is that many traditionally male high paying jobs like doctors, lawyers, etc. have become much more open to women. Some, like publishing, have become majority women to the same degree as Tech.

One very likely explanation is that many women who wanted to be independently financially successful had few choices other than tech back decades ago. Now they have many other choices.

> But there are fewer women in software now than there were 30 years ago. Are women today "wired differently" from their mothers?

But are they really ?, do you have any data/reference to back it up, I was under the assumption that there are more people, both men and women, working as programmers, than 30 years ago.