Why is that, though?
Are women not encouraged to pursue technology careers? Or are they being encouraged to chose other careers instead?
Are they driven away from it by a toxic work place culture?
Or just the perception of tech as having toxic workplace cultures?
Are women moving into roles with more flexibility because they are expected to take on more domestic duties?
Or my hunch... Do women just feel less comfortable entering an industry with such an unbalanced gender ratio to begin with, and it becomes a self perpetuating cycle?
You say Biology be damned, but I don't think it's settled that biology is the main factor here.
And I'm not saying it is or it isn't. I'm saying we don't know.
I used to work at school. Not for a long time, but enough to make some observations. One of them: school kids are passionate. If they're interested in something, no amount of persuasion, toxicity or whatever else will distract them.
What I don’t understand is why so many people insist that this must be the explanation, as if the current state of things is definitely a level playing field (or biased toward women) and the fact that there are so many more men in the field must therefore be due to something innate.
We’re only a few decades out from a time when women couldn’t open a bank account without their husband’s permission, and when raping a woman was perfectly legal as long as you were married to her. I think we should give it a little more time and effort before we declare that everything is now fair and any remaining discrepancies must be biological.
I think that because it seems unlikely that we’ve managed to completely eliminate thousands of years’ worth of systemic sexism in such a short time. It’s highly improbable that, with so many things changing all the time, this just happens to be the moment when we’ve achieved a level playing field.
And to address the specific claim, why would being interested in people keep women away from computer jobs? It’s an intensely collaborative field. And why didn’t this keep women out of the field a few decades ago when women programmers were much more (relatively) numerous? If women are generally more interested in people and this drives sex disparities in different professions, why are there so few women in politics, the most people-heavy profession imaginable?
I think it's a good example, you (and GP) just missed the more interesting part: Nurses handle the patients on a more intimate level than doctors, and female nurses outnumber male nurses roughly 10:1 in the US.
https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/total-number-of-pr...
These people who insist the explanation comes down to preference are basing this on their own lived experience, on the women they've met and what their interests are. 18% just doesn't strike them as being out-of-the-ordinary.
The percentage of women who own a set of wrenches is even smaller. Should we assume that is also due to unjust influence?
Even if it were worth something, am I to believe that those people have never observed sexism? Regarding your bit about wrenches, have you never wandered into a toy store and seen the toy wrenches filed under “boys”?
Or, like another commented suggested, maybe something about STEM appeals to men disproportionately.
If I had to guess, it's probably a combination of multiple factors. STEM isn't for everyone. But at a young age, more men are encouraged to pursue it. The high salary of tech jobs might attract men more than women, if men face more pressure to make a lot of money. Now you have a male dominated industry. And that starts to self perpetuate. Young boys see role models and women don't. Women outnumbered in male dominated workplaces become subject to more harassment. STEM starts to become a "man" thing, and less women feel like pursuing the career, especially when there are so many other occupations that seem more interesting. I think that's a plausible explanation for how we got to where we are today.
But nobody knows for sure. My point is, biology shouldn't be the default answer whenever we see gender gaps.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
Quote:
The upshot of this research is neither especially feminist nor especially sad: It’s not that gender equality discourages girls from pursuing science. It’s that it allows them not to if they’re not interested.
To answer that I would compare it to a field like finance, where people are well paid and over worked. I think the money comes first, then the men, and with them the bro culture. So my hunch is that men will disproportionately do anything for a dollar. And no-one notices because they are busy wondering where the women are.
This this is a minority, that stance does not generalize to people on the left in general.
Because historically the trends of CS grads proves this is a false statement [1] so I'm curious where this statement comes from.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
Biology is not "preventing" women, it's directing their inclination. Women have a ton of opportunities, and it's just as likely that as CS blew up they decided they didn't want to and didn't need to take on the long hours and relative social isolation that professional engineering entails.
And making biological arguments without any sort of citation or statistical inference is illinformed. You haven't explained what exactly caused the trend reversal in the 80s other than an incredibly strained appeal to biology, which also mischaracterizes software engineering as a whole. Professional engineering is hardly a socially isolated career.
I've never heard of such a policy, or perhaps I'm misunderstanding your comment. Are you suggesting that companies should have policies that affect what the spouses/partners of employees do in terms of caring for children? Why would an employer have any right to say what their employee's spouses/partners do with their time? Or are you suggesting that employers should somehow provide compensation in this situation? I also don't understand how that would work (and I don't think the lack of such policies is specific to software firms).
1: https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/amazon-parenta...
I've never heard of it before now, and I worked for years as a corporate lawyer. And my lack of awareness isn't because I'm a man, as you've implied — my wife has also never heard of such a policy (and she works outside tech). Both of us have heavily researched the leave policies in our respective fields, as we have used them on multiple occasions.
If there are a bunch of non-tech companies offering this policy, then perhaps that could lead to your conclusion that it's one of the reasons women choose other fields. But based on what has been described so far, it's equally likely that this is an incredibly rare policy that does pull people into or push people from the tech sector. If there are sectors where this is common, please enlighten us!
Visualize it like large numbers of people are creating characters for an RPG.
For the female version of the character generator, "mother" is a class with a shitload of XP bonuses and it's the only way to complete the "bear a child" quest. Not all of them are going to do it, many will multi-class, but they have very strong non-economic incentives to do so.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
If we were to assume that biology is the reason why women avoid certain fields, then this logic should hold true irrespective of the amount of gender equality a region might have. In fact we should assume that the two factors should compound: That is, if a region heavily discourages women from entering into STEM careers then that combined with their biological inclination to avoid said careers means we should see the numbers crater.
So given that this hypothesis does not hold to be true we can clearly show that it's not biology that's the case. It's far more complex than that and is the result of various social and economical factors. Reducing the entire argument into 'it's biology' does a disservice to examining social trends and is mentally rather lazy in my opinion, considering it can be easily used to explain everything.
Women’s interest in comp sci has experienced two booms and is otherwise somewhat stable.
In fact, that seems to be the problem: no amount of discrimination against men resolves that women simply are choosing careers in a different distribution to what men do, but the only policy lever that can really be utilized is discrimination at various stages of education or employment.
This has left people aiming for a fantasy, and using increasingly aggressive discrimination to try and carry it out, biology be damned.