My girl child likes trucks, not Frozen, and the pressure from other adults to get her to conform and play with Disney-branded dolls is non-trivial and unrelenting. Ugh.

That's true. But if you ask 1000 men and 1000 women if they want to program all day, you'll get a much higher % of men.

> My girl child likes trucks, not Frozen, and the pressure from other adults to get her to conform and play with Disney-branded dolls is non-trivial and unrelenting. Ugh.

I largely agree, Disney is overwhelming. Though no one has pressured or tried to make my daughter conform, other adults do mostly buy her girl typical things. Her cars, trains, dinosaurs, legos and the like mostly came from us (didn't buy any dolls, she got those from others). She likes trucks and Frozen. But mostly Paw Patrol. It's amazing, everything else is a distant 2nd to those pups!

Throw them out, seriously. I did when they got to be too large a portion of the toys.

He also had a daughter. Similar age. He was not doing the same for her.

Perhaps these children had such a strong idea of what they wanted at a very very early age and the father was responding to that. But I find it more likely that the father held an implicit bias about what jobs his son and daughter should have and was providing support to push his son into tech.

When these two people graduate college and the son becomes a software engineer and the daughter doesn't it will be their choice. But it is not clear to me that it wasn't sexism that produced the circumstances for that choice.

I feel like this is a “??? Profit!” argument. Accepting that girl infants prefer faces and boy infants prefer trucks—what does that have to do with programming? Even within the context of traditional stereotypes about male/female preferences, what makes programming a “male” thing? The analogy that programmers “build things” is just that—your typical programmer is certainly not cut out to be a construction worker.

Building things is not just construction though. I mean, your average clock maker is not qualified to plumb a bathroom, but that doesn't mean he's not making things.

I don't have an opinion on this, but the idea that programmers aren't building something is a bit silly.

Construction worker may do even less engineering design work than garment-makers do.

Programming jobs often involve extremely minimal face to face interactions

Deep contemplation of technical problems while staring at a screen and talking to computers for hours on end often made talking to people after work exceedingly difficult

And some of us like it that way.

Also, if programming is solitary as you suggest, why do tech companies discourage remote work and insist on culture fit, team building, collaborative work spaces, etc.? Much more so than law firms.

I've heard the argument that somehow "actual coding is a relatively small part of being a software engineer," but unless you're a manager (of which there are many more women), the thing you're being trained for, the thing you spend most of your time doing, and the basis of how people perceive the profession, is sitting in front of a computer coding. You can describe any profession as people-oriented on the basis that one needs to work with others, but the key question is whether the basic activity of the job is a social one.

Regardless of whether the people-vs-thing distinction is significant or not, it seems inaccurate in a big-picture way to describe programming as people-oriented. Like, that's not what people mean when they draw that distinction.

[1]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/taking-...

I don't even know if the data is ready for us to draw any conclusions, but at the very least it seems to me we should find this to be an extremely interesting pattern, and use it to motivate hypotheses.

Sure, but it seems more than a little convenient that the male-chosen professions seem to generally pay significantly more, on average, than the female-chosen ones. Haven't there been studies that showed that women moving into a profession was actually associated with pay dropping?

Programmers are paid relatively well because

1. Software is "eating the world", so a lot of software is being written leading to demand for programmers. 2. Programming scales really well. Software has zero reproduction cost and can reach a global audience almost instantaneously. So software companies can make a lot of money with relatively few employees.

What would be the mechanism for pay dropping when women enter a profession?

Some global masterminds reducing pay across multiple corporations across the board when they find out women are being hired in that industry?

Maybe it's just a matter of a sudden increase of supply of workers as women enter a field to meet the existing demand, driving wages down?

Is it because the women are being paid less, while the men are being paid the same as before?

No coordination is necessary. People will simply start to view the role as less valuable or skilled due to more women being in it.

Men hit the extremes more often and as a result occupy more of the outlier positions. They're also over represented at the bottom of the ladder. i.e., the homeless and prison populations. But I don't see anyone claiming it's a conspiracy that men over represent this end of the spectrum.

It’s not a coincidence at all. Men place a higher priority on pay to the exclusion of all else, when choosing a career, than do women. Women are much more likely to choose careers with flexible working hours, benefits, and the potential to help other people (positive externalities).

When you look at it this way, it makes more sense that you’ll find men occupying all these different high paying positions. It makes a lot less sense that every employer deliberately pays less for women-dominated positions just because there are women there.

Because, on average, men are given a lot less social pressure to "be there", they can more often take high-pressure jobs. Then the high pressure becomes a status symbol, and a gate to keep people with higher social obligations out.

As this phenomenon also causes a ton of burnout and is a cause for men's shorter lifespans, the whole thing needs to be actively taken down.

And as for high-powered careers being a status symbol, I would offer that a man's socioeconomic status is a major component in attraction for women. The reverse is true to far less of an extent. The stats on dating apps bear this out.

Isn't there a study that said women ask for pay raises at the same rate as men, but they are granted them less often?

> In four studies, Bowles and collaborators from Carnegie Mellon found that people penalized women who initiated negotiations for higher compensation more than they did men. The effect held whether they saw the negotiation on video or read about it on paper, whether they viewed it from a disinterested third-party perspective or imagined themselves as senior managers in a corporation evaluating an internal candidate. Even women penalized the women who initiated the conversation, though they also penalized the men who did so. They just didn’t seem to like seeing someone ask for more money.

The paper: https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/cfawis/bowles.pdf

Some things can only really be tested in artificial environments.

What exactly do you think will be tested in that artificial environment when the environment itself (with what I'd hazard to guess quite a list of specifics, many of the "subtle and implicit, but influential" kind) is a central variable of the test?

If an observational study of this kind is deemed hard/improbable/impossible to set up - how hard do you think it is to get the artificial setup right? To account for - or even identify - all variables and preconditions? This is so easy to mess up and end up with basically meaningless data. (Yeah, I know - that doesn't mean it won't be published. Everybody raise your hands and shout "Replication Crisis"! :) )

1. More people (women in this case) enter the profession.

2. Due to increased labor supply, pay starts to drop.

3. Men, placing a relatively higher priority on high pay, begin to avoid the profession.

That last point is sort of interesting. Men are strongly associated with their careers and level of pay. This is most of their status. It has a tremendous impact in the dating market. It is a key factor in the likelihood of divorce. Men follow the money; they don't get randomly assigned careers and they don't just follow their dreams. Men strongly seek the status of a high-paid job. To marry and start a family, that job is almost required. Women have no such trouble, so they don't need to prioritize earnings. Women can pick careers they actually enjoy.

While this is plausible, the data on this isn't consistent. In fact, some professions that saw a large influx of women also saw wage increases. There are many variables at play.

They don't. Most men have to work in order to earn money and attract a partner. You think all of us love sitting in open offices, following our Scrum Master? Of course not, we just don't have the luxury, as do women, to follow our 'passions' in lower paying jobs. We can't marry a breadwinner too easily. We don't receive subsidies from the state, unlike women who are a net tax loss. We aren't able to attract a mate simply by being young, as can women, due to biological differences between genders.

In Scandinavia, where salaries are progressively taxed and women have tons of opportunity to do what they want, women still choose not to sit in front of computers all day. Why the hell would they if everyone's salary is essentially equalized, regardless of whether you're a part-time teacher, social worker or a talented computer engineer working 60/hours a week. All salaries are taxed down to a median $75K / year, with the same health insurance, subsidized parental leave, etc.

Thus, Scandinavian women follow their 'passions' which is what most Western women do, as we see from their choices in college majors, all of which are unarguably 'easier' but pay less. If society were to equalize my salary at $75K year whether I coded all day or worked for a charity or NGO or a music teacher or artist or actor, I'd dump my programming job as fast as I could.

Look at India or China where far more women are into computers - they don't have the luxury of following their passion in dance or writing, because they don't have as much PRIVILEGE in their societies as do women in the West.

* http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students...

Source for this? I've never heard this claim before and on the surface it makes no sense. I'm a woman and I don't get any kind of special tax exemptions for it...

The tax revenue point can be proven by the same 'wage gap' arguments which are true in the sense that men work more and are paid higher, in aggregate, so pay more income taxes.

Second idea is that most federal and state benefits that are direct subsidies go to women: TANF, WIC, SNAP, Section 8, etc. Most people (i.e. women) who receive these benefits have children.

The biggest difference, can't remember where I saw it, is as our population shifts towards a higher median age, health care (and social security and other things like government pensions) become a larger share of net pay outs. Women live longer and spend more on health care.d.

But responding to your own question, no I don't think there are any special exemptions for working women, though it is creeping into US law in many states and soon Federally. Expenses like parental leave will be paid for by all taxpayers but be distributed mostly to women.

Obviously, some of these discrepancies are due to child care being a non-paid job, but it isn't the only difference.

I think this though itself is an artefact of a male dominated profession. The fact that working with software is "programming a computer all day" reflects a male preference and value system, and many people open acknowledge that it's quite harmful and often creates quite dysfunctional teams. We need better requirements, better communication, better documentation, more human approach to the whole process. I've talked to great women working in software development who say "I don't really care about the programming itself and I would never go home and do it for fun - but I love the other aspects of the job". Perhaps the nature of the job itself needs to change a bit for the preferences to adjust.

Isn't there a place for people good at thinking deeply about difficult problems on their own and coming up with effective solutions?

Yes, everyone needs to be able to communicate well to be part of an effective team. But there is also a role for deep thinking and introspection.

By the way, introverted women exist, too.

You can't possibly think that this is what the person you are replying to is saying. But anyway, the point is that the conception of programming as a task suited to people who like to work in isolation is incorrect and harmful. One of the most common pitfalls of software development is writing software that no-one wants or needs. The solution to that problem lies in better communication. Of course, there are some kinds of programming problems that are suited to intense work in isolation. But most programmers probably need to spend more time talking to their non-programmer colleagues.

I do think that.

I think programming selects for people high in introversion and maybe even on the autistic spectrum.

I think some extroverted people find those people deficient and don't like working with them, and would like to change the working environment to be less comfortable for the introverts and more comfortable for the extroverts.

If you're employed as a programmer, you're most likely being paid to solve other people's problems by writing code. If you can't communicate with those people, you'll never be able to do that successfully.

It's no conspiracy. A socially clueless introvert who's being paid a lot of money to do nothing useful doesn't have much to offer.

There are also a lot of tasks where thinking deeply without distractions or interruptions for an extended period of time is the best way to come up with good solutions.

And even a lot of the best communication comes from taking time in quiet and deeply thinking about what you want to say and writing a good, convincing argument.

Thinking introverts have nothing productive to offer is just bigotry, and really makes you come across as a complete ass.

???

I don't say that they're deficient as people, or that working in isolation is bad per se. I'm just saying that people who like to work in isolation are unlikely to make good programmers (in the context of a typical programming job).

Personally, I switched to programming from academia, where I really did work in isolation on challenging problems. Now I spend most of my time talking to my colleagues to figure out exactly which not very challenging problem I should be spending my limited time on solving.

Now it makes sense.

I'm sure you're right.