It doesn't actually treat women worse than lots of other places that have plenty of women. Islam, acting and modeling all treat women worse than computing (flogging them for rape, casting couches), yet have far more women.

Women are sometimes treated badly in technology. Technology also has few women. But what evidence do we have that the former is a significant cause of the latter? It's hard to even demonstrate a correlation, let alone causation.

The notion that there is some intrinsic property of women that makes them uncompetitive in computer science, but not in accounting, actuary, law, medicine, &c is an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. No such evidence has been presented.

The notion that a male majority which happens to almost entirely comprise the upper echelons of the technology industry might, intentionally or (just as likely) not, set up self-reinforcing cycles of encouragement for men and discouragement for women is not an extraordinary claim. It is bog-standard human pack-animal clique behavior. And nevertheless, clear, ringing evidence of these phenomena are published routinely.

I think you are ignoring the much more likely scenario that women see computer science/software development as a bad bet or it simply does not appeal to them.

For example it is a field where if you take 5 years off you are treated worse than a fresh graduate... Funnily enough a lot of women might want the ability to take a few years off.

Or for example it is an industry which has a lot of instability and lack of internal mobility. This means that you often are forced to leave jobs you love and where you have close friends in order to progess, or because they pivoted, or simply went out of business. Less women are willing to put up with this crap.

I've worked as a software developer at a couple of larger companies where maybe 15% of the developers were female. However, about 40% of the systems analysts/business analysts/project managers/testers/QA were female. These are roles in which you interact with the developers on a daily basis.... Surely if the issue was software developers being sexist then women wouldn't want to do these other roles either.

There is some sexism in the industry, but no more than many other industries which have plenty of women.

No offense, but I'm not sure you've actually said anything here. Take this exact comment, substitute "women" for "men", and it seems equally valid. If you can't explain why things would be different specifically for women, you're not addressing the fact that there are four men for every woman in software development.

I'm saying that women, on average, might value the attributes/factors I listed more than men. I.e.

Being able to take 1+ years off when you have children without serious career damage is more important to woman than men.

The research I have read suggests that women are much less likely to leave a job they enjoy and where they have made friends in order to get a pay rise than men are. It's not much of a leap for women to consider this issue before entering a field.

Likewise there is considerable research on women being more risk averse than men and surely this at least has an impact on joining the startup world.

My last two paragraphs basically boil down to a question for you: why are women who are, in your opinion, not becoming software developers because of sexism still entering into roles that interact heavily with these sexist software developers?

Easy: because those roles you referenced are fed by a career track that starts in university programs with a much better gender balance. Some of those role are MBAs, and some of them (the project management stuff) are generic liberal arts with some industry training (like PMP).

That doesn't mean that the solution to the problem is in university enrollment, but it does explain why it's easier to find women in non-tech roles in software companies: it's because those roles don't require an early life commitment to a career in technology.

Every field you mentioned had the same male majority, yet they all failed to keep women out. Well, almost every field you mentioned - actuaries were quite successful.

http://www.prb.org/pdf08/scientistprofiles/occprof08_actuari...

If you want to appeal to "bog-standard human behavior", it would help if you showed that computing, physics and actuary have "bog-standard human behavior" while law and medicine don't. As I said, not even correlation has been demonstrated.

Just so that you can understand what I mean by "correlations", let me demonstrate with a different theory. Theory: women are less likely to have high quantitative ability, so fields with higher quantitative ability requirements will have fewer women. Demonstrating a correlation would involve showing a downward sloping graph with quant ability requirements on the X-axis and %women on the Y-axis. Like the graphs here: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required...

Then I'd need to present evidence that women are less likely to have high quant abilities. Like in these papers here (note that the abstracts have been creatively worded to be published, skip to the data tables): http://www.sciencemag.org/content/321/5888/494.summary http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2889145?uid=3738256&ui... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21038941 http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf

Simply pointing out that humans act like humans fails - it predicts flat graphs rather than downward sloping ones.

I said extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

You just made two different extraordinary claims: that women (as a demographic) intrinsically lack quantitative ability, so much so that they're at a disadvantage in industry (not merely at a disadvantage in the competition for Fields Medals), and that computer science as an industry is uniquely dependent on quantitative ability, moreso than actuaries (where there is significantly greater female participation.)

Your extraordinary evidence for this is a blog post with regression lines.

Sometimes your rhetorical strategy on HN is bracing and useful. Like all message boards, HN is prone to flights to abstraction and goalpost moving, and the introduction of facts can cut through that and ground the discussion.

Other times, it seems like you simply have far too much confidence in the significance of the facts you choose, and your overconfidence hamstrings you.

I don't have to care whether male quantitative ability has more variance than female ability. I can sort of enjoy reading about it on Marginal Revolution without incorporating any of those conclusions into my identity or philosophy.

I do care about the idea that results about variance in quantitative ability speak to CS ability. For the great majority of specialties in CS, they do not, at all. I think you may be blinded to this by the specialty you've chosen to work in, which is math-intensive. I'm a systems programmer --- in fact, a crypto-intensive systems programmer! --- and I will go to the mat against the idea that computer science requires atypical quantitative ability.

At any rate: it is self-evident that professional software development doesn't require the quantitative aptitude required to compete for university math tenure.

I gather you assign a lower prior to cognitive variations - that's fine. No point debating that at the moment, it's just an example to show what evidence might look like: a downward sloping graph with your predictor on the X-axis and %female on the Y.

You don't have that graph. All you have is vague theories like "bog-standard human behavior prevents women from entering a field". This theory predicts that every historically male field should remain historically male, which is false.

Every historically male field will remain male in the absence of a focused effort to improve balance, which is what happened in the demanding (and often quantitatively rigorous) professions that improved women's participation, and what's being contested in computer science.

I am not making an extraordinary claim. I am looking at the numbers for female participation in CS, noticing that they are anomalous, all the more so given the relative size of the CS professions (they are enormous, which should have helped smooth out the anomaly), noting the incentives for participation (CS professions are, relative to the effort it takes to enter the field, well compensated, flexible, geographically well distributed, and not physically demanding) and observing that there are only two logical explanations:

(a) Social and process factors are having the effect of encouraging male participation and discouraging female participation, or

(b) Women are intrinsically sharply less capable of performing in software development despite a demonstrated ability to perform in law, accounting, medicine, and even other STEM fields.

In the absence of something much more compelling than a blog post on slatestarcodex, I feel pretty comfortable ruling out (b).

So where is your evidence that quantitative fields did not have this "focused effort", but non-quantitative fields did? Can you present some evidence of focused effort in medicine, law and biology but none in computing and aerospace engineering?

I.e., do you have an upward sloping graph with focused effort on the X and %female on the Y?

You can for instance read through 'rayiner's comments on how this happened in law.

I skimmed his comments, he hints it was discriminatory affirmative action but doesn't say much in detail. It's hardly clear that engineering and STEM didn't do the same thing - in fact, we know they have done this for some time.

I find it a bit surprising that you are so unconvinced by Scott Alexander's actual quantitative data (not to mention all the other academic studies I linked to), yet find vague hints at a single datapoint to be proof positive of an alternate hypothesis.

In the face of a gigantic participation gap, I am not persuaded by numerology. I don't find the data you have on this issue to be particularly compelling. I think it relies primarily on a vain misconception a lot of people have about the demands on software developers.

I think you find it persuasive because you work in a small specialty of CS that is particularly math-oriented (even if I don't buy that your facts apply to your particular specialty).

So in the face of weak but suggestive data, we should instead accept an alternate hypothesis with a single data point vaguely alluded to?

"Single data point vaguely alluded to". That's funny. Women compromise 20% of the software development workforce. For every woman developer, there are four men. Against that fact, you've got statistical studies on the variance of quantitative ability between men and women which purport to explain why women don't chair math departments and win Fields Medals, and which you'd also like to use to explain why there are four men writing SQL queries to every woman.

Just curious, what evidence (if any) would cause you to change your views?

Also, given that you keep bringing up CS as somehow unique, does this mean you attribute other STEM fields without women (e.g. physics, aerospace engineering) to a different cause?

Those fields are tiny compared to software development, so I guess I'm willing to believe (a) that there isn't enough social impetus to correct them and (b) whatever biased CS is probably very similar to what biased those STEM fields that have the same problem as CS.

Results from unbiased work-sample aptitude tests would influence my views. But they wouldn't influence the views of the "pro-gap" faction; I expect the results would be explained away as "well of course that cohort of women captured by your sample does well on the test; it's all the other women that have the problem."

Anyways, I'd pay attention to that, because: the biggest fallacy I see in arguments that suggest the gender gap is benign is the notion that it attributable to intrinsic differences in intellectual attributes between males and females; when people attempt to explain those differences, they appear not to connect to software development in any but the most naive, high-school guidance counsellor kinds of ways.

My sensitivity to that fallacy has, like, the inverse vector of what I think yours is: I started my career with a huge deficit in math (my worst subject in high school, which is where my formal education stopped), but was successful regardless, and not because I plugged form fields into databases: after doing somewhat interesting systems programming for an ISP as a network admin, my first real dev job was compiler-theoretic. So I'm automatically suspicious of the belief that software development is closely tied to math aptitude.

Your claim (b) confuses me. First you try to paint CS as somehow special and requiring no quant skills, unlike the rest of STEM. Thus, the well supported "quant skill -> less women" correlation doesn't apply. But then you try to suggest other STEM fields do have the same problem as tech.

As for why intellect gap arguments persuade you and not me, I think I understand now. I tend to believe that there are very few independent dimensions in human intellect, you seem to think there are many. I'd suggest investigating psychometrics in a bit more detail - I found this idea very surprising, but it holds up quite well. Take tokenadult's linkdumps on hiring procedures as a good starting point.

Also, let me emphasize that I don't claim my theory is perfect - I just claim it's the best supported. Quantitatively, all the correlations point in the right direction. I see no reason to exclude other theories, e.g., Sapna Cheryan's "women avoid nerds" theory ( http://faculty.washington.edu/scheryan/research.htm ) - the correlations at least line up there, admittedly anecdotally (doctors and lawyers are high status, computer and math geeks are low status).

The idea that CS, math and physics are somehow uniquely unkind to women seems weak to me. I see no plausible reason why "bog-standard human behavior" would be worse in STEM - if anything, you'd expect objective fields to care less about human behavior. (That's probably why computing is so tolerant of weirdos.) Note that you haven't even provided anecdotal evidence that computing is somehow worse than law in this regard.

That's a strawman. The actual claim is that playing with computers at a young age has a high correlation with becoming a great programmer later in life, and that generally young girls are not encouraged to play with computers.

So the claim is that playing with computers at a young age is vital to the development of programming skill, just as the Hasbro game "Operation" is for physicians.

See: "extraordinary claims...".

No, again, you're creating a strawman. I never said it was vital; just that it helps a lot. And I see no reason such a claim would require a similar effect to be present in every industry.

In fact, the evidence supporting the idea that programming is special in this regard is precisely that you don't hear doctors talk about how they had spent their childhood years endlessly playing Operation, while meanwhile you do hear many great hackers say they spent their whole childhoods playing with computers (or, when unavailable, then the nearest facsimile: taking apart electronics, playing with Game Genie codes, building erector sets...)

It's hard to tell whether you're missing my point or agreeing with it. The idea that computer science is unique among the sciences and professions --- including detail, abstraction, and symbol-intensive fields like aerospace engineering and forensic accounting --- is itself an extraordinary claim.

It's also a counterintuitive claim, given the reality of what software development work actually is. A plurality of professional developers do little more than plumb connections from SQL database tables they understand poorly to front-end frameworks they didn't write. That's the practice that requires exposure from preschool, like a competitive concert violinist?

No. Not buying it. Sorry.

Indeed, most tech industry jobs don't require the sort of deep hacking abilities you can only learn young. However, the hiring process puts high value on having learned to hack young, and the social scene tends to exclude people who didn't have lifelong exposure to hacker culture.

Changing both these things would improve the gender balance.

I'm glad to see you writing that, and thanks. Lemme just add that I think I might be able to surprise you about aptitude to and development of "deep hacking abilities". I don't know about robotics, but C/ASM RTOS-style systems programming? I think you can quickly develop that from people with no prior exposure. I built a hiring process on that hypothesis, and months after leaving the firm we used it at, it apparently continues to be working very well.

I think if you were able to somehow come up with a compelling way to get kids to play forensic accountant (perhaps a new J.K. Rowling series?), you would absolutely see in 20 years that the kids who did were significantly more likely to go on to become great forensic accountants. Same with aerospace engineering. The special thing that distinguishes programming from those skills is that programming skills do have many analogs in the world of childhood playthings and can thus give certain children a preparatory advantage over others when they all reach college together.

Actually, aerospace engineering might have a bit of that. Have there been studies to see if children with the opportunity and encouragement to design, build, and fly their own model aircraft might perhaps be more likely to grow up to be successful aerospace engineers than children who aren't exposed to such things?

Your intuition that the world's best forensic accounting game would produce a generation of the world's best forensics accountants might be useful, but it is not evidence. And the requirement here is for extraordinary evidence.

What do you see as my corresponding extraordinary claim?

Once again: the idea that computer science is unique among virtually all the professions in that performance at the median level of competence requires, like a concert violinist, exposure at the earliest possible age. This despite the fact that most of what programmers do is simply plumbing and diagnostics.

> performance at the median level of competence requires [...] exposure at the earliest possible age.

I never claimed that, though. I think my actual claims were pretty mundane:

1. Children who play with computers have an advantage when, later in life, they're learning programming.

2. Young girls, in many places, are not encouraged to play with computers the way that young boys are.

It's funny that you keep mentioning highly quantitative fields like aerospace and actuary, and then try and contrast them with computing.

http://www.ae.utexas.edu/news/students/683-more-women-ase

Undermines your point a bit.

This is sleight of hand. What you're doing here is crossing the streams between your conversation with me, which is about intrinsic male advantage in math ability, with my conversation here, which is about the supposed advantage men get from being exposed to computers at an earlier age.

The point of citing fields in your discussion with me is that there are quantitatively intensive fields which have significantly greater female participation than computer science, despite the dubious idea that computer science as it is actually practices is quantitatively more demanding than, say, the demands on corporate lawyers to structure debt and equity financing.

The point of citing fields in this particular discussion is that there are demanding technical fields in which practitioners generally get little to no exposure to the work until they approach the age at which professional software developers enter the industry.

Did you miss the distinction? I sometimes go "on tilt" in discussions and misfire like this too.

So is our primary goal increased representation of women, or treating women well? (Put more directly, if we find that mistreating women makes more of them enter technology, what should we do?)

It's certainly possible that not as many women are interested in technology careers as men. (Seems overwhelmingly unlikely to me based on both anecdotal and rigorous evidence, but as a good scientist, I should say it's possible.) But why does that justify mistreating those women who are interested? And why should we be satisfied with our behavior based on merely being not as bad as a religion or another industry?