[lbn]

The reason I said hostile is that in most discussions on Hacker News and Reddit a lot of people argue that the only reason women are so under-represented in tech is that all the guys are very hostile to women. This survey goes against that. For some reason they refuse to believe that some things are more interesting to women than men and vice versa.

[viraptor]

> For some reason they refuse to believe that some things are more interesting to women than men and vice versa.

It could be that this is just as wrong as the "only hostility is the problem". Not everybody sees the same barriers. Not everyone faces the same challenges. We don't even know if/what's more interesting, because we're bombarded with ideas of what should be more interesting since very young age. Software engineers I know successfully raise girl geeks for example.

[badsock]

In different cultures (e.g. Russia), and different time periods (e.g. the 80's), the level of interest and participation from women is/was much, much higher. I would say that's a pretty objective reason for believing that it's cultural and not biological.

What I find hard to believe is that some people don't think that women get treated differently than men, or that that wouldn't matter when it comes to people choosing to participate in certain communities.