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by DenisM 3556 days ago
Straight from the article:

When I was in school in the 1980s, women got about 37 percent of computer science degrees and law degrees then. Law went up to 47 percent now. In medicine, we were at 28 percent in 1984. That’s gone up to 48 percent. Computer science went from 37 percent to 18 percent.
1 comments
advantark2 3556 days ago
That is a good point. I've tried to think of a good argument against this, but I haven't been able to come up with one. It's an odd statistic, since the ratio of women to men in college has been going up & women have been encouraged to go into STEM fields for a while now.
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erroneousfunk 3555 days ago
> I've tried to think of a good argument against this, but I haven't been able to come up with one.

Why are you spending so much time trying to think of an argument against it? Is it really so hard to consider that women are now leaving programming in droves (particularly in the few years after college), in no small part due to the overwhelming number of men who tell them, day in and day out, that they need to accept the fact that they're "psychologically different" and that's "just reality"?

We encourage women to go into STEM fields and then make them feel like freaks a few years later when they actually try to make a career of it. Especially as they start doing more advanced work in the company, being promoted (and especially in specific IT fields), it becomes much easier to just throw their hands up and say "I'm so done with this shit. Peace." than to be BOTH a great programmer and a constant target/poster child of gender politics (both well-intentioned and otherwise). It's a positive feedback loop.

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advantark2 3555 days ago
I tried thinking of a good argument against it because it seems unintuitive. From everything I see, women are ENCOURAGED to go into STEM fields. They are significantly more likely to be hired and promoted when compared to their male counterparts, and get all sorts of support and scholarships.

Are you suggesting there aren't any psychological differences between men and women? Because testosterone has been shown to cause people to be more competitive, assertive, and violent. That's a pretty good indicator of a difference in psychology. We are of course talking about trends here. There are of course individual exceptions to the norm.

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