[umanwizard]

Woah, where did I ever claim women are unqualified to work as programmers? You're putting words in my mouth. There are many other possible explanations.

As for your example, it is not "strong evidence". Historical breakdown doesn't mean much since very few people were computer programmers at all back then. You can't extrapolate from that to the distribution of people who would become programmers decades later once it would be a super mainstream profession that a huge fraction of the population would enter.

[thanatropism]

> Historical breakdown doesn't mean much since very few people were computer programmers at all back then.

Programming was a different affair too. You have to be much more detail-oriented to deal with punch cards and spaghetti goto code; this means fewer people get to be big-picture focused.

Going back a couple decades further, computers were huge halls where women did small calculations by hand; someone (Oppenheimer, Feynman or some such) did the big picture work and divvyed it up much like physicists now give Matlab or Fortran work to do.

[balsam]

Hey just saw your reply. Thanks! (This is great comment, too)

[ubernostrum]

If the process produced one gender ratio at one point, and a wildly different gender ratio at another point, and the process is asserted to be meritocratic, then the only explanation is that the relative innate qualifications of people as a function of their gender changed between those two points in time.

Also, your second paragraph amusingly makes a different form of my argument for me (if you can't assume that the ratio at one point in time is indicative of general facts about qualification as a function of gender, you also can't assume that it is at a different point in time -- it may be that a decade or two from now there will be an order of magnitude more programmers!).

[Sacho]

> then the only explanation is that the relative innate qualifications of people as a function of their gender changed between those two points in time.

Sure, for example, boys being encouraged to become computer programmers. There's an article on NPR that discusses this[0]. Also, when you say "the process", I'm not sure you're adequately describing the evolution of programming and its related skillset demands. A strong increase in competition would naturally lower the ratio of women to men:

- time invested in programming correlates strongly with skill

- historically men have been able to put more time into careers than women(who often need a better work-life balance to manage a household).

- the historic SMAM[1](mean age at marriage) gives men an extra ~2-2.5 years over women even if you assume equal parenting responsibility, before men must also make parenting concessions.

[0] - http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

[1] - http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/worldmarriage/...

[camelite]

Innate qualifications is an oxymoron. Your thinking on the matter is confused.