[beat]

There's a presupposition that the natural distribution of intelligence is gender-neutral. Which suggests that the unequal distribution of software engineers by gender has a cause other than intelligence.

So what is the cause, then? Is it biological, or social, or random chance? "Random" doesn't seem likely, especially given how many other professions are male-dominated, and the relative economic and social power of those roles, compared to female-dominated professions.

"Biological", if it doesn't map directly to intelligence, needs another cause - something that can be measured. Do you have a suggestion for this? I don't.

"Social" is the most likely reason, but how is "social" different from "discrimination"? How do you define a social cause for men dominating the industry that can't be readily interpreted as discriminating against women?

[axlprose]

is there a reason why you're so intently focused on the metric of intelligence here, as if it's the end-all-be-all of psychological factors?

I work in personality psychology research, so this whole IQ-centric line of reasoning is very dubious to me. There are many other influential phycological factors involved in people's lives that aren't (as far as we know) a direct result of nurture, and when taken together often make a more significant contribution to people's lives than their score in the single dimension of IQ. Learning disabilities and affective/mood disorders are a big example of this, and personality traits are just as impactful in how a person's life unfolds, regardless of intelligence.

[beat]

It doesn't need to be IQ-based. I'm dubious about any sort of "genetic" argument for why some fields are dominated by men, and others by women. The shift in programming from primarily women to primarily men is evidence for that, imho - if the leanings are genetic, why a change over the course of one or two generations?

[axlprose]

>if the leanings are genetic, why a change over the course of one or two generations?

A trait not being the direct result of nurture does not imply it's the result of a traditional long generic process, and this is something that we're only just beginning to scratch the surface of with epigenetics, so it's unlikely that such questions will get definitive answers anytime soon. That being said, the observation that a trait may be determined at birth only suggests that the trait is heritable, but not that it's genetic; those are two separate concepts, and heritability allows for much more variation from generation to generation, such as the case of children of immigrants from poor countries generally being taller than their parents when they're raised in western countries (which is likely due to improved nutrition enabling the full expression of their heritable height).

For example, you could ask the same question about whether the increase in learning disabilities and affective disorders within the past few generations in western societies is also "genetic". The default answer there of course, is that these conditions were only formalized as officially recognized diagnoses recently, and that such traits are only known to be heritable anyway (i.e. there are no definitively known "autism/adhd/etc genes" as of yet), so they're likely caused by the combination of the environment enabling the expression/observation of heritable predispositions. We can then similarly propose a null hypothesis to the male/female divide with the observation that western societies have only recently attempted to become more egalitarian by making various fields more equally attractive than they used to be, along with technological advances creating even more of such equally attractive opportunities, leading to heritable traits expressing themselves more noticeably through choices in the overall job market. In other words, being a professional "gamer" wasn't a viable job option 500yrs ago, but neither was being a professional "camgirl" either (to use two distinct, yet similar and stereotypically gendered "modern" occupations), but being a farmer was, in which case equal male/female distributions among farmers would've been the result of an underlying bottleneck in the pipeline, rather than the lack of one.

To suggest that this issue is either purely "genetic" or purely "social", is severely oversimplifying the matter.