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by Simulacra
2664 days ago
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As a woman in technology, a coder no less, I totally understand the pipeline problem. Men dominated technology in the very early days, and men made up most of the workforce. As much as society, government, and education attempt to force women into STEM fields, it's going to take a while before there are enough women, with enough experience, to truly equalize compensation. As for girls opting out of coding, that's ok.. Not all girls want to code, and not all girls want to take a STEM path, and that should not be see as some failure. |
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It's also true that not all boys want to code, and not all boys want to take a STEM path.
But what if a larger percentage of boys want to code or take a STEM path? If this were so, it would look like a pipeline problem, and it would look like a pipeline problem that's quite hard to fix. It might actually look like the reality we currently see.
But wait, it used to be that computer science was almost evenly split between men and women, right? Where did all those women go?
This is a reasonable question to ask, but it's not the only reasonable question to ask. Another question to ask would be: 50 years ago, what percentage of the overall population had computer science degrees? And is that percentage larger, smaller, or roughly similar to what it is today? I don't know, but I think it was likely much, much smaller than it is today. It might be the case that there are more female computer science graduates today as a percentage of the total population than there was 50 years ago. But how could that be true, if (as we know) men with computer science degrees now way outnumber women with computer science degrees?
This isn't really a trick question, the answer is pretty easy: Today there are a lot more people with computer science degrees. That increase was disproportionately men, and that's a consequence of a pipeline that is disproportionately men.
So what's the difference between the pipeline 50 years ago and the pipeline today?