[manfredo]

> I'm saying there's a much more obvious hypothesis for why "people are selective of the industry they work in", and you need to refute that instead of circularly insisting on its truth as the basis for your argument.

...no? It's your responsibility to provide evidence for your "much more obvious hypothesis". I provided evidence for my claim that women choose not to go into tech on their own volition. I provided global statistics that demonstrate that the more freedom and equality women have, the less they choose to go into tech. I did "prove it" as you insist I need to do, so I'm confused why you continue to say that I have not provided evidence . It's your turn to provide evidence in refutation of this claim.

The way you keep summarizing this as "chicks don't like tech" and insisting that I provide evidence of my claim while simultaneously calling your explanation "much more obvious" without providing evidence to back it up is not indicative of a good faith discussion.

[ajross]

> I provided evidence for my claim that women choose not to go into tech on their own volition.

Uh... no, you didn't? I don't see it. All I see is circular logic: you're citing the lack of women in tech as evidence that they don't want to be there in response to a thread that says the lack of women in tech is a problem.

My point is that there are dozens or hundreds of other career paths where women used to be excluded and are now at parity, so I don't see any reason (other than novelty -- tech is still new, comparatively) for things to be any different here.

And your logic doesn't speak to that at all.

[manfredo]

> All I see is circular logic: you're citing the lack of women in tech as evidence that they don't want to be there

If this is all you see then you did not get the underlying point I'm making. I provided evidence that there is the least representation of women in tech in countries with the most gender equality and gender freedom. The countries with the least gender equality and most restrictive gender roles have the most women in tech. The evidence lies in the inverse relationship between greater gender equality and more flexible gender roles with the percentage of women in tech. If all you took away from this was that women are underrepresented in tech worldwide, then you did not see the evidence I was actually referring to.

[yorwba]

The evidence is not the small proportion of women in tech, but that it gets smaller when you compare countries where women have little freedom to decide for themselves to countries where gender equality is enshrined into law and women earn as much as men. So individual freedom appears to lead to fewer women choosing a career in tech.

That doesn't necessarily mean that no discrimination is going on. For example, both medicine and tech could be discriminatory, but medicine slightly less so, and women choose the better one. But any possible explanation needs to take into account that women do have a choice and they choose differently from men.

Offering scholarships might be able to tease out the difference, although it would have to be applied at much larger scale. If every student of medicine were offered a scholarship to learn programming instead, how many would switch?