[dbt00]

> It may well be the case that the gender split is 80% / 20% male to female (as is roughly the case today)

Ask the same question in 1965 and get the opposite result.

There’s a lot of motivated reasoning by men that their innate characteristics are selected for computer programming. There’s a lot of hostile behavior by men towards women who are in computer science. You can view this like any other resource scarcity turf protection gambit.

It’s impossible to separate any apparent belief in the natural order of male dominance of the field from this behavior, so to draw conclusions from it is extremely dangerous.

[commandlinefan]

> Ask the same question in 1965

To be fair, though, a LOT has changed about the nature of computer programming since 1965.

[chmod775]

> To be fair, though, a LOT has changed about the nature of computer programming since 1965.

Has it though? The Von-Neumann-architecture was already a thing back then, programming languages (BASIC, Fortran, ...) already had many of the things you are still using today (such as for-loops) and any algorithm and data structure thought up back then is still perfectly usable today in most modern languages.

Sure, the whole tooling and library situation is not comparable to back then, but the fundamentals haven't really changed.

Consider these things:

- Binary search trees (1960)

- Linked lists (1955)

- Quicksort (1959)

- Hash tables (1953)

Looking back I rather have to say I am not impressed with advances in practical computer programming since then. The only major change was the introduction of type systems and OO imho, though these were technically a thing already back then too on an academic level.

[gamblor956]

True, programming is much easier now that you can use words to code, and have programs do all of the actual work of turning that code into usable machine code for you.

[fzeroracer]

Probably the biggest change was the introduction of personal computers, which were primarily marketed towards boys at the time. It should come at no surprise that the result of a huge marketing apparatus appealing solely to one gender would create a generation or two of predominately male programmers.

When you examine the fundamental nature of programming though, not much has changed. In fact things have become significantly easier over time.

[pdonis]

> Ask the same question in 1965 and get the opposite result.

Really? Reference, please.

[MayeulC]

Well, any history book should do.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing

Women were litterally employed as computers ca. WWII. When the transition was made to programmable machines, they were in majority the first ones to use, operate, program and design algorithms for them. The field was regarded as uninteresting, tedious, and not real engineering by their male counterparts.

[delecti]

Early programming was viewed as "women's work" because of the similarity between between the work and sewing [1]. I don't think it was quite 80:20 women:men in 1965, but it was certainly higher than 20:80.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory

[reroute1]

> There’s a lot of motivated reasoning by men that their innate characteristics are selected for computer programming. There’s a lot of hostile behavior by men towards women who are in computer science. You can view this like any other resource scarcity turf protection gambit.

That is entirely your opinion. Framing biological differences as turf protection is laughable in my opinion.

[tsimionescu]

You're looking at a societal bias, and inferring a biological difference. In other societies, this bias is much reduced, which would not likely be the case if differences were truly biological.

In particular, Eastern Europe of all places is relatively egalitarian in men-vs-women in programming.

[Hitton]

Easter European here. I rather agree that Easter Europe is relatively egalitarian, but it doesn't seem to affect ratio of men and women in IT. There is less than 20 % female students in IT related fields and smaller percent of women stays in the field after graduation compared to men.

[reroute1]

I could just as easily say you are looking at a biological difference and inferring a societal bias. Just because it doesn't exist in the same proportion everywhere doesn't mean that the difference is not biologically based. There are endless confounding factors that would lead to variations in different locations. The fact that the overall difference stems from biological differences doesn't require universal equivalence of the effect.

For example men on average have more muscle mass than women. If you found a random population of women that had proportionally higher muscle masses compared with their male peers, that doesn't discount the biological fact.

[gamblor956]

You're citing an actual biological difference in human biology to try and support an unsupported claim of a nonbiological difference...

One that is refuted by the history of computer programming, which used to be a female-dominated field back when programming was significantly harder than it is today.

[reroute1]

I chose a clear biological difference to illustrate the point that was being argued, about one sample population disproving the larger trend. And it's not an unsupported claim there is plenty of science and argument for why men and women choose different careers.

Please note that this doesn't discount any actual gender bias that may exist. The biological claim is only that men and women in general have a given set of personality traits. That isn't controversial science. It also isn't controversial because it doesn't claim that men are better engineers or better anything, just that more in general may naturally gravitate towards certain activities.