[hnracer]

This is definitely a large part of the picture but it's also possibly partly genetic when it comes to the science and tech fields. I'm talking about interest and not competence. Women tend to self select out of science and tech in richer societies where they have the freedom to do so, and self select into disciplines that serve the empathic personality better. There are persuasive studies on that topic.

[BlueTemplar]

A significant factor seems to be that the way (not only STEM) academia is currently organized means that women have to pick between a career or having any children (at ages favorable to childbearing):

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4522

And I kind of have the impression that the situation here actually got worse during the last decades?

[hnracer]

I'm also talking about regular career choices (not academia) that only involve a three or four year undergraduate degree. Women self select out of technical pursuits (CS) and self select into more verbal or empathic areas (Law or Medicine, and an even more extreme example being liberal arts) even though such areas might entail even more study than CS. This self selection is magnified when women have more choice and freedom. Women in software is more common the more poor a country is.

I mean it's not only career choices where such gender differences manifest, we also see it in the choices that young children make. The burden of proof is on the camp that proposes that it's entirely sociological since the extant empirical evidence, along multiple independent lines, contradicts it.

[BlueTemplar]

Yes, I'm specifically talking of women loss after undergraduate level.

[hnracer]

Agree that this is an issue

[tasogare]

This theory doesn’t any hold scrutiny: some academic or academic-like fields are dominated by women despite having the same formal organization as the STEM ones.

[BlueTemplar]

I would guess that they were already dominated by women at the undergraduate level, perhaps even more so ?

[galoisgirl]

We're still a society that treats women very differently.

For instance, women have to be just the right level of assertive. Too little, and you're not respected nor listened to, you're passed for promotions... Too much, and you're viewed as aggressive.

You have all those articles about women leaving tech - they must have had the interest to get there, the opportunities, and yet they're leaving.

[hnracer]

We agree in full that women face these problems across tech and also in other industries.

However, this is not evidence of a uniquely bad problem in tech which can explain why tech has a gender disparity (which occurs primarily because women are self-selecting out of it before college) and other areas do not. Tech workers are far less blokey and much more aware/introspective of the issues than finance workers for example, actually the contrast is rather extreme speaking as someone who's worked in both industries, but it has less women proportionately than in finance which is contra to what your hypothesis would predict.

We also have to contend with the fact that women are underrepresented in tech (again due mostly to less women entering technical fields in college, even though they can easily do so if they wanted) across every developed country. Are we to say that chauvinism is such an extensive problem in tech across every single country, and that it's consistently more of a problem than in Law, Finance and almost every other field, and that we can't find a single exception to this in Scandinavia or one miscellaneous country?

I find that dubious and think a genetic explanation (i.e. genetics influencing group means in interests/passions) is a far better fit to the available data, especially since such differences show up at a very young age, across cultures, before significant socialization. Not to mention that these results fit with fairly mainstream science (evolutionary psychology).

This is not an attempt at a value judgement, prescription, or to diminish the very real issues that women face in the workplace (including the tech workplace). I'm just trying to get a descriptive answer to the question "what's the biggest factor behind tech having so few women?".

> they must have had the interest to get there, the opportunities, and yet they're leaving.

I see these as anecdotes. They're interesting and worthy of attention, but it's not good data that compares how many women and how many men are leaving tech when compared to other industries.

-

I would really like to see a survey of 18 year old women who are enrolling into college, and straight up ask them why they didn't choose tech. My money is on them saying they have no interest, and not that they read some article about tech-unique chauvinism. I will await such results keenly.

[galoisgirl]

I'm not denying the gender equality paradox, that in societies where women have the choice, they chose STEM less often.

I'm not denying a genetic factor either, because I can't disprove it.

What I'm arguing against is this "tabula rasa" at age 18. Women grow up with less female role models in STEM. A Barbie doll used to say "math is hard", which speaks volumes to how prevalent this message is. Sure, 18yo haven't seen the workplace yet, but they've seen how women are treated, how higher the bar is for them, how more criticism they get when they take a risk and fail, how often they'd be the only woman in the room... Going into STEM for a boy is being safe in a group of similar peers, going into STEM for a girl is harder, because all your life, you have to prove you're good despite being a girl, and because it's lonely.

My personal view is that both genetics and society matter here. I don't have a problem with genetics, but I do have one with society.

[hnracer]

I think we are mostly in agreement. I agree that there are societal factors as well and that these are not good and we should work to address them.