[ghaff]

I don't think it's the only factor but it's been my belief for a long time that it's one factor. If you assume 18 year olds entering CS programs started to widely use computers and game consoles as kids in the mid to late 80s, that lines up well with the decline in women entering CS. [1]

Again, there are almost certainly other factors, and correlation is not causation, but there is at least logical correlation.

To your broader point, a lot of kids enter college with only a broad idea of what they want to do. And high school courses don't really offer much guidance. High school science classes have very little to do with their counterparts at good colleges.

[1] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-the-declinin...

[moshmosh]

Right, agreed on that not being the only factor, but I do think it's suspiciously-sufficient-looking to explain why CS was becoming a boys' club even as women were reaching parity with men in terms of proportion-of-the-sexes in medicine and law, and to some extent business more generally. "Computer nerds are so remarkably and uniquely sexist that they not only avoided this trend, but sharply reversed it" has never... quite rung true to me. Again (because you have to over-specify on this topic or risk angering people) not because there's no sexism among computer nerds or computer companies, but just because I don't get why programming/CS would be uniquely afflicted with that, to such an apparently huge—in order to explain the sharp difference—degree.

Meanwhile there are definitely a lot of gatekeeping-assumptions about childhood interests in modern CS programs, which one would expect to have gotten stronger as more and more freshmen actually could have had experience with computers on their own—so, starting with late-80s freshmen, mostly, with the effect getting stronger fast after that. That lines up so well with the data on CS-program-enrollment-by-sex that it seems to me like the factor to examine before we go looking for other explanations. Again, to be excessively explicit due to the topic, I mean this in terms of accounting for the gender gap in programming, not in terms of addressing any other issues of sexism in the industry, which I am not denying exist.

[ghaff]

There are some fields--notably within engineering, mechanical engineering--where women have historically had low participation. But one probably doesn't need to examine gender stereotypes too deeply to see why that might be the case. But there haven't been the large shifts there we've seen with CS.