[bfe]

Whether or not you think this is tremendously important, it is.

We could easily unleash almost twice as much human potential of the human race we are right now in coding, and engineering and science in general, if we go back and inspect all the hideous details and biases inhibiting girls and women from pursuing scientific and technical interests and positions of authority.

(Almost twice as much, since a few women have managed to emerge with amazing technical superpowers from a still very sexist and sexist-tolerant society.)

For a very long time I had faith in how far we had progressed in sexual equality in American culture. But very many experiences over the past many years have convinced me overwhelmingly of how very far American culture still needs to go before every girl and woman has a level playing field at EVERY STAGE of educational and professional opportunity.

This is extremely important for every single one of you. If you're an American male programmer or engineer or scientist today, keep in mind always that almost half of your potential awesome colleagues or awesome employees aren't there working with you because they faced obstacles you might never have imagined.

Please, everyone, make it better and treat every single person the same way in every way from now on.

[sp332]

You know it's not that simple. It's not that people think of programming as a "guys' job". It's that most people never think of programming at all. It just happens that the few people who do think of programming, ever, are mostly guys. We just need to advertise better.

[bfe]

Dude. How is any of that "simple"?

Thinking that just better advertising will solve gender imbalances in technical roles is overly simple.

[ZoFreX]

That may be what caused us to get to the current situation, but the status quo being how it is has led to other problems in the meantime. Sexism is a very real problem in CS, both on academia and the professional side (sorry not really sure how else to distinguish, academics are also professionals obviously).

[Niten]

Where are all these obstacles you refer to? You're immediately jumping to the dogmatic conclusion that if there are less women in computer science right now, it must be because someone else is setting up obstacles to hold them back. But we don't actually know this to be the case.

It may instead be down to a lack of interest. It may be because the best and brightest programmers are all hackers who have been obsessed with computers since age 12; that's the kind of person you need to be, it seems, to keep up in this field, and that's a very male profile. Are we to cry "discrimination!" if it turns out that 12 year old girls are genetically predispositioned to prefer socializing with friends, over intrinsically loner activities like tinkering with computers?

It may even be a matter of aptitude. It's well known that although males and females, as groups, have roughly the same mean IQ scores, males have a greater variance in their scores. This means that if you look at the extremes of low or high intelligence, you'll find more males than females in either direction.

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

Programming is not only an intellectually demanding career, but your potential as a programmer seems to correlate with your intelligence more tightly than in most other occupations. And if you take the group of people with an IQ higher than x, with x >> 100 (or lower than x, with x << 100, for that matter), you'll generally end up with more males than females. This may be taboo to speak of, but we shouldn't let dogmatic value judgments cloud a discussion about empirical truth.

So what am I saying? I'm not claiming to know why there are more males than females in computer science. If there is some sort of hidden institutional misogyny keeping women from succeeding in this field, then of course that's a bad thing and should be fought. But we can't just leap to the conclusion that anti-female sexism must be the cause of this discrepancy when there are other possible explanations we haven't ruled out.

We must treat everyone as equals, in the sense that we give everyone the same opportunities regardless of gender. But that doesn't mean we're necessarily doing something wrong if, at the end of the day, we don't have an even gender distribution.

[prodigal_erik]

This. As part of the small minority of humanity who found ourselves irrestibly drawn to the profession during childhood (even when it wasn't cool and didn't pay especially well), it bugs me how many people seem to assume I am no more talented and dedicated than an arbitrary member of the huge majority who were not. We already have far too many male dilettantes jumping in and doing shoddy work just for the big paychecks today, and attracting female dilettantes is not going to improve anything.

[bfe]

No we wouldn't need to try to balance genders in any given profession at the end of the day if everyone had completely equal opportunity at every stage of intellectual and educational and professional growth. But if you think we're anywhere near that point you are living in a self-serving shell and haven't educated yourself at all about this.

[Niten]

But that's exactly what you're arguing:

> We could easily unleash almost twice as much human potential of the human race we are right now in coding, and engineering and science in general, if we go back and inspect all the hideous details and biases inhibiting girls and women from pursuing scientific and technical interests and positions of authority.

In other words, women are in a minority in this field, therefore someone must be oppressing them.

> But if you think we're anywhere near [the point of everyone having completely equal opportunity] you are living in a self-serving shell and haven't educated yourself at all about this.

I'm of the opinion that modern young men and women have equal enough opportunities in education and in the programming job market that a lack of opportunity probably is not a primary cause of the gender gap in computer science, any more than I think a lack of opportunity for men accounts for the predominance of women in education for example. You keep talking about discrimination but you still fail to provide any evidence; if you want us to believe there is a legitimate gender discrimination problem here, the burden of proof is on you to show that it actually exists. At the moment all you offer is hand-waving.

[bfe]

I guess default perception of burden of proof, prior to sufficient learning on the topic, has a lot to do with life experience, and I'm not going to spend my Saturday night looking up citations for someone who is wrong on the Internet, especially when they could easily find them themselves if they were actually interested, but I am certain if you are able to discuss it with woman friends who trust you, in any of a wide variety of professional fields, they will be able to tell you enough experiences they've had to, at the least, shift your perceived burden of proof.

[gte910h]

I just hope we're not at the apex. If it's not some mix of higher gene variability or somesuch holding us here where women only do X of profession Y, etc.

I know sexual harassment is an issue at some conferences, etc, so I doubt we're there yet as far as the reaches go, but I wonder if 50/50% representation is ever going to happen in IT, the boardroom, the classroom, science or in prisons. For instance, the suspicion towards males at playgrounds and in teaching positions and the lack of suspicion towards females removes a entire set of males from many child centric occupations, thereby sticking them in ones unrelated to children, unbalancing it.

I hope that there isn't the case, but there may be something about testosterone, expectations of mating, etc holding us here deeper than just educational awareness, or promotion mechanisms. I am not saying this is good, just pointing out we may be approaching the point where bias isn't the issue, other socio/biological factors are and may require bigger tools to get past.