[joe_the_user]

The argument of the article is that when computers were new, they were new to everyone of either genders whereas at present gender-based expectations can take over in expectations and decisions about who would play or work with computers.

"In some ways, it is like the very ubiquity of technology has led us back to a world where socially normative gender roles take hold all over again"

[bermanoid]

It's a nice story, but it sounds just-so to me.

Probably because most women that grew up in the 80s did not in significant numbers show the same fascination with computers that the author did. In fact, the current state of the mid-to-senior level job market reflects the interest level from exactly that time period, and it's just as lopsided in favor of men as it's ever been.

[parfe]

"In 1967, when Cosmo’s “The Computer Girls” article ran, 11 percent of computer science majors were women. In the late 1970s, the percentage of women in the field approached and exceeded the same figure we are applauding today: 25 percent. The portion of women earning computer science degrees continued to rise steadily, reaching its peak — 37 percent — in 1984. Then, over the next two decades, women left computer science in droves — just as their numbers were increasing steadily across all other science, technology, engineering, and math fields. By 2006, the portion of women in computer science had dropped to 20 percent." http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-computer-program...

The Computer Science/Tech/IT industry created an unwelcoming environment for women; the women left.

A random sampling of how IT can be hostile to women:

I sat one empty seat away from a long-haired friend in a Computer Architecture class with around 15 students attending lectures in a room with theater style seating and the entrances to the rear. Plenty of room to spread out.

On a regular basis, guys would enter from the rear and sit directly next to my long haired friend. No empty seat between. Only after sitting down did these guys realize the woman they just sat next to was actually a goateed dude. These creepers would then get up and quietly leave the classroom horribly embarrassed. This happened for half a semester until enough of these guys learned.

I can't imagine how a woman would feel if she had her personal space invaded on a regular basis when clearly there was plenty of room to spread out.

Then if a woman gets to the professional world she gets invited to a hackathon where the women will be serving drinks to the men. Or she sits near the front door and visitors assume she is a secretary. Or she "gets" to run the party planning committee. Those experiences add up over time and make life unpleasant.

[bermanoid]

I believe that IT is unwelcoming to women, I really do; traditionally male dominated fields are always hostile to women, even after they've reached population parity, and moreso until that happens (there are more men in the field and fewer women, so more interactions will be male-female than with a less skewed ratio, which means both that women experience more harassment, and men witness less of it). You don't need to argue this point, I know that a lot of guys are assholes in any field, and I don't for one moment doubt that any of the stories about what women have experienced are true.

I'm just not yet convinced that a significant number of women actually avoid the field because of this (and scattered anecdotes aren't convincing here since the numbers in need of explanation are so huge). Primarily because women rarely enter the field - no, that's not right, because they rarely even enter preliminary training for the field, in the first place, so there's not much of a chance for them to be driven away by the behavior of men in IT at all.

We're losing women very early in the funnel, and I need some real evidence to swallow the claim that the pain that the 17% (or whatever small number) that end up in IT experience is the reason we lose the first 33%. As someone that has paid a lot of bills by working on conversion funnel optimization, I can tell you for sure that I'd absolutely never assume, a priori, that the latter part of the "women in tech" funnel was the one we should be focusing on, based on the numbers - you always look upstream first, especially when you see stats as bad as in tech, and only once you're satisfied that those are the best you can achieve with reasonable efforts do you start to look at later steps.

If the freshman CS male to female ratio was 50/50, I'd agree that we should assume on-the-job treatment was the "leak"; but it's not, based on ETS numbers, by the time girls take the SAT, they only make up 12% of the people intending to major in CS - there's already a 9 to 1 ratio, even before college! The ratio for in the workforce is actually better than the corresponding rate upon entering college, which means more women end up moving towards the field when it comes time to picking a job than away from it. [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women,_girls_and_information_te...]

I'm not satisfied that I've ever heard a good answer to this objection. I have heard many plausible reasons that girls are either not interested in, pushed away from, or not pushed towards tech, and that's a separate matter, the one that I think is most worthy of discussion. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the behavior of the men actually in the field, at least as far as the arguments I've heard go.

[parfe]

Of course the situation is complex.

http://storify.com/charlesarthur/oh-hai-sexism

But the tech community just effuses sexism.

[greiskul]

No. Just no. First of all, anedoctal evidence doesn't mean anything. Sure, women are sexually haressed at technological jobs, but women are haressed EVERYWHERE. And men are also a minority in lots of professions, is that because the women majority on those fields haresses men that try to enter their area?

I suggest that you watch the first episode of this series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask

If you don't have the time, atleast think about the result of this experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing-systemizing_theory#...

"Research on one day old babies have found that boys look longer at a mechanical mobile while girls look longer at a face. This, as well as the effects of fetal testosterone on later behavior, is argued to be evidence against the sex differences being only due to socialization"

[whateverer]

Your evopsych argument doesn't explain the drop in female enrollment rate since the 80s.

[fosk]

You can't explain something like that without considering the context, the social/work environment of those years, that led to this change. It may just have been that, for example, since the 80s new interesting fields were born or discovered by women, thus reducing their interest in computer science. This factor, for example, may have led to men predominance in the field, and that subsequently may have led to new scenarios/environments again, and so on till nowadays.

I'm sure that if there was a time when multitude of women were interested in CS probably today there would be more of them, and less men. That's unequivocal. Environments change, always in every field.

[roguecoder]

Your hypothesis has the convenient feature that it lets men off the hook, but given that the "social/work environment" is male-dominated, surely they have agency over it.

Rather than a "lack of interest", I offer alternative Wildly Made Up Explanations For Why Women Left Software Engineering In Droves and Had CS Enrollment Fall: A) they may have been discouraged or prevented from studying a subject: Grace Hopper, for example, would have been an engineer but was prevented because she was a woman. Instead she studied math, as did many early female computer scientists. When Computer Science programs became common they may have hewed closer to the Engineering approach than Math, and when they became expected for programming jobs it may have closed off the pathway women had been taking into the field. B) They may have faced harassment or hostile environments that discouraged them from pursuing a coding career. That is not them "being interested", it is "them being willing to tolerate the environment they were required to study or work in." C) They may have faced discrimination in hiring, promotions, pay or been preferentially tracked into project management roles. You can't work in a profession if no one will hire you, and you can't advance if employers will only promote you into a non-technical role. D) they may have faced impossible-to-reconcile expectations on their time, if they were unable to find employment working regular hours and so utilize child care. Men being willing to be a primary care giver is a relatively recent phenomenon.

I'm not saying any of these are true: I am saying that in the absence of any evidence my wildly made up speculations are just as likely to be true as yours. None of those things have to do with interest in technology, programming or working as a programmer. They all implicate the men who changed the social/work environment of computer science in ways that discouraged or excluded women. They are also all things that we could fix.

I'd rather focus on explanations that offer disprovable models we can use to fix the issues at hand if they turn out to be correct. Your approach is like looking at a crash report and being content with the explanation, "something obviously happened that was outside of expected parameters."

When I read the article, I want the next generation of girls and boys to have those moments of joy at technology. I don't want half of them to be turned off by the entirely-irrelevant social/work environment.

[jleader]

How many "interesting fields" have been "born or discovered by women" since the 80s? Can you name any of these hypothetical fields?

In your 2nd paragraph, are you saying that the statistics about the declining proportion of women CS are wrong? On what do you base this statement?

[parfe]

Sweet, sexism doesn't exist because experience doesn't happen! Forgot I might be talking to a robot and I must have a repeatable scientific experiment to validate my individual experience. Otherwise it means nothing.

Oh, except those rules for a scientifically valid and repeatable study don't count when he cites it himself:

"The evidence for an inborn, male predisposition for systematizing comes from a single experiment on newborn infants, tested with a single person and object. The person was the report's first author, who surely knew the experimental hypotheses and who, we now learn, may have known the sex of the infants whose attention she elicited. The experiment provides no evidence that the basis of infants' preference, if real, had anything to do with the categorical distinction between the displays. Would infants show the same preferences for other face/object pairs? Would they maintain this preference if low-level properties of the two displays, such as their speed of motion, were equated? One need not object to Baron-Cohen's politics to be less than persuaded by his data."[1] says Elizabeth Spelke[2].

Sad Trombone.

Go validate your sexist culture another way. Evopsych:Psychology::Astrology:Astronomy

And yes, I watched that entire clip. It sucked and wasn't worth the time. It's by a comedian who gets scientists with competing models react to each other's statements. And only the newborn baby one has any bearing on gender vs environment when it comes to women avoiding CS.

I'll include another excerpt below because it's just too good to leave out:

" More important, Baron-Cohen fails to consider the extensive evidence that has accumulated, over the last thirty years, on infants' developing understanding of object mechanics. Hundreds of well-controlled experiments reveal no male advantage for perceiving objects or learning about mechanical systems. In most studies, male and female infants are found to discover the same things at the same times. Both males and females come to see the complete shapes of partly hidden objects under the same conditions and at the same ages. They figure out how objects support one another, through the same series of steps. They reach for objects by extrapolating their motions, with equal accuracy. They make the same errors when they search for hidden objects, and they get over those errors at the same time. Sometimes female infants have an edge: In experiments by Laura Kotovsky and Renee Baillargeon, for example, females start to learn about the relation between force and acceleration (the harder a stationary object is hit, the further it goes) a month earlier than males do. Males catch up, however: by 6 1/2 months, you can't tell them apart."

"Whatever the newborn infants in Baron-Cohen's experiment were doing, the male and female participants in three decades of infant research have followed a common path, engaging with objects and people. Infants don't choose whether to systematize or empathize; they do both, and so do we all. Baron-Cohen's categories may seem as quaint as left and right brains by the time his newborn subjects are old enough to read about them."

[1] More at http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge158.html (Search for her name as there are a lot of people there tearing Simon Baren-Cohen a new one.)

[2] Her Bio http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/index.html?spelke.html

[flomo]

Just a thought: IBM made a big effort to recruit women into mainframe programming jobs. 1984 roughly when Unix and PCs started to take over the industry; perhaps those companies were not as interested in recruiting women.

Also, you can be sure there's far less sexual harassment now than in the 1970s and 80s.

[parfe]

I personally theorize BBS's, which got popular in the mid 1980s, and later the Internet, gave spiteful and poorly socialized men a anonymous veil. Reddit keeps the legacy of woman-hostility alive and well with comments like "tits or gtfo".

Well, women chose to get the fuck out. The hostile behavior experienced online would never be tolerated in a face to face setting.

Of course it's only a theory and I was too young to remember any first hand experience of the 1980s.

[flomo]

It might be tough to imagine now, but very very few people were online in those days. In the programming forums (Compuserve, Usenet) people generally posted using their real names and job/university affiliation, so the atmosphere was professional at least.

Perhaps some small porn BBSs or IRC channels had a different atmosphere, but the "tits or gtfo" mentality is mostly something which appeared over the last decade or so.

[dgabriel]

I was a highschool student in the late 89s, early 90s, and I encountered some truly awful stuff on local bbs scenes. At first, I must be ugly and a social outcast (they referred to me as "the burly Russian wrestler"). I shrugged it off, because everyone got shit. So what? Then I went to one of the parties; very few people there had met me before. I was a pretty standard looking 16 year old girl, but I felt like meat, just meat. In the space of 20 minutes, two 20something men hit on me, virtually everyone else expressed shock at my lack of hidiousness, or told me they were surprised I was actually a girl. I begged my older brother to drive me home immediately. Then I buried my former alias, and made a new male alter ego. Just because you didn't see it, doesn't mean it didn't happen.

[gaius]

1983 was also the year the bottom dropped out of the console market, loads of firms went bankrupt, it was not a good career move to get into the industry in the mid-80s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

[joe_the_user]

1. Regardless of the state of the field, you haven't made an argument that these isn't her experiences.

2. Whatever the reason, the number of women involved in computing has been on the decline for the last twenty years.

3. The number of women in senior positions today might not reflect the number who enter the field twenty years if there was significant job discrimination or if women happened to have different preferences. The gender distribution of principals doesn't necessarily reflect the gender distribution of teachers.

[bermanoid]

I'm in no way doubting that the explanation offered is a possible one. I just don't think it's been seriously supported. Anecdotally, girls these days actually seem more interested in computers than when I was growing up, and I think that the high availability of computers is actually helping the situation, not hurting.

As for point number 3, you are of course correct in theory, but the reality is, there were already no girls in the middle school computer clubs of 1992, the high school programming classes of 1996, and the CS 101 classes of 1999. So I'm not really buying the idea that anything on the job is primarily responsible for the lack of women graduating CS in 2004 or becoming senior engineers in 2012.

Rule one of conversion optimization is to figure out where you're actually losing people in the conversion funnel. In tech, we're losing women while they're still girls, for whatever reason, and that's what we really need to track down and fix. Focusing on points after they've already left is premature, since if we can get more women coming through those steps in the first place, the dynamic will change anyways.