[nicholasjbs]

Human nature doesn't change just because we pump a few billion dollars into figuring out how to get girls to love STEM. It'll never change.

If women's interest in CS is purely fixed by human nature, how do you account for the precipitous drop over the past decades? Women got 37% of the CS degrees in 1984 but get way fewer now.[1]

[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~women/resources/aroundTheWeb/hostedPa...

[discolemonade]

To understand what really motivates people, it's much better to look at what they do in the real world. Sure, there have always been women getting CS degrees, but how many of them go out and become programmers or tinker with technology, electronics and hardware late at night because they want to? The people who do that have been the engines behind technological advancement and growth throughout human history. And they've been mostly males. Saying that men tend to be more interested in technology than women doesn't mean that women's interest in CS is purely fixed. It just means that there will always be statistically more males tinkering with technology than females. And those statistical disparities will always ensure that the majority of tech-heavy, companies, and inventions will be led by men.

[iamgilesbowkett]

that's great dude but you didn't actually answer the question.

"If women's interest in CS is purely fixed by human nature, how do you account for the precipitous drop over the past decades?"

a 37% drop over a few decades is a pretty dramatic change.

your argument is based on zero data and a whole bunch of rhetoric. not only that, it completely ignores the question.

if it's all about human nature, how do you explain a dramatic recent change? (and realize that if you really want to take the discussion to the grand, sweeping level of human nature, three decades becomes a tiny, tiny timespan for such a sharp drop.)

[xiaoma]

>if it's all about human nature, how do you explain a dramatic recent change?

It's difficult to tell if you're trolling or if you truly don't get it. At no point did the parent poster claim that 100% of a person's likelihood to found a tech start-up was nurture.

Consider this situation: Nurture (U) and Nature (A) are both factors in a person's likelihood to start-up (L). If L = UxA, then a 37% drop in U would cause a 37% drop in L regardless of differences in natural abilities.

A good starting point if you're interested in the interplay between nurture and nature in human psychology is Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate.

[iamgilesbowkett]

I don't need help finding a book, and I don't appreciate your condescension.

[Drbble]

Comparing 1984 to 2002 in CS is ridiculous. Nothing dropped precipitously. CS grew astronomically, and it attracted more new males than females, but still there are far more women doing CS now than then.