[mwd_]

These articles typically throw the ratio of female to male employees out there as a statistic. How do we know that gender discrimination is the biggest factor in the gender gap? It's not hard to imagine that men and women on average would have different career preferences even without discrimination.

[FuzzyDunlop]

This is what crosses my mind quite often when gender is brought up here. The sentiment is that gender imbalance is a problem that needs to be fixed. And as you say, any other reason goes out of the window.

I'm also of the opinion that there's a hint of arrogance in saying that men are the reason there are fewer women in the field. I generally take a feminist stance with these things, and am of the opinion that women's jobs being at the mercy of chauvinistic 'brogrammers' or some such bullshit is exactly that: bullshit.

Given the desire and the determination, any woman interested in the field can pursue a career in it, and the field does not prevent that.

> "For Yeung, having parents who were both engineers spared her the sense that computers weren't for girls."

This conveys the real truth, hiding in the mound of rubbish that is the majority of that article.

It's not Silicon Valley's fault; it's not the fault of technology, or programming; it's not the fault of the men working in those fields. It's society's fault for dictating what qualifies as 'girly', and what doesn't. Tech is not 'girly', therefore society fails to provide the same incentives to pursue those interests to young girls, that are available to young boys.

[Niten]

> It's not Silicon Valley's fault; it's not the fault of technology, or programming; it's not the fault of the men working in those fields. It's society's fault for dictating what qualifies as 'girly', and what doesn't. Tech is not 'girly', therefore society fails to provide the same incentives to pursue those interests to young girls, that are available to young boys.

I agree... there was another good comment along these lines in another thread on this topic earlier today:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4061749

If the engineering gender gap is an issue we are going to address as a society, then we need to address it at its roots: childhood social pressures.

[Niten]

For one thing, if gender discrimination were the major cause of the lack of female software engineers in our society, then one would expect other societies to do better. But that isn't the case. Even in famously egalitarian Sweden, only 30% of computing graduates are female, according to the ACM; Norway, Germany, and the UK actually do worse than the US on that statistic.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/programming-and-development...