What I never understood was if there are less female software devs simply because they genuinely value others things more in life than staring at pixels on a computer screen (e.g. raising a family) and if this is the case in other time intensive fields such as medicine and law?
Biological clock and childrearing are well understood from an evolutionary perspective and are things that affect men disproportionately less.
When the topic of gender diversity in tech comes up, why is this such a controversial point to raise or am I missing the argument for gender diversity in STEM fields? More women are graduating college than men are they not? Why are fields like Human Resources and Nursing dominated by women? Are there simply different skill sets that differ between men and women that we are not acknowledging?
Anyone have any studies or data on this topic to explain why?
Honestly, I think most of these things are essentially tribal. A great source of data to support this idea is the 2015 table of physicians by gender and subspecialty [1]. Why are neurologists 28% female while neurological surgeons are only 7.8% female? Why are women 5% of orthopedic surgeons by 11.3% of vascular surgeons? You can come up with all sorts of just so stories (oh it's the hours, it's the blood) but then oops women make up 26.6% of emergency medicine specialists, so guess it's not hours or gore... What I see in math is that people flock to people to either are like them, or are nice to them, or to people who'll hire them. If you're deciding on your surgery specialty and the vascular surgeons will talk with you and the orthopedic surgeons snub you, you'll probably go for vascular surgery. It's certainly what happened in math grad school; if the numerical analysts were mean to women and the combinatorists were cool and said grad students only had to pay $5 for seminar dinners and weren't mean, magically combinatorics had more women (and more men, too, because this also applies to dudes!). If you get your first software dev job out of college and all the guys sort of avoid you and won't talk to you and wonder why you're there instead of raising your non-existent family, maybe... you'll end up somewhere else. Life is short.
Women make up the majority of house cleaners. It's not because women are so in love with cleaning, it's because it's a flexible job you can get into through another (often female) contact that will sometimes let you bring your five-year-old kid along so you don't need childcare. Longhaul trucking won't, in general, let you bring your five-year-old kid along so you don't need childcare (you really can't stop for potty often enough), and many blue collar jobs men hold are also gotten by family and neighborhood contacts.
The ironic thing is that the earliest programmers are women. I think I saw or read that the reason why there is such a gender disparity in programming is because programming was marketed as a male-oriented activity in the 80's. Sadly, I can't find the source for that anymore.
> The ironic thing is that the earliest programmers are women.
That's not correct, or at least, very misleading. The "programming" which you're refering to, would be more precisely called "data entry" using today's terminology. The actual software development was done mostly by men, even back then. In the 60s/70s, when computers increasingly had proper input methods (screen and keyboard), the data entry part was swallowed by the development part, but the term "programming" stuck.
What is today understood as "programming", has always been dominated by men. I don't know why that is, and I don't care to speculate, but the narrative that female software developers have been pushed out of the field is wrong.
I suspected that the whole “geek culture” around computers started to grow around the time when video games were heavily marketed to young boys. And it’s natural that through video games these young boys would have grown interest in computers and eventually programming. I admit that this theory needs quite a lot more research though. (Maybe it’s the other way around, the prevalence of male geek culture changed the landscape of video game marketing? Or perhaps it’s not just cause-and-effect and more of a positive feedback loop.)
The funny thing is that at the start of the video game industry (I would mark that as the Atari era), TV advertisements for it really didn’t marketed it specifically for boys, it was more for “the whole family” and for both boys and girls. The heavily gendered marketing started in the Nintendo era (years after the Atari shock), around the late-80s to early-90s you see a large shift in style of TV video game ads. I don’t currently have links to the TV ad archives, but you can find lots of it on Youtube.
James Damore went a bit further than the author did. He also didn't take care to avoid offense and misunderstanding when talking about certain topics.
For example, he mentioned that women, on average, have more neuroticism. He's technically correct in terms of the psychological definition of the word (women will, on average, experience higher levels of anxiety than men when exposed to the same level of negative stimulus), but he didn't consider the political ramifications of describing 3.5 billion people as neurotic.
If a woman had written what he did, she would have been ripped to shreds also.
> For example, he mentioned that women, on average, have more neuroticism. [..] he didn't consider the political ramifications of describing 3.5 billion people as neurotic.
You're doing it too. If I say "men have, on average, more muderous tendencies than women", am I describing 3.5 billion people as murderers?
Certainly, but I don't find the fault to be with the statement, but with people. Our inability to separate "inconvenient general fact" from "specific, personal insult to whole swathes of people" is one of the banes of modern discourse.
Unfortunately, you're communicating with other people. Unless you find a way to magically stop people getting triggered, it's best to avoid certain trigger words and be careful when expressing certain points.
When you're the author, yes, absolutely. When you're a reader, absolutely not, you need to consider what the author is saying rather than what your personal feelings make you think he's saying. Each party must be responsible for their part, and while "he could have been more tactful" is valid criticism, "he shouldn't have offended people" is not.
Just to be more tactful, I don't remember exactly what had happened with this whole thing, I'm only talking about this specific fact.
> He also didn't take care to avoid offense and misunderstanding when talking about certain topics.
I don't think it's realistic to ask people to walk on egg shells is realistic when misunderstanding and offensiveness are always in the mind of the audience and therefore can't be fully controlled.
> but he didn't consider the political ramifications of describing 3.5 billion people as neurotic
I think people working at Google have a basic understanding of statistical distribution...
