For example trying to diversify a ballet team.. I find it unlikely that any significant percentage of males can be reached.
Is tech different than ballet?
But is it actually so?
The proportion of the population involved in ballet at all is vanishingly small so it seems likely to me that the supply of both male and female candidates must be greater than the demand. Or at least would be if men and boys were not given the impression that ballet is somehow unmanly.
> Is tech different than ballet?
In this respect, no. Both suffer from sex related prejudice.
that is misunderstanding or mischaracterizing the point made by OP, who as asking about differences in job preference.
is it because of prejudice that there are many fewer male ballet dancers than female ballet dancers? I don't know much about ballet but I suspect that the major contributor to the difference is that there are many many many more women interested in ballet dancing than there are men interested in ballet dancing. if we expected a 50/50 split in ballet dancer gender representation we would have a problematic expectation for obvious reasons.
is programming similar? seems like it might be.
Why would that be likely?
And that happens even in African tribes where most people have never seen a car in their lifes, which pretty much falsifies the modern theory that all differences are due to boys wearing blue and girls wearing pink.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-pr...
One of the things that happens when a human brain matures from a child's brain to an adult's brain is that it undergoes significant reorganization. It prunes a lot of old connections and starts focusing on more important adult things.
In girls this reorganization starts at age 10-12. In boys it starts at 15-20.
My guess is that it is easier for a brain that is still in child mode to develop and maintain an interest in technology. But it isn't until high school that you start to get the education that lets you really move beyond just an interest in tech as a user to a serious interest in going into tech as a career. I think it may be that getting that high school education while you still have a mostly child's brain greatly increases the chances you'll go into technology.
In the US you typically start high school at 14 or 15. That means that in high school most girls will already be well on their way to adult brains, but a lot of boys will still have child brains or be early in the transition to their adult brains. That could greatly skew things toward boys going into technology.
Though I had a similar theory at one point that math ability was affected by how much you thought about math before puberty. The relative abilities of my classmates went through a reshuffling in that period.