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"Pushed out" is an odd narrative for an industry that is bending over backwards to try and draw more women in. Is it even possible that women (on average) are less interested in tech work and thus have chosen (on aggregate) to pursue other careers instead? It seems like even asking that question is forbidden.

Why is the same level of angst not applied to education, where <20% of primary school teachers are male? Have the public schools been pushing men out, or are men just not interested? Or maybe it's some of both? Do we even know?

If primary school teacher was a valued (well-paid) position, I think we'd be having that very discussion. Historically in the US, teachers were men, and computer programmers were women. As teachers shifted more toward women, and as computer programmers shifted more toward men, the compensation for teachers dropped, while the compensation for computer programmers skyrocketed. The correlation is strong, although causation is debatable.

It's no surprise that the efforts to achieve gender balance in a highly-paid industry gets a lot more attention than any gender-imbalance in a lowly-paid industry.

Put another way: men weren't too upset about being pushed out of teaching positions because they were able to make better money elsewhere.

That's now how that works. That's not how any of this works.

Why are software engineering jobs being looked at in a vacuum? And why is capability to do the job the only metric being looked at here?

We could do the same thing with men and teaching children (the distribution there is even more skewed than software engineering, only the opposite direction) and say that there's no need for female teachers. We won't because that also simplifies a very complex equation to a handful of variables. It appears that most men don't want to be teachers because the incentives don't align with what most men want. Teaching is a field that doesn't pay very well, but requires a lot of social interaction, compassion, empathy, and generally is suited to more maternal people (this may be considered controversial, but on average women are stronger in these traits, according to psychological studies). Software engineering is the opposite.

Full disclosure: I'm a male software engineer that lives with a female preschool teacher. She was on the path for medical school (a field also somewhat dominated by women currently but pays much better than teaching) but decided that becoming a teacher would be more rewarding for her.

We've discussed our career choices and I realized I could never do what she does because it requires more patience and compassion than I want to exert on a daily basis, I wouldn't feel as much gratification from it as she does, and it pays a fraction of what I currently make. I realize this is an anecdote, but it does represent the average distributions of male and female careers and the incentives for each gender.

Could it possibly be that in general men and women want different things out of a career? And maybe software engineering offers more of benefits that are valuable to men, in which case it would be fine that there are more male engineers, just like it's also fine that there are more female teachers.

I'm using in general and on average a lot here because I don't want to imply that there aren't compassionate men or women who want high paying jobs - they're just less common than their opposites, on average.

And note that I'm not saying that these preferences are due to biology - whether it's that or sociological factors doesn't really matter here. Trying to artificially equalize the distribution between males and females in a given industry doesn't make sense either way.

> Could it possibly be that in general men and women want different things out of a career?

A few years ago I watched a documentary, «The gender equality paradox» [1]. It discussed the strange fact that it is far more likely to find make masons and female nurses in Norway, despite the fact that everything in that society pushes towards gender equality.

In that documentary, I heard an interesting fact: the proportions between make and female engineers are much farther from 50:50 in Norway (where men are more common) than in India and other less-developed countries, where the two sets are more evenly balanced.

The documentary provided this possible explanation: let's suppose there is a biological reason why it is less likely for women to be interested in engineering topics, and men in works requiring social skills. One could imagine that in those countries where there are plenty of jobs and possibilities, everybody is free to pick the job they like most. On the other side, in less developed countries there isn't as much choice, so people are more willing to accept things different from what they would have chosen otherwise.

It is clear this is just a theory, but I find the basic fact of the existence of this Norway/India difference intriguing.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70

  Women constituted 35% of all software engineers in 1990, but only 26% in 2015

Nobody needs to have been "pushed out" to cause those numbers. I'd bet that most women who were software engineers in 1990 are either retired, in upper management, or own their own businesses by now -- not "pushed out". It just means that the replacement rate is insufficient to maintain the same percentage, and that can have any number of contributing factors.

This is an incorrect way to look at this question. There is no where near 5% of the global population (men and women) who are interested in technology. To get at a more accurate number of what the real percent (absolutely not 5%) you'd need to talk about you would first need to look at the entire population's trends before looking at a subset stratified by gender. To further focus this onto a topic I will only be looking at data related to programmers. Looking at some statistics gathered by Wikipedia it looks like there were closer to 1,069,220 actual software development (611,900 + 457,320). During 2016 there were a minimum (to give your 5% figure the best chance) of 150,576,000 employed people [1]. This means that in actuality you're talking about 0.7100086% of employees in "tech" (which I'm taking to mean software development).

If you wanted to talk about gender parity in software development then you would need to use 0.7100086% of women (who are employed) are (expected to be) good at tech, 99.2899914% of women (who are employed) are bad at tech.

There about 387,508 female programmers (.212 mul 473000) + (1536000 mul .187) and about 1,621,492 males ((1536000+473000) - 387508) [2] according to more recent statistics. From the same report it looks like 46.9% of the workforce is female with a total number of 153,337,000 workers for 2017. If we apply the 46.9% number we get 71915053 females. If we further apply our 0.7100086% multiplier we get 510,603 females who we'd predict to be software developers. This number is higher than but close to our 387,508 figure from earlier. This was off by 0.76x

If we apply the same logic to males we will find that of the 81,421,947 (153,337,000 mul .531) working males after we apply our 0.7100086% from earlier we will find that the number we get extremely under-predicts the number of software developers at a predicted 578,102 males. This is off by a 2.8x

I have a few questions that I have not been able to answer. They are as follows:

    - Why is my percentage of humans who go into software more accurate for women?
    - Why is my percentage of humans who go into software off by 3x for men?
    - There are many higher paying and lower effort jobs that are male dominated that men could choose to go into? Why would this skew be so great for software engineering?
    - Are there other careers who have a similar factor of inaccuracy except flipped (3x more women then predicted, .7x the predicted number of men?)
    - Does this error factor show dependence on salary? Hours worked? Location of jobs?

I know, anecdotally, that none of the other jobs on this list interest me at all while software development is truely my passion. I would find a way to make software development my job no matter what.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph... [1] - http://www.dlt.ri.gov/lmi/pdf/usadj.pdf [2] - https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm