> In India, for instance, about 35% of developers are women; in the U.S., it’s 16%
Does India not have the various gender biases we often attribute a large part of the problem to? What is India doing so well in this space to have over double the percentage of female software developers as the U.S.?
If you score at the top in your entrance exams, you will applying to medical or engineering schools. The good schools are hyper selective and only take the top scorers (at a rate more selective than our ivy's). Very, very few people consider majors outside of these areas. Secondly, there is a huge amount of social pressure to be an engineer or doctor. It is quite often that parents choose your major, or at least heavily push their kids into one. There are lots of Bollywood movies whose plots are centered around parents forcing their kids into engineering.
Since your choice of major is largely determined by academic and social reasons there isn't a big gender disparity. Females do just as well on the entrance exams, and there is no societal view that engineering is a male major. If you are a parent who wants your kids to earn well and marry well, you will push your kids towards medicine or engineering regardless of gender. If you are female who scored well and got entrance into a top engineering school, dropping out would be unthinkable. It would be an insult to your family. You would be throwing away years of hard work in their view; some kids start preparing for entrance exams when the hit 14. There is even a suicide problem when people fail out of the top schools (see the movie 3 Idiots). Essentially majors and careers have a hierarchy which is the same regardless of gender.
As to why there isn't a societal bias that engineering is a male major, I'm not sure. It was definitely a quick change as it was only in the 1960s when most engineering colleges started admitting females.
There is definitely still a gender gap (many women are not supported to even finish basic schooling), but there isn't a huge societal bias that engineering major or STEM is a male profession.
I have heard that some of the USSR countries (Russia, Ukraine) have a similar culture and don't view engineering or STEM as "male" majors.
Maybe the problem is parents don't bully their daughters and sons into engineering here :)
I wonder if gender bias still kicks in once in career. I seem to see way less than 35% Indian women vs men in very senior or management roles. (Just my anecdotal data point of one, I don't have any numbers to back that up).
1) women entered the field later than men (so the distribution on the experienced end is less) 2) women have a significantly higher societal expectation to be the caretaker. Many pause or stop their careers when they have kids. 3) Indian society is heavily patriarchal
Regardless, I personally think the situation is better in India. It's pretty hard for the US to improve if not enough women enter the field in college. If the bottom of your funnel is weak, all the efforts on managing the middle and end are largely fruitless. We (Americans) need to take a better look at how our education and culture is causing the gap at the university level. I think that some of the approaches Harvey Mudd has taken is something we need to implement across universities.
It's only when there's a lot of economic pressure that women that they start going into fields they don't tend to go into. India, specifically, has a lot of pressure for people to go into software dev.
Here's the LA Times talking about it:
https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-women-e...
In the small minority of hacker rank study set, I would say that women are just as much encouraged or frankly expected to be in STEM as men. Although I am fairly certain that this observation will quickly disappear and will be heavily male dominated on a larger percentage of the population.
Really, looking at the actual hacker rank source, it seems like their sample set is really tiny and heavily biased.
Secondarily, Indian education admissions have a high co-efficient on standardized tests and a near zero co-efficient on 'well-roundedness'. Affirmative action is caste-based and implemented via quotas filled from the standardized-test scores.
Finally, lots of SWEs in India are drudge-work engineers. They may spend a few days changing the text on a ColdFusion page. For these jobs there is a bare selection mechanism that involves your university GPA-equivalent and whether you can speak English (usually). The large number of graduates will then spend their time 'on the bench' as spare burstable capacity to perform this sort of drudge-work maintenance. The lack of a selection mechanism removes a source of bias.
So some good things, some bad things. Some don't apply to Google India (like the last one, I think).
EDIT: Sorry, had to create a throwaway for this one, but I lived there (and observed this for many of my friends, though not for myself) and felt you deserved to have live info. I'll accept the full ban on my account for bypassing the rate-limit.
> Does India not have the various gender biases we often attribute a large part of the problem to?
The gender equality paradox details many of these sorts of inconsistencies. For instance, why does Iran have gender parity in compsci while virtually all progressive cultures struggle to crack 20% in compsci?