And I highly doubt that male chauvinism/sexism/harassment is the reason women aren't going into tech careers.
http://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/chala...
"A" reason? Absolutely. Other commenters have have linked to specific incidents where female tech employees have left jobs and even left the industry as a result of they way there were treated.
I don't say this to downplay your position - which I understand to be that there are in fact other factors driving the gender ratio is tech. I assert without reservation that treatment of women in our industry is not the primary factor causing the imbalance.
In my opinion, the social conversation within our community is toxic to both sides. I try very hard not to become involved in it. That said, my own political views lead me to see individuals as individuals first and foremost, to treat others in a way that encourages cooperation, and to engage with my peers in voluntary and mutually beneficial ways. In almost every way that I've been able to objectively nail down, I am a feminist. I just don't share some of the viewpoints of the particular variant that is vocal in our community.
That's fine. I've worked both online and in person with many people whose beliefs in this matter differ from mine. Human beings are perfectly capable of identifying areas of common interest and working together to improve both of their positions, however incompatible their desires end states happen to be.
I try to share my own values by working with young people and encouraging them to see tech as a valuable and valid career path - and as a passion that's worth pursuing regardless of their profession. There are many people who don't see it that way, for reasons that vary depending on their background.
My sincere belief is that a world where every young person sees tech as an option is superior to today's world, where a large portion of children and young adults see it as inaccessible or unworthy of their attention. You don't have to self-identify as a feminist (or anything else) to share that belief :)
Then you're wrong - http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/women-leave-tech-culture/
Rather, it complains that women don't get enough positive discrimination (ie, discrimination in their favor or against men).
> Some women felt that their work environments were discriminatory, but most reported something milder: the simple discomfort of not fitting in in an otherwise homogenous setting.
That is, the only actionable thing that it suggests is that you should preferentially hire women so they don't feel so lonely, not that there is any actual discrimination to address.
That's not to say we shouldn't work to eliminate this treatment or an attempt to minimize it in any way, of course.
What I believe we should ask ourselves is this: "Is the tech community responsible for the fact that far fewer females see this industry as a reasonable and viable career path?"
Until we can answer that question with a confident "nope", then the social conversation around feminism and its role in our community need not be settled. We can work toward a more equal future without addressing the underlying philosophical and political motivations for doing so.
Free individuals, voluntarily working together to achieve a common goal. That's what it's all about, people. Forget the lables, find something in common with your neighbors, and make it happen.
What do you think changed?
> I highly doubt that male chauvinism/sexism/harassment is the
> reason women aren't going into tech careers.
> How would you explain that there used to be more women than men
> as programmers?
At that time "programming" meant the relatively unskilled job of translating someone's detailed pseudocode onto punch cards or worse. The need for such unskilled labor diminished as the abstractions and automation improved. Ensmenger speaks for himself about his research on this in the following article:
Goldstine and von Neumann spelled out a six-step programming
process: (1) conceptualize the problem mathematically and
physically, (2) select a numerical algorithm, (3) do a numerical
analysis to determine the precision requirements and evaluate
potential problems with approximation errors, (4) determine scale
factors so that the mathematical expressions stay within the fixed
range of the computer throughout the computation, (5) do the dynamic
analysis to understand how the machine will execute jumps and
substitutions during the course of a computation, and (6) do the
static coding.
The first five of these tasks were to be done by the "planner," who
was typically the scientific user and overwhelmingly was frequently
male; the sixth task was to be carried out by coders.
Coding was regarded as a "static" process by Goldstine and von
Neumann -- one that involved writing out the steps of a computation
in a form that could be read by the machine, such as punching cards,
or in the case of the ENIAC, plugging in cables and setting up
switches. Thus, there was a division of labor envisioned that gave
the highest-skilled work to the high-status male scientists and the
lowest-skilled work to the low-status female coders.
As the ENIAC managers and coders soon realized, however, controlling
the operation of an automatic computer was nothing like the process
of hand computation, and the Moore School women were therefore
responsible for defining the first state-of-the-art methods of
programming practice.
This one story -- about a small group of women chosen for their exceptional capability as human "computers" who previously calculated by hand numerical tables like the ones the ENIAC was designed to calculate -- has been spun into a narrative suggesting that women dominated early software development. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I don't think Engsmenger sees it that way. He says elsewhere that "Although many of the earliest programmers were women, by the beginning of the 1960s programming was generally considered a male profession. Certainly the elite ranks of ‘‘systems men’’ [i.e., those responsible for what we would today consider software design] were, quite literally, men." http://homes.soic.indiana.edu/nensmeng/files/ensmenger2003.p...
Of course, all of this shows that male chauvinism (and very very very probably harassment too) has always been a huge problem for women who wanted to participate in this field, but the idea that "there used to be more women than men as programmers" just isn't true, at least as we understand the word "programmer" today, and the evidence it's based on has no bearing on why women aren't entering tech fields today.