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It's a very complicated issue. You've provided a graph which describes a trend, a Gladwell-esque 'just so' story (yes that's a pejorative) and an anecdote by way of explanation. Actually interpreting the data and understanding why people do what they do on a large scale isn't a solved problem. We aren't Hari Seldon. Social science is called soft science for a reason. People are much, much more complicated than climate. And climate is still pretty complicated. I believe there's a huge gender problem in tech but if you want specifics? If you want to know why women aren't in this field, well you'd have to ask every woman. If you want to generalize all women and ask why most of them don't, the answer, if it even exists, is unbelievably complex with undoubtedly many factors. I don't think there's much evidence that discrimination and a gendered culture is the only reason or even the primary reason for the discrepancy, though I personally believe it plays a very significant role. But I'm open to having my mind changed. What would actual evidence even be?

What I'm convinced of is that a) more women and minorities in the industry would improve it a great deal in a variety of important ways b) Making the culture of the industry more open and welcoming to these groups is an important step we need to take in order to effect (a).

Finally, it really isn't appropriate or helpful to smear anyone who disagrees with you or even suggests an alternate explanation as a 'denier' and spew hate. This isn't climate change; nobody is disagreeing about the facts and trends. If you're so certain you're correct and uninterested in hearing disagreements, why even post? And it's very condescending to presuppose and pre-dismiss what someone you're having a discussion with will say in response to you. You're arguing in bad faith. If you want people to listen to you, you should tone down the vitriol and try to write with respect.

> There's tons of evidence that women are excluded from our industry, at every level -- high school, university, and even the ones that graduate and go on to work in the industry drop out at a very high rate.

Can you point these out? Last study I saw, women entering industry tracks very closely with women graduating with CS degrees, which strongly implies that if there's a problem it's in women entering CS programs, not with industry.

Can we have an environment more welcoming to girls/women and still keep it meritocratic? I think we can. This is what many companies do.

The hackathon described in the post was not like that. It bent the meritocratic part, which breaks the right incentive to participate.

What we need more is removing prejudices and careless practices that push away females. This has everything to do with culture, speech, general environment, and nothing to do with preferring a PDF to code on a hackaton. As the poster say, don't lie. Not only to women; to anyone.

>I know you probably think you're being a skeptical and intelligent speaker of uncomfortable truths. But you're a lot more like a climate change denier. You're going with your gut and not the facts.

>You will probably now try to bury me with various quibbles, because you can argue against any statistic. but maybe you could try ASKING A WOMAN.

That's a heck of a lot of assumptions you're making about me, Neil. I can't understand how you came to the belief that this kind of gruff contributes to the conversation let alone to your point.

>Is it really conceivable that women were more interested in computing when it was all about hand-coding assembly for a modest amount of money, and less interested now that you can make >$100K/year doing Rails from home?

Is it really conceivable that women are abandoning well paid careers in business and other areas to become yoga instructors? Or life coaches? Or re-training in psychology? Or starting their own home businesses on etsy or similar?

There's seemingly more ways to make money than ever before. Just because sitting at home grinding out a rails app is an appealing way to make money to you, doesn't necessarily mean it is to others.

>There's tons of evidence that women are excluded from our industry, at every level -- high school, university, and even the ones that graduate and go on to work in the industry drop out at a very high rate. Other scientific or mathematical fields do not have the same problem.

How many of their male counterparts drop out of the tech industry? Or move into non-tech roles within it?

On a second point, how much more socially acceptable is it for a woman to change careers or to become stay-at-home mothers than it is for men?

I've read studies about self-actualization that have concluded that more than twice as many women achieve self-actualization than their male counterparts, so maybe it's a case of more women realising how lacking in substance tech work really is and getting out of it, than their male counterparts who simply struggle on with it?

And by the way, Neil, I have talked to women about this. My own partner is a very successful female in a competitive, scientific area. I've worked with many female engineers over the years also.

I've also seen first hand, and have actively supported, many female engineers leaving the industry to do something they find more fulfilling.

This is a complex topic and we're not going to agree on everything. Building me up, even internally, as some demonic misogynist who has no contact with women isn't going to do or contribute much though.

> Is it really conceivable that women are abandoning well paid careers in business and other areas to become yoga instructors? Or life coaches? Or re-training in psychology? Or starting their own home businesses on etsy or similar?

Yes. I know a number of people (some women, some not) who were excellent software engineers, sharp minds, good at teasing a part a puzzle who have left the field.

People balance quality of life together with compensation (and whether the opportunity is interesting), or everyone would be trying to become an investment banker.

It is certainly the case that if being a woman software engineer sucks more than being a man software engineer that calculus may result in clearly delineated differentials like the ones we see today.

While we're continuing with the superfluous anecdotal evidence, I also know of software engineers, some of them women, who are totally happy with their jobs/workplace, work their asses off, and see real tangible results of that hard work, whether it be from happy users of a shipped product or salary increases.

Quantifying what "sucks" about being a woman software engineer is borderline impossible due to the level of subjectivity involved. Even when one does, I'd posit that there is a sizable overlap between what sucks according to women and sucks according to men. At some point in the discussion though, other potential causes have to be at least considered when talking about why there's so few women engineers. Unfortunately getting to that point of is much less attractive and doesn't drive page clicks.

Of course that isn't true, being able to quantify people's experiences. Sociologists do this sort of thing all the time; there's a pretty well-established body of literature and practice and describes how you can go into the field, ask people questions (with interviews, focus groups, surveys, etc), and develop a general understanding of the field.

I'm not familiar with workplace/STEM literature around gendered experiences, but people may already be doing the research. (Makes note to self to look into this, to see if anyone is...)

That NPR story has been discussed previously on HN. A comment there led me to look into the study used for that chart, and it turned out that "data processing" and "data processing technician" were counted as computer science fields back in that peak era for women. As those fields faded, so did the number of women.

Now, that's not iron-clad explanation for the chart, but it's very much worthy of consideration as an explanation.

It's entirely possible that women were never that high a percentage of what we now classify as computer science.

In other words, maybe it's more a change in classification than anything else.

The flip side to that is that "Computer Science" traditionally wasn't about programming either, but closer to applied mathematics. It wouldn't surprise me in the least bit if a data processing technician's role back then was a lot closer to what a modern web developer does.

Figuring out the best heuristic function for A* to do path finding through your dataset? Probably computer science. Writing SQL queries and presenting the results as HTML or JSON? Probably a lot closer to "data processing technician".

Edit: looks like people are downvoting you because they disagree with you. I disagree too, but I think it's a valuable avenue to discuss.

People are downvoting us because they can't come up with a good counter-argument and won't admit it. Their loss.

Whenever someone says something like this, I immediately assume that they're a closed-minded individual who's ready to quibble with or dismiss anything that runs counter to their closed-off view of the world.

I've simply never seen a comment like this alongside another from the same writer that goes something like "Oh, I was wrong about that. Now I know."

So I wonder...is there anything that could be said to you that would make you say, "oh, I was wrong, now I know better"?

Normally I would say a published study but I have seen so many studies that had a horrible methodology, where the data was twisted to show something that it didn't (like this NPR study or the famous 1/4 of every women is raped at university) or where the authors plain went ahead and lied.

At a minimum for anything to be convincing it would have to show why there were less women who start studying computer science than men and that same thing can't be why there are more women who chooses to become nurses than there are men who choose to become nurses (since that something would then be either biological or societal in either case it wouldn't be an issue with our field). Depending on the specifics, I reserve the right to raise further objections.

What kind of training do you have in sociological research? I mean, you obviously consider yourself qualified to assess study methodology. I'm curious about why.

Hey, downvoters, what exactly is contentious about asking this guy--and I have no idea who he is except that he's widely dismissive of published science--about his background or training?

If we weren't talking about something as hot-button a topic as sexism in tech, but someone was all "tiny invisible biting demons? I just don't know about this so-called germ theory...", wouldn't it be fair to ask, what's their background in medical research?

>If we weren't talking about something as hot-button a topic as sexism in tech, but someone was all "tiny invisible biting demons? I just don't know about this so-called germ theory...", wouldn't it be fair to ask, what's their background in medical research?

Medicine makes concrete, testable predictions that are used every day. Sociology isn't there yet. Sociology, to me, lies somewhere between theology and medicine on the credibility scale. I wouldn't expect an atheist to educate herself on the finer points of of the Trinity and the Holy Ghost before taking her opinion on modern American Christianity seriously, for example.

Data Processing Technician at the time was more along the lines of things like running batch jobs, loading punch cards, loading tapes, and so on. And straight-up data entry work as well.

And some of it was like IT people now, but generally less technical. It was more mechanical, not a coding type job.

It's pretty different from what we classify as computer science degrees now.

I never knew that, my mom did "data processing" for years! She knew Excel, really knew the formulas and everything.

Just commenting to add more graphs:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/28/359419934/who-stud...

http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/15/the-double-edged-sword...

which leads to http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm

> Is it really conceivable that women were more interested in computing when it was all about hand-coding assembly for a modest amount of money, and less interested now that you can make >$100K/year doing Rails from home?

Yes. I don't know if it's the case, but it's really easy for me to conceive.

Me too. I'd take a job doing assembler over one doing Ruby any day of the week. I'm sure lots of people would.

Could we please stop the adhominom attacks before this gender thread derails into rape/genocide threats (like all those that come before)?

You cite one study on NPR that another commentor has already pointed out used a flawed methodology. ONE STUDY - and you tar your opponents as science deniers.

Congratulations on providing exactly the derailing you were warning about?

Agh, you beat me to it with that link. Also, nice analogy with climate change.