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I was just using the language of the person I was replying to. So it depends what you mean.

Should we have segregated bathrooms? Yes.

Should we have a segregated society, like the old South Africa or something? No.

When people say "segregation" without any context, they generally mean the latter.

Which is why I quoted as much as possible and linked to the posts you made - all the context is in there. You still don't get it - your ideology is just as abhorrent to normal folk as those who claim that women aren't as capable in $INTELLECTUAL_ENDEAVOR as men.

Here's a link showing the decline of women in CS since the 80s. I've posted it before (but somehow you couldn't find that), and frankly I'm not your personal google butler. http://www.randalolson.com/wp-...

Strawman - I never your numbers, I contended your repeated claims that is must be due to sexism. Where's your evidence that it's due to sexism? After all I never contended that the number of women is anything other than you claim for various years, I contended that sexism doesn't explain the difference in numbers.

I was just using the language of the person I was replying to. So it depends what you mean.

Should we have segregated bathrooms? Yes.

Should we have a segregated society, like the old South Africa or something? No.

When people say "segregation" without any context, they generally mean the latter.

Here's a link showing the decline of women in CS since the 80s. I've posted it before (but somehow you couldn't find that), and frankly I'm not your personal google butler. http://www.randalolson.com/wp-...

I was recently having a discussion about someone related to IQ tests (there was an interesting poll (who knew) on Slashdot a while ago) and was discussing Raven's Matrices as an example of a test that I thought was unbiased as it was free of any cultural context and had been reduced to abstraction, but a friend shared a study (PDF link)with me that pointed out that the test did have a built-in gender bias due to reliance on spacial analysis, which men do perform better at.

Given that spacial rotations, manipulation, etc. are an important part of many mathematical fields, it doesn't surprise me that men tend to perform better on average. Also, this does not say that all men are better at math or that women cannot be brilliant mathematicians, merely that if you look at the number of elite mathematicians, that more of them will be male because they are biologically predisposed to be stronger at some of the aspects that make an individual better at math.

Also, you should account for a person's own internalization of their abilities and how it affects their behavior. If women tend not to be as good at math from an early age, many of them will take a disinterested approach to it. This is hardly unique to women as children and people of all ages and genders exhibit this behavior. Because there are areas where women tend to perform better than men (along with any other brain wiring differences that produce different effects in people) they may be more drawn to other areas of study and focus there time there.

The problem is that there is evidence to suggest that men and women are different, but there are some who will not accept that argument. I don't know whether that is because the fall prey to some of the same illogical reason that you point to above and assume that it means women can't do something or if it's just a simple matter of people treating their belief as an article of faith that must be true and therefor anything to the contrary must be false.

While there's certainly no lack of sexism in the world, it's a lot harder to accept that there's some kind of pervasive institutional problem when you have no reason to suspect that you should see roughly equal number of men and women among the ranks of the top mathematicians. Also, given that women earn ~45% of B.S. degree's in mathematics in the U.S. it makes the claims of institutional sexism (at least in this area) even harder to believe. Interestingly enough, women early ~70% of the B.S. degrees in English and foreign languages. Perhaps that is related to the scientific evidence that shows that females perform better than males in terms of verbal abilities.

I don't think you'll find many people who are against providing equal opportunity (or as much as we reasonably can) to everyone, but you can't get there with bad arguments. You end up fighting a problem that doesn't exist or attempting to use a solution that isn't going to work. I think that people are just tired of dealing with other people who don't care to look at the science or will reject it because it doesn't mesh with their existing views. It's a bit like trying to argue with someone who believes in young-earth creationism.

I'm assuming the article is referencing this data: http://www.randalolson.com/wp-.... That is a pretty striking curve, though there are two interesting points to make:
      - Women have made consistent gains year to year in nearly every engineering and "hard science" field, some more than others (biology is a standout)
      - The absolute number of women CS graduates is actually increasing as well - it's just that male graduate numbers are increasing at about twice the rate.

However, contrary to your claim, there are many, many people trying to asking why. There's lloads of speculation, but the ones that seem most reasonable to me point to a large scale cultural shift that considers women better youth educators (pre highschool teachers), psychologists, journalists, biologists, pharmacists, and a large drive into the agricultural job market. Studies have shown - as referenced elsewhere - that these cultural values are imposed early, and one of the major sources is the female child's mother, though popular media also drives some of this. This goes the other way too, with the cultural acceptance of male interest in video games potentially acting as a familiarization gateway to CS careers.

But really, we're only investigating ~that~ question because we're trying to solve a bigger one: How do we get more women with CS degrees and/or working as software engineers? If the studies are right, it seems the best way is to train new parents to stop limiting their children.

More important in my mind though: is that a valuable goal?

There is some greater potential for creativity in problem solving - meaning things like faster software, better interfaces, when you include a diverse body of people, but it's hard to measure that potential, or determine if it's been realized. There's nothing to indicate that given two individuals, one can be expected to perform any better than the other based on gender in this field, so it seems that if you myopically focus on one with a disregard as to their actual merits, you run the risk of hiring the worse performer.

Generally, I'd say that this is more of a non-issue. As we raise an increasingly tech-savvy generation, and negative cultural stigma of IT workers fall to the side, I think we'll naturally see more women in the field, as the work is fairly light and the pay is reasonable. At the same time, I don't think deliberately pushing towards that goal really serves the public or companies or women in any real way, and it may even be hurting it, as per the article's original question about gender stereotypes.

I just attended a nursing graduation at a local University. Probably 10-1 Female to Male Graduates. (rough estimate). Tell me again how men are represented adequately in Nursing? The link below says it is 85% (close to my guestimate)

http://www.randalolson.com/201...

1) Health Professions (85% women): nursing assistant, veterinary assistant, dental assistant, etc.

Females have better representation in Engineering and Computer Science (18-19%) than males do in Nursing.

And I can come up with a whole slew of possible reason why women shy away from certain kinds of jobs, and are more attracted to others. Here is a good example, women tend to be more social than men. They need the company of other people. So then are attracted to jobs that have more social interactions than jobs that don't have much social interactions. This has nothing to do with ability. When women find out that there is not much social interactions in programming ... well they are not all that excited about it.

Five seconds with Google: http://www.randalolson.com/201...

Physical sciences and maths are both above 40% in the US.

FTFY: http://www.randalolson.com/201...

I found an interesting graph. Why is there no uotcry about the declining number of men getting degrees in the following discaplines? Biology, psychology, communications and journalism. And no outcry about the historically low levels in the following fields? Health professions, public administration, education, foreign languages, English, and Art and performance.

By lumping all physical sciences together the graph hides a lot of information. Here [aps.org] is a much more detailed graph. Notice that bachelors for females has declined in almost all fields.

That's a true lie - a literal truth that obscure a more meaningful point. It is true that there have been declines, but they are not correlated with the loss in CompSci which started roughly 15 years before most other majors and they are no where near the same magnitude.

This chart which breaks out CompSci specifically makes the real truth of the 50% decline in CompSci clear. Compare that to the others in your chart which saw at most a 10% decline from their various peaks and all but math & stats are 30%+ up over the 1985 graduation rates.