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Solving the Mystery of Declining Female CS Enrollment
theodp writes After an NPR podcast fingered the marketing of computers to boys as the culprit behind the declining percentages of women in undergraduate CS curricula since 1984 (a theory seconded by Smithsonian mag), some are concluding that NPR got the wrong guy. Calling 'When Women Stopped Coding' quite engaging, but long on Political Correctness and short on real evidence, UC Davis CS Prof Norm Matloff concedes a sexist element, but largely ascribes the gender lopsidedness to economics. "That women are more practical than men, and that the well-publicized drastic swings in the CS labor market are offputting to women more than men," writes Matloff, and "was confirmed by a 2008 survey in the Communications of the ACM" (related charts of U.S. unemployment rates and Federal R&D spending in the '80s). Looking at the raw numbers of female CS grads instead of percentages, suggests there wasn't a sudden and unexpected disappearance of a generation of women coders, but rather a dilution in their percentages as women's growth in undergrad CS ranks was far outpaced by men, including a boom around the time of the dot-com boom/bust.
No mystery - suddenly there was money in it and the women were squeezed out of the profession. Even as a male I got to notice the depressing bit in the late 1980s where there were still a lot of women training in CS/IT but hardly anyone was employing them. As I've written here many times, I've seen more women even in heavy engineering, mining etc roles than in IT.
However it is rather amusing to see some here trying to justify how women are not suited for what was historically considered "women's work" - we're sitting inside at keyboards FFS and would be considered sissies by someone defrosted from 1970.
To the best of my knowledge, the preeminent "feminist" theory is that there are social and economic barriers (i.e. artificial barriers) to women in the field. The peer reviewed data seems to show a number of clear artificial factors that do act as barriers to women entering and succeeding in the field.
To the best of my knowledge, the preeminent misogynist theory is that women are born with physiological differences that make them naturally less inclined toward the field. There is no clear peer reviewed data showing this is true.
The misogynist defense mechanism is either to find some gross beliefs among feminists that is absurd or obviously untrue and use it as a straw man or to make the argument from ignorance fallacy and support nature as the primary causal factor because nobody has disproved it and there exist some number of hypotheses (none of which have clearly been demonstrated true) to support it.