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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.
... more about systems than people and women are more interested in people than systems.
kinda like, never was.
That's why you can't rely on means/medians/averages alone, they don't tell the whole story.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Are we gonna get one of these articles every week from now on?
The marketeers turned me into a newt.*
Really just how many times do you need to go around the block before it becomes impossible to see this as anything but what it is someone's attempt to push an agenda. Gee women coders are now the victim and have to be made right. I guarantee that if you look at any profession you can see groups that are under and over represented, this isn't a social problem it's statistics and thank god that everyone is not exactly the same.
*I got better which is why i can post this.
You must find putting everyone in your boxes pretty easy.
That sounds about right. Why would you bet your career on something that is increasingly being viewed as a blue-collar profession?
If girls want to sign up for CS, then fine. If they don't, then fine. Stop it with the sexist nightmare shit.
As a middle-aged white male that's been in I.T. my whole life, having dealt with the globalization of I.T. services, not to mention the wage-supression of our industry being settled within the court system, lately there's seems to be a new threat. People like me are actively discriminated against, in favor of women and minorities. I haven't knowingly experienced it first-hand, but it is impossible to tell. I read HR text all the time explaining how women and minorities are preferred candidates and are encouraged to apply, when I apply for a job.
When was the last time you heard of 'affirmative action', and was it on one of the news talk shows recently? Frankly, I advise youngsters I come across to steer clear of I.T. and to find a job in another industry. One that doesn't eat its own.
rerun article.
Now we're not just sexist pigs, but we are also in an unstable industry and women will avoid us like the plague. Actually I don't find this stuff as insulting as the "anyone can code" meme. Maybe we should all wear suits so that people take us seriously, like lawyers. Actually, that might be the real reason women don't get involved. Their parents don't take the profession seriously, so they steer their smart daughters away from it.
Comparison of the demographics of undergrad CS majors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1984 and 2014.
Consider the possibility that women just aren't interested. Don't apply your feel-good agendas to it and expect it to be magically transformed.
Has anyone, you know, *asked* women why they don't go into CS?
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
My #1 complaint about that BS article every time I see it pop up is this: there is a few false assumptions in it. Firstly, "Computer Science" isn't the ONLY school route to teach computer programming. It is also offered under the label of "Information Technology", or as elective classes under other fields such as "Network Administration" or "Database Administration" - And the other assumption is that SCHOOLING is the only way to learn things. Pretty sure just about everyone here on Slashdot can easily agree that they've learned a hell of a lot more tech either on the job or on their own than they could have ever imagined learning in a classroom environment.
Woman are more rational than men, and don't want to go into CS because it might be a bad job market. So fields like psychology and art history, which have more than enough women, must have amazing job prospects, right? Anyone who thinks about it for two seconds can see that the problem is not that simple.
I work in an environment where most of IT is outsourced to India-based corporation. My casual observation is that there are many more young females from India in our IT group than Anglo-Americans. I've also noted the same with computer courses - that there are many more Asian women (South Asian and East Asian) relative to their male counterparts than there are Anglo Americans.
I suspect that Asian societies do not view computer work as primarily male-oriented work, and that talented women are encouraged to work in the field.
Among the Anglo-Americans, many of the IT focused women are in their 50's and 60's, having entered the field when mainframes were predominant and hence when computing was viewed as less of a male domain.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
...why the sudden change started around 1984-85. Did the labor market for CS grads suddenly start its "drastic swings" around that time frame? Or, since we're looking at % of graduates, about four years prior (e.g. 1980-1981)? If not, then I'm not sure how women's (alleged) aversion to "drastic swings" explains the sudden change.
"Oh noes, women are under-represented in science/engineering/politics/business leadership!" "Typical oppressive old boys' club glass ceiling keeping women down!"
Has anyone ever seen a feminist petition for more women to do construction jobs, cleaning jobs, heavy industrial trades etc? ... ... ...
Yeah, that's what I thought. Cherry picking 'gender equality' when it suits them.
P.S: Has Slashdot degenerated into a cesspool of women's rights activists? This is a tech blog/forum, so behave like a proper one.
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.
Where is the pissing and moaning about the over-representation of women in nursing?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
If you were trying to discourage girls from trying to program computers, you'd be hard-pressed to top Apple's famous Ellen Feis 'Switch' ad (2002 Slashdot discussion). Btw, by introducing 'The Computer for The Rest of Us' in 1984 without a viable hobbyist programming language, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates no doubt helped discourage both girls and boys from studying CS, even if BillG is trying to make amends now.
That is all this study confirms. Because men are willing to get into things that might not be the best financial move. If women only go into it if there is a lot of money then they're showing up for the money... not the coding.
This confirms what has been established many times already. Men and women get job satisfaction out of different things.
There are jobs women will go into that don't pay as well as other options because they find them personally rewarding.
Men are the same way. But they find different things rewarding.
Shocker... humans are sexually dimorphic. Any biologist or anthropologist or medical professional could tell you this in a heartbeat.
The gender studies academics have their heads so far up their own asses on so many issues. We're sexually dimorphic. Get over it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Did the debut of the AP CS exam in 1984 and its choice of languages - Pascal, C++, Java - make some kids hate computer science and programming?
I suspect that Asian societies do not view computer work as primarily male-oriented work, and that talented women are encouraged to work in the field.
No, they view it as a good source of income that is not going to cost you life or limb. Women applying are artificially high because it's relatively easy work that is good pay. In the USA, the pay isn't as good unless you're really good, and the family time is markedly worse than the alternatives.
...was that absolutely CS is like many professions a labor of love, you follow what interests you.
And 100% of the girls in high school - even the ones that were brilliant in science and math - had far, far better things to do with their spare time than to fuck around with a computer in mom's basement or dad's attic.
-Styopa
At its release, the Mac was "designed as an information appliance" for which a hobbyist programming language was deemed unnecessary. To me, this ad - targeting teen girls - is consistent with that leave-the-programming-to-others philosophy. Your mileage may vary. :-)
but ageist, definitely.
Everyone time I see an article like this I have to wonder why I'm not seeing a similar effort to get men into teaching positions. Do we not want positive male role models for our children?
Why are we not seeing a push for more male nurses? Why not a push for more male hairdressers?
Is the assumption just that men have nothing to offer these fields? Why are we not deconstructing these situations to find out what sort of systemic sexism (given that seems to the default assumed cause for situations like this) is causing these disparities?
The summary attributes the low CS enrollment to women being more practical than men. If that's the case then why do we also see a much lower portion of females in engineering fields? Isn't engineering considered to be one of the most practical course of studies available? In my experience women are in fact more prevalent in "non-practical" fields such as health, humanities, and fitness.
If by "people from other races" you mean "international students".
Which is what this boils down to.
There aren't any mysteries here at all.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Because suddenly there was money in it, and as a consequence it squeezed the women out of the profession. I even put it in bold. Do I need a BLINK tag?
We're talking about the 1980s. Sexism, racism, nepotism and a lot besides was pretty blatant. Employers were happy to take workers that wouldn't get pregnant and didn't want to finish early to pick the kids up from school. They also wanted people just like them so not just a boys club but boys that resembled the founders - making it a bit tough for serious grown men coming in from other industries as well.
As for your second bit, WTF did that baggage come from?
I hope this is a true story, bruh
The pay isn't bad if you are a network architect or programmer in the language de jour, with 2 years experience for every year it's been out (I love the jobs advertised for 10 years experience in something 5 years old.
Learn to love Alaska
The lack of MacBasic is hardly evidence that programming was made inaccessible on the Mac. HyperCard and later AppleScript were excellent ways to get started programming that did require a lifetime coding experience. The AppleII already had various Pascal implementations and BASIC and was still a relevant computer in schools and homes at this time so picking out a lack of one company's implementation of a single language is hardly evidence that it discouraged anyone from programming. The existence of a large number of programmers who started in during this time learning Pascal, assembly, and BASIC might refute your argument.
I am a male and I claim a fairly different nature than thou.
I also claim your notion of predestination is absolute BS.
My observations:
- Women protect their own time more than men in this industry (don't want to do as much overtime, don't want their weekends to vanish, etc) and this leads to a negative management style that penalizes healthy behaviour and thus limits women's progress
- Women take maternity leave and have kids and that hurts prospects in the high-grind world of CS
- There are a lot of poorly emotionally developed males in management roles (not all, by any means, but enough that an 'I like my coders young male and single' comment isn't a surprise out of a manager)
- Women will try to ask for an answer when stumped, guys will try to battle through (taking a long time sometimes) - the best course is usually somewhere in the middle.
- Women don't particularly love to be abused and they are less willing to put up with it from management than men (who are willing to get called some nasty things by their boss most times)
The industry is hard on developers and artists and QA people. It burns them out, treating them like disposable resources. Women are smart enough to recognize this and fewer of them want to enter this. Guys are still 'hey, neat tech!' and 'I get to code a video game/drive the space shuttle/build smartbombs/code networked scrabble/etc'. So they still throw themselves into the grinder more willingly.
Guys also respond more to challenge and to hostile bosses (that's likely deep in our genes) by trying to outperform. That same climate I believe makes a lot of women just want to leave.
So in summary, it can be a hard field on people and it is managed in ways that drive women from the field.
My cred: 18 years in software development in a lot of companies (custom software contractor much of the time in and out of companies of all sizes).
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
For shit's sake, can we stop with the PC bullshit and finally acknowledge that women and men are different?
Women in general have evolved over thousands of years to have lower tolerance for risk, and the CS labor market is a risky place. That is ALL there is to it.
Being middle-aged means that any time soon they will kick out the old and bring in the new because somehow everybody seems to know, old IT workers are somehow completely useless and just cost money...
Oh and there is never enough of them so please let in more cheap labor from abroad!
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
While differences between men and women might play a part in this they can't wholly explain it. In Germany the percentage of female CS students has been rising for years.. Still only at about quarter but higher than in the US, so culture does seem to play a part.
Looks at decorative towels and wash clothes in bathroom we're not allowed to use taking up prime realestate that would be great for useful things.
Looks at fake flowers sitting on top of storage furniture I access frequently that must be moved before accessing said stored objects and returned.
Looks at useless decorative items that must remain on kitchen counter despite being useless, in the way, and knocked around regularly.
Thinks of how many times I've been asked to hold a purse because it's impractical for the owner to do things, or carry something in my pockets because the objects owner didn't bring their own pockets.
Thinks of how the toilet paper is stored in the closet at the entry of the dwelling because the storage areas in the bathroom are taken care of rarely used beauty products and appliances.
My head is shaved - literally a bar of soap, a stick of deodorant, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a razor and some shaving gel is all I have for bathroom use in comparison.
I call this quote for the summary into question
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
After an NPR podcast fingered the marketing of tampons to girls as the culprit behind the declining percentages of male tampon users.
After an NPR podcast fingered the marketing of lipstick to girls as the culprit behind the declining percentages of male lipstick wearers.
Yawn.... Yet another "Blame the other sex, instead of me" Story.
Speaking about advertisements, "Marketing" is probably the place to be. Something like top 10% programmers are in the $120k range and top marketers are in the $160k range, and the median programmer was in the $75k range and the median marketer was in the $120k range. Even better was the low end. The bottom 10% programmers were $45k and the bottom 10% marketers were $62k
There are a lot of women in marketing(68% female on average). Maybe they should quit their much higher paying jobs in marketing and become programmers. At my job, all of the management positions in marketing are women, and that's quite a few positions.
I don't know how much our marketing people get paid, but we have as many people in marketing as we do programmers, and we're a company the lives and dies by its software.
Maybe we should be just as concerned about getting men into marketing as women into programming. I wouldn't mind the pay raise.
I have seen quite a few hand-wringing and postulative articles about why there are not more women in programming or general IT disciplines, and why the ratios of men to women in CS courses widen so much as they progress.
One thing I have not seen in any of those articles is a report on any attempts to reach out to those girls/women and the boys/men who dropped out of CS courses to switch to other options, about why they chose to switch. It seems such an obvious choice that I am sure it must have been done at some point, except that nobody seems to want to mention the results.
Everyone is entitled to equal opportunity, but absolutely no one is guaranteed equality in outcome.
So long as the CS field is accessible to everyone - that's all that matters. If a group of people decide that CS work is not for them - that's OK. That is how markets work.
We should stop wringing our hands about things we cannot control and start focusing our efforts on real problems.
I go out and talk to kids of various ages, sometimes, and I do a lot of mentoring. I've talked to girls who want to program, and I've talked to other girls who don't. When I poll the ones who don't want to go into it, the girls at elementary-school age tell me:
"I can't do that, because I'm no good at math."
This just kills me. There is NO math these kids are doing in elementary school that is any indication of programming ability, whatsoever. I've been programming professionally for almost 20 years, and I'm terrible at elementary-school level arithmetic.
When I actually engage these same kids in a programming exercise, they light right up. They get right into it. Who is telling these girls they can't do this? It breaks my heart.
*tin foil hat*
Hmm...
Conclusion: If you can't get the H1B visa legislation passed, why not push for people who already accept lower wages to take on programming jobs?
And put all the men in concentration camps.
That if overall enrollments are falling that the # of females enrolled would also decline.
How many work visas are fem?
I have worked with a (notable) number of Russian (Slavic) gals as well. (dont know where they were schooled though)
Rick B.
If it is true, is the over- riding reason that gender imbalance is due to men doing things that discourage women from entering those professions?
The "reasons" we hear, that we stopped advertising to women, therefore discouraging them, must mean that we got what we wanted in computer programming, shy and socially awkward males.
If the "reasons" are that these males are sexist pigs and they harass women, of which the "dongle" incident is the biggest example, how do we reconcile the two?
Even if we don't reconcile it, the reasons start to sound more like excuses than verifiable actual causes.
Moreover, why is it possible to discourage women so easily? I can only say as a sample of one, that I have worked around some disagreeable women, yet they have no more influenced my career choice than the wonderful women I have worked with. I just accept it as different people being different, and no mean person is responsible for my career choices, only me.
The most discouraging aspect of this entire discussion is that once you buy into the premise that women are discouraged by advertising, or by guys making "dongle jokes", you are saying women are inherently weaker than men, because they give up easily, and are influenced away from science and tech careers by advertising. I've heard women in the workplace make many off color jokes, and just figured it's what people do at times. It's just people
Do we really want to say that women don't have the ability to stick to what they want to do, and are turned away by what are actually trivial things?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
In the old days CS was associated with Math and Physics which still have high (relatively) female enrollments, now it is associated with Engineering which I believe never had enrollment of females. I believe that this is the major reason for the declining.
disclaimer: I have no evidences whatsoever about what I am claiming.
So someone felt threatened enough by the above post to mark it flamebait? That very strongly reinforces my suggestion that it wouldn't be considered a job for "real men" by someone defrosted from 1970. What kind of weakling would think the opinion above is coming on too strong?
Face it kids (ie. too young to remember when there were many women in CS/IT), it's soft indoor work with a bit of thinking so saying it's something better suited for big strong men is ridiculous. If it's the thinking bit that is supposed to be the big deal that's even more ridiculous - not much of IT is at the physics doctoral thesis level and women can do that stuff, let alone the lesser tasks that most of the people reading this site do.
Me.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I am 26.
I taught myself how to program because I liked video games and wanted to make my own.
That led to a career in software development.
Before I started playing video games and learning to program, I wanted to be a dentist.
For the last 20? 30? years, women, generally, did not play video games.
That is changing now, due to mobile gaming, but computer and console gaming has not been appealing to women.
So, I am not saying that everyone my age (and in the last few generations) only learned to program because they liked video games, but asking around, I get the feeling that a LOT of them did.
So, does a teenage interest in video games correlate with CS graduates 10 years later?
Will we see more women CS graduates in 10 years because of Candy Crush and Angry Birds?
I have a great many thoughts on this topic as I have a 10 year old daughter who I am trying to rear with a love a learning and desire to get into the STEM fields academically. She has great math skills and won this year’s round of math-Olympics at her school. That said, she probably wouldn’t excel at math if her mom and I didn’t push and insist at doing well in math. She hated dad trying to introduce her to programming and HTML, but when she was exposed to a summer camp of HTML (semi against her will) and discovered she could use it to create her own webpages and blogs she suddenly became quite enthusiastic about using at home. Similarly I suggested she might like Minecraft as it was a creative form of game playing and she demurred, citing specific geeky boys that were into Minecraft. About a month later a teacher she likes suggested she was so smart and curious she should try Minecraft. Nothing would do but I download Minecraft that evening and now she plays Minecraft.
Now comes my Ah-ha moment, the reason women are not in our field is not about them, but about us. Not in the typical harassment fashion which one hears about anecdotally, and which is I believe is overstated at best – but because we geeky guys are not perceived as attractive socially. Rightly or wrongly we are not perceived of has having brawn or power.
Women flock to lots of careers that have tons more harassment than the typical IT house will have. Lets face it, other than a few awkwardly made, bad taste jokes, our ranks can be quite milquetoast. I for one cannot conceive of myself or any of my coworkers pulling a female coworker into a side-office to grope her, and yet in many institutes of politics and money this seems to come to light quite often.
I’m not saying women want to be harassed, far from it, but they are attracted to Alpha male types and the careers they have. We my comrades (the male programmers out there) are the Betas, and women know the power flows not from us. That said, many a considerate, intelligent, and even attractive women can be found that knows we are the best bet for building a family and future, even if they are not programmers like ourselves.
Letter To Iran
Your observations are accurate, but your conclusion is completely wrong. All the elements you called out are things that would keep women from staying in a CS position for a long duration. Very little of what you listed would be something that a freshman entering CS would be exposed to or have any knowledge of. If your conclusion is correct, we should see a lot more of female CS grads that drop out of the talent pool in the first five years, and what we are actually seeing is they aren't even entering CS programs.
The problem starts much earlier. Girls start losing interest in STEM topics at a much younger age. There are no positive female role models to show young girls that they can excel at programming and there are plenty of females presented in the media as being interested in 'girl' stuff. Children are highly impressionable, and if they don't see an archetype they probably aren't going to gravitate towards it.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I've seen many articles talking about reasons why there are so few women in CS and about ideas how to overcome this problem. However, I fail to see why this is a problem to begin with. If women are not interested in this profession, why would we want to change that?
This is mostly true, however, nursing is notoriously hostile to male nurses, while the current dialogue is unsure if CS/IT is particularly hostile to women.
As a male, I protect my own time, and I never let my weekends vanish and totally reject any 60-80 hour week as a standard (if it happens it is entirely self-imposed).
Men also take paternity leaves. I have seen this, many companies allow this, as well as many countries. Without this then the company is being anti-family (or family only for management maybe).
Not sure how management works everywhere, but in every one of my jobs that managers were also developers or engineers. I've never worked for a management-only manager. This includes women managers who were developers.
As a male, I don't put up with abuse either. I may keep quiet about it but update the resume and go job hunting on the sly.
I've also worked on medical technology and the ratio of women goes way up than the dreadfully dull dull world of communications and networking.
The first two lines of your observations point out that women are likely to:
-work less overtime
-work fewer weekends
-drop out of the labor force due to pregnancy (diminishing the ROI of education/corporate training investments)
Let's assume that all those points are backed up by statistics.
Then in your next line you seem to criticize managers for displaying a preference towards young single male employees.
But isn't that an entirely rational decision on management's part, to maximize the expected utility it derives from its employees? Assuming all other credentials between a male and female are equal, if the stats backup the assertion that the female employee, say over a timeframe of 5 or 10 years, will deliver fewer hours of productivity compared to the young single male, how can you expect management to take such a risk?
The constant agenda we see is "management styles need to change to accommodate women". Are there any studies or stats demonstrating a net productivity gain from doing so, and what kind of metrics did they use?
I think you make a good point about how women don't respond to the sorts of management techniques that maybe work well on men. But men who find an institution's practices unsatisfactory (whatever that institution is, a workplace, a religion, etc.) often tend to break out on their own, and craft a new organization in their image. Women seem more inclined to complain about the existing institution until it is changed to accommodate them.
So why is it wrong to tell women "Your entire approach to social problem-solving is neither valued nor tolerated in this environment. If you have a issue with that....feel free to go forge your own destiny elsewhere" ? If I said that to a male employee no one would bat an eye. But if I say it to a female employee I'm "poorly emotionally developed"?
Except that your answers are excellent reasons why women shouldn't go into a host of fields, including management. I've read lots of advice that the best way to advance in management is to spend a whole lot of time at the office, keep at it constantly, and put up with all sorts of things. What's the big difference?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
That's the most sensible thing I've ever heard.
Candle burns its brightest in the dark
I am a male and I claim a fairly different nature than thou.
I also claim your notion of predestination is absolute BS.
My observations:
- Women protect their own time more than men in this industry (don't want to do as much overtime, don't want their weekends to vanish, etc) and this leads to a negative management style that penalizes healthy behaviour and thus limits women's progress
- Women take maternity leave and have kids and that hurts prospects in the high-grind world of CS
- There are a lot of poorly emotionally developed males in management roles (not all, by any means, but enough that an 'I like my coders young male and single' comment isn't a surprise out of a manager)
- Women will try to ask for an answer when stumped, guys will try to battle through (taking a long time sometimes) - the best course is usually somewhere in the middle.
- Women don't particularly love to be abused and they are less willing to put up with it from management than men (who are willing to get called some nasty things by their boss most times)
The industry is hard on developers and artists and QA people. It burns them out, treating them like disposable resources. Women are smart enough to recognize this and fewer of them want to enter this. Guys are still 'hey, neat tech!' and 'I get to code a video game/drive the space shuttle/build smartbombs/code networked scrabble/etc'. So they still throw themselves into the grinder more willingly.
Guys also respond more to challenge and to hostile bosses (that's likely deep in our genes) by trying to outperform. That same climate I believe makes a lot of women just want to leave.
So in summary, it can be a hard field on people and it is managed in ways that drive women from the field.
My cred: 18 years in software development in a lot of companies (custom software contractor much of the time in and out of companies of all sizes).
I also claim your notion of predestination is absolute BS.
While slight off topic, I agree. Predistination is an excuse for idiots to do stupid things without thinking.
My observations:
- Women protect their own time more than men in this
You nailed it. That's the biggest factor. Most people who stay in this industry are idiots who work a crazy amount of overtime and do spectacularly bad work. It's 99% machismo. And 99% of the time it's the small number of people working sane hours who are doing almost all of the work, plus fixing the idiots' constant disasters.
And like you, have many years of experience supporting this.
- Women take maternity leave and have kids and that hurts prospects in the high-grind world of CS
When I read the stories about companies offering to freeze women's embryos so that they could work more, I realized that it was tech companies basically admitting that they were sweatshops, but still trying to pretend that they were worth something. They're full of shit.
The industry is hard on developers and artists and QA people. It burns them out, treating them like disposable resources. Women are smart enough to recognize this and fewer of them want to enter this.
If I'd known that the industry would be like this, I'd have avoided it like the plague. It's a waste of time, life, money, and talent. I'm building a client base for my own start up in order to get out.
My cred: 18 years in software development in a lot of companies (custom software contractor much of the time in and out of companies of all sizes).
Mine's similar. This industry is basically dominated by seat-warming ass-lickers, not talented developers.
Which industry are you talking about? Because almost all your points are true for all industries to some extent. If that's your explanation why women are reluctant to study CS, you haven't proved your case.
Don't quote me on this.
Women don't particularly love to be abused and they are less willing to put up with it from management than men (who are willing to get called some nasty things by their boss most times)
I don't think that women necessarily object more to abuse, but that our culture tends to give them more freedom to leave their jobs.
Our society tends to regard a working wife as a bit of a luxury. It certainly encourages women to work, but there is also nothing wrong if a woman just stays at home and raises kids, or if a woman is out of work for a while.
Our society tends to regard a working husband as more of a necessity. There is a stigma on a married man who is out of work. Families with a stay at home father and a working mother are very rare.
I think that there is also far less pressure for a young woman to move out of the parent's house/etc than there is for a young man to do the same.
So, a married man in particular is under a lot of pressure to simply not lose a job under any circumstances, while a woman often feels much more free to do so.
I'm speaking broadly, and I'm certainly interested if others feel differently. From my standpoint the women really are the ones with the right attitude here, but the problem is that the US in particular is very cruel to anybody who is out of work. There is very little government support available for anybody who is "picky" about working conditions, and social acceptance may have a big impact on somebody's ability to find support in other ways if they lose their job. Until men are as free to quit their job as women are, I doubt you'll find the same kind of parity in the workplace.
Look at it another way. Suppose you take two groups of runners and put them in races. The one group is competing such that the #1 runner gets a prize. For the second group after each race the last-place runner is shot and replaced with a new runner for the next race. After a number of races, which group do you think is going to end up having the faster average time?