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Women in Computing To Decline To 22% by 2025, Study Warns (usatoday.com)
New research warns that at the rate we're going, the number of women in the computing workforce will decline to 22% from 24% by 2025 if nothing is done to encourage more of them to study computer science. From a USA Today report (shared by an anonymous reader): The research from Accenture and nonprofit group Girls Who Code says taking steps now to encourage more women to pursue a computer science education could triple the number of women in computing to 3.9 million in that same timeframe. Women account for 24% of computing jobs today, but could account for 39% by 2025, according to the report, Cracking the Gender Code. And greater numbers of women entering computer science could boost women's cumulative earnings by $299 billion and help the U.S. fill the growing demand for computing talent, said Julie Sweet, Accenture's group chief executive for North America.
If women choose not to go into computing fields, why should they be forced (or even encouraged) to do so?
Why isn't there a similar push to get men into kindergarten education or nursing?
How about letting people pick the field(s) they want to go into without telling them what they "ought" to do based on a pointless metric or percentage?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Putting aside yet another "WE NEEDZ MORE WOMENZ IN IT" crap, did anyone else think "H1B" when they read "growing demand?"
Companies are already doing everything they can to bring in cheaper talent. The "demand" in question has nothing to do with the number of competent and trained talent, but rather the number of competent and trained talent willing to work for peanuts. Encouraging more domestic IT/programming workers to enter the field will only exasperate that, regardless of their plumbing.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I don't understand why they should be "encouraged" to study computer science to just keep up some random statistic vs. encouraging them to do whatever their hearts tell them they should be doing? Stories like this make me so angry because it casts women as unable to decide for themselves and we should be "correcting" their life choices. Whatever...
Women value stability in careers often because they are the ones left holding the domestic bag when the dude flakes on the family.
IT and stability are often at odds. I happened to be in California during the dot-com bust, and had to take scrappy contracts, some out-of-state, to survive.
One's skills are always growing outdated and you have to guess the correct "new thing" to get documented experience in or get left behind again. It's like being the news weather person before satellites: guess right often enough or get booted.
Table-ized A.I.
Let's be perfectly honest with ourselves. Most people suck at programming. Most people suck at just about anything they do. Programming is hardly a glamorous job. Most people are non-technical, illogical and irrational, especially when it comes to their pathetic attempts to do whatever "business" they are trying to get done. For the most part, the only reason they're still in business is because their customers are clueless and their competition is even less competent.
A better question: why are there so many men left in computing? If I wanted to have morons yapping nonsense at me all day I could turn on the TV - no need to go into work.
http://amarillo.com/opinion/op...
Good paying jobs, and women just don't want them.
Stories like this make me so angry because it casts women as unable to decide for themselves and we should be "correcting" their life choices.
Well, perhaps you should calm down, stop and actually think. Humans, ALL humans are influenced by outside factors. No man is an island etc etc.
Funnily enough that includes women.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
disclaimer: im just a machinist who likes linux.
we had something similar to this in the late 90s when kickpress workers and fabricators were starting to get replaced by multi-axis milling machines and fluidform/laser. almost overnight we had a crisis where we needed more people who could do CAD/CAM, because while im sure managers saved a bunch of money handing out pink slips to the line workers they were losing a hell of a lot of money on trying to find a good desk jockey who didnt crash tools and wreck parts every hour. Management offered hundred dollar bonuses if we could convince someone to join the team and this worked for a while until someone started complaining about diversity and asking why we didnt have it.
we didnt have black or latino CNC or SPC guys because most of them never saw a promotion. Its not racism --nobody was yelling bigoted obscenities-- but the managers in charge of lining up bonuses and promotions came from an ancient era where brown people were still some subset fraction of an actual person. the ones that got promoted didnt see much of a raise either, at least at the North Carolina shops i worked at. When the diversity hammer started to swing too close to the portly boss-types, they made excuses until retirement. Either they promoted a hard work ethic, or they were trying to drive cost.
and women? we had women but they were all in the office stamping paychecks and handling HR claims, or in shipping. we had welders, good female welders, but management fired them once we started shipping the parts to missouri, then mexico for final weld. The management came down hard on us for creating hostile work environments, and sure in some cases that was true. The worst shop i was in had 3 sexual harassment meetings in a year. But to tell the truth, it was probably the pay or the fact that if you left for maternity, you usually lost your job. I worked at a place that ran an entire diversity job fair for a year before realizing the factory area we worked in never had a womens locker room, so incompetence can certainly be attributed..
but programming? what barriers exist? i mean christ its every day im online seeing courses or classes, or getting some handout from a government agency that encourages me to take a spreadsheet class or something. programming is an office job; is an office a hostile workplace?? why is it so hard to just give someone the damn job so long as they have enough sense not to chooch up the work? why is there a percentage to achieve?
Good people go to bed earlier.
I would rather encourage young kids to be curious and to have other aspects that may lead to programming and other technology. Pushing programming and coding itself to young girls (boys as well) may turn kids off, where if you encourage things like curiosity, those who end up programming will have done so because they are passionate about it. People who are passionate about it end up being good at it, and we need more girls (and boys) that are actually good at programming.
We cannot state that we need the same representation in the various fields as we have in the general population. Women and men, blacks and whites, hetero and homo, all have different interests for whatever reason. What we need is to ensure that everyone is given an opportunity to try and if they are unsuccessful so be it. Seems to work in sports where the best are hired and retained, why not try this with work and stop with the PC work force demographics BS.
Information Technology and Computer Science need to be entirely split up. This within itself will virtually entirely solve the problem. The problem right now is that they're treated as one in the same, with the same requirements for entirely different jobs. The programs in school focus specifically on short algorithm design for things like tree searching or solving various mathematical principals. In the real world, however, the primary focus is on finding solutions to either business logic problems or finding new ways for users to interact with their devices and the environment around them. The CS side focuses primarily on the mathematics of computing, while IT focus more on the logical side of computing. Developing a great and simple API doesn't require much of a math background, but needs quite a bit of logical thinking. But again, as stated initially, the schools are only focusing on the mathematical side, which correlates to an extremely small part of the actual tech sector, with the logical side being the majority of the jobs in the workplace. Schools need to finally get their shit together and teach the industry, rather than teach what some particular program is more or less forced upon them by a very few companies that dont fully represent the industry.
Keeping the IT lights on is a thankless job. When everything works well, few people care about IT. When SHTF, everyone blames the "useless" IT department.
Couple this with the influx of H1B workers and wage stagnation, why on earth would anyone want to do this job?
Women close to me in demanding jobs like teaching or nursing say they find those careers challenging and fulfilling. When I ask them about technology work, they make a face and say - no thanks.
Maybe it's OK that men and women are actually different and they have differing tastes in work. Maybe the SJW's of the world simply need to be OK with that.
How is this possible. There are dozens of government programs, corporate program, and not profit programs all pushing "Women in Tech". Millions upon millions of dollars have been spent encouraging women to join the tech field. In a society the is getting ever less sexist. And for all this the participation rate is going down?
Maybe these groups should reevaluate what they are doing and try to understand why women aren't interested in joining the tech workforce. It's seems crying sexism at every opportunity is not an effective strategy.
And what if the conditions of work are preventing them? And I'm not just talking about the "usual" conditions like a lack of affordable daycare and the like which often keep women from better employment. What if there are certain groups within this industry, or in any industry really, who are hostile to women being there?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
As an avid viewer of Deadliest Catch, I am troubled by the lack of female representation aboard Alaskan crab fishing vessels. Women should be encouraged to enter this lucrative filed where they are grossly underrepresented. Of course, that would involve risking their lives and destroying their bodies like men do, while being isolated from their families for months at a time, so I doubt the women's studies departments will be pushing for this.
I get the feeling that the people who are troubled by women's underrepresentation in STEM fields and C-suites somehow view this as women missing out on easy money, when that couldn't be further from the truth. These fields typically require huge sacrifices in terms of time and stress, not to mention isolation. Men seem more willing to accept these sacrifices because we're taught to do that from a very young age. We become providers (wallets) and sacrifice our time as nurturers within the family because it is expected of us. Women can't expect to take on these roles without the downsides that come with them, and the lack of women in certain fields is likely a reflection of women valuing family time over work time.
Outside factors are not an issue.
Bullshit they ain't. Summon Captain Anecdote!
I was talking to my officemate a couple of months ago about relational databases (she was doing a course on them). I prefer to think about things in a quite mathematical way, and I was trying t ooffer some insight in that direction. Turns out she apparently used to be decent at maths but dropped it after being told repeatedly in school words t othe effects of "maths isn't for girls".
So perhaps you'd like to go and explain to her how outside factors are not an issue.
. Outside factors help influence a decision
Wait... didn't you just say they're not a factor? Please do try to make up your mind.
It's just not the choice they prefer.
Aaaand we're back to it not mattering.
Honestly, you seem to be trying to rationalize something or other to me.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
First off, I'm a little skeptical believing anything coming out of Accenture as a non-biased study, same way a Gartner magic quadrant rating is basically a paid-for advertisement.
Next, women are smart. They see programmers, admins, etc. being tossed out of work above the age of 40, having to constantly grind on skills training and being one mistaken specialization away from being out of a job. They also see industry offshoring every single job they possibly can in pursuit of lower costs. Women and men starting out in their careers need to be shown there's a future in tech or else no one is going to want to go into it. If you're smart enough to get perfect grades and perfect MCAT scores, there's absolutely no reason to not go to medical school and become a doctor. Medicine and some other licensed/regulated health care work is and will be the last protected, stable high paying profession left in the US. Why would you slave away in an IT or developer job only to be tossed out in 15-20 years, while your doctor friends are contemplating which boat will fit best in the dock next to their waterfront mansion? Right now the answer is that tech jobs do offer a decent salary for the work, but that stability thing is a killer. I'd rather be a licensed professional who's able to name their own price and whose competition will be kept to a reasonable number by law than be disposable.
Women are rational creatures, and want stable work for themselves and their families. I'm a little cynical, but it seems like Accenture might be trying to ensure there's a steady flow of new recruits. Their entire business model is shipping 25 year old "consultants" around the country, men and women, to project manage and direct their Indian techies to "do the needful" from remote. The company's business model is up-or-out, and it works just like school does, so it's tailor-made for fresh grads with no work experience. If that pipeline is stopped, Accenture's entire cost structure goes up because they have to start hiring experienced people.
New research warns that at the rate we're going, the number of men in the nursing workforce will decline to 22% from 24% by 2025 if nothing is done to encourage more of them to study nursing science.
This tragic result of institutional discrimination shows no sign of improvement in the immediate future. Beginning at childhood and continuing throughout the educational system, there is little incentive given boys to study nursing. Those who do are often discriminated against by employers and even patients. Legislators have failed to recognize the problem or offer incentives for equal rights for boys.
...omphaloskepsis often...
After endlessly repeating the message, "Women need to be encouraged to work in this field because they don't naturally have much interest in it", who could blame them for wanting nothing to do with it? No one wants the first thought people have of you to be, "Is this a professional or just the diversity hire?"
Could also have something to do with not wanting to work unreasonable hours just to eventually be replaced by an H1B.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Outside factors are not an issue.
If every role model of a programmer you see until you're a teenager is male.
If computer programmer Barbie involves the girl doing some design, but the actual coding being done by boys.
If every children's TV show that includes both women and computers has the woman saying computers are hard and the man solving the problems.
If all of the clever boys at your school are encouraged into extracurricular activities involving computers, but the girls aren't.
I'm sure it would have no impact at all on you.
If you don't think that this is real, then sit down for a couple of hours this evening and watch two hours of children's TV. Count the number of male vs female lead roles. Count the number of times anyone builds anything and whether it's done by a male or female character.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So if there were outside factors that biologically predisposed men and women towards different career paths or interests would you accept that those might result in something other than an even distribution of employment in certain vocations?
This doesn't make sense. The differences are either innate (biological) or the result of external factors. If they're the result of external factors (i.e. not biological) then they're likely to be amenable to change. The fact that the participation of women varies hugely between cultures (for example, in India, Korea, Israel, Iran, and Lithuania, Romania, it's a lot higher) implies strongly that external factors are far more of a reason why we have so few women than anything biological.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I wish half as much time and money was spent on men. We have male high school and college graduation rates at record lows and well below that of women which strikes me as far more important problem than a lack of women in a single field of business. Shoot, no one even talks about how few men become teachers when many studies show boys learn better from men than women (it's the same for female teachers and girls).
Dont get me wrong, having a good ratio of women in a workplace team is a good thing as it brings different perspectives, I just feel i hear a ton about the lack of women in computing and virtually nothing about a far more serious problem.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
He's not complaining about choice, but that we're apparently telling women they are making the WRONG CHOICE.
And, oddly, blaming the men for making them choose wrong too.
Actually, I see quite the opposite more often. A lot of TV shows are making quite an effort to change the gender stereotypes. Nowadays you see more females doing the tech or science jobs and roles on kids TV shows than you do males. Obviously not working, there are other societal factors at work, or kids are smart enough to realize those characters are exceptions meant to reverse the rule.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
No problem of this nature is fixed by forcing people to change. The only way is to stick it out in the hostile environment until you are a majority. Then you can change the situation simply by acting differently. When you're the majority, you set the tone.
That's assuming there's a problem to begin with, of course.
It's not that women are not choosing to go into computer fields. It's that they are being SCARED off by being told how horrible it is for women - even though I cannot think of any field in which women are generally treated better, and respected for knowledge.
I agree we should let people choose what interest them but women currently are being painted a very false picture of what being in the computer industry is like, leading to misinformed choice.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It also sounds like what happens to men in tech, too.
Alright, anecdotal evidence is always dodgy, but here's mine.
I have an intern working with me right now who is a bright, talented, hardworking young woman. She's been interviewing at a variety of shops and found one that looked really good for a junior software engineer. Lot's of flexibility about the kind of work you do etc.
She was talking to one of the HR types and they felt the need to inform her that there were multiple generations of engineer there, and that some of the older engineers sometimes said things like, "Women don't belong in programming." And that she should just ignore it.
Now, whether any engineer there actually said that, someone from inside the company felt the need to tell her that they would, and told her the right behavior was to just put up with it. No matter how you cut that, it does not scream "Welcoming environment".
The barrier doesn't exist. Computers are ubiquitous. There are tons of free development tools, tutorials, forums to ask questions. If you really want to get into it, you'll already be playing around with code.
The fact is that programming is a shit field over the long term. If I had to do it over again, I would have just kept it as something to toy around with.
Doesn't matter how many women you try to push in the field - the vast majority change to another field within 10 years.
Over the long term, it's better than being forced out in 20 years by the beancounters because you're perceived as too old (both sexes) and they can get someone younger cheaper.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
That's true for every field in one way or another. In the long run, every job is something that can eventually be outsourced, replaced by robots, or both. Getting ahead financially is about playing the percentages, picking something that pays well and that you can stand, and saving up as much money as you can for the inevitable drought later.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
This is a simple question of physiology - girls can't grow neckbeards, therefore they can't reach pinnacle of programming career.
Any problems that still exist in IT still exist in any "traditionally male" industries and occupations. And it's not just females that are affected, it's any special snowflake.
We can't single out IT and say how sexist and terrible its constituents are when I'm sure there are still much worse places (harassment-wise, etc.) for snowflakes like refineries, steel mills, oil rigs, railroads, heavy equipment repair, and probably almost any other blue collar job where you get dirty or risk your life.
Saying that the snowflakes get treated worse in a cube farm full of programmers than literally any of those other places is doing a disservice to the real women working in those other fields every day busting their asses. The difference? Your average millennial snowflake doesn't want to be a millwright, work on an oil rig, repair railroad tracks or become a tradesman. Why? Because (unlike tech) it isn't perceived as glorious, you have to deal with extremes of temperature, you can't become famous doing it, you can't sit on your ass and tweet all day about how oppressed you are while doing it, you probably won't get rich (but you'll earn a very comfortable living) and you sure as hell can't be a SJW idiot if you want to survive (literally, in many of those places) the first month on the job.
Yet, women have been working in all of those jobs for generations now. The problem isn't sexism or discrimination or harassment (which again, the HR departments and years of sensitivity training have pretty much taken care of), it's the softness of the last two generations of humans. They've been taught that feelings must be preserved above all else, above self, above country, above safety, and above security. In the traditional blue-collar industries I've mentioned above, anyone who makes it past training and the first week on the job will realize, right quick, that the safety of you and your crew is the number one priority. Feelings be damned. Does it matter if someone hurt your feelings if they got you out of a serious jam alive?
Now, in IT, it may not be life or death, but you might make a bad decision and decide to preserve someone's feelings and lose your career or promotion over it. You might lose your business a ton of money if a critical system goes offline or worse. And that isn't cool, we shouldn't have to lie to people and tell them they're good at something they aren't if they actually aren't good at it because of some protected status (or worse yet, feelings). There are plenty of women throughout history who have found great success in traditionally male fields. There are probably a lot who (for whatever reason) couldn't cut it and decided to move on. We are at a critical juncture right now where we decide what's more important: feelings or honesty. Hurting someone's feelings isn't always malicious, unwarranted, nor is it discrimination, in fact, it's one of the few things that even to me (as a man) can reach me when I'm sure I'm right and I'm really not. It's part of growing and being an adult.
So, are we going to embrace being an adult, growing up, and being responsible for making good decisions? Or are we going to embrace a permeating culture of perpetual adolescence where everyone gets a trophy and we base someone's worth not on what they produce or they can create or build, but on how many oppression points they can collect for themselves or how many times you signal your virtue to those holding those points? Women should work wherever they want to work, it shouldn't matter what percentage of them work where, it's their decision to determine whether they can cut it or not in a certain field. And saying they somehow shouldn't be left to decide their own future and destiny for themselves is positively the most sexist thing I've ever heard.
Why would women specifically want to go into a job where you work long hours and at all times of the day and for mediocre wages for the required skill set and are forced to compete for a shrinking number of opportunities with foreign workers whose cost of living is 10% of yours and for corporations who get tax breaks to hire them?
If every role model of a programmer you see until you're a teenager is male.
The only age-appropriate programmer role model I can think of offhand from when I was a kid and teen is the girl in Jurassic Park. And later on, let's see... well, there was Edward from Cowboy Bebop. I'm trying to think of a good male example as a strong character (not a pathetic clown), but nothing is coming to me. When it comes to positive computer programmer role models in the stuff I watched growing up, females are honestly the first thing I think of. Male programmers are usually portrayed, first and foremost, as creatures of pity.
Also, I'm curious if you are at all concerned about our profound lack of female sanitation workers? Female fisherman? Female homeless people?
I've worked in IT for over 2 decades. This may have existed back in the late 80's, possibly even into the very early 90's, but since about 1995 has been a fallacy perpetrated by those with an agenda to cast this industry as somehow sexist or backwards. If there are any people left who are still truly hostile to females in IT that haven't been weeded out through attrition, harassment claims, or other HR procedures, they must be really good at hiding how they truly feel and therefore it isn't really an issue anymore.
Stop being disingenuous and perpetrating "what if" scenarios to further a divisive agenda you know is going to lose, anyway.
I tend to agree with you that harassment in the workplace is significantly less than what it used to be. The stigma still lingers, however. It doesn't help when geeks make presentations with sexual parts in conferences, either (and no, the answer is not to develop humor or grow thicker skin, but to be less of a pervert.)
Harassment in academia and in other STEM fields still exists, and it is serious enough to make students switch careers and not pursue work in Academia. I've seen it.
Alright, anecdotal evidence is always dodgy, ... She was talking to one of the HR types and they felt the need to inform her that there were multiple generations of engineer there, and that some of the older engineers sometimes said things like, "Women don't belong in programming." ...
I'm perfectly willing to accept isolated incidents. But the widespread existence of such a sentiment, I have to call BS. As you say, its just an anecdote
I am an old engineer and in 30+ years of software development at various employers, small, medium and large I never saw that sentiment. Were there occasional inappropriate jokes, well from a PC/SJW perspective yes, but the women I knew could give as well as take. And when in a female majority environment the non-PC jokes targeting men came from the women occasionally too, All these jokes whether from males or females, while admittedly not PC, were not offered with malicious intent and were more in the nature of friendly teammates joking around with each other. Everyone, male and female, had their day where they thought something was not funny. Even so, when a team transitioned away from an all male team as that first female member joined, there was either indifference or a supportive sentiment, not a hostile sentiment, when we males got together and talked when we got the news; even in the old days of the mid 1980s.
Were there excessive dating invitations, excessive as in "how many times do you need to hear no", yes. One time I had to have a serious talk with a peer from another team about taking "no for answer" when I found a team member in her cube obviously pissed off about something and she confided in what it was.
I have to admit that one day I made one of my female team members cry. I got her to follow me out of our cubicle farm and into an empty office and I closed the door for privacy. I then told her that of all the people I had worked with these last four years at the company she was the most reliable person I knew. That if it were possible to get something done she was the person I learned to trust more than any other. And the fact that she did this while having to juggle hours around occasionally to take care of things related to her two kids, school events, doctor's appointments, etc made her even more impressive. She cried, gave me a big hug, and then I went for my exit interview with HR since that was my last day. By the way, this was not my unique opinion, she was a highly respected engineer among her peers and management. As I was getting ready to leave I realized I had never shared my opinion with her.
I agree that women have faced challenges over the decades. For several years I dated a female engineer, she worked on embedded software, so I have her perspective to add to my own. And while these many challenges still exist to this day to one degree or another, the "women don't belong in programming" problem is not something I've seen myself or had 30+ years of coworkers mention that they had seen. I'm sure it happened somewhere but such a sentiment is an anomaly not a widespread problem like being asked out on a date too many times.
My opinion as to why the low representation of women exists, I think it is simply that fewer are exposed to it. I initially imagined programming boring, then I had to do a little in school and I discovered it to be a lot of fun, interesting and that I was also good at it. It was literally a life changing revelation. I expect that fewer females are given the chance to make such a personal discovery. So maybe there is a "women don't belong in programming" sentiment, but it would seem to be at home with their family, parents, aunts, uncles, etc than in industry. FWIW that girlfriend I had who did embedded software, her dad had a small manufacturing business and her and her sister grew up around people who made things. Both had the same opportunities to explore, but only she had the curiosity, her sister did not. Programming
No problem of this nature is fixed by forcing people to change. The only way is to stick it out in the hostile environment until you are a majority. Then you can change the situation simply by acting differently. When you're the majority, you set the tone.
That's assuming there's a problem to begin with, of course.
The Civils Right movement says otherwise. Sometimes you have to force people to be less of an asshole.
I meant external from the perspective of the job itself, basically there isn't some characteristic of the job (e.g. requires lifting 100 lbs. or more on a regular basis) that favors men over women, though I can see where the confusion comes from due to poor wording on my part.
Here's one popular argument that I've heard before that offers an explanation for why IT and programming are predominantly male-driven: The incidence rate for autism spectrum disorders is about 4-5 times higher (there are plenty of interesting theories as to why for this in itself) in males than in females. People who fall into these categories often have more difficulty working with people and are likely to find programming or IT more appealing as they find working with a machine less difficult, because it doesn't require them to use the emotional reasoning capabilities that they lack or find more difficult to use.
If that were true, it's not that there's anything inherent to programming or IT jobs that make women bad or somehow less suitable in any general sense, but rather men being drawn to the field disproportionately.
Most baby boomers will be dead by 2030.
The oldest baby boomer will be 84YO and the youngest baby boomer will be 66YO in 2030. Most people are living 30 to 40 in retirement. Many baby boomers will live into their 90s and 100s.
I suppose your company totally gets it and there is never any of the mini-aggressions and put-downs that can erode a female technologist's confidence in her abilities or desire to work at your company, or in the industry in general?
And that never happens to men right? Both men and women are occasional recipients of the joke gone wrong. Both men and women have to deal with a-hole coworkers who try to elevate themselves by denigrating the skills of others. And by men I am including majority white straight men. Everyone gets their feeling hurt one day or another, and its something that should be avoided regardless of gender. But lets not try to manufacture a PC/SJW explanation for the problem of female underrepresentation, assuming that it is a problem and not a natural occurrence, more on that below.
The problem is simple. Many people do not imagine that programming can be something fun and interesting. Many software developers were actually a bit surprised at how much they liked it once they gave it a try, and sometimes these tries were not of their choosing, something school made them do for instance. The heart of the problem is more likely a lack opportunity to make such a personal discovery. In other words things go "wrong" long before someone enters the workplace, the flaw is not in the workplace.
Of course, maybe things aren't going as "wrong" as I just suggested. To do well and to be happy in software development a person needs a certain innate interest in it. As mentioned above we don't always know that this interest exists, it sometimes has to be discovered through experience. But perhaps there is a natural difference in the occurrence of this interest between males and females. I dated a girl for several years that was a software developer, embedded systems. She and her sister grew up in an environment with a dad that built things, who took his daughters to work occasionally, who had them help him make things out in the garage. One daughter discovered an interest, one did not. Is one of these daughters an anomaly, and if so which one? I have a niece and nephew that are fraternal twins. Both grew up being exposed to the outdoors. My niece is the one who wants to go on family camping trips, trips where we hike in and live out of our packs for two or three days, her brother has no interest. Scuba diving is a hobby of mine, while physical it is certainly within the abilities of "average" women. Yet in college where a very inexpensive and truly excellent training program was available through the PE department very few women took the class. Sometimes things require an inherent interest, and what factors into that interest may be biological and not necessarily socially induced. Its premature to say what the natural representation of women in a particular activity is.
Am I missing something? That article was about the number of pull requests at GitHub that were accepted, it mentioned nothing about your statement that "Studies have shown that female programmers write more efficient code on average than male programmers". If you are going to be that dickish in your reply, you should at least post something that supports your argument. Just because a pull request is accepted does not mean it is more efficient and a self-selected group (GitHub users) is a poor source for meaningful statistical data.
Enigma
You can't outsource or replace with robots services catering to humans and their bodies.
Nor can you outsource or robotize salesmanship, leadership and all the other -ships.
And there will probably always be legal reasons why legal services and public administration can't be out given out to foreign employees or machines.
But speaking of services for humans...
Education and health services are about as female dominated as manufacturing tends to be male dominated.
Actually, slightly more... 74.65% for E&H vs 71.9% for manufacturing.
But much more important is that there are more than twice as many jobs in E&H services (33,678 thousands ) than in manufacturing (15,338 thousands).
Education and health services is actually the BIGGEST industry in the US, making up more than a fifth (but not quite a quarter - 22.62%) of ALL JOBS in the USA.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat1...
You can't outsource child care or health care cause you can't outsource people. And robots are nowhere near to be able to do that job.
Making those E&H jobs safe and secure.
Amazingly, that category has the most humans who, thorough a quirk of biology, tend to have the need for a safe and stable environment in order to gestate, give birth to and raise the next generation of humans.
Whodathunkit, right?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Well, you could argue that the reason you have to push women to enter coding as a career is that they're also being pushed to aim high on the career ladder.
That was the thing that made me laugh at the whole Barbie "I Can Be a Computer Engineer" fracas. Oh, it was sexist alright -- against men. Here's how I construe that story: Barbie is an entrepreneur who obtains free commodity coding and sysadmin labor from her male pals and yet retains total ownership of the resulting intellectual property. It's a cynical way of doing business, but that girl is going places.
Here is where they'll be in ten years:
Stephen -- works as a network admin where the pay is lousy and everyone treats him like shit. Despite the fact he hates his job, he's terrified that it will be outsourced.
Brian -- works as a coder. His pay looks pretty good, until you factor in the hours he puts in to meet deadlines management pulls out of its ass, the cost of his Bay Area apartment, and the time he spends commuting on the clogged freeway. He gets through the day with Adderall he scores of the neighbor's kid and comes down every night with booze. His apartment is full of expensive sports equipment he doesn't have time to use anymore. He's gained fifty pounds since he was in High School and will gain another fifty in the next five years. Brain can live with all this, but the thing that really bothers him is that when he does a great job, nobody cares.
Barbie -- Sold her girl-power themed indie computer game studio for millions, landing her on the cover of Time's "30 Entrepreneurs under 30" issue. She parlays this into a senior VP position at a hot social media startup, and after cashing out on the IPO joins an angel investor group. She's currently bankrolling research in parthenogenesis.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Women already make up nearly 60% of all college graduates. They already receive favoritism for things like financial aid, grants, and scholarships (except for sports). There are TV ads, commercials, and companies doing everything they can to get more women into STEM and it is all failing. So what, coercion and extortion are not working so we panic?
People should stop trying to bully people into a field and forcing an ideology that people simply don't want. There is equal opportunity, in fact it's white males who today are treated like shit by politicians, academics, and media and every other racial group and gender is receiving preferences.
Also, people in general need to stop pretending like biological differences don't matter. They do, and facts matter.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.