Maybe they just don't like CS or STEM fields in general? There's something called the Norwegian Gender Paradox. A Norwegian comedian made a documentary about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask.
Bascially, Norway is/was the most gender equal country in the world according to some index, yet the gender disparity in jobs is still very high. Apparently, the more advanced and gender equal a country is, the greater the disparity. The host of the documentary goes and finds some real scientists and they agree that biology plays a role.
Are we actually going to do further research even if the result is uncomfortable? If we find that biological differences are pushing girls to play with dolls and boys to play with trucks, are we going to stop pushing women to go into STEM fields?
> Maybe they just don't like CS or STEM fields in general?
Well that's facially not true: women receive more than 40% of the bachelors degrees in physical sciences, mathematics, and biological sciences.
> The host of the documentary goes and finds some real scientists and they agree that biology plays a role.
The issue I have with the biological evidence is the half-assed conclusions people want to draw from them. For example, it's pretty well established that women place a higher value on social connections than men. So that explains it, right? That explains why Silicon Valley, golden land of open offices built on software for advertising and chatting with your friends, has such a hard time attracting women! And that also explains why medicine and accounting, detail oriented left-brain jobs without much of a social component, attract a high percentage of women?
There is also evidence that women place a higher value on concensus and cooperation. That explains why programming, which involves working together to build things, has a much harder time attracting women than law, which involves being the proxy for acrimonious disputes between people.
> The issue I have with the biological evidence is the half-assed conclusions people want to draw from them.
I hope you place just as much skeptism on the research done in social sciences. Watch the documentary, not a single social science researcher in the doco had any evidence what so ever. They simply dismissed the any research that ran counter to their views.
> For example, it's pretty well established that women place a higher value on social connections than men. So that explains it, right? That explains why Silicon Valley, golden land of open offices built on software for advertising and chatting with your friends, has such a hard time attracting women!
That makes little sense. Having an open office is not going to make the people on opposite sides of the office get up and talk to each other if they really don't want to. And why would the act of writing social software be more social than writing other types of software?
> And that also explains why medicine and accounting, detail oriented left-brain jobs without much of a social component, attract a high percentage of women?
I am not a doctor or an accountant. I won't make assumptions about those professions. This may simply be the overlap area between men and women where these professions have things that appeal to both men and women almost equally.
I'm not suggesting individuals stick to their gender roles. If you want to go and do something, go do it. But I am suggesting that using employment numbers as a proxy for equality could be very wrong and encouraging one gender to do one thing or another could be a waste of time.
Remember, in the countries where gender equality is the best, gender sterotypes are still prevailant and the numbers remain stable. At the very least you have to question the idea that gender roles are enforced by society or that our ideas of what an equal society looks like is wrong.
Do women receive more than 40% of degrees in CS (or CS, maths, engineering, physics which I think are the other degrees likely to feed into a programming job)? My estimate is that the figure is more likely to be 5-20%.
Women receive 40-45% of the degrees in math and statistics, but less than 20% of degrees in CS. The percentage of CS degrees degrees awarded to women is down from 30% in the mid 1990s.
There is no rational "biological" explanation for why women would somehow be "biologically" averse to CS while pursuing degrees in a closely related field at much higher numbers. There is no "biological" explanation why women's interest in CS would drop dramatically over just a few decades.
There are 7 episodes but here is some of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70
Bascially, Norway is/was the most gender equal country in the world according to some index, yet the gender disparity in jobs is still very high. Apparently, the more advanced and gender equal a country is, the greater the disparity. The host of the documentary goes and finds some real scientists and they agree that biology plays a role.
Are we actually going to do further research even if the result is uncomfortable? If we find that biological differences are pushing girls to play with dolls and boys to play with trucks, are we going to stop pushing women to go into STEM fields?