One thing all these fields have in common is that they are more intellectually rigorous and harder to succeed in than the computer software industry.
Clearly, they have something else in common. We just need to figure out what it is.
This essay, which invokes the "Google Memo", is subtly attacking a straw man. Even those almost the entire rest of STEM is better than CS, it's true that it's not balanced; it remains deeply imperfect. Physics and mechanical engineering, clustered with CS, remain the province of men. There's a expanse of STEM fields with female participation between 25-40% that you'd want to explain or correct. Is it stereotype threat? Implicit bias? Who knows? Probably not?
But that has nothing to do with why Google has so few women engineers. The work that a commercial software engineer does --- even at the lofty heights in which the profession is practiced in such a cathedral of software design as the Alphabet Corporation --- is simply not that hard; most of it is just wiring form fields to databases in new and exciting ways.
Whatever is holding women's participation in our field at or below twenty percent is artificial, and a travesty.
> But that has nothing to do with why Google has so few women engineers.
Uh. What?
As far as I can tell, it has _everything_ to do with that. These two things are so closely related i cannot fathom how you can make such a statement...
Also... You make the same point twice. To paraphrase you:
a) "academic CS is less intellectually rigorous and less hard to succeed in than chem/etc -- but there are less women in it"
b) "work as google is simply not that hard, just wiring form fields to databases -- but there are less women in it"
For both a) and b) you then point out that they are problematic and that we cannot explain them (and, for the record, I agree with you on both counts) - but they are still unrelated?
EDIT: To reiterate: I think you are right in that the gender imbalance is a problem and is hard to explain. It's just this disconnect that i don't get here...
It may be the case that some intrinsic difference between men an women keeps the field of chemical engineering at 40-60 women/men, or mathematics at 35-65.
But those fields are cognitively more demanding than commercial software development or, for that matter, undergraduate computer science. No cognitive ability or innate affinity explains the degree of disparity in computer science as practiced in industry. If it did, you'd see it in related STEM fields.
The term for an argument gerrymandered around the data to the degree "CS participation disparity is innate" is is special pleading.
What those two have in common are shitty working conditions. Yes, coding is done sitting in climate controlled offices. But it is mostly shit: shit doc, shit managers, shit clients, shit hours, shit tools. Only dumbfucks who don't mind shit conditions for more money would do it.
I'm sure if you checked the gender balance in government coding jobs and in gamedev you'd discover how it is more about working conditions than sexism.
Well, it's more physically demanding, isn't it?
But your point is that there are areas where society screws men over, and that nobody cares, right?
So... Why do you raise that point when the topic is how society screws women over?
Wouldn't it be better to improve society? In both places?