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.
> those fields are cognitively more demanding than commercial software development or, for that matter, undergraduate computer science
... you arrive at
> No cognitive ability or innate affinity explains the degree of disparity in computer science as practiced in industry.
Even if software development is "cognitively less demanding" in every sense (though I'm not convinced there is just one universal kind of cognitive ability), it may still be that women do not possess the "innate affinity" for it - namely, they do not like working in it, preferring other fields instead. To my understanding, there is nothing to contradict this explanation, and it makes perfect sense.
There's no evidence supporting the supposition that there is an innate ability gap. Social explanations are supported by the evidence and that's why people are trying to change the field to be more welcoming.
One of the key things to remember is that this isn't some fixed quantity – any argument for innate characteristics would have to explain why the rates started going down in the 1980s despite the field becoming increasingly popular and lucrative over the same decades and not seeing a similar trend in comparable fields such as math:
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
First, this is a straw man argument: I never argued for "innate ability gap". I argued for "innate affinity", which I understand as (quoting myself) "they do not like working in it".
Second, I never claimed there was evidence to support the correctness of "innate affinity" argument. I only claimed that it is a possibility, and OP should not have ignored it.
Third, there is no consistent evidence supporting "social explanations", and that's why people resist attempts to "change the field to be more welcoming" at the expense of hard-working, deserving white males.
> any argument for innate characteristics would have to explain why the rates started going down in the 1980s despite the field becoming increasingly popular
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...