zlacker

>>andren+(OP)
Once again: compared to other STEM fields, women participate less in CS than any other field except physics. By double digits percentage more in mathematics PhDs. Statistics is almost 50/50. Several rigorous earth sciences fields --- chem and biochem, for instance --- have 50% or greater female participation.

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.

>>tptace+Ti
Yeah, and after all those words about how even in advanced gender equality countries differences persist they offer the following qualitative reason for it:

> The sex difference in interest in people extends to a more general interest in living things, which would explain why women who are interested in science are much more likely to pursue a career in biology or veterinary medicine than computer science.

Right, so because as a woman she intrinsically like people more, my friend is now doing a postdoc about moths?

>>Siempr+Wj
Not to mention that there's nothing touchy-feely about biochem, which is chem except you take orgo almost immediately. But the prefix "bio" in it allows them to dismiss it.

>>tptace+4l
This is a misstatement of what the biochemistry coursework I am familiar with looks like.

Biochem, when offered as an undergrad program, is offered through the biology department and has a number of standard biology department requirements that would be elective at best for chemistry undergrads. Biochem majors also take orgo following gen chem, just like chemistry majors.

I don’t know what “touchy-feely” means in this context, but “chem except you take orgo almost immediately” does not match with my experience at all.