It's well known that men generally are stagnating economically, while women are catching up. In many metro areas, single women out earn single men.
And so I came across this paper[0], which had some interesting research about that. And what struck me was this: there's an explicit assumption that men have worse socio-emotional skills than women, and that can be used to explain the gap.
By itself, I don't take any issue with it. It's true. But if you turned it around and explained the CS gap starting from the assumption that men are disproportionately represented among the upper levels of spatial and mathematical abstraction skills, there'd be an uproar. Petitions would be signed, scalps would be taken. I say that as someone who thinks much of those differences can be explained by childhood socialization.
And you're not even allowed to talk about it. I'm hesitant to post this comment, for fear someone might hunt me down and dox me to my employer. (Even now, I ponder if I should be making a throwaway account.)
In real life, I had been willing to have conversations about this because I find it an interesting and nuanced topic. But now both sides have taken to treating anyone who doesn't take a stance of complete agreement with their respective ideologies as the Enemy.
It's creating a class of people who know just to shut up and withdraw from any discussion about the topic, because there's clearly no good that can come from it, either socially or professionally. Even academics. And I genuinely don't get why anyone would want that.
I’ve mentioned it repeatedly on HN and have never so much as gotten a rise out of anyone. (I should also point out that the SAT folks publish a detailed report on SAT gender differences each year and nobody blinks an eye.) The problem is that it doesn’t explain the disparity in STEM—it cuts against it.
Men outrepresent women about 2:1 among perfect SAT Math scores. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this represents a real difference in mathematical ability. Even if programming ability were 100% correlated with mathematical ability, you’d expect a much higher ratio than you see in practice. That is strong evidence that women are kept out of STEM for other reasons. Beyond that (1) the pool of programmers isn’t just people with perfect SAT scores—the representation gap rapidly disappears as you go from top 0.5% to top 5%; (2) professions leverage other competencies too. The same 2:1 difference shows up in the top percentile of the LSAT and MCAT, but those fields are more gender balanced because women applicants tend to have better college GPAs.
Anecdotally: I went to a competitive admissions STEM high school, where admissions is gender blind and based heavily on an SAT-like test. The ratio was about 60:40 boys, about what you’d expect from the required testing percentiles. CS was required for all students so it is gender balanced. But APCS was overwhelmingly boys, not because it was full of the best math minds, but I suspect because we’d play DOOM if we got our assignments done early.
I might be boiling down your comment down to that one line, but it such a common line that I feel the need to point out some data. Here in Sweden about 12.5% of the population, men and women, work in a profession where the gender segregation is not higher than 150% dominance for a single gender.
The other 87.5% of the population all work in a profession which is seen as extremely gender segregated. We could describe it as if the wast majority of the population is keeping people who don't gender identify similar to their own out of the work market for which they themselves work in. Evidence that men are kept out of 87.5% of the professions that women work in, evidence that women are kept out of 87.5% of the professions that men work in. In a nation which pride itself on equality, we could claim that there is evidence that the wast majority of everyone here is actively being sexist in their professional life.
When looking at numbers to explain whats going on in society, I feel that the discussion often lack perspective. A ratio of 60:40 is actually within that small minority of 12.5% that is recognized as gender equal, and yet many feel that it too is unacceptable high level of gender segregation.