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
It is a travesty that for so much talk, money and political focus that gender segregation get in our field, we are just so average on the work market. If we split up all the employed people in my nation, about 50% will be working at a profession below the twenty percent line the the other 50% will be above the twenty percent line in gender segregation.

If we only could figure out what is common below and above our field, we might get out of this place in astoundingly average in gender segregation and become exceptional. Whatever is holding men's and women's participation in each other fields may be something fixable.