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.
This is very misleading. Female post docs in the maths are below 30%, and computer science post docs are at about 20%:
https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17310/digest/fod-wome...
There is no really justification to think that the maths "are doing better" than other STEM fields. It's certainly not a double digit difference.
> Whatever is holding women's participation in our field at or below twenty percent is artificial, and a travesty.
That's pure conjecture. There is very little evidence that this is artificial, and a few good reasons to think it's not. For instance, female participation in STEM in more repressive countries like Iran is at 50%, because it's one of a small number of careers they can choose from.
Pretty much every country in which women have more opportunities to choose from a wider selection of careers shows the exact same gendered STEM trends. Do you really believe these prejudices holding back women from STEM are somehow universal in precisely the same ways across dozens of cultures? And furthermore, that the fields that were even more sexist and old-boys-club, like law and medicine, couldn't keep women out, but a bunch of nerds with keyboards are far too scary for women? That frankly stretches credulity.
A better theory that reasonably explains all of this data is the things-vs-people hypothesis:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
You claimed widespread prejudice, which has no supporting evidence.
And you may consider the article I linked to be rambling, but it's comprehensive.
The "people / things" role postulate is interesting, it may explain some of the differences. But I don't think it holds up in all cases (50% of chemist bachelor degrees are female (https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/membership/acs/welcom...) and chemistry really isn't a "people" oriented discipline IMHO).
In general culture, I do think some things get grouped into one sex or another based on pure marketing and image. The marketing style or image itself might play on certain characteristics of the sexes that are biological (for instance, men have more testosterone of course, so men will respond better to marketing and imagery that plays on testosterone oriented characteristics). But this might say nothing about the product itself.
For instance, I see nothing biological at all why in most Western societies, beer tends to be seen as a "masculine" drink and wine a "feminine" one. Rather, to me it seems to be pure marketing positioning at this time.
With CS, there may be some biological explanation which will produce a natural bias in the ratio. But there may also be a marketing / image / "role" component of CS that does depress the ratio as well. IMHO, the marketing / image part of this is always worth challenging.
And there is an ingrained stereotype with computer programmers: the popular image of someone into computers in Western media is, pretty much almost always, a socially awkward, non-athletic, nerdy male. (This stereotype honestly is actually honestly unfair to male programmers that aren't socially awkward or are athletic or aren't terribly nerdy.)
It would be interesting to examine the popular stereotypes and generalizations of programmers in other countries and see if sex ratios differ based on what the positioning is.
The article I linked also discusses similar trends in mathematics, ie. ~50% of math bachelors are also for women. Of course, what you can do with a bachelors in math is become a teacher, which is why the number of women doing grad and post doc math work falls to roughly similar levels as computer science.
There is no comparable horizontal skill transfer for a computer science degree into teaching, so there's less enticement from the beginning, and so less engagement. No doubt some women actually continue with math post docs because they actually find it more interesting than expected, and they change their minds about using the math degree for something else.
As for chem, besides teaching-oriented goals as with math, a lot of chem is closely related to life sciences, pharmacology and other disciplines which typically do show high enrollment among women.
The things-vs-people effect seems quite strong. I agree that it may not account for all of the differences, and this would need to be quantified to be sure, but it does seem to account for the many of them. Certainly much better than the oppression hypothesis, so why is the latter still the prevailing narrative?
> IMHO, the marketing / image part of this is always worth challenging.
Agreed. I think this should apply to all fields, like male nursing, pro dancing and flight attendants, whose stereotypes are typically highly feminized.
But we shouldn't then be up in arms if people still openly and naturally choose to segregate by gender, as seems to be the trend across all nations with high gender equality.