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.
In some cases, there is some genuine concern behind the rant -- some of the stereotypes out there that some people hold are indeed downright oppressive. However, a lot of the times, accusations of malicious oppression are probably overblown, even if there truly is some stereotype out there that is facilitating the divide to some degree. Often the stereotype and prejudice might exist, but more because of social construct, not because of malice.
So angry rants about the situation are probably the least productive way to look into this problem. And yes, as you say, stereotype issues affects all professions. Once we resolve this problems (if we ever do), I agree there is no reason to be concerned about natural drift.
Right, it wouldn't bother me so much if the academics pushing the "oppression" narrative were a little more honest about how non-robust the evidence is. Instead, it's often just conveyed as fact, which just blows my mind. No wonder there's so much manufactured outrage on college campuses these days.
Like when the Damore memo came out, and academics on both sides lined up to agree and disagree with Damore's points, which often just devolved into attacking straw men. I was thoroughly unimpressed with the quality of the arguments I read and how uncharitable people were with the people disagreeing with them.
Edit: Like, there are literal studies [1] demonstrating how much better a theory things-vs-people are in explaining the STEM gender divide, but the narrative seems immune to facts and better theories.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018...