Women are just as interested in STEM fields until about the middle school/high school level. What changes around that age? All sorts of external peer pressures.
I work with a lot of women. They're not anything near a majority, but the org I'm in is big enough that there are plenty to speak with. They almost universally have many bad experiences and stories to tell that are specifically due to their gender.
By no means am I saying this is unique to tech, but I do believe it's worse. Even if it isn't, acting as if we've reached gender equality and it isn't common for women to face issues specifically due to their gender in tech, is so off base I recommend you take the time to actual speak with women and listen to them. Over the more than decade I've been in the industry, the amount of women I've spoken to who have said they haven't experienced sexism is easily a single digit percentage.
Do you have a citation for the interest of girls in STEM? And also, especially, citations about the peer pressure? Not my experience from High School - in my Maths class, there were only 3 girls out of 16 pupils.
When I was in school, there was also nobody being encouraged to pick up Computer Science. Boys were into computers despite the disdain by society, peers and parents. On a scale of 1 to 10, how attractive did being into computers make you to girls in High School?
Also, much is being made of the performance of girls in High School Maths, but let'S be honest, Maths at school often is not really Maths, it is calculating stuff. So it is perhaps not the ultimate measure.
Also, significantly more women than men study Medicine or Biology - somehow they don't seem to count as STEM? Why not? Given the choice between Medicine or Computer Science, I am not even convinced that Computer Science is the better choice in the long run. My stance has always been that women are too smart to choose CS - they shun the long hours in front of a screen in a windowless basement, devoid of daylight and human contact.
Interestingly I worked in a DNA sequencing centre - so very STEM related. Around 50% of the staff worked in the wet lab and 50% in the bioinformatics part. Around 50% of the staff were female and the vast majority of them worked in the wet lab part. Most of the males worked in the bioinformatics side. So even within STEM there appear to be some clear divisions with the disciplines that attract females / males.
I'm pretty sure it has something to do with women being pursued by men at that age and generally having better things to do than sit in front of a computer screen throughout their teenage years.
Then, by the time they have to pick a university program, they feel so far behind the computer nerds that they don't feel they can compete or succeed in tech. That and they don't want to be lumped in with the socially awkward nerds that they associate with tech by that point.
> by the time they have to pick a university program, they feel so far behind the computer nerds that they don't feel they can compete or succeed in tech
At the college level, I think that the social gap gets even worse. Women can get into frat parties where they don't know anyone, though they don't even have to because they are much more likely to be invited in the first place. Bouncers at bars/clubs will let them skip the line and overlook them during ID check.
Women are better paid in the services industry which gives them bank roll to sustain their partying lifestyle, although this isn't even needed because they can get people to pay for their cover/food/drinks.
All these privileges drive them away from looking up buffer overflow errors on Stackoverflow late at night.
Historically, the few women in tech were often not the most attractive ones. It seems to have gotten better. Likewise, the male nerds were often not the most attractive ones.
Perhaps there are not that many unattractive young women, so their number is not sufficient to increase female participation in tech by a significant amount.
I work with a lot of women. They're not anything near a majority, but the org I'm in is big enough that there are plenty to speak with. They almost universally have many bad experiences and stories to tell that are specifically due to their gender.
By no means am I saying this is unique to tech, but I do believe it's worse. Even if it isn't, acting as if we've reached gender equality and it isn't common for women to face issues specifically due to their gender in tech, is so off base I recommend you take the time to actual speak with women and listen to them. Over the more than decade I've been in the industry, the amount of women I've spoken to who have said they haven't experienced sexism is easily a single digit percentage.