You lost me at "strong natural interest and affinity." That could've been said for law or medicine or accounting or any of a large number of professions that were male-only until they weren't.
It's also worth mentioning that men actually don't have a strong natural interest and affinity with computers. If you look at males in the general public, very few of them would actually be considered a 'power user' or higher. Regardless of whether it's more or less than women, the fact is that most men don't have an affinity for computers.
This is a good point worth keeping in mind. We're talking about a statistical property of groups of people, and one that is relatively uncommon in both groups.
>It's also worth mentioning that men actually don't have a strong natural interest and affinity with computers. If you look at males in the general public, very few of them would actually be considered a 'power user' or higher.
I disagree, and think that adults who grew up before computers were commonplace are skewing your perception. I was a teenager not too long ago, and as I remember it, personal computer ownership was about even between the sexes in middle class youth, perhaps even biased towards girls a bit because "a boy will just use it for porn." In spite of this, pretty almost every young boy I knew that had a computer, whether or not they were really a "computer person" or grew up to do anything related to technology, was interested in tinkering with their computers in some way. From playing games for long hours, tweaking their configs or even making maps or modding the game, running their own game servers from their desktop (Minecraft is especially popular for this today), to having the spiffiest desktop and theme, to building their own PCs, hanging out on forums/irc channels/etc. and the good ol' fashioned standby of amassing a huge collection of pirated music, movies, and pornography, there were a lot of opportunities for otherwise "normal" boys to get experience in playing with computers and learning something about them along the way. Being good with computers could even be somewhat cool, in a "you're a fucking wizard, dude" kind of way. And to be clear, this is the perception I got from hanging out with kids on all levels of the social spectrum, not just super computer dorks like myself.
In contrast, most of the girls I knew used them mostly for IMing friends. The most "hardcore" girls I knew were involved in communities themselves like Deviantart or the various MMOs, which gave them plenty of their own opportunities to play and learn (for instance, Photoshop is a very complicated program, and sites like Neopets and MySpace taught basic HTML to a lot more girls than boys), but in general a larger proportion of the girls seemed more interested in study, their personal lives, relationships, and "drama" (the "dickhead teenaged boys" I mentioned in another post ITT would blush at the shit that girls do to each other), than in the computer itself or the internet outside of their "small world." I'm not a girl, though, so obviously I don't have the whole story.
With the younger generations, the situation looks similar to me, but with smart phones. It's common and "cool" for a guy to have a rooted/jailbroken phone, get a buttload of apps for free, and customize the crap out of his phone. But while I obviously don't have much contact with teenaged girls nowadays outside of family, the ones I have talked with are more interested in instagramming and snapchatting with their friends than the phones themselves.
People often say that women naturally have more emotional and social intelligence on average than men, so I don't really get why those same people get offended by the idea that men could naturally have more more "systems intelligence" or general interest in tinkering than women on average.
I agree that it seems more boys than girls do things like write mods for games. My point is that just looking at boys alone, ignoring girls completely, the proportion of them that do write mods for games and similar is still well in the minority. Hence my point that males, looked at as a group independently of females, don't actually have a strong affinity for computers.
And no, I don't agree that "all the young people today know heaps about computers". I just left a job where I was the 41-year-old sysadmin and there were a dozen or so twentysomethings. Apart from one or two self-starters, I was the go-to guy whenever there was a problem requiring a bit of computer nous. I'm talking about simple stuff that a power user would be able to do. In the same vein, just because you drive a lot doesn't mean you have an affinity for vehicles. Plenty of people that have driven for decades can barely change their own fluids, for example. Mass usage != mass affinity.
>I agree that it seems more boys than girls do things like write mods for games.
That was a bad example on my part. I wasn't trying to suggest that "most boys mod games" or anything like that, but rather that more "normal" boys than girls are interested in and capable of basic internet/computer-related things like installing a torrent client and grabbing some stuff off of The Pirate Bay, or following a "how 2 jailbreak your iPhone" tutorial.
I'll trust your experience, I'm probably overestimating the competence of the average middle-class twentysomething. To be clear, however, I had even younger kids in mind, early 20s at the latest, that you may not have ever worked with before (being ambiguous about my age is a habit I picked up as a kid pretending to be an adult on the internet, sorry about that). If you consider that PCs and the internet really took off in the middle class in the late 90s/early 2000s, then it's much more likely that someone around 20 now would have had an internet-connected personal computer all to their lonesome since elementary school, while those from in their later 20s probably would not have had one until high school or even college. Likewise, I didn't have a feature phone, let alone a smartphone, until I was in high school, so I just don't really give much of a damn about them, whereas they mean the world to kids that have had them since elementary school.
It's interesting you brought up gaming in your earlier post, as I was just talking about this with my brother.
Most of my programming friends and I (many of whom are women, by the way) first learned to use the command line for PC games. Same reason I first took apart a computer and put it back together. Most kids, then and now, don't play pc games. Back then, most kids didn't play video games at all. If they did, it was a console. That hasn't changed.
You can have an internet connected computer your whole life and never open it up. I'd say the vast majority of people fall into this category. Things work, and when they break, you take them to someone that can fix them for you. The people that aren't like that are usually in my experience people that want to boost performance on their machine, whether it's a car or a computer.
Script kiddies aren't hackers. What you've just described, using a jailbroken phone, downloading tons of apps - that's using a product another person developed.
While I disagree with GP, I think there is a difference here. As GP mentioned, nerds tinkered with computers growing up, despite a stigma. There isn't such a social phenomenon for accounting or medicine, those are things that almost everyone gets into in college or later.
Yet, as I said, I disagree with GP. The word "natural" is misleading, it sounds like he or she is suggesting a natural inborn aptitude, and we don't have evidence to support that. Unless all that "natural" meant here was "commonly occurring, happening without prompting", in which case I would agree.
I'm pretty sure there are females and males who have more natural aptitude or preference for one or another kind of technical work. And they typically are stigmatized as nerds when this is publicly known. We just don't have to suppose that nerds are more commonly male.
It's too bad that it's not socially acceptable just to support nerds regardless of their gender. But that is just more of the same stigma which never really ended.
The interesting thing about medicine and law is that they are professions that deal with human needs and social relationships. As formal barriers were removed, the percentage of law and medical degrees awarded to women steadily increased to parity:
The graph doesn't show the last few years, but I believe medicine is over 50% women now.
Compare this to computer science. I can't find easily find data for Ph.D.s or master's degrees, so here is bachelor's degrees over roughly the same period:
(NB: technically enrollment rather than completion.) That looks to me pretty clearly like a thumb lifting off the scale.
I do not think the quantity of sexism in CS is zero. Yet from my experience of CS and law, I have a hard time believing that there is more bad behavior, (on the order of a 200-300% difference) among computer scientists than among lawyers. Maybe I'm wrong about that?
In any case I think comparisons to medicine and law actually raise more questions than they answer.
At some level of scale medicine and law are about human and social needs, but at that same level of scale, programming is about social and consumer needs. Yet by that chart you posted, the level of CS degrees awarded to women in the era of Twitter is half of what it was in the era of Lotus 123. And what about accounting? Big 4 accounting firms are close to parity. And I'm not sure how different the professions are at the lowest levels. Poring through a spreadsheet trying to tie-up a number that's off isn't much different than poring over a core dump. Yet half the people who do the former are women.
Your first point is a non-explanation. If the conjecture is that the preference for CS is based on inherent factors, that doesn't explain why the preference ratio would change over time. Did the nature of programming change in 1985 and 2003 to make it more attractive to men?
Disclaimer: the sources below are controversial. The below is not necessarily an endorsement of these conclusions, but an attempt to address them on their own terms.
Regarding your second point. At the ranges in question, the male-female disparity is not enough to explain the observed results. I'm going to rely on SAT Math data, because that's more rigorously studied than what you posted. The male-female disparity among people with perfect SAT Math scores is less than 2-1: http://www.aei.org/publication/2013-sat-test-results-show-th.... So that might explain why only 40%+ of math majors are women. It doesn't explain why less than 20% of CS majors are women, or why that ratio has fallen by half even as the field has become less mathematically rigorous.
Also, there is quite a lot of evidence that women outperform their SAT Math scores relative to men: http://esd.mit.edu/Headline/widnall_presentation.html ("He found that women outperform their predictions. That is, that women perform better as students than their math SAT scores would predict. The effective predictive gap is about 30 points.") It is interesting to note that men also outperform women at the upper range of MCAT and LSAT scores, by similar margins. Yet, differences in observed performance in medical and law school by gender are slim to non-existant, and those professions have an even number of men and women, at least at the degree and entry level.
medicine is over 50% women now (everyone at every level) or doctors are over 50% women now? If it's the former, I'm wondering if it has more to do with the industry becoming more equal or if the demand for nurses has gone up much faster than the demand for doctors.
This is not to say that doctors are more likely to be men than women (I happen to think it's roughly equal based on my own experiences), but that nurses are far more likely to be women because nursing is a profession that has been overwhelmingly female, and one in which men are discouraged from participating.
Worldwide, it varies from country to country, but the are more male physicians than female physicians in every country except Algeria, Cabo Verde, Czech Republic, Estonia, Guinea and Mongolia.
All jobs require some dealing with people and some dealing with things. Does that imply no difference between the fractions of the day that software engineers and social workers spend systematizing vs. empathizing?
But let's examine the point more closely: what is the name for the department that is explicitly in charge of managing human needs and social relationships at a large software development company? Who tends to prefer those jobs?
