You’ll actually find similar gender disparities in China and India. Maybe not as pronounced as the USA, but it’s still there. Somehow there is something going on throughout the industry that crosses cultural boundaries.
From a sample of 3 countries (two with very traditional gender roles), I’m not convinced. In Eastern Europe software engineering was a female dominated field.
That's the gender-equality paradox, STEM version: the more gender-equal a society, the more the genders self-segregate occupationally.
It's important that this is not about any absolute value, but about the sign of the correlation. The "blank slate" hypothesis would predict that the correlation is positive, i.e. the more gender equal a society, the more equal the distribution.
The opposite is actually the case, the correlation is negative.
This strongly suggests that the statistical differences in occupational preferences have an innate cause. That difference is moderated by societal influence, not caused by it. When societal pressure are lessened or removed, the innate differences manifest more strongly.
And of course, it needs to be stressed that these are statistical differences, not categorical ones, just like the outcomes are statistical and not categorical.
> From a sample of 3 countries (two with very traditional gender roles), I’m not convinced.
These are the three biggest countries (40% of the world population), and also the ones most represented in tech here in the USA, at least (because they are the biggest).
It's a legacy of socialist regimes enforcing gender ratios. Gender disparity is usually proportional to freedom of choice. ie. countries where there's less pressure to choose a particular field are more disparate in their gender ratios across disciplines.
I'm not sure about that, i've hear Professor Emeritus Mallard talk about his youth in the genetical field and the first use of computers to assist geneticists, he told me that he basically never saw men doing computer work, and that changed in the 80s, along with the culture.
> The story i've heard is that the olden days, operating a computer was seen as clerical work, just like being a secretary, so ideally suited to women.
The fact is that in the old days, there really was plenty of clerical work around computers that just disappeared. Like rewritting data to punched cards and swapping wheels with punched tapes. My grandmother worked in 'data-processing facility' in a communist country, the facility employed many women, but they were (from whay i heard) essentially clerical positions without much CS/EE knowledge.
Were they 'into' it though, or did the nature of the secretarial work they were doing change? At least as I understand it, that was predominantly (of course there were exceptions, and female scientists, etc.!) the reason for the rise and fall of it.
I'm not arguing for or against '"Women don't really like this stuff"' - I'm just saying an example against it needs to be women liking this stuff, not merely doing this stuff.
I was born in USSR and I don't recall any aspect there that would amount to "enforcing gender ratios". The way I recall the "gender politics" of the communist 1980s was that formally, gender was effectively ignored; in practice there were quite some prejudices; but the notion of discrimination wasn't even discussed much so anything similar to "affirmative action" or even caring about gender ratio would be quite alien to that regime.
And yes, there were proportionally quite many female engineers and computer scientists. I might guess that this perhaps was facilitated by prejudices/discrimination in the "more macho" fields of construction engineering and industrial engineering, so all the high school girls with good STEM results would go to math and computer science fields instead of all the programs with a focus on heavy industry - but even those had a decent proportion of female engineers.
Not true, at least not in Communist Poland. Jobless single men were sometimes prosecuted, but a stay-at-home-mom was something completely normal in families which could afford it (which there weren't that many of).
I'm not commenting on gender disparities in other countries, although I have seen first hand what you are saying about China and India. What I am saying is that when I hire for various tech jobs, I get a ton of non-American candidates. It can be hard to find good American candidates at times. The demand for the jobs is there, but it's clearly not be communicated to American high school and college kids enough.
I have come to realize that most people have no idea how much freaking money people are making in the corporate world...especially in tech. They simply have no exposure except to opportuities or jobs that take a decade or more to work up to the salary that barely-graduated college kids are being pushed to in tech.
We are talking about whole population segments that dream of one day making $75k. They know that tech pays well but have no idea how outlandish the pay is compared to their experiences and expectations. They think their counterpart is tech is making $10k more than them, when in fact they are probably making $50-100k more.
