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I'll bite. This sort of ultra-shallow analysis fails to explain why the sexism of software developers today is apparently harder to overcome than the sexism of medical doctors and lawyers was decades ago. Somehow women managed to break into those fields, so that in the present day almost 40% of doctors and lawyers (and more than half of medical and law students) are women. I don't see a consensus on what fraction of software developers are women (presumably because there's no official license to be a software developer) but the numbers appear to range from 10% to 20%. That's what the fraction of women lawyers was in the late 80's, and I think it's going to be hard to claim that today's software developers are better at excluding women than 80's lawyers were.
I believe that the claims about sexist treatment are real - even if software developers were much less sexist than average, one woman in a group with nine men would experience more sexism than she would in a less unbalanced environment. I don't believe that sexism is what keeps most women out of software development; if it could do that, it would have kept them out of medicine and law too.
The question to me is what happened in the 1970s and 1980s that resulted in women no longer going into CS based fields?
Why is it that developers used to be 80-90% women, whereas computer engineers was the male dominated field and now IS and IT are all functionally male fields?
Men realized it was high paying with low barriers to entry and did shit like this (Men Overran a Job Fair for Women in Tech) repeatedly until women felt like it just wasn't worth the trouble anymore.
In order to keep barriers to entry for themselves low, they created barriers for others by being loud, forceful and unpleasant. It's very similar to how other minorities were and are kept out of various fields. It's not a new playbook. It's not that difficult to figure out.
Also, there has been a significant shift in the field since the 70's, 80's, 90's and early 00's when uber "nerdy" personality types were prevalent to the modern era of "tech bros" that is kind of the result of the same things and due to the same behavior.
Except behaviour like that didn't exist in my high school, where the IT and IS classes I took were again, almost exclusively guys.
No one in the class gave a shit what gender you were, no one was harassed, but almost no girls had interest in it enough to sign up. This despite half the class being jocks who literally signed up for the class as an alternative math/science credit because they didn't pass the grade 11 science / math class(es).
My mother was in IT in the 1980s but left the field due to a combination of myself, siblings and being laid off due to the change from building sized servers to more modern ones. When she went back she didn't have the credentials or knowledge to be more than data entry.
Hell, I recall shop class in 9th grade was an even split, but suddenly in grade 10 it dropped off a cliff and became a sausage fest.
The issue I can see is that for an unknown reason school aged girls seem to have been culturally dissuaded from IT and IS when the technical revolution in the 1980s took place.
Taking one extremely isolated event that even in the event's own history is unprecedented, and extrapolating it across the entire industry is wrong and dishonest. If it was as systemic as you state, then that fair would have always had that issue, not have it suddenly occur this year.
You may feel that way strongly and want to reinforce your biases with anecdotes. Instead of argue with you in kind, allow me to provide resources going back to 2008 produced by very qualified women that come to similar conclusions. If this isn't enough there's sourced material in these and much more found elsewhere.
The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering, and Technology - June 2008
Athena Factor 2.0:Accelerating Female Talent in Science, Engineering & Technology - 2014
...
(cont'd - 5k character count limit)
If you think women in tech is just a pipeline problem, you haven’t been paying attention - 2015
Women in tech can get out of the mid-career limbo by being themselves–and using this one superpower to get ahead - 2023
Discussion of the same issues and strategies to work around them.
Everything I cited was found pretty easily with this search, and this was all in just the first couple pages of results (there was much, much more):
https://www.google.com/search?q=not+enouch+women+in+tech
These were fantastic comments. Thank you for providing all this information, along with citing sources.
Uses study that ignores occam's razor, imagining a vast conspiracy all through Silicon Valley.
Reality is that working in Silicon Valley (and companies that follow their lead) sucks for everyone. Just women tends to care more about work life balance since they're not trained from birth that their only value is how much money they make.
Tech had a lot of women early when lots of manual labor was needed. Women were making and organizing punch cards, collecting output, and monitoring computers while programs ran. As computers got better the need for these functions was reduced.
I feel like part of the issue is cultural. Just like Nintendo putting video games in the boys section of the toy store, Hollywood has made tech out to be a field dominated by anti-social, awkward, and frankly gross, morbidly obese, barbaric dudes that shower once a year. From Jurassic Park to NCIS, tech people are not "sexy" and are typically quite unsavory.
Some of the newer shows have done better, as have the newer toy isles... and video games and tech do seem to be rebounding, at least somewhat (anecdotally of course).
In my experience working in several countries in Europe it most definitelly is cultural, apparently starting by the proportion of women that get Software Engineering degrees (i say "apparently" because there I only know how it was in my homeland were I got my own degree, were women in the Software Engineering one were half the pupils).
As for the work culture, as I wrote in another post the worst place of all I worked in actually had several women, mostly in low-level management, who were there due to gender quotas, were treated mainly as eye-candy by their own managers and were all over the place in competence (from "competent" to "seriously incompetent"). Worse than the "bro" culture is the one were a certain kind of manager gets a huge budget and is told to "hire 10% women".