All the talk of discrimination against women requires that they be helpless damsels in distress in all this, when their dominance of college graduation suggests the opposite.
Biology is not "preventing" women, it's directing their inclination. Women have a ton of opportunities, and it's just as likely that as CS blew up they decided they didn't want to and didn't need to take on the long hours and relative social isolation that professional engineering entails.
No, it does not require women to be damsels in distress and to suggest that is to be highly disengenous. It requires discussing greater trends in terms of what career paths women are considering and general industry trends. Women may be a majority of college grads, but that says very little about what they choose to major in, what states they're located in and so forth.
And making biological arguments without any sort of citation or statistical inference is illinformed. You haven't explained what exactly caused the trend reversal in the 80s other than an incredibly strained appeal to biology, which also mischaracterizes software engineering as a whole. Professional engineering is hardly a socially isolated career.
> lack of parental leave policies in most software firms that would allow their partners to stay at home should a child be born in their household,
I've never heard of such a policy, or perhaps I'm misunderstanding your comment. Are you suggesting that companies should have policies that affect what the spouses/partners of employees do in terms of caring for children? Why would an employer have any right to say what their employee's spouses/partners do with their time? Or are you suggesting that employers should somehow provide compensation in this situation? I also don't understand how that would work (and I don't think the lack of such policies is specific to software firms).
Wow, indeed they do. [1] Do any other companies? The original comment indicated that such policies were not common at software companies, but Amazon is obviously a software company...
I'm not sure how this proves the point that the lack of such policies at tech companies discourages women from working there. Only one company has been mentioned as offering this policy, and it's a major tech company. Are there others? Are there fields where it is common?
I've never heard of it before now, and I worked for years as a corporate lawyer. And my lack of awareness isn't because I'm a man, as you've implied — my wife has also never heard of such a policy (and she works outside tech). Both of us have heavily researched the leave policies in our respective fields, as we have used them on multiple occasions.
If there are a bunch of non-tech companies offering this policy, then perhaps that could lead to your conclusion that it's one of the reasons women choose other fields. But based on what has been described so far, it's equally likely that this is an incredibly rare policy that does pull people into or push people from the tech sector. If there are sectors where this is common, please enlighten us!
When you can make a new person and shape their entire life vs. being largely secondary to that role, that completely alters your horizon of opportunities.
Visualize it like large numbers of people are creating characters for an RPG.
For the female version of the character generator, "mother" is a class with a shitload of XP bonuses and it's the only way to complete the "bear a child" quest. Not all of them are going to do it, many will multi-class, but they have very strong non-economic incentives to do so.
You're making a logical error here in assuming that it's related to biology.
If we were to assume that biology is the reason why women avoid certain fields, then this logic should hold true irrespective of the amount of gender equality a region might have. In fact we should assume that the two factors should compound: That is, if a region heavily discourages women from entering into STEM careers then that combined with their biological inclination to avoid said careers means we should see the numbers crater.
So given that this hypothesis does not hold to be true we can clearly show that it's not biology that's the case. It's far more complex than that and is the result of various social and economical factors. Reducing the entire argument into 'it's biology' does a disservice to examining social trends and is mentally rather lazy in my opinion, considering it can be easily used to explain everything.
Biology is not "preventing" women, it's directing their inclination. Women have a ton of opportunities, and it's just as likely that as CS blew up they decided they didn't want to and didn't need to take on the long hours and relative social isolation that professional engineering entails.