Physics hardly any more applicable to software development than biology is, especially areas like biostats or neurophysiology that involve directly writing code.
But these numbers sure suggest that something is wrong with computer science departments.
> sure suggest that something is wrong with computer science departments.
Why? Why do men and women have to have the same preferences in what to study, in your opinion?
Does the fact that 78% of students in veterinary science are female "sure suggest" that something is wrong with veterinary science?
Since there are so many fields where women vastly outnumber men (and women significantly outnumber men overall in college) a corresponding skew in other fields is a necessary outcome: you simply run out of women to fill those seats, they are elsewhere.
Which specific biological mechanism are you hypothesizing is responsible? In combination with which specific cultural construction of computer science that is somehow inalterable?
Look no further than the evolution of our species up to Homo sapiens. Women and men excelled in different 'occupations' related to providing sustenance (hunter-gatherer) and child rearing activities that were vital to the success of their people/tribes.
Is it that hard to believe that these deeply evolutionarily engrained practices have no effect on influencing how the different sexes value spending their time when we control for income gap disparity in choosing a profession w.r.t work life balance?
It takes a very specific type of person that enjoys staring intensely into a computer screen all day, lost in thought and confined in solitude while being unplugged from the human condition which can make you feel like a robot as the years progress.
Humans didn't evolve to sit in front of an artificial light source and forgo human interaction, regardless of gender or race.
> Which specific biological mechanism are you hypothesizing is responsible?
Testosterone, causing male-female behavioral divergence in general. Excerpting from an email...
"The amount of eye-contact shown by infants at 12 months of age is inversely correlated with prenatal testosterone (Lutchmaya, Baron-Cohen & Raggett, submitted), and prenatal testosterone is higher in males than females." That study seems to be here: [1]. "The amount of eye contact varied quadratically with foetal testosterone level when data from both sexes was examined together, and when the data for the boys was examined alone."
(Why not for when the girls were examined alone? "This may be because there were only 30 girls in the sample, making the resulting model under-powered. A sample size of approximately 60 would be required to give the model a power of 0.8, assuming a similar effect size...")
There's another one about testosterone in girls [2]: "Here, we report that fetal testosterone measured from amniotic fluid relates positively to male-typical scores on a standardized questionnaire measure of sex-typical play in both boys and girls."
That study also references others that directly show cause-and-effect on other mammals: "For instance, in rodents and nonhuman primates, treating developing females with testosterone or other androgens increases male-typical play, whereas reducing androgens in developing males reduces it."
To me, the question isn't whether testosterone affects behavior, it's how much.
There is general two conflicting answer to that last question. One is that the effect is very minor and testosterone make certain behavior more likely to occur if and only if specific environment is present. It is very possible that testosterone effect on sex-typical play is dependent if it is the father or mother playing with the child. In addition such experiments in recent time has undergone a lot of methodology criticism. In new studies on primates they found that testosterone secretion is increased after physical fights among males which correlate to how much they fight. Behavior in this case causes high testosterone levels, rather than high testosterone level causing behavior.
The other answer is that practically every behavior is influenced by a combination of hormones, genes, and environment. Everything from athletic skills, obesity, teeth health, stress, sleep, diet, honesty, politics, and so on. To quote a profession, free will likely do not exist and is only the result of all the different biological systems interacting with each other, the environment, and random chance.
>> sure suggest that something is wrong with computer science departments.
> Which specific biological mechanism are you hypothesizing is responsible?
Apparently the only alternative to there being something wrong with CS departments in particular is a specific biological mechanism? How so? And somehow there must also be a "cultural construction" of CS that is "inalterable". Why?
How about there are cultural mechanisms that have nothing to do with CS departments? Is that a possibility? For just one example, just about every study (and there are tons) shows that a dramatic split in preferences is already present in schoolchildren at an early age. How, in your opinion, do CS departments at universities get to shape those preferences?
Also, I don't understand your apparent belief that if something is biological, it therefore must be unalterable (and the inverse that if something is alterable, it must therefore not be biological). Culture can override almost anything. Survival for example is a strong instinct, yet societies impose death penalties and create armies sending people into battle where they are likely to be killed. So is reproduction, yet some societies impose(d) single child policies.
These are very extreme examples, where even the strongest biological imperatives are overrides by strong societal coercion. But it shows that it would be trivial for society to override all other cultural or biological effects by simply mandating that enrolment be 50:50, and enforcing that mandate without compromise. Easy peasy, but is it something we want?
I think what we want is to maximise freedom, personal agency and potential for fulfilment, not enforcement of specific gender distributions.
You may ask how this is relevant. Well, it turns out that female participation is STEM fields is inversely correlated to the freedom and gender equality of the society, not positively as the blank-slate theorists posit. This is called the (STEM) gender equality paradox.
So yes, there is a large cultural effect, but it goes in the opposite direction. The usual counter to this is that "even in western societies equality isn't 100%", but this is irrelevant, because this is not about absolute values, but about the sign of the change of the dependent variable. And that is a simple boolean: positively or negatively correlated.
And yes, I know that "correlation doesn't imply causation", but that's not the issue here: a claim for causation (cultural forces causes unequal representation) is fairly thoroughly debunked when not even the claimed correlation shows up, and even more throughly debunked when a negative correlation shows up.
So unless some new and very compelling evidence shows up, the idea that the surrounding culture/society causes unequal representation is simply wrong, never mind this odd idea that somehow it is the fault of CS departments.
So if you want freedom, you get unequal distributions. If you want equal distributions, you must curtail freedom.
Another alternative to "something wrong in CS departments" is "something very right" in other departments. Take early childhood education. The skew is very much the same as in CS, just the other direction. So let's assume you have 100 women and 100 men and just these two choices for degree. If 80 of the 100 women go into education, only 20 are left to go into CS. Simple arithmetic.
Is it so unthinkable that women choose education degrees because they want to? And not because "hey, I really wanted to go into CS, but the conditions in the CS department are so horrible that I will settle for early childhood education instead"? And is it so unthinkable to posit both cultural and, yes, biological mechanisms why women might be more into early childhood education than men? Mechanisms that come into play as you remove societal pressures to do otherwise?
In fact, it turns out that a "people vs. things" preference difference is one of the stronger findings in psychology. It is present in infants of a few months. It is present in infant monkeys. It is of course, statistical in nature with large overlaps. Again, how does whatever is wrong with CS departments affect the preferences of infants and monkeys?
As to the study. I am not sure what they were trying to show, but (a) I've never seen CS departments decorated like that (b) it was all hypothetical situations that seem to have little to no bearing on actual decision making and (c) if the decor of the classrooms is the deciding factor in your study and career choices, .... ?
Oh, here's another fun one. A difference in ability and preferences that also has some explanatory power. It goes like this:
1. Men who score high on the math part of the SATs (or similar exams) usually score well only on the math part. On the other hand, women who score high on the math part usually also score well on the verbal part.
2. Irrespective of gender, people who score well on both verbal and math scores prefer non-STEM fields of study.
The short answer is yes, all of the statistics which show a deviation from a priori gender balance suggest that there is "something" going on.
That "something" is almost certainly cultural, since there is little evidence that any group based genetic hypothesis has explanatory power, whereas cultural forces have clearly been shown to impact gender balance. e.g. the right to vote.
Yes. There is SO MUCH wrong with ballet. So much. Like, way more than is wrong with tech or computer science. Just... so much is wrong with ballet.
Of course, while a majority of ballet dancers are women the people who run ballets are almost entirely male, which should give you some insight into what is wrong with ballet.
Indeed, if you want to feel better about tech I have never heard of a tech company where developers were openly expected to sleep with the person running the team to get a promotion, so we are beating the New York City ballet by a mile.
It does not suggest anything is wrong. Seeing any group represented more than another in anything that is due to CHOICE does not correlate to an issue.
"CHOICE" is not a get-out-of-sexism-free card. Anyone who builds products or sells anything to anyone ever should know that we have enormous influence over who chooses to consume our products.
But these numbers sure suggest that something is wrong with computer science departments.