You're getting downvoted, no doubt because the thing you remarked is a thing-you-can't-say. I completely missed it myself, but it's very telling: code screen eliminates women in a 28:5 (5.6) ratio, compared to men's 26:10 (2.6). A classic rebuttal is that the test could be biased.
Reducing complex phenomena to one factor so that they can be digested on a 30-second news segment or put into soundbites by any politician is an unwelcome consequence of modern media. I have no doubt many factors cause demographic changes such as the one discussed. Testing for the weight of each factor needs scientific work and controlled experiments which are pretty much impossible to carry out, unfortunately. Until then, things will be talked and written about, but remember, it's all fluff. Someday, some historian will even write the definitive history of women in early computer science, and I have no doubt his conclusions will be as disputed as the fall of the Roman empire is today.
But these discussions will still serve as vehicles for political agendas, most of which will be of the variety "more people should be like me".
Tiny sample size aside, a given woman is nearly four times as likely as a given man to receive an internship offer from Fog Creek provided both have reached the phone interview stage. From there, women are twice as likely to decline Fog Creek's offer, presumably due to having more & better internship options.
Survival rate by stage:
Submitted resume gets reviewed:
1.05 : 1 in favor of women.
Reviewed resume gets a code review:
1.02 : 1 in favor of women.
Reviewed code gets a phone interview:
1 : 1.96 in favor of men.
Completed phone interview leads to an in-person interview:
1.31 : 1 in favor of women.
Completed interview leads to an offer:
2.92 : 1 in favor of women.
Candidate declines offer:
2 : 1 in favor of women.
Easy - choose a domain where pre-knowledge is gender-biased: "Design a web application to manage a fantasy football league", "Implement a D&D character generator", "Implement an optimal queueing strategy to solve the urinal-allocation problem (http://blog.xkcd.com/2009/09/02/urinal-protocol-vulnerabilit... ).
Not suggesting that's what fogcreek do, of course, but just to demonstrate that a coding test could easily have a gender bias - or a cultural one, for that matter.
If a person of any gender can't turn urinal allocation into selecting a subset of range(0,N) of maximal cardinality subject to the constraint that neighboring integers are excluded (assuming my quick skim of the problem didn't gloss anything over), they are a bad developer.
Lots of times you need to develop stuff without domain knowledge. My startup targets women's fashion, which I know very little about. If I were to give up or fail because the problem involves plackets and silhouettes, I'd have already quit and gone back to NJ.
Xkcd is wrong about that as it depends whether the man is a huncher or an arcer. I suppose you're right, only a man would know that. But Joel is well known for Fizzbuzz.
I doubt the compiler is responsible for assessing the test. I also doubt that gender-bias on the part of the assessor is the reason for the disparity though (assuming the disparity in this small sample is representative anyway).
Reducing complex phenomena to one factor so that they can be digested on a 30-second news segment or put into soundbites by any politician is an unwelcome consequence of modern media. I have no doubt many factors cause demographic changes such as the one discussed. Testing for the weight of each factor needs scientific work and controlled experiments which are pretty much impossible to carry out, unfortunately. Until then, things will be talked and written about, but remember, it's all fluff. Someday, some historian will even write the definitive history of women in early computer science, and I have no doubt his conclusions will be as disputed as the fall of the Roman empire is today.
But these discussions will still serve as vehicles for political agendas, most of which will be of the variety "more people should be like me".