I'll propose a theory which will probably not be very popular, that IT jobs are one of the few "male" support jobs that are marginally socially acceptable, causing intense demand for them by men and crowding out the women who have other opportunities.
If a woman wants a low status / long hours / behind the scenes / support career there are a variety of socially acceptable job fields to enter. Secretary, nurse, day care worker, elementary school teacher, social worker... If a guy wants a similar job there is what, a small amount of jobs ending in -tech like large diesel engine tech aka mechanic, which are rapidly technologizing anyway into "IT plus some grease" and of course IT. And thats about it. So the girls can do anything including IT, but all the guys are stuck in IT.
I would theorize that if you made male nurses, male day care workers, male social workers more socially acceptable, the logjam of male IT workers would decline and you'd approach 50:50 both inside and outside IT.
If every frustrated male nurse / male secretary / male schoolteacher crowds into the IT classes, its going to overwhelm the small number of female exclusively IT students.
I may be off on the root causes but I think I'm onto something with the mechanism of male concentration. Maybe the root cause is a desire to enter an extremely agism oriented field, or a desire for the drama of always being on call and only being visible during disasters sort of a policeman/fireman job for nonathletic people.
Maybe rephrased the general wider class of humans that might like IT or a related field, is sorted by sex such that all the guys get stuck in IT but the women are free to choose, so "naturally" the concentration of maleness in IT is very high in IT and low in other related fields.
Women get to choose, most importantly perhaps they get to choose to stay home when a baby arrives.
They also get to choose jobs that earn less money, in exchange for more pleasantness and flexible work hours, because they have to worry less about being breadwinners for the whole family.
The general public unthinking consumer type is of the opinion there exists only one type of IT person. We all are experts on removing viruses from their windows machines and purchasing the "best" PC or phone, etc.
Career decisions are usually made by kids who are legendary for poor decision making in general and are (intentionally?) not very well informed. It would be interesting to compare the choices made by kids who decide they're going to "do computers" at age 6 vs adults retraining at age 35 (as if on average someone that old will be hired, but I digress)
But surely, an adult who makes a conscious decision to enter the CS/IT field knows about the different domains in a much more real sense. Why would a woman not choose a CS career path in that case? She would know the difference between a technically challenging programmer position vs a support desk job.
The humans I've run into who didn't choose a IT career path definitely know nothing about the difference between programmer, sysadmin, and helpdesk, not even that the differences exist. If I didn't have an uncle in the biz I wouldn't even know there's a categorization of rough/structural carpenters and finish carpenters. I don't think most people make career decisions based on extensive rational data gathering of the whole human experience of work before picking a career.
If a woman wants a low status / long hours / behind the scenes / support career there are a variety of socially acceptable job fields to enter. Secretary, nurse, day care worker, elementary school teacher, social worker... If a guy wants a similar job there is what, a small amount of jobs ending in -tech like large diesel engine tech aka mechanic, which are rapidly technologizing anyway into "IT plus some grease" and of course IT. And thats about it. So the girls can do anything including IT, but all the guys are stuck in IT.
I would theorize that if you made male nurses, male day care workers, male social workers more socially acceptable, the logjam of male IT workers would decline and you'd approach 50:50 both inside and outside IT.
If every frustrated male nurse / male secretary / male schoolteacher crowds into the IT classes, its going to overwhelm the small number of female exclusively IT students.
I may be off on the root causes but I think I'm onto something with the mechanism of male concentration. Maybe the root cause is a desire to enter an extremely agism oriented field, or a desire for the drama of always being on call and only being visible during disasters sort of a policeman/fireman job for nonathletic people.
Maybe rephrased the general wider class of humans that might like IT or a related field, is sorted by sex such that all the guys get stuck in IT but the women are free to choose, so "naturally" the concentration of maleness in IT is very high in IT and low in other related fields.