Some actual expert was on TV talking about space, a European space probe I think, wearing his Hawaiian shirt with ludicrous SciFi babes on it, and a certain type of person kicked off declaring that somehow SciFi babe Hawaiian shirt is misogyny incarnate or something.
The main outcome for me was that now two different friends own sofa cushions with the identical fabric pattern, they're a bit... garish? Both these friends are women, one of them is a bona fide scientist with a PhD and everything, so evidently the "No to SciFi babes on Hawaiian shirts" misogyny claims were less "mainstream feminism" and more "I'm just looking for reasons to be angry", but whatever, that's culture for you.
From my experience as a programmer, while some level of communication is certainly important, most of my time and effort is spent concentrating alone at the task at hand. That's the central part of the job, communication only supports it. Communication is necessary to divide work across the team and exchange experience; it also provides some psychological relief and motivation. While all of these are important, I consider the concentrated mental effort a far more important and difficult part.
Right, but isn’t this true about many other fields that women do go into, like art, design, medicine, journalism, earth sciences, finance, research, etc? In these fields, the “meat” of the job is also analytical and done alone, but they’re still seen as more social than CS.
I used to be like that when I was younger and in earlier stages of my career. As time passed, the pride of achieving the status worn off, as did the novelty of problems I was solving. Many problems turned out to be reoccurring, so I moved on to harder and less mundane problems. I keep doing that to this day - moving away from mundane work to something new and/or more difficult.
At the same time, as I grew older, my social life improved, and I learned to understand humans, so that part became easier.
It's when you talk about young men in kinder gardens that you realize how ridiculous this whole discussion truly is. There will never be 50:50 young men to young women in kinder gardens. Not even 20:80. That much is obvious.
Most young men do not like to be with children. Most young women do not like working in car repair. While none of these claims are sufficiently substantiated in research, if the first can be true, then surely the second one can be, as well?
IMO the only reason is that IT looks relatively clean and easy job for nice money.
Although after working in the field for over a decade, I don't really think that's true. While it's clean physically, mentally it's totally different story. Personally I'm on the line if I want to keep doing what I love or if I switch to something more sane.
> why we have any reason to believe that programming is a “masculine” profession
By exclusion: we have checked everything else we could think of and found no other logical explanation for the disparity of sexes in STEM. That doesn't mean women's preference is the true underlying reason, but then, we don't have a better explanation, or even any other explanation consistent with facts. Still, AFAIK, Damore never claimed it was THE reason, he just raised it as a possible and the likeliest explanation - given no other explanation seems to work.
> But in India, the vast majority of teachers are men.
I don't think India is a valid example here, because there is still a lot of inequality in that society. Let's talk about countries on the higher end of the equality spectrum, like Finland or Sweden.
> those fields are cognitively more demanding than commercial software development or, for that matter, undergraduate computer science
... you arrive at
> No cognitive ability or innate affinity explains the degree of disparity in computer science as practiced in industry.
Even if software development is "cognitively less demanding" in every sense (though I'm not convinced there is just one universal kind of cognitive ability), it may still be that women do not possess the "innate affinity" for it - namely, they do not like working in it, preferring other fields instead. To my understanding, there is nothing to contradict this explanation, and it makes perfect sense.
> it may still be that women do not possess the "innate affinity" for it - namely, they do not like working in it, preferring other fields instead. To my understanding, there is nothing to contradict this explanation, and it makes perfect sense.
There's no evidence supporting the supposition that there is an innate ability gap. Social explanations are supported by the evidence and that's why people are trying to change the field to be more welcoming.
One of the key things to remember is that this isn't some fixed quantity – any argument for innate characteristics would have to explain why the rates started going down in the 1980s despite the field becoming increasingly popular and lucrative over the same decades and not seeing a similar trend in comparable fields such as math:
> There's no evidence supporting the supposition that there is an innate ability gap.
First, this is a straw man argument: I never argued for "innate ability gap". I argued for "innate affinity", which I understand as (quoting myself) "they do not like working in it".
Second, I never claimed there was evidence to support the correctness of "innate affinity" argument. I only claimed that it is a possibility, and OP should not have ignored it.
Third, there is no consistent evidence supporting "social explanations", and that's why people resist attempts to "change the field to be more welcoming" at the expense of hard-working, deserving white males.
> any argument for innate characteristics would have to explain why the rates started going down in the 1980s despite the field becoming increasingly popular
How about the moral imperative "we should treat men and women the same", as opposed to "women are heavily oppressed, we must discriminate in their favor"? Would that imperative be justified by stating a difference?
