Why is computer science a sausage fest?

I'm not a fan of the male-stereotyping in the article. At best, it's unproductive, at worst, it insults men and so they stop listening.

A lot of the responses here on HN though demonstrate exactly why many women leave software engineering. Read these responses and ask if you like your mother, wife, girlfriend, or daughter working with people who have these attitudes. In an all-male group, the level of misogyny is camouflaged because there are no women to talk about. When there's a woman around, it's exposed, because she is both a target of any misogyny PLUS all the discussion about the drama created by it. Most women cope by becoming "one of the guys" and laughing along when someone makes a sexist remark. The stereotype of the un-made-up geeky female hacker exists because a lot of women notice the difference in how they're treated when they wear a skirt, heels, nice hair, and make-up, as opposed to jeans, sneakers, ponytail. It's a lot easier to dress sloppy and not be made a target.

Another problem is that a significant amount of workplace happiness derives from having friends at work. It's a lot harder to make friends when you're the only woman and you occasionally wonder, "does he really view me as a friend? or is he flirting? that sounded like flirting." Or consider networking - the best way to advance your career. How do geek guys network? It's not usually golf. Networking with geeky guys usually involves late nights gaming, coding, drinking beer (in my experience). I'm not comfortable going to my single coworkers house to play video games and drink beer until midnight, or staying at work coding with a couple coworkers after everyone else has gone home and the secret mini-fridge in the server room has been opened. It could lead to a bad situation with lots of misunderstanding that could ruin a career. Best to just avoid it.

If it wasn't a wide-spread problem, then why does every single woman in the industry feel like it's something she has had to deal with personally? I've been in the industry 5 years and I'm considering leaving because I feel my gender is holding me back. I'm smart and hard working and I can do really well in a field where being a woman isn't going to hurt my career.

I don't put it that way because it makes the causality sound wrong. If you think about men being attracted, then it all sounds neutral and due only to one factor, when it's that men being skewed to STEM makes the fields untenable to women who are, if anything, skewed away from STEM (consider the well-established superiority of women at verbal tasks and interpersonal skills).

The question is not why are the other occupations that Greenspun characterizes as attracting women - doctor, psychologist, lawyer, etc. - so well paid, but why STEM occupations are so poorly paid.

If we thought about it from the perspective of a Martian who has just landed, we might say, 'programming, especially in its niches like embedded or highly distributed scalable, is an intensely demanding task which can be profoundly alien to the human mind, and often requires years of training and experience starting as a child-user just to begin to grok things; therefore, I would expect it to be highly professionalized and to have salaries for its accomplished specialists quite commensurate with specialists in other fields like medicine.'

The Martian, of course, would be quite wrong.

In case you didn't bother to read my Greenspun links, he says that a motivated and very intelligent person - the sort of women whose absence is noted in STEM - could expect in their 40s to collect salaries in specialist medicine in the neighborhood of $300,000, or $500,000 as a law firm partner, or $90,000 as a tenured teacher; he didn't cover child psychologists, though I could swear he did somewhere, but those have similar or higher salaries. Assuming you're even able to get tenure in STEM, your salary will be nowhere near any of that...

A software engineer elite enough to make it into Google will earn - while he's employed there - somewhere around $100,000. (http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm) So yeah.

I'm arriving to the discussion too late to make a fairly minor point.. but I do think that this blog post misses the boat completely on her dismissal of the fastest growing occupations for women.

"We are veterinary technicians not veterinarians, dental assistants not dentists, medical assistants not doctors. We like to believe we have evolved, but the data speaks to something else."

Utterly untrue. Women are not doctors? How on earth can she make a statement like this?

According to this site:

http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/charts1982to2007.pdf

"Since 1982-83, the total number of women entering U.S. medical schools has increased every year (in fact, the annual increases reach back to 1969-1970). Women’s share of the matriculating class has likewise increased. Women went from less than a third (31.4%) of all matriculants in 1982-83 to a high of 49.6 percent in 2003-04. In 2007-08, women were 48.3 percent of all matriculants."

This data is a little old, I wouldn't be surprised if women surpass 50% soon.

I didn't say smarter. You made that up.

If you're willing to accept that men and women have different physical characteristics and different aversion to risk, why then must the brain have an exemption when it comes to ability? Why can't men be more comfortable programming a computer?

And the more important question, why should there be an effort to lure women into computing?

Martin Luther King actually had very similar ideas. The fact is, racism was used as a wedge issue for decades to divide poor whites from the black community to the detriment of both.