Why we don't need more women in tech... yet

I'm not sure this argument stands up to the facts. Women have been pouring into every discipline over the past twenty+ years. That's a significant number because we're now talking people born in the 1990s, which can not be said to be a decade untouched by feminism. Women are graduating with more degrees then men now, women are the majority on campus, and the proportions are rising. Every discipline, engineering and computer science no exception, has been soliciting for women and minorities for decades now.

And yet, as pointed out in the article, the percentage of computer science degrees awarded to women is going down, which I think is an acceptable proxy for the presence of women in tech. Yet numerous other "male" fields have been entered and in some cases dominated by women. The very same women who were raised on Barbies and ponies.

Is the only theory that fits the facts that somehow, virtually uniquely across all the fields into which the women have come streaming in, despite equal if not at times greater solicitation for women to come in to the discipline, computer science has somehow escaped the incredible dominance of political correctness on campuses and managed to create this fantastically and uniquely hostile environment for women, and therefore has some sort of major responsibility for changing itself? The only hypothesis?

What about this one: In an environment where a thousand voices are shouting for the women to come study $X, it doesn't take very much of a natural disinclination towards a certain discipline for it to very, very rarely be the top choice for a woman. It's not as if there aren't disciplines unbalanced every bit as much in favor of women, and for the same reason; it doesn't take much natural disinclination, for whatever the reason, for a field to very, very rarely be the top choice for the man.

Every year that goes by like this, every year that the STEM initiatives get even more strident and better funded, every year that women continue streaming from our very-politically-correct lower schooling systems into our very-politically-correct higher schooling systems and choose not to study computer science, I find the hypothesis that computer science is somehow deficient that much less compelling. If computer science were any more solicitous of women we'd have to draft them.

(Note: For once I do not necessarily mean "politically correct" as a slur. For the purposes of this message, I merely mean that the idea that primary or higher education has been systematically structured against woman for the past twenty years is absurd. The suspicion of sexism in this environment, in this timeframe, is enough to end your career advancement, if not your career itself. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to consider a hypothesis other than the "deck is stacked" hypothesis that we've been using for something like fifty years now and consider just for a moment some other hypotheses, in the interests of science.

I am also confining myself to the question of the education time; even if the workplace is somehow hostile to women today, the ultimate solution to that problem is graduating more women into it; between that and the copious and rather strong laws on this front it'll work itself out after that.)

I'm not entirely convinced that "society starts conditioning for gender roles very early". You'd have to show me hard data. On the other hand, there is fascinating evidence to prove the reverse:

Case in point is David Reimer, who received the first ever sex re-assignment surgery conducted on a developmentally normal child at age 22 months. David became Brenda.

"At age 2, Brenda angrily tore off her dresses. She refused to play with dolls and would beat up her brother and seize his toy cars and guns."

http://www.slate.com/id/2101678/

That's pretty sexist, isn't it?

I largely agree with the conclusion, but where are all these people who claim that women working non-tech jobs in tech companies magically count as tech jobs? This is the first time I've ever heard the issue framed this way. I've always heard it framed as a problem with the number of women choosing CS and math degrees and making it out to industry.

Well, it's hard to argue with her basic claim, which is that it's not at the college or at the job-recruiting level that we need to focus our attention if we want to be more gender-balanced; it's on the little kids. Speaking as a college educator, I can confirm that the social biases are already set, if perhaps not in stone.

I guess you could claim that gender-balancing the field is undesirable, which is strange, or that it is impossible, which is an interesting claim but I'd need more evidence. But otherwise you'll need to look at the little girls and work from there.