The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

This isn't even a grammatical sentence, but you appear to be suggesting that being told what to read isn't providing a source, which is nonsensical.

Go read: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4391847-18-CIV-00442...

To repeat - for most of what I've written I'm the source. Make of it what you want. What I've seen is consistent with similar claims made by others, many times in many contexts. The tech industry discriminates against men systematically, and it's because of the distorted ideological beliefs of people like you!

That puts the ceiling closer to between 30 and 40 percent[0, for a representative top tier school

GA Tech isn't representative. Even your own linked document says that: "Georgia Tech also awards more engineering degrees to women than any other U.S. institution"

GA Tech is famous for having a much higher proportion of women on its courses than normal. I guess someone told you it's a success story and now it's your go-to example.

They "achieved" this by systematically discriminating against men, which has led to a Title IX complaint against them for no less than ten different programs:

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/title-ix-updates-ocr-opens-in...

They routinely ban men from all sorts of events so if you believe this is an example of an unbiased selection process you're making my case for me. Men are systematically discriminated against and women never are: the disparate outcomes reflect fundamental differences and NOT some sort of non-existent bias against women.

Let's even abandon, for the sake of argument, any desire to see ratios in engineering even approach demographic ratios

You act like it's an absurd position to "abandon", but it's an absurd position to have in the first place. Let's not do for-the-sake-of-argument, let's deal with reality. Nearly all jobs have distributions different to base demography.

Here's a chart you should look at: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce...

You're picking on engineering here, but why not pick on:

1. Kindergarten teachers, 97.% female

2. Dental hygienists, 97.1% female

3. Nurses, 90% female

4. Phlebotomists, 86.% female

5. Insurance claims processors, 85% female

All these jobs are less representative of the population than programming, which at merely 80% male is significantly less far from 50/50 than a huge number of teaching and medical related roles.

If you scroll the list you'll see that most professions aren't even close to 50/50.

“Thing exists” does not imply “thing normal” or “thing ideal”[3]. That’s a common logical fallacy used to justify traditionalism in all forms

Actually this kind of thinking is itself a logical fallacy. You're starting from a base point of assuming you can understand the reasons for absolutely every fact about the world, which clearly isn't the case. To believe you can decide what is ideal in any area of human existence requires a vastly over-exaggerated sense of one's intellect.

What you call traditionalism is really just a starting assumption that when studying complex evolved systems there are reasons for its current state that you may not understand. This is a perfectly rational assumption and made all the time in e.g. medicine. It's an assumption of incomplete information and inaccurate methods, that can lead to creating new problems instead of solving them. It's what led to "first, do no harm" as a medical concept.

When we look at technology it’s especially strange because there is no clear mechanism (outside of social bias) that might explain why we’d see the ratios present.

This is the root of the problem - that belief is pure ideology. The obvious explanation is that women find technology less interesting than men because they're women and women are different to men, in all sorts of complex ways. This statement is like saying "there's no clear mechanism for why almost everyone who works with children is a woman". Of course there's a clear mechanism for it: they're women, they have babies, they evolved to want to care for children as a result and thus women very often enjoy children's company more than men do. The idea that anything other than the base 50/50 case must be bias ignores not only vast amounts of basic evolutionary theory but also common sense.

In the end I'm arguing with you because it's people like you who ultimately argue for and implement anti-male discrimination, on the belief that you're on some grand moral quest to eliminate discrimination against women. But like Animal Farm, the evil you think you're fighting is in fact yourself - the only gender based discrimination I've ever seen in my entire career was done by feminists.

I suspect SO surveys are heavily biased towards younger developers, but even taking those 2019 numbers at face value: about 20% of professional developers have no degree, and of those with degrees it's about 75% CS/information systems/sysadmin/webdev, 17% maths/physics/engineering, and 8% other. So a typical 15-developer team would be 9 with CS degrees, 3 with no degree, 1 with an engineering degree, 1 with maths/science and 1 other. The non-CS folk are not exactly rare unicorns.

I was giving those as examples of degrees that are normal and don't stand out. We don't think there's anything particularly odd about a programmer with a maths or physics degree. That's all I was saying.

> you previously said the best programmers tended to have math, or physics degrees or something similar.

A category which would include engineering, at which point we're at 20-25% of professional programmers with degrees by your numbers (which I still think are significantly biased).

> The point is that you are prone to confirmation bias as evidenced by your belief that it's close to an equal split. Your mental model is overrepresenting people with physics and math degrees likely because it confirms your belief that they are better programmers.

My mental model is that it's an equal split between CS degrees and not, and per your own sources that's accurate. You're fixating on a couple of specific examples of non-CS degrees that I mentioned when that's completely beside the point.