Something I’ve been for a while now is why this gender disparity is so strong in this specific area of engineering compared to all other engineering areas. People seem to claim it’s because of the “geek” stereotype, but that seems more like a symptom than a cause and I fail to see how it enforces this disparity, considering there’s nothing preventing a woman from being a geek too.
the actual reason? Nobody pushes women into the field of CS. Back in the 80s and 90s it was a similar thing, boys were fucking around with computers and software, not girls, it was considered to be a boys thing back then, and it still is now, because women are moving more frequently into higher expertise fields more often than not. CS while incredibly complicated, and difficult, is also just code monkey simulator at the end of the day. You could just write a PHD thesis on some mathematical shit and be as involved with CS while having been a mathematician instead lmao.
Nobody pushed me into this field, I followed it because I liked it. Same thing with kids messing around with computers in the 80’s. Nobody was pushing boys to do that, they just did. For some reason more men enjoy working with computers than women. I’ve worked with a few female coders, and they were good at their jobs, but women are definitely a minority in the field.
May have something to do with computers as they exist being defined by male psychology. Well, it’s understandable why swords, guns, rockets are, and same with computers.
Basically sending instructions to change state. I don’t know how can a computer exist which doesn’t work like this and is still usable for the humanity, but this seems to be psychologically a bit more of a male thing. Maybe there’s nothing problematic for women but aesthetics there.
If it’s something deeper, then maybe some analog optical\quantum\whatever computers of the future will push us to change paradigms for some drastic change in efficiency. And maybe those new paradigms will be more appealing to women.
I probably would have gone into tech earlier if I’d had a female role model in tech. When my (male) friends started programming in high school, I was very interested and wanted to learn it too. But it literally didn’t occur to me that I could, until ten years later, when I was already far along in a study in the humanities. I ended up in data/ software development in the end, but it took me ten years longer because I didn’t realise earlier that it was a field I could get into if I wanted.
So long story short, it’s not just a matter of interest, there are societal factors that play a role too.
Which is ironic, because women were the “code monkeys” of back when human computers were a thing - humans actually doing the computing by hand; and most of them were women.
Something I’ve been for a while now is why this gender disparity is so strong in this specific area of engineering compared to all other engineering areas. People seem to claim it’s because of the “geek” stereotype, but that seems more like a symptom than a cause and I fail to see how it enforces this disparity, considering there’s nothing preventing a woman from being a geek too.
In countries like India and China where women are less free to choose quality of life and human connections over money, a lot more of them go into IT.
the actual reason? Nobody pushes women into the field of CS. Back in the 80s and 90s it was a similar thing, boys were fucking around with computers and software, not girls, it was considered to be a boys thing back then, and it still is now, because women are moving more frequently into higher expertise fields more often than not. CS while incredibly complicated, and difficult, is also just code monkey simulator at the end of the day. You could just write a PHD thesis on some mathematical shit and be as involved with CS while having been a mathematician instead lmao.
That’s my guess at least.
Nobody pushed me into this field, I followed it because I liked it. Same thing with kids messing around with computers in the 80’s. Nobody was pushing boys to do that, they just did. For some reason more men enjoy working with computers than women. I’ve worked with a few female coders, and they were good at their jobs, but women are definitely a minority in the field.
May have something to do with computers as they exist being defined by male psychology. Well, it’s understandable why swords, guns, rockets are, and same with computers.
Basically sending instructions to change state. I don’t know how can a computer exist which doesn’t work like this and is still usable for the humanity, but this seems to be psychologically a bit more of a male thing. Maybe there’s nothing problematic for women but aesthetics there.
If it’s something deeper, then maybe some analog optical\quantum\whatever computers of the future will push us to change paradigms for some drastic change in efficiency. And maybe those new paradigms will be more appealing to women.
I probably would have gone into tech earlier if I’d had a female role model in tech. When my (male) friends started programming in high school, I was very interested and wanted to learn it too. But it literally didn’t occur to me that I could, until ten years later, when I was already far along in a study in the humanities. I ended up in data/ software development in the end, but it took me ten years longer because I didn’t realise earlier that it was a field I could get into if I wanted.
So long story short, it’s not just a matter of interest, there are societal factors that play a role too.
Which is ironic, because women were the “code monkeys” of back when human computers were a thing - humans actually doing the computing by hand; and most of them were women.