Thank you for informing me of those discrepancies – I should done more investigating before posting. I edited my blog post and cited your help.

I agree with some of Brizandine’s detractors in that she overextended herself throughout her book. Indeed, I included a blurb at the end of my blog post to warn against taking her conclusions too seriously.

I’m not sure the entire book is useless, however. At the least Brizandine’s case studies suggest a linkage between estrogen and an emphasis towards relationships, interaction, and emotion. If such traits are not well suited to computer programming (vs. other job types), then that is interesting.

Keegan

But even if this were true, in order for the explanation you posit to be plausible, we’d have to see statistically significant evidence that women choose careers with more social interaction and men choose careers with less, across the board — you’d see more men in relatively solitary occupations, like humanities grad school, and more women in more talkative occupations, like elected politician. What you’re doing is using “technical field” as a proxy for “doesn’t involve much social interaction”, which seems like questionable methodology.

I’m not sure you totally got what I was saying about stereotype threat and implicit bias, though. It’s pretty insidious and affects people on a subconscious level. You say “if programming is a field that you really like, you’re not going to let some alpha male spook you”; this may be true for confident women who have had the opportunity to get some programming experience, but the thing about implicit bias is that it affects people long before they have the chance to even get enough experience to decide whether they like something. So there are probably lots of women out there who would be really into programming if they’d tried it out, but never even thought about it because of these subconscious effects.

You also say you’re not a feminist — but you sound like one! Have you read this essay?

http://sugar2sweet.blogspot.com/2009/07/female-programmers-interesting.html

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=505844

His main points, if you think about them without prejudice, all make sense, and are clearly observable in practice. And his speech is actually rather cautiously formulated. I’d be a lot more straightforward - but then again, I’m not the Harvard president.

I think this has simply got to do with the fact that women on average aren’t as good at solving formal, abstract, complex problems. I’ve seen evidence for this repeated for many years over and over again. It is less obvious at highschool level where problems are primitive and almost all of the population attends (so even the less capable males), and thus girls statistically are similar to boys, or perhaps even better. However, the picture drastically changes at university and post-university level. In hard sciences, there are very few capable women. VERY few. Similar with programming. On a simple level - basic HTML, web design, simple scripting, generally easy-to-grasp highlevel languages - women are still somewhat present. Not a majority, but present. However, if you go into pointer-heavy hardware-near C/C++, Perl, generics, or any other more cryptic and harder-to-comprehend things, women practically disappear. A female Perl or LISP hacker is practically an oxymoron. I’ve never even heard of one.

IMO the only real explanation that fits that consistent picture is that women have more trouble with complex abstract concepts. Which is confirmed by personal experience as well - and not just my own.

It’s just a no-no to say in public.

Ethan — wow, that’s a really good point, yikes! I think most people who look for info on Wikipedia expect some degree of bias in the size of articles (like big, well-researched articles about pop culture stars vs. smaller, skimpier articles about important historical figures), but they probably aren’t also taking into account that the articles’ point of view is influenced by this gender imbalance (there are probably cultural and racial imbalances too — the link you shared doesn’t give country/race breakdowns for contributors but I would imagine it’s disproportionately white Americans).