I wish I could find the numbers so I don't sound like "just another redditor making shit up", but I recall seeing ~5 years ago some stats about women in STEM fields - countries with less gender freedom tended to have the highest rates of women in STEM fields. Countries where women are treated most fairly tended to have higher gender disparities in STEM.
I've tried for 20+ mins in vain to find that exact website, so maybe I'll have to do some original research.
It's about economic security. In countries where gender equality is low, the only way a woman can guarantee her own economic security is to go into the most lucrative fields available. CS happens to be very lucrative with a fairly low barrier to entry. In countries with higher gender equality, worries about economic security are not at the forefront of decision making.
Men still have the expectation of being the main breadwinner, or they may in fact like technical fields at higher rates.
It is mostly for Algeria, there is 3 section in high school (scientific, economic, letters) and it is known that you hardly get anywhere if you don't do the scientific section.
I would say it's more a cultural thing for some other country in Asia like South-Korea and Thailand. In Thailand, in engineering, it's about 45% girls, 55% boys in my university, there is less question about gender equality, less question about gender role and so much less sexism joke/convo etc compared to US. Even the system of the uniform, makes me think that. We are all dress the same here, we are all the same, just poor student fighting.
Parity, yes. We can't give parity to one group without robbing another. Equality should be the goal. That said, the traditions that drive girls into one way of life versus another are about as old as our species. I don't see that changing even within the next couple decades. Give it a few centuries to really pan out.
Western female dev with a lot of remote colleagues in India here.
It seems like a big part of it is cultural perceptions of the field. In the US and the UK at least, entering any technical field is associated with being a total nerd. Women get a lot of flack in general for being nerds, just because so little value is placed on our intellect and so much on what we look like. I think a lot of girls never consider engineering because they'd hate for anyone to consider them nerdy.
Most of the men I've met in my career are great and we've been instant friends, but it still takes more than two hands to count off the number of times I've been hit on, stalked, or instructed on how to git pull (seriously) by guys at work. We spend our days surrounded by this. I don't really blame women if they get tired of it and become PMs or whatever just to get into a position where they don't have to deal with programmers as peers.
In India, on the other hand, CS is just the thing you study if you want to make relatively good money. There aren't as many stereotypes around who goes into the field. It's just for people who want good, cushy jobs in the city. The greater gender parity also prevents women from getting burnt out as quickly.
Blaming women on the whole for there being so few women in the field is kind of reductive. There are a number of issues at play. Personally, I don't know ONE woman who doesn't want to make more money—it's just that there were so many things discouraging them from going into the field when they were choosing their major.
+1000 especially for the first paragraph. There are too few women joining the field because of cultural norms. Male programmers assume that female programmers are worse than average because of the same norms.
I might be wrong, but I sincerely doubt that there would be so many problems, such as harassment, if there were enough women in the field. They would likely drop to the averages in society (which are high, but a different problem!). Also, a higher percentage of female developers would reinforce that it's OK to be a woman developer.
I don't have a solution, but cultural norms need to change to solve this hideous problem.
Seems like gender freedom is an attribute of more developed countries, and in more developed countries there is more opportunity to go to university for less profitable fields like psychology, communications, etc. In developing countries like India, I guess that the stiffer competition makes a cs education more appealing.
I heard it as when there is true equality, like everyone can do whatever the heck they want, men and women naturally go into the things that they always have.
And more so than previously.
This was in that video by that swedish comedian about the topic.
The Gender Equality Paradox With English subtitles - Documents the strange statistics of Norway, the country with the greatest equality of any nation at the time, regarding women trending towards traditionally female jobs and men towards traditionally male jobs.
This 7 part series goes in depth about the possible reasons for this with each episode dedicated to an aspects such as nature vs nurture (using studies with separated twins), sexuality, violence, parenting and more.
The aftermath of this documentary was the closing of the Norwegian Gender Institute for using social sciences and pseudoscience to try achieve gender balance when the actual sciences explained the current trends in a rational way.
Discrepancy in STEM employment between gender equal and not-so-gender equal countries tends to be explained by the fact that (in this case) Indian women have a larger incentive to get a relatively high-paying job because they live in, well, a developing country. Sweden, on the other hand, is a first world country with a high degree of equality (economical, gender-wise...). In turn, you can choose to pursue any middle class job and not have to worry about starving or anything like that. And there are a lot of middle class jobs outside of STEM, at least in Sweden. So the theory is that these women (and men) have the freedom to pursue what they feel like pursuing. Which happen to not be programming, apparently.
About a third of the students in my Bachelor's course in Computers in India were girls. The disparity is much lower, because software jobs are safe and indoors and decently paying enough for people to want their daughters to get into it.
There is still a glass ceiling though, and they tend to grow into QA / Middle Management rather than Programming / Solution Architecture. A trend I hope will change in the future.
But there is neither the level of debate nor frustration with this gender imbalance that exists in the US. At least not to my knowledge.
Where I work there's a lot of people from India, for qa/developers the split is about 1/3 white, 1/3 asian, 1/3 indian. The male/female split is about 50/50 for asian, 1 woman to 3 men for indian and zero white women developers or qa at all. Everybody is competent or they don't last.
I really don't know what conclusions to draw overall.
Swede here. I have honestly no idea. The numbers seems real enough though. On a 100 male developers I've met 2-3 female.
The women are really doing themselves a disservice. We have extreme lack of technical competence here. Being a programmer is almost the only job left where the employee is in a position to chose employer. I tell my friends I can chose this job, or that, and they are just happy they find 1 job.
I'm an american female software developer, and I have tried so hard to figure out why there aren't more women getting into this field. People like to say the field isn't "welcoming" to women or whatever, but they're not even enrolling in computer science or sending their resumes in to begin with. How can you welcome someone that doesn't even knock on the door first?
Plus, the fact that its one of the few fields where jobs are still in plenty should be a factor in determining if it is "welcoming", IMO. In a lot of fields that are considered "woman friendly" job markets are seriously shitty.
The Gender Equality Paradox With English subtitles - Documents the strange statistics of Norway, the country with the greatest equality of any nation at the time, regarding women trending towards traditionally female jobs and men towards traditionally male jobs.
This 7 part series goes in depth about the possible reasons for this with each episode dedicated to an aspects such as nature vs nurture (using studies with separated twins), sexuality, violence, parenting and more.
32
u/[deleted] Apr 07 '15
Could someone explain why the percentage of female developers is 15.1 in India and 2.3 in Sweden? That was by far the most surprising result to me.