There was one thing in your excellent article that I feel you missed regarding women in tech. In some STEM fields, relative participation by women has burgeoned in the last two generations. E.g. more than half of biology PhD's go to women now. Yet in computing, if anything, there may be fewer women than there were thirty-five years ago when I was starting out. But I don't believe the bro culture you decry is the reason. It may exist in one sector, but it is definitely not that way in the whole field. The bro thing is very much a feature of entrepreneurial culture--AFAIK, that's the only place you see it in the computing world, and the entrepreneurial part isn't that big. I spent my career mostly in and around NY, and anywhere I've worked, even a whiff of sexist behavior would be a career suicide gaffe. Men don't speak that way about women even when there are no women around. It's just not done, ever. So what's going on? All I can suggest is this story. I was a TA many times as an undergraduate. For a few years I had office hours where students could come to me with programming problems. (The WWW didn't exist yet, so no google, no Kahn Academy. You had to find a human to get help.) One day I went to my professor, who was young and a very good man. A progressive to the bone. I said, "Matt, there's something going on with the women students..." He said, "Stop right there. Tell me if I'm right." And went on to say, almost verbatim, what I was about to try to explain. He said, "The men all come to you saying 'Why doesn't this work?!' and the women all come in saying 'Is it OK to do this?'" It was remarkably consistent and not a feature of any one culture, as the department was very diverse. Majority foreign born and from all over. The women were probably smarter on average than the men, and did better on exams, but there was a profound difference in how men and women approached programming. I don't know why. But it's not that the field is wide open to men and discourages women. That's not how it works--departments and companies would kill to get women in the door. They can't get them. I think there's a fallacy at work. To excel at programming, you have to be obsessed with it to an unwholesome degree. (You are still working while you sleep--when I started out, for the first couple of years my dreams were indented, like pretty printed code.) But probably 99% of men would rather have a root canal than program. The thing is, for whatever reason, 99.9% of women feel the same way. I suspect that the psychological approaches we saw in college are at the bottom. In terms of focus, it's a lot like gaming, another narrow focus activity that attracts far more males than females. You can develop an unwholesome addiction to the kind of behavior that produced "Why doesn't this work?" but nobody gets addicted to the kind of behavior that produces the question "Is this ok to do?" In my decades in the field, we were frequently under deadlines. I often left the office after midnight. All-nighters were not unknown. But that kind of mania for it was 100% men. Even when there were women programmers, the people in the office late at night were always male. I don't recall a woman doing that, ever, even once. I don't say this to complain, I'm not saying women shirked, because most of the men didn't do it either. But of those who did, they were always men, and that says something about their relationship to the activity. I don't know if this striking difference the emotions around programming is nature or nurture. Like everything else, it's probably both. But I do believe that the reason women don't flourish in programming has more to do with marginally fewer of them being unwholesomely obsessed with it.
