Neurology and psychology studies have shown differences in the way men and women think.
For example, when navigating, men tend to use dead reckoning, while women tend to prefer landmarks.
Similar differences may exist with respect to the modes of thinking useful for engineering. With that in mind, consider that our current modal computer architecture and programming paradigms were designed and implemented by men. There may be some intrinsic bias towards man-thought embedded in the entire toolchain.
As a thought experiment, imagine a computing system designed from the ground up by women, with no input whatsoever from existing systems or concepts. A group of females are placed in a time stasis bubble with no outside communication, and emerge from it only after they develop a computing ecosystem of equal capabilities to the existing one.
With this in mind, now give all new students in the pipeline the option to try out both, then choose between the new system and the old for the entire remainder of their career. In this experiment, try to determine whether, after 20 years, the overall balance between sexes is equal, and whether the balance within each system is biased to one sex or the other.
If Babbage and Lovelace had further developed their computational mills, Lady Ada's influence over early programming might have snowballed, such that software development would have been sex-biased towards women from the start. As it is, the ecosystem currently sex-biased towards men was created mostly by men, simply as a matter of feedback. In order to make the existing ecosystem less intrinsically biased in the future, it needs to be shaped by a less-unbalanced group now.
So the natural biological differences are irrelevant. A fair system would have caused those differences to cancel out or complement each other through equal participation. To make the unfair system more fair, you have to force it, against its natural flow toward unfairness.
That’s an interesting idea, but it sounds like your argument rests on two assertions:
1) Professions tend to become more gender biased over time
2) It was equally likely that computing become a female dominated field.
These are novel claims that require justification. If (1) was true, we should expect to see it in other fields. But many industries seem quite stubbornly gender neutral - for example medicine. (Although many specialties are male dominated or female dominated). And if (2) were true we should see the same profession have different gender biases in different cultures. But I don’t think we see that either. My understanding is that generally the direction of gender bias we see in other highly gender biased fields is consistent cross-culturally. (nurse, prison guard, career criminal, construction worker, child care worker, etc).
"My understanding is that generally the direction of gender bias we see in other highly gender biased fields is consistent cross-culturally. (nurse,"
Your understanding isn't correct, at least for nursing.
Nurses were male until the 1800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_nursing#History give examples of predominately nurses and caregivers in other cultures before that time. http://minoritynurse.com/rethinking-gender-stereotypes-in-nu... says "Before modern day nursing, men were nurses, not women. The earliest recorded nursing school was established in India around 250 B.C. It was exclusively for men; women were not allowed to attend because it was believed that women were not as pure as men."
> Through the efforts of Florence Nightingale in the mid-nineteenth century, nursing was established as a women's profession (Hus, Chen & Lou, 2010). Nightingale's image of the nurse as subordinate, nurturing, domestic, humble, and self-sacrificing, as well as not too educated, became prevalent in society. The American Nursing Association ostracized men from nursing until 1930, when as a "result of a bylaw amendment, provision was made for male nurses to become members of the American Nurses' Association" (In Review - American Nurses' Association, p. 6). Looking back in nursing history, Florence Nightingale, and the American Nursing Association ostracized men from the nursing profession.'
See also http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1365-2648.1997.... , "History appears to indicate that men have had a place in nursing for as long as records are available, but their contribution has been perceived as negligible, largely because of the dominant influence that the 19th century female nursing movement has had on the occupation's historical ideology."
Interesting. Did men actually make up the majority of nurses back then, or are we just talking about fluctuations in how much of a minority men were in nursing? From the wikipedia article you linked:
> The term nosocomial originates from the latin nosocomi, the name given to male care-givers, meaning that men were prominent in Ancient Rome
... If they needed a special word for male care-givers in ancient rome, that implies they assumed care givers were female by default.
One of the quotes I gave included "Before modern day nursing, men were nurses, not women". The files.eric.ed.gov link says "Prior to the organization of female nursing schools and as early as the fourth and fifth centuries, men provided nursing care to members of various religious orders (Cook-Krieg, 2011, p. 22-23), and held the predominant role in organized nursing in western society."
I don't see how you can therefore infer that men weren't the majority of nurses back then.
As for the term "nosocomi", it doesn't imply that care givers were female by default. Latin is a gendered language. A different word would have been applied to female caregivers. As an example from Spanish, think "maestro" and "maestra" for male and female teacher, respectively.
If the Latin only used the masculine form, and never the feminine, then it indicates the job was primarily (or perhaps only) done by men.
Consider the word "maid", short for "maiden" meaning "female virgin." We have a special word for female domestic workers but that doesn't imply that domestic workers were male by default.
Similary, in many English speaking parts of the world, a senior or supervisory nurse is a "sister". This title includes males, eg. from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282839878_Clinical_... "… what was nice there was a senior male sister that welcomed us and orientated us, so that really help me a lot to accept the situation …".
A male sister may also be referred to using the gender neutral term "charge nurse".
Again you see that a gendered term for a given job does not imply that job is usually done by the other gender.
Or, we have "mailman", "chairman", "cabin boy" for jobs which were usually done by males, while "charwoman", "lunch lady", and "call girl" indicate females. The existence of a special gendered term doesn't mean the mail was usually delivered by women, or that prostitutes were usually men.
I don't agree. The gender bias of a profession this year is dependent on the gender bias from previous years. They would only become more biased over time if the previous bias favored hiring new entrants to the field that are more biased.
If there is an imbalance in intrinsic inchoate biases, such as if men tended to unconsciously hire 55% men and 45% women, whereas women preferred to hire 50% each, then an initial 50-50 split, but with no other biases in play after someone enters the field, would drift towards an equilibrium at around .5263 men and .4737 women. More men magnify the male bias towards males.
My other assumption was that early movers have a magnified effect on the future of the field. Think about how any arbitrary decisions made by Turing or von Neumann could still be affecting computing today, like the sign convention for the charge on an electron--that could have been +1 instead of -1, and many of the signs in physics equations would be flipped. If a female had been making those decisions, we might be using a different computing paradigm that would better match female thought patterns. Computing as we now know it initially came about through the confluence of war and academia. Mathematicians designed machines to aim artillery pieces and automate military-grade ciphers, and then to automatically break automated ciphers. The development of computing has occurred rapidly and recently, and after air travel and telephony, such that there really is only one global culture for it. The body of work is already so large, and readily available to everyone, that starting from a different foundation today really does require the fictional time stasis bubble that I described.
You would have to look back into history, when culture barriers were stronger, to look for examples of computing devices that may have been used preferentially by men or women.
> The development of computing has occurred rapidly and recently, and after air travel and telephony, such that there really is only one global culture for it.
I agree and acknowledge that. But many other fields are much older than computing, and arose independently in separate countries (medicine, childcare, law, organised crime, nursing, farming, cooking, construction, etc). If your hypothesis were true we should expect strong, consistent gender biases in all those fields. And we would expect that the dominant gender in different fields would vary across different cultures. But we see the opposite of that in the world - the dominant gender in different professions is remarkably consistent between isolated cultures. In the case of child care its even consistent cross-species.
SSC had a much more in-depth analysis than I'll manage in this comment. The onus is on you to explain why we don't see that actually happen in the world, as would be predicted by your theory.
> The body of work is already so large, and readily available to everyone, that starting from a different foundation today really does require the fictional time stasis bubble that I described.
I understand why this feels true, but in practice it is easier today than it has ever been to make novel user interfaces for programmers and users. There are no gatekeepers between you and your code editor. Please experiment with this; I'd love to see what you come up with.
Before we continue, I'll need you to paraphrase my hypothesis in your own words, so that I can be sure we're talking about the same thing, because I'm not entirely certain we are.
Your argument sounds nice, but does not offer sufficient proof for your rather strong statement "so the natural biological differences are irrelevant". This is a claim which could be scientifically tested. For example researchers could develop two rudimentary tool chains, one for women and one for men. Then they could investigate if in fact they can generate any statistical difference in participation.
It would actually be a rather interesting theory to test, and I would hope someone does test the theory. However your claim is not currently known to be true, rather just a promising theory.
For example, when navigating, men tend to use dead reckoning, while women tend to prefer landmarks.
Similar differences may exist with respect to the modes of thinking useful for engineering. With that in mind, consider that our current modal computer architecture and programming paradigms were designed and implemented by men. There may be some intrinsic bias towards man-thought embedded in the entire toolchain.
As a thought experiment, imagine a computing system designed from the ground up by women, with no input whatsoever from existing systems or concepts. A group of females are placed in a time stasis bubble with no outside communication, and emerge from it only after they develop a computing ecosystem of equal capabilities to the existing one.
With this in mind, now give all new students in the pipeline the option to try out both, then choose between the new system and the old for the entire remainder of their career. In this experiment, try to determine whether, after 20 years, the overall balance between sexes is equal, and whether the balance within each system is biased to one sex or the other.
If Babbage and Lovelace had further developed their computational mills, Lady Ada's influence over early programming might have snowballed, such that software development would have been sex-biased towards women from the start. As it is, the ecosystem currently sex-biased towards men was created mostly by men, simply as a matter of feedback. In order to make the existing ecosystem less intrinsically biased in the future, it needs to be shaped by a less-unbalanced group now.
So the natural biological differences are irrelevant. A fair system would have caused those differences to cancel out or complement each other through equal participation. To make the unfair system more fair, you have to force it, against its natural flow toward unfairness.