Statistics [1]: 56% of women in technology leave their employer mid-career, and 24% of these women take a non-technical job with a different employer. "This is double the turnover rate of men."

It would appear, then, that actually something does happen between high school and death which decreases women's interest in CS. It is not due to women leaving their career for family either, since many of this 56% decide to continue working, but in a non-technical role.

Thoughts?

[1]: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-state-of-women-in-te..., no 10

I'm one of those 56% of women who left mid-career for a non-technical job; I don't have a family of my own, so that wasn't a contributing factor. Sexism was not the primary reason why I left, but it was a major factor in my decision. I returned to the field after a decade because no other job has been as satisfying as coding is, but it's still a really unbalanced field.

The things that most guys don't get is that it's usually not anything they consciously do. It's unconscious behavior. The one I wrestled with the most - and still wrestle with - was the unspoken assumption that because I'm a woman that I'm not technically competent. If I enter a technical conversation with male colleagues, their default stance is that I'm either less knowledgeable than they are (even if I'm the senior dev), or that I'm wrong. Either I get challenged and attacked on what I say, or I'm talked down to like a child. My male colleagues don't treat other men this way, even if the men they're speaking to is non-technical.

It's also about isolation. I'm on a team of 30, but counting myself, there's only two women. The only thing that's unusual about it is that there's two of us. It's far more common for me to be the only woman in the room. I can count the number of female developers I've worked with on one hand with fingers to spare. Tech is an incredibly isolating field for women; we're in an environment that is frequently uncomfortable (and sometimes outright dangerous) with very few allies and even fewer mentors and leaders. The women mentors and leaders we do see are often publicly lambasted and denigrated for existing, or harassed completely out of the field.

It's not getting easier to be a woman in tech, it's getting harder. Used to be I could connect to other women techies online without much difficulty; now we find our community spaces overrun with trolls and strident voices about phantom spectre of "the SJW". I can't read about women coders on places like Slashdot or HN without the legions of comments about how feminism is evil and women are inferior. I'm a developer in a highly specialized field, and I have seriously considered ceasing any contribution to the Internet outside of my code deployments, because there's only so much harassment one person can take before they just give the fuck up.

I really appreciated this comment. As a black software engineer I feel I've experienced a lot of the same condescension and isolation in my career. Most days it isn't so bad that it makes me want to quit, but sometimes it is that bad. I can definitely understand how someone could get to the point where she would want to leave the field altogether.

I liked the parent article, but what I think the author misses is that the dismissiveness we sometimes encounter from collaborators isn't just about hurt feelings or disrespect, but can actually pose a serious obstacle to solving the problem at hand.

I'm not sure how you jumped from A to B there? Yes, this is an anecdote, but I know more than a handful of women who were in non-technical roles to begin with, started a family, and then entered a completely different industry when they went back to work. Most of them just didn't like what they were doing in their old job.

You quite possibly have a valid and correct point, I'm just having a hard time justifying it based on my own experiences.

I would posit, that this "something," if it exists, is also experienced by older programmers and by programmers who, for whatever reason, have a harder time presenting themselves as a "Standard Silicon Valley guy."

As an oddball older programmer, I would attest: I strongly suspect this "something" definitely exists.

That "something" is bias and is going to be impossible to overcome so long as we let human emotions be involved in decision making processes. The best you can do is recognize them and try to overcome them (when appropriate), but they are still there (and you are then just being biased with your anti-bias, since you are more likely to catch your known biases).

The latter assumption in particular is one that I find highly dubious. This is only anecdotal, but I have noticed that many more of the women I meet in software started coding later in life than the men -- college or later. It's more likely to be a second or third career. Sometimes it was an aptitude discovered while working as non-technical staff at a software company. So an attempt to measure the effect of misogyny in the tech industry via attrition from AP Computer Science seems doomed from the start.

Perhaps women choose not to study computer science because they feel it'd be overly difficult to get in to an industry made up of 80% men. What if the fact there are relatively few women tech workers is the reason few women study it, and not the reverse as you're inferring.

What is abundantly clear is that young women and men are influenced by cultural norms and act accordingly when choosing a path through life.

Most servers/flight attendants/nurses are women. At my sister's nursing school graduation, there was only a single man on stage to receive his BSN and he was a former medic in the Army.

What gives? There are plenty of women doctors now. Why don't men find nursing to be a rewarding and satisfying career option?

Not sure why this post is being downvoted. The lack of men in nursing is a real problem in that field, and the post builds up to this in a way I don't necessarily agree with (I think the tech industry's cultural appearance outside of it is completely garbage, and I think most folks know it) but I think is worth rolling around in one's head.

Male nurses (again, this is anecdote from my sister) are handed the most troublesome and aggravating patients with the assumption that they are willing to be "rough" with them (and the implied threat to the patient is that if they are nice, they get the pretty nurses to come back). They are given the jobs that require heavy lifting (like moving patients) in a medical setting and are subjected to vicious gossip campaigns about their sex lives.

I've worked in an all-female IT department. Six women, one guy. Believe me I've got stories. Not all internet gender-memes are universal. All experiences are valid and inform the debate. Even those that don't conform to the proffered agenda.

We need to be a little more empathic all-around. It's not a contest to see who can be more outraged or oppressed.

Maybe at one point they didn't, but thanks to Twitter they are now told how horrible it is.

As a counterexample, I offer the military industry. Under your hypothesis, the all-male military would have remained as such forever, because women would have seen the near-0% proportion of females in the military, and would never have attempted to join it. So how did the military get up to about 15% women?

Clearly, it was because at some point a decision was made to actually accept those who attempted to enlist, and not because the industry already had enough women in it to encourage the attempts to be made.

Nevertheless, it is still a perfectly testable hypothesis, and an experiment might still be in order before we go around saying it's no good.