@Ashrand @thatcosmonaut
really don't understand why people got so upset at that guy. there was a lot he overlooked, yeh, which is to be expected since he isn't a woman and probably doesn't talk to any often, but there were also a lot of things he got pretty right, and he put in his best effort to avoid speaking in absolutes and to back things up with research.

like it should be obvious that women and men, on average, tend to be different physically. and the brain is a part of the physical body, so it should also tend to be different, right? and hormone balances also tend to differ pretty radically between men and women, and those have direct impact on everything the body does, including what and how it thinks and feels. so yes, it should be obvious that men and women should on average tend towards different careers based on these sorts of biological differences.

what he overlooked, though, is that there are other factors involved which have very strong effects on career choice as well. see the chart below. the sharp incline in all listed fields there can probably be assumed to be a result of feminism/hippie-driven societal change in attitude towards "women in the workforce", with more and more women feeling comfortable pursuing careers. computer science drops away from the others, though, in two pretty distinct time periods. the first one lines up with when personal computers and game consoles in the home were popularised, and the second with another massive climb in both (ps2, windows xp, xbox & xbox360, gmail, firefox) and in the popularisation of the internet (percentage of people with home internet access in the US jumped from 18% in 97 to 50.4% in 2001) ( https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/computer-internet/computer-use-1984-2009.html )

so increase in the number of computers "in the home", and in the number of things those computers can do, was apparently correlated with decrease in percentage of women using them. the article associated with this chart offered the possible explanation of marketing etc being targeted towards boys, which it seems fair to draw on as a factor. what also seems relevant to me, though, is that men are more likely to stay inside and/or engage in solitary activities than women (and in particular that autism and autistic traits are more common among men than women https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html https://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/news/20170208/brain-differences-hint-at-why-autism-is-more-common-in-males ). personal computers removed the barrier of required socialising, rewarding children with these traits who stay inside alone with a big head start in the field of computing

along with these two dips in percentage, computing-related university classes and office environments became much worse places to be for a woman (yes, still speaking on average; obviously some out there are better suited to how things are now, but yeh). because of hugely lopsided man-to-woman-ratio (and the higher concentration of autistic traits), being a woman (who tends to socialise a lot, i.e. most) in these environments is lonely as heck. there's this ocean of guys who, if you try to talk to them, give maybe two or three word answers at best, and there's always a few staring at you when they think you don't notice or openly saying really uncomfortable things that you wouldn't hear almost anywhere else. it's this communication barrier that's keeping so many of us away.... and the driving factor for its existing is seated in biological differences
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