Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies
Once again: compared to other STEM fields, women participate less in CS than any other field except physics. By double digits percentage more in mathematics PhDs. Statistics is almost 50&#x2F;50. Several rigorous earth sciences fields --- chem and biochem, for instance --- have 50% <i>or greater</i> female participation.<p>One thing all these fields have in common is that they are more intellectually rigorous and harder to succeed in than the computer software industry.<p>Clearly, they have something else in common. We just need to figure out what it is.<p>This essay, which invokes the &quot;Google Memo&quot;, is subtly attacking a straw man. Even those almost the entire rest of STEM is better than CS, it&#x27;s true that it&#x27;s not balanced; it remains deeply imperfect. Physics and mechanical engineering, clustered with CS, remain the province of men. There&#x27;s a expanse of STEM fields with female participation between 25-40% that you&#x27;d want to explain or correct. Is it stereotype threat? Implicit bias? Who knows? Probably not?<p>But that has nothing to do with why Google has so few women engineers. The work that a commercial software engineer does --- even at the lofty heights in which the profession is practiced in such a cathedral of software design as the Alphabet Corporation --- is simply not that hard; most of it is just wiring form fields to databases in new and exciting ways.<p>Whatever is holding women&#x27;s participation in our field at or below <i>twenty percent</i> is artificial, and a travesty.