A pet theory I&#x27;ve been developing is the decline in the 80s began with a growth in self destructive behavior in the programming employment sector.  Eating junk food, caffeinated energy drinks, lack of exercise, lack of good food, lack of sleep, lack of socializing, lack of overtime pay, lack of professionalism, obsessive game play, lack of life balance, lack of decent working environment.  Before the 80s programmer culture felt very engineer &#x2F; mathematician &#x2F; academic, after the 80s its kinda felt like an introverts weird interpretation of an all night party, every night.  Here have a hot pocket and type all night.  A culture that prides itself on twinkies and monster energy drinks isn&#x27;t going to fit the nearly 100% female readership of the typical health magazine.  The stereotypical programming environment is nearly unique in the working world, isn&#x27;t it?  Are there any other job markets culturally like programming?  If there were, we could compare how the two fields opposition to personal hygiene or opposition to dressing fashionably, or even dressing in clean clothes might not appeal to women at similar rates, for example.  I&#x27;ve only found two work places kinda like programming&#x2F;IT as defined above.  One is military mechanic and the other is SOME trading desks at big finance.  Both tend a bit male.<p>That&#x27;s directly on topic.  I suppose from an &quot;eating your own (addictive) dogfood&quot; perspective its kinda self inflicted.<p>It would be interesting to look at male&#x2F;female relations and ratios for programmers at non-traditional employers, perhaps the government or military or maybe academic.  I suspect the lifestyle at a unionized state government office is quite a bit different than &quot;standard&quot; programming environment and theorize almost anything would be an improvement WRT women&#x27;s interest in that workplace.  Perhaps addictive behaviors would vary in those circumstances.<p>Surely there must be some HR statistics buried somewhere at a giant corporation or government about % of programmers participating in the corporate alcoholism project by decade, or something like that, WRT trends in addictive personality by decade.