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Men like to work with things whilst women like to work with people. News at 11.

Good software development is more about working with people than with things...

[edit: the problem is that schools don't teach it that way]

Well, as with a lot of things, both are quite important aspects. At my work I'm blessed to be able to work with 2 very talented female programmers. Although they are talented, no doubt about that, the lower you get to the machine and the more abstract a design needs to be, the less they like to be involved with that part of the job. Even though they do know what for instance MVC is, or how the bits and bytes are moved between a CPU and its caches and main memory, they frequently divide the responsibilities of an application in a slightly incorrect way with respect to the functional layers.

E.g. one of these women build a core for our custom messaging service (fairly abstract), but constantly needed assistance from a male coworker specialized in software architecture to help out with the dependencies. For example, initially she configured some part of this core by using a servlet listener, but then got into trouble when the core needed to be used in a Java SE environment. Of course it's a simple thing to design your code in such a way that one layer is independent of a specific technology, where multiple clients of this layer simply pass configuration data on and call into it. I talked with her about this, and she specifically remarked she knew such a thing could be accomplished in a thousand possible ways, but that she just found it so hard to 'feel' what the correct way was.

Then again, in another project a rating algorithm needed to be designed. A first a male programmer did that, but there were so many domain issues he did not take into account. The female programmer, who was new to the problem domain too, analyzed it, talked with stakeholders, and came up with a much improved algorithm.

These are just 2 simple examples and by themselves wouldn't mean much, but I've encountered a lot of similar cases like these.

For the entire software development process, you *need* to have a good understanding of your requirements and your (business) algorithms need to be correct. On the other hand, your software architecture and technical low level machinery (like your memory management for example) simply need to be correct too. I really don't want to say that the one is more important than the other...

I think XKCD rebuts Henks notion that a gap in knowledge is solely gender based better than any amount of prose response.
http://xkcd.com/385/

Hahah, that's a nice way to express it. In my defense, I specially noted that it was not just these two cases ;) But even though, it was only my statistically irrelevant observations of course.

You missed a key point in the article:
"The data is quite clear," she says. "On anything you point to, there is so much variation within each gender that you have to get rid of this idea that 'men are like this, women are like that.' "

The real point of the article is that it's just not that simple. They don't know *why* women choose not to go into those fields. They have speculative ideas. But really how do you separate a person from their cultural influences? You don't. Otherwise we would have figured out nature vs. nurture long ago.

Voted down for the overly simplistic title.

Asinine article. Otherwise qualified women choose professions other than IT/hard sciences is the end result. The article nor the cited studies help answer why? Sure women choose other career but is it because they can, because IT is unappealing, because of ability, other factors. No statistically based answers, just fluff next to numbers.

@planetmcd:

"Sure women choose other career but is it because they can, because IT is unappealing, because of ability, other factors. No statistically based answers, just fluff next to numbers."

Just the fact that they *choose* not to go into IT is significant, because it debunks a lot of politically correct conventional wisdom, i.e. that whenever women or minorities are underrepresented in any subset of the population at large, it must be because sinister forces are conspiring to keep them out. Personally, I don't care why women choose not to go into IT in greater numbers than men, because I don't see the gender disparity in the IT field as a good thing or a bad thing, just something that is.

Dglasser,
I want you to know I struggled with where to vote this. I think the content is assinine, but its an important article to read. As the content was assinine, in my thinking, I voted it down.

I do agree that women are choosing other careers, the question, in my mind, is why. I don't think this article addresses that at all. I agree that this is a discussion to which people bring their political hobby horses. That said, if there is a systematic marginalization of women, it should be looked at. Not because I think that its important to have an equality of specific physical traits in a profession, but because if a population of otherwise qualified people leave for other disciplines, it diminishes the one that we're in. Its could be a huge opportunity cost (and in fairness, it may not be too). When there is a gulf that wide, that is not consistent across other modern democracies and other skilled professions, it implies that there is something going on that is influenced by something other than genetics. It could be cultural, it could be industry specific, but to say merely that women choose other professions as an explanation for the gulf offers no real insight.

Let me also say that when I say systematic, it does not mean intentional. I'm not saying that male programmers are getting together to figure out how to keep women out. One common example is mentoring, and this is true in many professions, not just IT. Mentors may give equal official time to all jr. staff, but much mentoring is unofficial over a pint or at lunch (or both if you're lucky), and when a mentor decides to spend free time with other workers, they will spend it with people more like themselves, as they are likely to share non work interests. This is not a choice to exclude someone, but to include someone, the flipside of it though is that the "different" person receives less mentoring and may feel more isolated. They are less likely to continue in the profession or recommend it to others like them but younger.

On a self interested note you could turn around this same arguments in the article to ask if otherwise qualified women are finding better opportunities than the IT segment, why aren't similarly qualified young men being made aware of these same opportunities.