This story just isn't convincing. If anything, the legal field has always been more hostile to women, and now it is becoming dominated by women. The same was true of advertising, PR work, sales, and any number of other fields previously dominated by men, and now slowly being taken over by women.
More than 50% of my law school class (top ten law school) were women. In law school the know-it-all assholes were still mostly men. And that didn't seem to dissuade the women one bit from pursuing a career in law. In my first legal job, more than 50% of the first year associates were women. In my wife's firm, 70% of the first year associates were women.
When I was an undergrad (early 90s) there were about 40-50% women in the CS introductory classes, but by the 200 level classes, there were only about 10-15% women. I was pre-med for a time. Pre-med classes were just as hard ... the attrition did not change the sex ratio in the pre-med classes.
Why do people insist on making up all kinds of just-so stories to explain the discrepancy in numbers of women and men programmers. Isn't it possible that women might not be interested in programming in the same numbers as men. Even within the male population, those genuinely interested in programming seem to be a pretty small number.
Most of my classmates in the CS program did not stay programmers. Many of them went to work for places like Goldman, McKinsey, etc. In fact, those were the preferred jobs in those days. Only a very small number of us wanted to actually program for a living.
I don't know, but here are some possibilities:
1) Change in competition in classes that were graded on a curve. If CS became more popular, it could have become more difficult to be an A student.
2) Change in curriculum. CS could have gone through a change in subject matter. At my alma mater in the early nineties, CS included a huge amount of math. The Math and Physics majors also had the same kind of ratio distortion as CS. There were no advertisements to boost male enrollment in Math and Physics.
3) A few new majors were created (like Operations Research and Industrial Engineering) that offered admission into lucrative jobs like banking and consulting, while being much lighter on the algorithms and math. A large number of people from CS went into those majors (both male and female). There were certainly a lot more women in Operations Research. People used to comment on how OR had all the women, and CS had all the immigrants from Asia.
Looking at the raw data, there's a boom in computer science degrees in the mid-80s, for both men and women. Then there's a significant drop-off, again for both men and women. However, in percentage terms the drop-off for women is larger.
To me, that suggests a narrative where the "bust" painted computer science as a less reliable, more risky field. As a result women were less likely to go back into it.
A similar boom/bust happens in the early 2000s. Again, the female share drops more and recovers slower.
More than 50% of my law school class (top ten law school) were women. In law school the know-it-all assholes were still mostly men. And that didn't seem to dissuade the women one bit from pursuing a career in law. In my first legal job, more than 50% of the first year associates were women. In my wife's firm, 70% of the first year associates were women.
When I was an undergrad (early 90s) there were about 40-50% women in the CS introductory classes, but by the 200 level classes, there were only about 10-15% women. I was pre-med for a time. Pre-med classes were just as hard ... the attrition did not change the sex ratio in the pre-med classes.
Why do people insist on making up all kinds of just-so stories to explain the discrepancy in numbers of women and men programmers. Isn't it possible that women might not be interested in programming in the same numbers as men. Even within the male population, those genuinely interested in programming seem to be a pretty small number.
Most of my classmates in the CS program did not stay programmers. Many of them went to work for places like Goldman, McKinsey, etc. In fact, those were the preferred jobs in those days. Only a very small number of us wanted to actually program for a living.