Whereas we have pretty good evidence that by improving the signaling of ambient belonging for women we can significantly increase their interest in computer science: http://ilabs.uw.edu/sites/default/files/Cheryan_Meltzoff_Kim...
Few things with a biological mechanism are that easy to manipulate.
Is it that hard to believe that these deeply evolutionarily engrained practices have no effect on influencing how the different sexes value spending their time when we control for income gap disparity in choosing a profession w.r.t work life balance?
It takes a very specific type of person that enjoys staring intensely into a computer screen all day, lost in thought and confined in solitude while being unplugged from the human condition which can make you feel like a robot as the years progress.
Humans didn't evolve to sit in front of an artificial light source and forgo human interaction, regardless of gender or race.
Testosterone, causing male-female behavioral divergence in general. Excerpting from an email...
"The amount of eye-contact shown by infants at 12 months of age is inversely correlated with prenatal testosterone (Lutchmaya, Baron-Cohen & Raggett, submitted), and prenatal testosterone is higher in males than females." That study seems to be here: [1]. "The amount of eye contact varied quadratically with foetal testosterone level when data from both sexes was examined together, and when the data for the boys was examined alone."
(Why not for when the girls were examined alone? "This may be because there were only 30 girls in the sample, making the resulting model under-powered. A sample size of approximately 60 would be required to give the model a power of 0.8, assuming a similar effect size...")
There's another one about testosterone in girls [2]: "Here, we report that fetal testosterone measured from amniotic fluid relates positively to male-typical scores on a standardized questionnaire measure of sex-typical play in both boys and girls."
That study also references others that directly show cause-and-effect on other mammals: "For instance, in rodents and nonhuman primates, treating developing females with testosterone or other androgens increases male-typical play, whereas reducing androgens in developing males reduces it."
To me, the question isn't whether testosterone affects behavior, it's how much.
[1] http://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/papers/2002_Lutch_eyeco...
The other answer is that practically every behavior is influenced by a combination of hormones, genes, and environment. Everything from athletic skills, obesity, teeth health, stress, sleep, diet, honesty, politics, and so on. To quote a profession, free will likely do not exist and is only the result of all the different biological systems interacting with each other, the environment, and random chance.
> Which specific biological mechanism are you hypothesizing is responsible?
Apparently the only alternative to there being something wrong with CS departments in particular is a specific biological mechanism? How so? And somehow there must also be a "cultural construction" of CS that is "inalterable". Why?
How about there are cultural mechanisms that have nothing to do with CS departments? Is that a possibility? For just one example, just about every study (and there are tons) shows that a dramatic split in preferences is already present in schoolchildren at an early age. How, in your opinion, do CS departments at universities get to shape those preferences?
Also, I don't understand your apparent belief that if something is biological, it therefore must be unalterable (and the inverse that if something is alterable, it must therefore not be biological). Culture can override almost anything. Survival for example is a strong instinct, yet societies impose death penalties and create armies sending people into battle where they are likely to be killed. So is reproduction, yet some societies impose(d) single child policies.
These are very extreme examples, where even the strongest biological imperatives are overrides by strong societal coercion. But it shows that it would be trivial for society to override all other cultural or biological effects by simply mandating that enrolment be 50:50, and enforcing that mandate without compromise. Easy peasy, but is it something we want?
I think what we want is to maximise freedom, personal agency and potential for fulfilment, not enforcement of specific gender distributions.
You may ask how this is relevant. Well, it turns out that female participation is STEM fields is inversely correlated to the freedom and gender equality of the society, not positively as the blank-slate theorists posit. This is called the (STEM) gender equality paradox.
https://researchtheheadlines.org/2018/04/20/the-stem-gender-...
So yes, there is a large cultural effect, but it goes in the opposite direction. The usual counter to this is that "even in western societies equality isn't 100%", but this is irrelevant, because this is not about absolute values, but about the sign of the change of the dependent variable. And that is a simple boolean: positively or negatively correlated.
And yes, I know that "correlation doesn't imply causation", but that's not the issue here: a claim for causation (cultural forces causes unequal representation) is fairly thoroughly debunked when not even the claimed correlation shows up, and even more throughly debunked when a negative correlation shows up.
So unless some new and very compelling evidence shows up, the idea that the surrounding culture/society causes unequal representation is simply wrong, never mind this odd idea that somehow it is the fault of CS departments.
So if you want freedom, you get unequal distributions. If you want equal distributions, you must curtail freedom.
Another alternative to "something wrong in CS departments" is "something very right" in other departments. Take early childhood education. The skew is very much the same as in CS, just the other direction. So let's assume you have 100 women and 100 men and just these two choices for degree. If 80 of the 100 women go into education, only 20 are left to go into CS. Simple arithmetic.
Is it so unthinkable that women choose education degrees because they want to? And not because "hey, I really wanted to go into CS, but the conditions in the CS department are so horrible that I will settle for early childhood education instead"? And is it so unthinkable to posit both cultural and, yes, biological mechanisms why women might be more into early childhood education than men? Mechanisms that come into play as you remove societal pressures to do otherwise?
In fact, it turns out that a "people vs. things" preference difference is one of the stronger findings in psychology. It is present in infants of a few months. It is present in infant monkeys. It is of course, statistical in nature with large overlaps. Again, how does whatever is wrong with CS departments affect the preferences of infants and monkeys?
As to the study. I am not sure what they were trying to show, but (a) I've never seen CS departments decorated like that (b) it was all hypothetical situations that seem to have little to no bearing on actual decision making and (c) if the decor of the classrooms is the deciding factor in your study and career choices, .... ?
Oh, here's another fun one. A difference in ability and preferences that also has some explanatory power. It goes like this:
1. Men who score high on the math part of the SATs (or similar exams) usually score well only on the math part. On the other hand, women who score high on the math part usually also score well on the verbal part.
2. Irrespective of gender, people who score well on both verbal and math scores prefer non-STEM fields of study.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/201707...
So men tend to flock into STEM fields because they have no alternatives.
