Without a doubt the industry has changed - it has more men in it.
The question at hand, I guess, is, have the tasks that one would be expected to perform as a computer programmer changed over the last fifty years?
Or has the hiring process - which even most male programmers are happy to admit is "broken," adjusted to favour men over women?
Two of the things that have been suggested as causes have been hiring tools focusing on puzzle solving / whiteboarding, and job applications focusing on finding "culture fit" and an ideal "programming type"
It's not hard to find male programmers who, even when gender is taken out of the equation entirely both admit that a) whiteboard interviews and culture fit is a thing, and b) is a terrible way of choosing people, so perhaps Occam's razor suggests that this is the cause rather than an inherent biological difference with an obvious counterexample?
I don't know how culture fit can be taken out of the equation. Work in modern workplaces (and in particular the office, knowledge-worker type we're talking about) is far from the conveyor-belt screw-tightening fully explicit work of our industrial past. Our whole output depends on shared mental context.
You may say -- "aha, but culture fit is a proxy for racism". Fine, then people are racists -- in that very implicit, system-wide way that's immune to sensitivity training and generic pressure in the wider culture. What to do then, shoot the racists?
> You may say -- "aha, but culture fit is a proxy for racism". Fine, then people are racists -- in that very implicit, system-wide way that's immune to sensitivity training and generic pressure in the wider culture. What to do then, shoot the racists?
You can say that while "shared mental context" is important, the research says that diverse teams are higher functioning teams [1] (one of the things myself and the author of the memo would agree on is that groupthink is a bad thing!), and that if culture fit is one of the blockers, find a way of retaining its good aspects while removing its potentially deleterious ones. Some of the world's smartest people work at Google. I'm sure they can have a role in figuring it out.
That could very well be because racists are underperformers -- they are racists, which is some kind of overgeneralization bias.
Then there's fit to organizational purposes. It's doubtful that Google or SpaceX could function as an organization of racists, but maybe that level of homogeneity is best for a tire repair shop in rural areas.
Hum, while short I thought my comment was clear enough. of course the industry has changed in the sense that what it means to be a software engineer is now vastly different from what it was 60 years ago.
