Not just about the fluffy stuff
Thanks for a pleasantly fact-dominated, dogma-free piece on this topic. It's well worth filtering out the political ideology about equality and focusing on the results (no point attracting a gender-neutral square peg to a gender-neutral round hole).
My younger daughter and her team recently enjoyed crushing others (mostly, came third) in a national robot building competition, and my 15 year-old daughter has just delivered a talk on implicit gender bias in STEM careers, so I value their input here. OK, self-selection in spades, but they and their peers at that age are clearly up for anything life wants to throw at them, making the intake and 'leaky pipeline' problem seem more relevant than whether the vague, future career appeals to feminine traits in the first place.
For example, when parents of equally performing children rate the daughters consistently lower at maths than the sons even when performing equally, and by 16 in the UK, twice the proportion of boys elect to proceed with maths than girls, that's not a problem with career choices. For reference it's four times for physics and if you rate the A-level, far worse for computing at ten times.
It's such a deeply ingrained cultural factor that it'll take a generation or two to clear if it ever does, but improving the early uptake to get educated in relevant areas and reducing the early irrelevant pressures to proceed (like implicit biases at university) may require less effort and yield more results than altering the attractiveness of an industry. Spread the skills and knowledge more widely and then let people choose, male or female.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
