My problem with this line of reasoning is the inferential leap. The other day my wife was surprised that I could box jump higher than her, even though I rarely work out, while she had been training for a stair climbing competition. Being a man has its advantages. But then we're going to make the jump from that to saying "and that explains why men just prefer/are better at programming and thus make up 90% of the industry!"
My second problem is that men set the metrics in ways that benefit them. Let's take the stereotypes as an assumption. What is a good programming team? One full of cowboys and rockstars, or one full of people who can concentrate on detail work for long periods at a time and communicate with each other? Studies of children show that girls are better at the latter (which is why they get higher grades).
Obviously it's not the whole picture, but I think the most quantitative answer is that the human resources field is one of the most female-dominated out there (source: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.pdf).
In companies I worked, they make a lot of them. HR is part of the panel that votes on a interviewee's fit and also handles a lot of the salary negotiation (which is as important as the whole hiring process).
I also detect a 'for programmers' added in that wasn't present before...
Handling salary negotiations means being able to say 'yes we accept your offer' or 'no, we don't think we can make that work'. That is making a decision.
They don't even do that. The company positions HR people between candidates and the hiring manager as a way of thwarting negotiation, but the HR person is invariably required to escalate back to the hiring manager if they can't get to "yes".
The idea that women have an outsized role in tech job screening because of the demographics of HR is totally specious. It also has nothing whatsoever to do with Rayiner's point.
The notion that HR has any meaningful role in selecting candidates is fallacious. Any appearance of such a role in an HR organization is a deliberately constructed artiface, intended to take the heat off the real decision makers and to trap candidates with poor negotiating skills.
Neither. Hiring is done a thousand different ways involving both genders (and sometimes involving those who don't care to be classified by binary genders). Which group may be in the majority depends upon location and industry and even on the way hiring works; in some cases direct report has 100% control, in some cases direct report has 0% control and HR has all of it.
If you don't think that men are currently making the vast majority of hiring decisions for programmers in the US right now then you are simply unaware of what's going on in the world.
Odd. See the original article is a discussion of needing people skills for the best jobs, and the branch that started this comment chain was based on someone calling out one gender for rigging the system, to which my only response was to ask if the other gender does not do the same. Programming was not the primary focus here and keeps being brought up to try to prove a claim that wasn't ever actually disagreed with, but which I just asked a question to give some equality to.
>My second problem is that men set the metrics in ways that benefit them
If you think going to war is a benefit then you may have a different concept of "benefit" than most.
And you are extrapolating stuff, just because men are better at lifting weights doesn't mean we are going to close female weight competitions. The same thing happens with programming or any career where one of the sexes may be better by biological predisposition.
My second problem is that men set the metrics in ways that benefit them. Let's take the stereotypes as an assumption. What is a good programming team? One full of cowboys and rockstars, or one full of people who can concentrate on detail work for long periods at a time and communicate with each other? Studies of children show that girls are better at the latter (which is why they get higher grades).