I think it's a little unfair to single out engineering. A lot of jobs with large salaries tend to skew towards men:

Women are only 16% of mergers and acquisitions lawyers (the big time money guys): https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/bclbe/Women_in_M_and_A(1)...

Women are still only 32% of physicians in 2010, despite "large advances": https://thinkprogress.org/despite-growing-number-of-female-d...

Women make up 5% of stock traders, hedge fund managers: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/06/19/would-more-...

Women are only 14.6% of CEOS, 8.1% of top earners, and 4.6% of fortune 500 CEOS: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2014/0...

One of my coworkers, when he thinks people aren't doing a good job, calls them ladies or girls. He also doesn't listen to the women on our team, insists on pair programming with them if he has shared assignments with them instead of splitting those assignments into subtasks like he does with the other guys, and is in general a nice dude to the other guys and treats the women like they're junior. If the rest of the men on the dev team behaverd like that, I honestly bet there would be no women on our team. I'm not sure how to approach him about it, but the women we work with don't seem to want to take assignments with him or interact with him, for fairly obvious reasons I guess.

Low pay,shitty benefits, demands to work long hours.

My wife makes HALF of what I make at the SAME employer. She does semiconductor and microelectronics back-end process engineering. I do RF/Microwave circuit design.

She transferred divisions a couple of years ago. In her old division (mine) there were TWO female engineers out of probably 100.

It's not constrained to woman though, as 80% of those who graduate with an engineering degree are no longer practicing engineering by 40 years old.

She wants to quit every day. We can easily live off my salary, but the additional salary is good for college savings (2 kids) and retirement savings.

She want's to quit and quilt full time; yes quilt. She is really good at that, applying all the engineering knowledge to CNC quilting, tricky geometry on piecing, etc.

May have to do with woman, in general, being more risk averse than men. Also less agressive for self promotion. At my employer, you must promote yourself and make your argument in front of a review panel.

> Kimberly wrote, “Two girls in a group had been working on the robot we were building in that class for hours, and the guys in their group came back in and within minutes had sentenced them to doing menial tasks while the guys went and had all the fun in the machine shop.”

I see this all the time. Women don't feel able to confront men about things like this. Without speculating as to why, I'll say that when I've seen women hit back ("like a man would") it often works. It sucks but you sort of have to engage men on their level, which means meeting aggression with aggression. People are always going to try to take advantage of each other, and men respect aggression.

I am little tired of this. The research is interesting but there should be more consideration for alternate hypotheses.

There is lot of evidence that girls are biologically wired to prefer people jobs, while boys prefer jobs with things. I really recommend Steven Pinker talk: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw

But even if this was cultural, who are we to dictate preferences of people? I think the whole nature vs nurture debate is a non-sequitur.

The article talks specifically about three reasons:

1. Self-doubt. It's well known that it affects girls more. But maybe it's how the brain presents risk-aversion to us? Or maybe it's actually needed for the job? Computers can be unforgiving.

2. Assholes. Sexism goes both ways. I label an asshole as an asshole, a girl might generalize it to "men are sexist".

3. Interesting work. Not much people in computing do world-changing work, you have to fight for it. It seems to me that there was a tacit expectation that someone will bring interesting work to you, which is IMHO false. The fact is nobody is preventing those girls to have a Github account.

I am all for removing barriers, but at some point, when we just can't see any, we will have to declare that it is a matter of personal preferences. If people are indeed happier in some other job, why not just call it a day?

> it’s been estimated that nearly 40% of women who earn engineering degrees either quit or never enter the profession.

Fantastic! That's much, much better than the 73% rate of college graduates not entering the field of their major https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/...

Of course, maybe men in STEM have an even lower rate. IDK, and this article certainly doesn't seem to know that important piece of data either.

Here is a short story about this. My wife has a computer science degree, but has since left the field to become a teacher. She worked at Foxit in software test before we got married. When we got married she moved to live with me. She doesn't like working with computers much, so she got a job at an after school program as a teacher. That went well, now she is going to school to get her teaching credential. For a while she talked about staying in software since the pay is better than in teaching. I like engineering and make enough money for both of us to have what we need. I think everyone should have a job they enjoy.

I found it fascinating that the question we're asking is wrong. It shouldn't be "Why do women leave engineering?" it should be "Why do men stay in higher proportions?". It seems that being arrogant makes working as an engineer more palatable. I know I suffer from this problem and many of the men I know in engineering do too. So between dealing with self-doubt (the imposter syndrome) and being around a bunch of oblivious ego maniacs, why would anyone stick around?

Honestly, this article just fed my confirmation bias. I have (ashamedly) believed that the reason there were so few women around me in engineering (specifically software engineering) is because they were too smart to be lured into the mind-numbing, sedentary, OCD-laden field by money alone. Leaving the number of women in the field approximately the same as the number of men who genuinely enjoy it. The rest of us are just out for a paycheck that most women deem "not worth it" (especially if the pay is not equal -- separate but related issue). I know that there are many cases that are not this simplistic, but in my experience, I have only seen women leave teams I was on for the same reasons as men (better position/pay elsewhere). I have never seen or heard of any Mad Men style harassment or the like in my immediate environment. I'm not sure if the coloration I have of normalcy is skewed by my experience or if the coverage of the gender gap has colored everyone else's. I'm sure this is what we're all asking ourselves in this industry the more this topic is covered. Regardless, it seems that we can't have these kinds of conversations as a country until pay is equal.

Here's a question: Which sex of all the sexually dimorphic animals on the Earth can give birth?

Answer: Females.

The simple answer to all these bait questions is that women can and do have children, which is time consuming and whether people deny it or not, mothers are far more integral in raising a child than fathers.

Naturally, spending less time in the workplace leads to them falling behind even though they might have started on equal or greater footing as their male counterparts.

While I think the article is primarily a collection on anecdotes the number describing the issue are amazing:

> Women make up 20% of engineering graduates, but it’s been estimated that nearly 40% of women who earn engineering degrees either quit or never enter the profession. Clearly, some elementary and high school reforms are working, but those at the college level are not.

There is obviously a mismatch. I'm wondering however to what extent the issue is at the receiving engineering job market end and what can be attributed to the pushing school side? A lot positive can be said about scholarly achievements of women but we all know there always has been limited correlation of grades with any genders success in job. Maybe some women are directed towards engineering, succeeding initially when they are faced with school type exercises? Maybe the selection at university is tuned to be hard for men and works indirectly as a selection for other traits than math?

In any case considering the magnitude of numbers I'd like to see a breakdown of where women exit. University, first year at job, 5 years and after first child. The article does not help here.

There are obviously many factors here, but one major one is

> women, more often than men, add that they want to become socially responsible engineers, working to solve major problems and making a difference in people’s lives—which is consistent with other research showing that women are significantly more likely than their male counterparts to be interested in engineering work that is “socially conscious” (i.e., specializations such as environmental vs. electrical engineering).

Electrical engineering and computer science and similar fields are, for the most part, just not a great fit for people with such aspirations. There are some nonprofits in the area, of course, but overall the industry is very profit-oriented. Most of us optimize ad revenue or something like that. We spend most of our days writing code instead of interacting with people whose lives we improve.

And yet, a significant portion of the comments on HN when this topic comes up:

  * Claim that there is no problem, and/or
  * Condemn any action to address this as anti-egalitarian because it treats men and women differently

Any studies looking at the career trajectories of self-taught developers? Not to equate web development with actual engineering or whatever, but I think it would be interesting.

Obviously it's because well paid white men are scum that do everything they can to prevent women, the obviously superior gender, to succeed. Women deserve to have opportunities handed to them while the scum men must sacrifice to make room for them in the already crowded rooms they've fought to get in to.

/s

In all seriousness though why should there be adjustments made for women if we are equals? (which we definitely are) Shouldn't they standup for themselves and take what's theirs like I had to? Just because women are a minority in a field doesn't mean the entire field should change to accommodate their sensitivities or preferences regardless of merit.

I am tired of my race and gender (white male) being blamed for everyone else's problems. I was born into poverty, both of my parents worked hard to educate me and raised me to work hard. I didn't get to go to college yet I put in the time and effort to teach myself software engineering and now I make more than both of my parents combined.

I probably won't be believed and I might even be downvoted or banned for saying all this.

I hold NO ill will for women or other races. In fact I enjoy working with them and learning about where they come from and their experiences. I just can't respect anyone who first points blame at everything around them for their problems before looking for a solution from within. There are bigots out there but just because I look a certain way or I stand up for myself doesn't mean I am one.

Maybe they were pressured into doing it in the first place when they wanted to do something else retards.