Sorry, Bostonian, but your obsession with genetics aside, the differences in STEM participation do not match any distribution of assessed math or spatial ability, and the vast differences between the two distributions have almost entirely social explanations.
Most notably, those differences have grown significantly wider over a very short time, so we can be absolutely certain that evolution had nothing to do with it:
https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valle...of-computer-game-marketing-20-years-ago/American students take math throughout their twelve years of schooling, but instruction in computer science is much more limited. My eldest son has been programming since he was about 8 and knows Java, Javascript, C, C++, Python, and Octave. He has completed his first MOOC on machine learning (by Andrew Ang -- good course) and will soon start a second. He has installed and run Linux and built computers in collaboration with his male friends. He has gotten to gold level at USACO and will take the AP Computer Science exam this year as a 10th grader. He has been a TA for a programming class and interns as a programmer. He has attended computer camps in the summer. At one camp where there probably about 50 students, he said there were no girls. He did have a roommate from Russia.
There are many students of both sexes who will not have had much exposure to computer science upon reaching college. My middle son and my daughter have done little so far. But of the students who have been tinkering and learning for a decade before starting college, I bet the vast majority are male. People considering CS as a major in college may be discouraged by the presence of classmates with far more experience than them. I don't see what is stopping more girls from doing the kinds of things my eldest son has, other than a general lack of interest, but they are not, in large numbers.
Paul Graham, founder of successful start-up accelerator Y Combinator, said this:
Does YC discriminate against female founders?
I'm almost certain that we don't discriminate against female founders because I would know from looking at the ones we missed. You could argue that we should do more, that we should encourage women to start startups.
The problem with that is I think, at least with technology companies, the people who are really good technology founders have a genuine deep interest in technology. In fact, I've heard startups say that they did not like to hire people who had only started programming when they became CS majors in college.
If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us. If we really wanted to fix this problem, what we would have to do is not encourage women to start startups now.
It's already too late. What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that. God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers. I would have to stop and think about that.
