It is a fact that even at birth, girls are more interested in people where boys are more interested in things. This is even true for newborn chimpanzees. You can’t really blame society for this.
Surely this is a more plausible explanation why there are more women in medicine than in programming?
For example, especially young men are much much more risk loving than women. They are also much more aggressive and competitive. This is true for a lot of social animals, but definitely for humans. You can imagine that there used to be strong evolutionary advantages from this. These differences may have arisen in a very different world, but they are still here today, in men and women born in 2019. Testosterone is real. Why insist on denying and fighting these biological realities? Better to accept them, let people make their choices and make the best of the situation?
No matter how many awareness campaings and female coding scholarships you launch, women will still prefer to work with people rather than computers if they can help it. And that’s not a bad thing. The issue if anything is that some people centric jobs are underpaid. Nurses and kindergarten teachers do some of the most valuable work in society.
I definitely would like to see more male kindergarten teachers, because the fact that there are no role models for boys in kindergarten and primary school also has detrimental effects on boys and girls.
Finally, let's first agree that society still has a big impact. Then, we can discuss if it's worthwhile to do something about it or not.
How about making more women want to do manual labour? There is a huge shortage of women in those industries.
Now, indeed it is an additional question if we should foster such career choices for girls. My personal opinion is: the people most talented for it should become pilots. By further opening this career for girls, the talent pool is increased. Consequently, the pilots who make it will be more talented on average.
Some boys who could have become pilots in the past will now not be able to, because now their talent isn't sufficient anymore. Why should they be protected from the competition?
And to get back to the original topic, we indeed do have a shortage of software developers, so having more female developers would also benefit our economy.
