Interesting!
 
Also bear in mind that when she talks about gender differences, these can be due to culture not genetics. For instance, this study found the gender differences are much greater in a patrilineal than a matrilinal society.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21876159

This seems like an interesting thing to discuss in the wake of the press release for the paper that attempts to explain that the lack of women in STEM areas of study is largely due to hormones. (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-09/ps-shi090111.php)

As a woman in the CS field bringing up the idea that there is a lack of women and something should be done about it is actually rather touchy. There's arguments that gender doesn't matter and only having skilled professionals is all we should care about, but there is a great concern that a large group of people are simply being left out of shaping the technology that shapes our world.

The phrase "biological gender" just made my head explode.  Sex is biological, gender is cultural.  (And neither is a true binary, although biological sex is close.)

I like the slideshow, but I don't like how it says "biological differences" when I think it means "differences in ability." Those differences may be real, and past studies have suggested they may be biological. But more recent studies (see this Reuters article) have suggested the gender gap in math ability is not biological but cultural. 

So there should really be two messages here: 1) Gender differences in math ability probably aren't biological; 2) Gender differences in math ability don't explain why there are so few women in computer science. 

I wish Oda had included #1 as well as #2. ETA: At the very least, she shouldn't have made it sound as though gender differences in math ability are definitely attributable to biological factors.

Brown, C., Garavalia, L. S., Fritts, M., & Olson, E. A. (2006). Computer Science Majors: Sex Role Orientation, Academic Achievement, and Social Cognitive Factors. The Career Development Quarterly, 54(4), 331-345.

This study found, when using the PAQ (Personal Attributes Questionnaire, Spence & Helmreich, 1978) with computer science majors, that more computer science majors are undifferentiated (low in masculine and feminine traits) than are schematic or androgynous. Only one of the ppl in the study scored as masculine, which is counter to what one might expect. Instead of looking just at male and female, it is interesting to look at gender or sex-role type.

There is more to biology than intelligence.  If there are differences in cognitive skills between the sexes, it's hard to imagine they are important.  However I sometimes wonder whether -- as a matter of honest academic inquiry -- it's worthwhile to consider other differences.

Obviously being a computer programmer doesn't require height or chest hair or some other blatant secondary sex characteristic.  But, one's career choice is an important signaling device, and draws on non-cognitive traits in addition to the cognitive ones, and while these issues plausibly stem entirely from culture / sociology, it's *possible* that there is a biological component, it seems to me.

For example, some fraction of the male workforce is football players, and some fraction of the female workforce is nurses, and while I imagine some women would like to play football and certainly some men would like to be nurses, there are clear statistical differences in preference here.  And of course it's plausible that these statistical differences are entirely explainable by culture, but it's *possible* that there is a biological component.  For example looking to other primates, for which culture is much less developed, I'd *guess* that gorilla males are more interested in sparring activities as a means of signaling fitness to gorilla females, and gorilla females are more interested in child-rearing as the duty evolution has assigned to them (fair or not).  And these things sort of resemble football and nursing.

Now, computer science is not so obvious, but that doesn't mean there isn't something subtle going on.  

I want to stress that none of this has to do with *fairness*.  Only women can/must bear children -- which is unfair -- but it doesn't mean we cannot construct a work environment that attempts to mitigate that unfairness.  Similarly, even if there were some biological reason why fewer women chose a career than men, doesn't mean that *some* women do not prefer that career, and doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for equal opportunity and equally supportive work environments and so on.  I guess I'm pointing out that there is a difference, between "underrepresentation" of women in a field, and unfairness.  (Indeed, there can be enormous unfairness even in fields with equal, or overrepresentation of women.)

I'll also add, just for good measure, that I think this is a separate issue than the pay gap issue.  To create an extreme example, suppose all men become computer programmers and all women become nurses.  Well, then, it hardly "explains" the pay gap that men are programmers, and programmers get paid more.  This only begs the question, why should programmers get paid more?  So, attributing pay gap to different choices in career only points toward deeper injustices in how society allocates wages.

I have to wonder whether the reason less women have computer science degrees is because they occupy their time with other things, such as writing about how less women have computer science degrees.

I am a college aged woman who worked in an internship as a programmer for a summer and decided that it was a career that I do not want to pursue. I feel that there are other aspects of this issue besides intelligence, namely work preferences among women. While I was competent as a programmer and able to understand everything, I found that it isn't what I want to do 40 hours a week for the rest of my life. The problem solving aspect was interesting (though sometimes frustruating), I found the lack of social interaction in the job particularly difficult. If you look at the numbers, women in general tend to pursue fields working with people. Think about fields like doctors and lawyers that used to be entirely male dominated but now law schools and medical schools are filled with women. This could be attributed to culture or biology (likely both), but I certainly think it is a phenomenon to consider. 

I didn't do computer science because I didn't code for fun as a girl. Then I took a programming class in college and it turned out I really liked it. I can't imagine any scenario where I would have begun coding without some kind of formal instruction though.

Here's a non-Flash version of the slideshow, for anyone who can't play the Flash version.

I don't care much for this slideshow.  For one thing, one of it's main points, made near the end, is demonstrably false:  "You know who really sucks at math?  People who think biology explains why there aren't more women in CS."  Guess what?  I am good at math.  I think biology explains (some of) why there aren't more women in CS.  Therefore, this statement is false.  QED.

Notice I injected "some of".  This is significant.  There are many factors at work, and that there is no one factor which explains the entire phenomenon.  Why is it that SSSM-proponents all insist that biology plays absolutely no role, and that culture/environment is 100% responsible, whereas people on the other side of the debate all say, very clearly, that there are a mix of factors?  There are obvious biological differences in basic physical traits, such as height and weight.  It seems to me that the claim that there is absolutely no difference, zero, in any other significant trait is a claim that is much more unlikely, and bears a huge burden of proof.

Even in this slideshow, Oda shows a set of bell curves that show that men have an (albeit small) advantage in math ability, but then says, on the next slide "biological differences do not account for the gender disparity".  It seems to me that the curves are good evidence that they could account for some of it (albeit a small amount).

There are other factors besides cognitive ability; and I think it's fair to say that they all have some mix of biological and cultural basis.  There is a good article which covers some of these topics, by Charles Murray, here:  http://www.iapsych.com/wj3ewok/LinkedDocuments/Murray2005.pdf.

Here are a couple of quotes to illustrate the kinds of things that he mentions that also play a role in this disparity:
- "women with careers were four-and-a-half times more likely than men to say they preferred to work fewer than 40 hours per week"
- "men take more risks, are more competitive, and are more aggressive than women."

Here is a similar type of analysis that has a different conclusion.  It's not an explanation for why there are less women in Computer Science, but it is related to math ability.

http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math.htm

Part 2:
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math2.htm

 I took a psych class from a professor who does most of her research on this topic. Here's a little blurb from her web site:
"Why do women consider a future in computer science to a lesser extent
than men (Dryburgh, 2000; Hess & Miura, 1985; Cheryan, Plaut,
Davies, & Steele, JPSP, 2009)? Might this be because the
powerful image of the male “computer geek” makes women feel like they do
not belong in the field? With colleagues, I found that there was a
clear stereotype of computer science students as people who, for
example, “stay up late coding and drinking energy drinks” and have “no
social life". In several behavioral experiments conducted at Stanford
University and the University of Washington (Cheryan, Plaut, Davies,
& Steele, JPSP, 2009), we found that women were less
interested in working in companies that contained objects
stereotypically associated with CS (e.g., Star Trek poster, video games)
compared to identical companies that had non-stereotypical objects
(e.g., nature poster, general interest books). The stereotypical cues
evoked a masculinity that made women feel that they did not fit with the
people in these environments. These results held even when the
proportion of women in the environment was equal across the two types of
companies. Attracting more women into computer science may therefore
depend on broadening the image of computer scientists."

(http://depts.washington.edu/sibl/index.html)

there are a number of problems with the claim that one sex is better at math than the other

our understanding of mathematical cognition, like that of any other complicated skill, is not complete either at the neural level or a higher psychological level; furthermore, different people solve different problems different ways (Benoît Mandelbrot for example was famous for using intuitive geometry to get by where his analytical skills were lacking) ... so we can't now (if ever) neatly reduce mathematical skill to genetic differences

the reasons given for WHY men are better at math are implicitly or explicitly reared on some thoroughly untestable or testable but wrong evo psych flapdoodle

for instance: Simon Bar-Cohen (Borat's cousin) links mathematical skill to autism (or what he calls "extreme male brain"), but, historically, true greatness in mathematics has required a lot of divergent, creative, metaphorical thinking, which people with autism notably lack ... and I think it's worth pointing out that at least a few great mathematicians either appeared to have had some kind of schizotypy running in their family or in THEM (cough cough John Nash)

and anyway the idea that there is some *intrinsic* genetic compromise between an ability to empathize and an ability to work with machines and stuff isn't really borne out by anything but clichés: where are the neuropsychological grounds for this claim? all told, I think confirmation bias is at work, basically: i.e. we pay special attention to girls sucking at math but ignore the many dudes who are shit at math: this is just an anecdote, but I've had to tutor quite a few dudes in stuff I consider basic, and I'm not really even a math ace

huh? the whole argument here is based on the fact that womens abilities in math are not different then mens, and yet the slideshow states clearly that CS skill isnt really based on math.  So she sidelines completely the question of what is CS based on anyway and why the difference?  I dont necessarily disagree with the conclusions but this is a post which adds nothing to a slideshow which demonstrates nothing.  If this slideshow is a demonstration of this womans logical capabilities i'd hate to see her code.

A recent article in physics today links some data sources which are quite revealing:
If you got a submission, try this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.1332

Thank you. I am a woman working in computer science. Coding is about language not math.

The difference is clearly biological in nature, but it's almost certainly nothing to do with ability at math, or really ability at all. What line of work people pick when given a choice tends to be things they're interested in and not necessarily things they're good at. Being bad at something is a barrier to entry but we don't see women trying at CS and then failing, if you look at young women today or any women really, they're simply not interested in computers, at least not in any technical capacity.

I think this political idea that we should have or strive for 50% gender divide in all areas is just stupid, you see female feminists pushing for this a lot but how many of them who even care about this actually work in these areas themselves? Almost none. Who is the magical subset of women who really want to strive to do CS but can't for some reason? I see feminists often fighting for this "eqaulity" but the reality is that women in general simply aren't interested, in the same way I (as a man) am not interested in things that appeal to women like say being a beautician. Yet we don't fight for 50% equality of men doing that, the world seems to understand that men largely have no interest in that.

I have yet to see anyone point out a good example of barriers to entry into CS that apply exclusively to women, it's nonsense.