> (Whoever figures out
> why girls freely went into CS in the 70s and stopped abruptly in the mid 80s will
> make a lot of HR departments very happy).
Simple: It's when the hippie (I mean that in a good way) ideals and womens' liberation movements of the 60s gave way to rampant consumerism.
When you go to pick out clothes for your newborn child, what do they look like? Blue if it's a boy, pink if it's a girl. When you flip over to the cartoons and kids' shows for pre-teens, what do they look like? Being "cool" if they're for boys, pink and glitter everywhere with everyone wanting to be princesses if they're for girls. When you're sitting there and watching TV shows with your son or daughter at 10+, arguably the years where their brain plasticity starts to harden and they begin to plan their adult lives, what do you see? Spray-tan, entitlement, cars and "bangin' chicks" if they're targeted at men, or fashion models, teenage mothers, and co-dependency if they're targeted at women.
When you go to watch a movie with your friends, what sort of ideals are portrayed on the glorious silver screen? Women want nothing more than to settle down and raise a family as a stay-at-home mom with the executive something-or-other she saw once in a coffee shop, and men have impossible six-packs and tear apart trees with their bare hands for fun, anything less than either of these ideals mean you're not good at being a woman, or not good at being a man. When you go home and flip the TV back on to wash away the tripe you saw on the big screen, and a commercial comes on to interrupt the show peddling make-up or Brawndo, what gets shoved in your face? The notion that men are bumbling, inept doofuses who can't do anything right without the gentle touch of a woman, and the idea that women are worthless without fifty dollars a day of Mary Kay applied with a putty knife.
Let's face facts here, young men and young women are inundated from practically the time they leave the womb, at every hour of the day, with media telling them what they can and cannot be depending on their gender. While I think that software development companies have a whole hell of a lot that they need to answer for in the way of sexism - take NVidia's crass party at GDC 2014 at a topless bar that, I swear to god, employed a little person on a megaphone outside - I think the battle to get women and other minorities involved in STEM fields is lost well before they get to the point in life of considering what their major will be.
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