We have to be careful not to draw too strong a line between any differences in attitudes between the sexes and career choices. When the Hollywood stereotype of

We have to be careful not to draw too strong a line between any differences in attitudes between the sexes and career choices. When the Hollywood stereotype of a programmer was a lab-coated professional working in a team on an idealistic project which runs amok then just as many women as men entered programming. When the stereotype shifted to a loan hacker in basement waging a solitary war against The Man gender ratios went lopsided. You can blame teenagers for being foolish in how they're affected by pop culture but it's more effort than most people expend to figure things out better at that age. And there is a real gender difference in that the archetype of the hacker is more appealing to men, but for the vast majority of programmers the old Hollywood stereotype is actually much more accurate. So even if gender differences are in some sense causal in differential representation that doesn't mean that they're inevitable or that they're something we should just accept.