I clicked on this link: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/the-brogrammer-effect-women-are-a-small-and-shrinking-share-of-computer-workers/2796

I clicked on this link: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/the-brogrammer-effect-women-are-a-small-and-shrinking-share-of-computer-workers/279611/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/the-brog... and I honestly think it's awful. Calling programmers "brogrammers" is a sexist label to begin with. More is explained in the comments. This is not an attitude that helps anybody. Regardless, maybe it simply doesn't have an explanation. You see, humans (and yes, women are humans) have herd mentality. And just like we get financial bubbles, maybe we get gender bubbles, with different genders doing different jobs. There is no "why", just like there is no why you rolled 1 on dice. In the book Butterfly Economics, there is a famous experiment described. You have an anthill, and you place 2 heaps of food at the same distance from it. The ants normally leave pheromone trail, and basically decide where to go partly based on the trail (that is, decisions made by other ants) and partly independently of it. What happens? Intuition would suggest that ants will divide 50/50 between the two food heaps, or very close to that. However, in the real world, the ratio of ants taking the food will fluctuate wildly, with up to 80/20 ants going to one heap. Then it may swing the other direction, and so on.