This is a tough one for me. I hope I don't have to say that I am very opposed to discrimination against women, and I think we should take this problem seriously.<p>However, I also have to wonder if the scarcity of women in software is simply the result of better career decision making among women.<p>The sf chronicle (sfgate.com) recently released a list of jobs and what they pay in SF. RNs (registered nurses) earn an average salary of about $112,000 a year. Application developers, on the other hand, earn about $111,000 a year.<p><a href="http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2013/12/17/what-the-most-common-jobs-in-san-francisco-pay/#18915101=0" rel="nofollow">http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2013/12/17/what-the-most-co...</a><p>Interestingly, physicians and pharmacists aren't listed (perhaps there aren't enough of them to make the list). Laywers, in spite of recent issues in the legal world, are still listed as having an average salary of $166,000 a year in San Francisco.<p>Nursing is 90% women. Pharmacy is about 56% women. At UCSF, the entering medical school class is 58% women. At Boalt law school (UC Berkeley), the entering class is 54% women.<p>Average don't tell the whole story. There's good and bad in everything. Many lawyers give up, so there is some survivor bias here (though you could certainly say the same thing about developers - many people believe firmly that there is bad age bias after age 40, something that doesn't appear to happen in health fields).<p>In terms of career stability and earnings, long term, I actually think that all of the fields (except perhaps law) listed above are probably better choices for academically talented students.<p>I post this a lot, but here it is again - the RAND institute concluded that the american aversion to graduate degrees in STEM fields is rational and market driven, a response to poor prospects and pay <i>relative</i> to the options available high achieving students in other fields.<p><a href="http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html</a><p>We should at least consider the possibility that avoidance of STEM degrees and software development careers may actually reflect better career decision making. We say that young women are generally outperforming young men academically, <i>but</i> not in STEM. Well, maybe avoidance of STEM is just another manifestation of how women are making better choices in life than men are.