An op-ed in the New York Times:

The percentage of women studying computer science actually has fallen since the 1980s. Dr. Cheryan theorizes that this decline might be partly attributable to the rise of pop-culture portrayals of scientists as white or Asian male geeks in movies and TV shows like “Revenge of the Nerds” and “The Big Bang Theory.”

Such superficial stereotypes might seem laughably outdated. And yet, studies show that the public’s image of a scientist hasn’t changed since the 1950s. And such stereotypes do have a basis in reality. Who could fail to notice that only one of the eight people awarded Nobel Prizes in science or medicine last week was a woman?

In another experiment, Dr. Cheryan and her colleagues arranged for female undergraduates to talk to an actor pretending to be a computer science major. If the actor wore a T-shirt that said “I CODE THEREFORE I AM” and claimed to enjoy video games, the students expressed less interest in studying computer science than if the actor wore a solid shirt and claimed to enjoy hanging out with friends — even if the T-shirt-clad actor was another woman.

Over and over, Dr. Cheryan and her colleagues have found that female students are more interested in enrolling in a computer class if they are shown a classroom (whether virtual or real) decorated not with “Star Wars” posters, science-fiction books, computer parts and tech magazines, but with a more neutral décor — art and nature posters, coffee makers, plants and general-interest magazines. …

As a woman who earned a bachelor of science degree in physics in the 1970s but left the field because I felt I didn’t belong, I have long been interested, and focus here, on women in science and math. I was fascinated, but not surprised, to learn that many young women today avoid studying computer science because they, too, fear they won’t fit in. …

TECHNOLOGY companies know they have a gender and diversity problem in their work force, and they are finally taking steps to try to fix it. But where are those new employees going to come from if women and minority students aren’t opting to study computer science or engineering? …

What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech By EILEEN POLLACK OCT. 10, 2015

This is not the first time Pollack has offered this analysis in the NYT, which in 2013 published her 8,000 word memoir “Why Are There So Few Women in Science?” I responded in Taki’s Magazine in “In Search of Sexier Scientists:”

In Search of Sexier Scientists

by Steve Sailer

October 09, 2013

Continuing its blanket coverage of the problems of people who don’t really have problems, The New York Times turns from the plight of female Harvard Business School students to the tribulation of female Yale physics majors.

In “Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?,” Eileen Pollack, head of the creative writing MFA program at the U. of Michigan, devotes 8,000 words to the churning passions that accompanied her return to Yale, where she was a physics major in the mid-1970s before losing all interest in science and math. Why, she cries out, did society not persuade her to pursue “the prospects, prestige, intellectual stimulation and income” that come with attending grad school in astrophysics?

Why?

Together, these Harvard and Yale articles make informative reading because they show how protean feminist analysis has become. Feminism rationalizes a culture of complaint no matter how contradictory the gripes.

For example, the Harvard article recounted a lesbian dean’s struggle to prevent heterosexual women students from coming to class on Halloween dressed up in “sexy pirate costumes.” In contrast, the Yale tale told by Ms. Pollack, a middle-aged girly girl with an ex-husband and a son, protests how our culture discourages women scientists from wearing sexy clothes such as fishnet stockings in the laboratory.

Similarly, while the HBS women are oppressed by a lack of time to finish their homework because future Jack Donaghys keep asking them out on exciting dates, the Yale women in STEM majors (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) are oppressed by a lack of exciting beaus because they find the boys in their classes to be immature Sheldon Coopers.

Nationally, female students have come to comprise a majority in almost all venues of higher education, except the most exclusive. Even the student body of mighty Yale Law School, alma mater of two of the last seven presidents, is now 49.3 percent women.

Among the few remaining academic institutions where men outnumber women are elite MBA schools such as Harvard’s and elite STEM programs such as Yale’s. So they receive an inordinate amount of attention because a male majority facilitates traditional feminist critiques of men as the suffocating mainstream. (Of course, there are also unmentioned advantages to being in the minority sex. For example, would dowdy Hillary Rodham have snagged handsome Bill Clinton if the gender ratio at Yale Law School four decades ago had been more equal?)

To explore the pain of being a young woman surrounded by highly intelligent young men, Pollack quickly found 80 Yale coeds who wanted to talk about their searing emotions. The airing of grievances included:

“The boys in my group don’t take anything I say seriously,” one astrophysics major complained. “I hate to be aggressive. Is that what it takes?…Will I have to be this aggressive in graduate school? For the rest of my life?”

Good question.

Pollack recalls one reason she quit science:

I was tired of dressing one way to be taken seriously as a scientist while dressing another to feel feminine.

Three and a half decades later, a grad student complains to her “about men not taking you seriously because you dress like a girl.”

Fortunately, there is hope abroad:

[Professor Meg] Urry told me that at the space telescope institute where she used to work, the women from Italy and France “dress very well, what Americans would call revealing. You’ll see a Frenchwoman in a short skirt and fishnets; that’s normal for them.”

And then there’s the issue of dating:

Another said she disliked when she and her sister went out to a club and her sister introduced her as an astrophysics major. “I kick her under the table. I hate when people in a bar or at a party find out I’m majoring in physics. The minute they find out, I can see the guys turn away.” Yet another went on about how even at Yale the men didn’t want to date a physics major, and how she was worried she’d go through four years there without a date.

Of course, Yale STEM coeds don’t have to go to dance clubs to meet men—there are always a surplus of unattached males right across the lab bench.

But who wants to date them?