Here in Germany most women prefer career paths that are paid worse than IT modulo medicine. Also, IT is not considered low-class, maybe because there are many academics in IT.
In the US it's considered low status because it's considered to have questionable long-term value, due to potential future outsourcing.
He's absolutely right. In the US, software development has always, until perhaps very recently, been considered a very low status career and with low long-term potential. That is, versus one of the classic engineering or medical jobs. By the way, in the US, IT generally means support desk job, which is seen as the lowest of the low. Only very recently has the median software development job approached anywhere near a medical specialist or the classic engineering job, and it's still far below the wage of many US doctors.
I'd say that the US general public is still expecting the imminent outsourcing of all software development, to foreigners making $2/hour somewhere far away, to occur soon. People in the field don't expect this, but that's how outsiders perceive it.
This low-status is a huge contributor to what keeps most US women from pursuing software development as a career, according to women I've talked to. It really is that simple and obvious.
This is also why there's a trend of US software developers prominently adding "scientist" or "engineer" to their job titles. Pure software development still has a low status stigma.
Interesting perspective, I would have expected the image of software professionals in the US to be way better due to companies such as Google or Apple.
In terms of long-term potential medicine specialists are better off here, but it is not as extreme as in NA. If you are a top-tier IT freelancer, then you can easily compete with them.
