There is a generally observable and most likely a statistically provable scarcity of women in the programmer community.
Would it be right to conclude from this that men are generally more intelligent than women? If so, what's the cause of this? And if not, why?
The short answer: No, sex differences in professions is not a good basis for judging the intelligence of males and females.
I would like to address some of the assumptions and misconceptions in the question. First, I would like to deconstruct the question, and then answer it.
One of the earlier titles of the question was "Are men more intelligent than women?". It starts with the observation that there are more males who work in areas related to mathematics and programming, therefore males are more intelligent.
I think this is a common bias in humans. People know a lot about their area of expertise and then judge others by their lack of understanding of what they are experts in. To take a stereotypical example, perhaps a female clinical psychologist, doctor, or lawyer may wonder why so many males are mathematicians and programmers. She might think that this is because they lack the intelligence to function effectively in domains that require strong interpersonal skills. I am not defending this point of view either. I merely intend to highlight that to judge others by your own standards of what represents intelligence is problematic.
Have a read of page 91 of "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns", which represents the position of a large reputable APA task force of leading intelligence researchers. Summarising a huge literature, males tend to perform much better on visual-spatial intelligence test items such as mental rotation and tracking moving objects. Females often perform better on verbal abilities such as synonym generation and verbal fluency. Overall, there is minimal difference in full-scale IQ.
You could also have a read of Hide's (2005) summary of meta-analytic sex differences across a wide range of cognitive tests.
Here, the author advances a very different view, the gender similarities hypothesis, which holds that males and females are similar on most, but not all, psychological variables.
However, this only addresses mean differences, and there is certainly much greater differences within sexes than between.
No. In developing IQ tests for intelligence science has found that age not sex is the key difference between groups of people for which non-biased conclusions can be drawn.
Most IQ tests are constructed so that there are no differences between the average (mean) scores of females and males. Areas where differences in mean scores have been found include verbal and mathematical ability.
-Wikipedia Sex differences in psychology
If anything modern research purports that women have an insignificant half point above men.
To think that men and women would differ should be obvious (specialization to differing tasks). To think that one group would be better or worse overall would be counter-intuitive (survival would be worsened).
When I was in college, the Engineering school with the highest proportion of women (46%) was Computer Science. I don't know why. I think it is also the Engineering field with the most women actually employed. When I worked as a programmer in a company with about 100 employees, about 40% were programmers, and most of those were women. Some of them were among the most intelligent people I have ever known.
I think that no general statements about intelligence relative to male vs female will hold up overall. I do know that females have much greater touch sensitivity, as proven by research. But that would make sense in terms of evolution. Computer programming has not been around very long for male-female differences to arise in the brain. (Check back in a million years.)
