Why are there so few women programmers in the software industry? (2015)

Why are there so few women programmers in the software industry? (2015)(chaource.livejournal.com)

19 points by akater 10 years ago | 8 comments

belorn 10 years ago |

Sweden collect statistics on peoples job titles as a part of the process of collecting taxes, and based on that I find it slightly odd that there is such focus on programming. Only about 10% of professions is considered gender "balanced", and a profession with 80% balance is quite in the middle. There is a bunch of professions which has 90%+, with several that has 99% of a single gender (primarily female professions, with some exceptions). The top one, never spoken about in gender politics, had about 4000 working females professionals to 1 male.

Since the article provided their personal theory, I will provide mine. I do not think its the work activity itself that matter, but that a person who picks between multiple choices of potential future professions, the deciding factor when everything else has been considered is the amount of people with similar life experience that one is likely to find. If you are a young parent, you have a minor preference for places which employ a lot of other young parents of the same gender. When everything else is equal, such preference can have a huge impact on gender statistics.

bbarn 10 years ago |

Odd article. Lots of interesting history in there, then the explanation is simply "Today's programming resembles design and construction of large mechanisms a lot more than word processing. The majority of women just don't find these things as interesting as men do."

Seems like the author did a lot of research then just jumped to conjecture for his conclusion.

buckbova 10 years ago | |

There's a lot of that in there:

> Today's programming resembles design and construction of large mechanisms a lot more than word processing. The majority of women just don't find these things as interesting as men do.

Do the majority of men find those things interesting? Do women like word processing and menial tasks?

Is it possible that as the job of software engineer garnered more money and status, women were shut out?

I don't know, but this article doesn't answer these questions.

sonabinu 10 years ago | |

Article seems to look at the gender gap only from a few angles - a natural inclination for design and mechanics, and gender specific marketing of computer devices, and curriculum changes in CS programs. I think there is more to it than that. The salary element, the odd job hours, the gender gap leading to a bigger gender gap as women feel like the odd (wo)man out in programming circles are some causes that need to be examined further. In my opinion to think of early programmer as people who corrected typos and worked on word processing is a biased view.

gavanwoolery 10 years ago |

The article provides a lot of interesting questions, but occasionally without enough data to answer them. But maybe the questions are a good starting point, from the perspective of logical deduction.

On an additional note, I find it odd that software always gets so much focus: for example, 99 percent of construction jobs are held by males in many countries (and a large portion of these jobs do not involve heavy physical labor, if that is a concern - i.e. heavy machinery operators, foremen (forewomen?) etc ).

http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2010/07/27/where-women-work/

See link above. I think we might be asking the wrong question, focusing on too narrow of a field. The better question might be, why do certain fields get dominated by women, and certain fields are devoid of them? I think there is a much broader hypothesis here to be tackled then one concerning a single field.

dementis 10 years ago |

The premise of this article and many like are based on flawed data. They only take into account the people with actual CS related degrees working in the industry. When in reality you have people with everything from English Lit. to psychology, to no degrees at all.

A more interesting study to me would be why so many "programers" seem to exhibit traits commonly associated with OCD or Asperger syndrome(some times both). Wired even called it "Geek syndrome" http://www.wired.com/2001/12/aspergers/

douche 10 years ago |

Hmm, immediately flagged off the front page.

Burn the heretic!

0xdeadbeefbabe 10 years ago |

I find that Java things like Ant or Maven bring tedium back to software, but not quite the same way that punch cards did.