Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?(blog.jessitron.com) |
Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?(blog.jessitron.com) |
>>When I go to Kindergarten Moms Night and someone asks what I do, "computer programming" usually ends the conversation
I don't this is specific to women - I run into exactly the same thing talking about my tech job with friends, family, strangers, etc.
There's also always an underlying question that gets avoided in these types of articles - what's the "correct" percentage of people of a particular gender/race/whatever in a profession? Obviously we should aim for a society where no woman is pushed away from programming if that's what she wants to do, but is there any reason to think every job should match society demographically?
As for the correct percentage of gender/race/whatever in programming, I don't think that really matters. I think a certain amount of people in general have the mindset to be a programmer and think the way a programmer does, and I don't really see anything like gender or race playing a part in someones ability to be a programmer.
Whatever numer of people that, barring societal interference, in an isolated vacuum with neutral exposure to all professions, choose the profession based only on personality and aptitude.
Maybe some market pressure towards in-demand professions, but that should be mostly extrinsic to someone in their developmental years until after they are exposed to most possible career paths.
Like the OP mentions, it isn't something that the software industry alone can solve, and IMO, all the affirmative action only does the inverse draw that doesn't actually attract those with a passion, but those for the easy access or money. It require society collectively to get over itself and stop thinking you can't do STEM without a Y chromosome, and it needs to stop demonizing the intellectually curious girls. But that is hard, because the parents of those girls were raised the same way.
I think that teaches us two things:
1) It's foolish to jump to conclusions about the "natural number" of women in programming. If you equalize the ratio and it sticks when you remove the affirmative action, that's the natural number.
2) Affirmative action can work when it comes to gender issues, even if it has been less successful for race issues. I think that's because gender doesn't have heritable socioeconomic status like race. A girl is equally likely as a boy to be born into a family that can say afford college, but that's not true of say blacks and whites.
And it's not that I don't care about women's issues, but I feel annoyed when I get grouped with other men just because I'm a man, despite the fact that race could also play a role in opportunities.
From my (poor) understanding of neurophysiology, it seems to me that women should actually generally be better than men at jobs like software development and engineering. So the fact that women are generally less interested in these things is alarming to me.
If that's so, then we have a major social stigma around technical interests that is preventing all but white and Asian men from gaining even a basic interest in these fields. And this is a travesty of the highest order.
Suppose that 200 years ago you took a poll and most women "simply preferred" not to vote. What does that tell you about whether the womens' suffrage movement was right or wrong?
Women are pushed away from CS because of sexism. A culture of sexism you contribute to with this comment.
My law school class was 55% male, 45% female, and my firm was pretty close to even.
My experience makes me believe that the reason that there aren't more women programmers is mostly that there aren't more women programmers. I think men and women, generally, interact socially in different ways. By the time I left engineering, I found the fairly homogenous and almost exclusively-male mode of social interaction rather tiring. It was refreshing to be in an environment with a diversity of people who had different ways of interacting socially.
I don't think most of the typical canards really matter. Yes, programming is a nerdy profession that rewards people who can work solitarily for long hours on detail-intensive work. But so is law, so is medicine, so is accounting, and those fields have almost even ratios of men and women. I don't think there is anything about the work that deters women.
Yes. This is one of the things I dislike the most about the startup world. I grew up with strong female authority figures, most of my direct academic advisors were women, and the first startup I worked at had a female CEO and a female CTO... over the years I've discovered that I tend to fare better with female leadership.
With an exclusively male office, there are some days during which the only woman I interact with is my girlfriend.
This is going to sound ignorant - but: Is it difficult / different for a woman to ignore that tag and still do cs (assuming she wants to)?
I'm not arguing #2 isn't a problem, though. Sadly, I'm not in tune with how kids get role models these days to have any useful suggestions how to fix it. I was a mentor for Technovation, teaching high school girls Android development, but by that age perhaps it's too late.
I think there's also an aspect of not realising what programming is, so not thinking you can do it because it seems a lot scarier than it really is.
[girls interest in code] = [interest induced by predispositions] +
[… by unalterable social pressure] +
[… by alterable social pressure] ± chanceAfter the interview I asked why she said that, and her reply was something to the effect of 'I have to prepare her for how the boys will act.'. It was a significant factor in my decision not to go.
In my total 4 years of engineering course. The branch with the least representation of girls was mechanical engineering, I say this because in all 4 years I didn't see a single girl take up mechanical engineering, same with civil engineering. Electronic and Communication was a little better, the best was Computer science, which seem to have only girls.
But that's sort of understandable, in the first year of engineering we had this subject called 'machine shop', you basically would have to build models with metal pieces, then there was a good enough amount of sheet metal work. You had to learn to use the hack saw, welding, soldering etc- there was also a good deal of carpentry. To give you a clue, even boys(most of them geeks and nerd types) from my branch(Electronics) found it exceedingly difficult to finish 40% of the models we were supposed to finish. They would be very physically tiring exercises, which we were never subjected to. Girls couldn't manage even 10% of them, in fact many of us helped them personally so that they could get passing marks.
Now I understand why no girl would ever want to get into things like mechanical and civil engineering. You have to work in male dominated cultures, where the work is almost designed such that a man could excel doing it- while you struggle to catch up. And you will be facing outright physical limitations. Now imagine doing this for years, Its a deal breaker to even begin with.
Coming to programming, the problem begins only when the going gets tough. I've seen a good deal of representation of women in large companies. The problem starts when you get into the rockstar culture, where you are expected put 16 hrs/day + traveling as a norm. When you start depicting whole night 'hackdays' as a sign of coolness. When learning new stuff needlessly happens just because its new etc. Now you are setting up a culture which is difficult for most women who have kids and family.
It's sickening how toxic the community is to women. Misogyny is often a cornerstone of 'internet humour' (e.g.: comments about getting back in the kitchen) and people act surprised when women are marginalised and driven away from indulging their interest in technology as a hobby. It's so normalised that even other women repeat the misogynist comments. I'm sure there's a fascinating psychology paper here on 21st century stockholm syndrome.
I really don't understand how people can be surprised women are systematically driven from the tech industry when their exposure of it is so constantly toxic.
An excellent case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Sarkeesian#Kickstarter_c...
preemptive edit: Just to repeat, I don't think that the professional industry is systemically misogynist. It's the hobby community centred mainly around the internet (which is, let's face it, the primary medium through which interest in tech and programming especially is explored) which kills any interest in the field before it can reach the stage of becoming a possible career option.
Is it really a problem? People do what they want, less women want to program, I see no problem with this.
Fewer women want to program because they're taught from a very young age that they can't.
As a result, we're losing out on a bunch of great programmers, which I think is a loss. I also think it's sad that girls are made to feel like these things are off-limits to them. I think the world would be a better place if every kid thought they could do whatever job they wanted to.
Before we ask women to charge into programming, we should be quite clear on why there are so few women in programming now and just what will happen to the women who go into programming based on our encouragement based on our guesses of what the situation will be like and what the results will be.
It took me a very long time to get some understanding of women. A first lesson is, in both obvious and deep ways, they are not much like men. In a word, they are different.
Be careful.
'women' is a noun, 'female' is an adjective. We wouldn't say 'men programmers', we say 'male programmers'.
It's usually framed as something like, "why do we care if there are more women in the programming world or not?" Here are a few answers that are true for me. Maybe these will resonate with some of you.
- I often meet women or read accounts written by women who struggle to simply exist in the world of programming without feeling like they are being called out as women all the time. This includes everything from being assumed to be ignorant of concepts to losing out on opportunities to being sexually harassed. As a male programmer, this makes me uncomfortable and unhappy as well--I want my female colleagues to feel welcomed and to equally "own" the identify of "computer programmer" (or software engineer, or what-have-you). Having more women programmers would help this, in many ways.
- I think it is possible we are missing out on some brilliant programmers coming into this field who could contribute things we haven't yet conceived of. Having more women programmers is not going to upset the balance in a zero-sum game; it's more for everyone. So having more women programmers could potentially help the world as well as provide all of us with more excellent colleagues.
- I would like to have more women colleagues because I enjoy the experience of working with women. Yes, I think women are different from men--but this is obvious if only because women will always experience the world differently from men. So I think having this perspective can only enrich a project and provide a more fertile ground for a successful project or team to grow.
I want to add one more thing. I get the sense that a lot of male commenters on HN feel immediately defensive about this subject, and feel like somehow they are going to lose something if they acknowledge that there is anything wrong or anything that could be fixed, or at worst, acknowledge that there is something that they could have handled better in the past.
But consider this: working in development, a concept that comes up again and again is software having a "smell." It seems obvious to me that the constant issues that come up relating to sexism in the industry is a very strong smell, albeit within the social fabric of the larger programming community. And it's equally obvious that the defensive, knee-jerk reaction is not productive. Consider, how would you approach this if it was a bug, and just wouldn't go away? If you were a good developer, first you would spend serious time trying to understand the problem and dig into it deeply, before you started writing code willy-nilly, right?
To which I say: so what? Does it all have to be about you?
Me, I have a cousin. She's 7. At the family reunion, she saw me using a screwdriver to take something apart. She immediately elbowed her way into the seat next to me, and politely insisted on me giving her the screwdriver. She then helped me take apart, fix, and reassemble the broken thing. She's a born engineer.
With God (or, our local equivalent, Paul Graham) as my witness, I declare: I'm getting her into tech. She's a natural, and I want to learn about anything that might keep her from a STEM career. Anybody who thinks that isn't relevant on a site called Hacker News can fuck right off.
I have a hunch that on account of the fact that your cousin is female and has engineering proclivities that you will give her significant unabated attention, hell you swore before God...This all really because she is female regardless if reality requires extra help or not (unproven as of yet). I'm pretty sure that's sexist entitlement.
roofers?
plumbers?
auto mechanics?
machinists?
coal miners?
underwater welders?
oil riggers?
merchant marines?
Typically, there is a 40-50% difference in upper body strength, and a 20-30% difference in lower body strength. Men also have significantly higher grip strength.
Those are averages, and there is overlap, but generally the pool of people qualified for jobs that depend a lot on physical strength is simply going to have a lot more men then women.
Programming is not such a job, so you can't really look to coal miners or oil riggers to explain why there aren't more women programmers.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_physio...
To flip the question somewhat, what is an industry which managed to successfully turn around its gender balance? From mostly men to a somewhat more natural ratio. What can we learn from that industry?
I don't think that's the barrier you seem to think. If women really thought programming was a worthwhile way to spend their time, they would create their own software companies/clubs/whatever and enforce any behavioral and attitude rules they cared to have.
Can women program? Absolutely -- at least as well as men. Do women want to program? Apparently not.
> I really don't understand how people can be surprised women are systematically driven from the tech industry when their exposure of it is so constantly toxic.
Women are not being driven out of the tech industry, they're being driven out of male-dominated enclaves. Women don't like the testosterone-drenched parts of the business, and they don't care to create a more congenial atmosphere for themselves as they have in many other professions. No one knows why, but it's misleading and counterproductive to explain that women can't produce technically successful companies and environments because men won't let them. Men don't have that kind of power any more -- the only thing stopping women is women.
The bottom line is that gender equality is not something men give to women, it is something that women take, because it's their right. The only question is whether women will choose to do it.
The reason some of us talk about it is that it's important to us. Just like every article here. Do you complain about every post on HN that isn't personally important to you? No, you skim on by. Why would you click through and comment negatively on this one? Because you want us to stop talking about it. You might ask yourself why.
Also, the pseudo-clever "nuh-uh, you're the real sexist" stuff is the kind of bullshit that I only ever see from anonymous accounts. If you want to make (idiotic) personal accusations, own your words.
While there are few women in programming, there are a lot more women than Hispanics or people of color. In my opinion this is even worse than the gender disparity. Are the reasons the same? I suspect so, especially #3.
I didn't mention race in the original post, because I'm white. I have no credibility there.
Thank you for bringing it up.
Edit: not saying men don't. I grew up in a household of girls. I DID play with barbies. Not makeup though.
This even despite the fact that there are a lot of other women who weren't taught this nonsense, and have been very successful in scientific and engineering fields.
I don't think it's a matter of women not gravitating toward programming. It's more likely a matter of girls being taught that they're not capable of it and not having successful role models who are in these industries.
Also, note that "it's just that men gravitate towards it more" is not an explanation. It's a way of avoiding actually thinking about the topic. Gravity is about mass, not gender.
A better comparison would be if most women didn't vote even though they could. (Because of thugs at the booth perhaps?)
But if you really can't get the point without a more specific analogy, try doctors. Or going to college.
Given that "fewer women become X because of societal obstacles" has been proven true for many professions over the last couple of centuries, I think the burden of proof is on somebody who wants to claim that programming is some strange special exemption.