And she said that one of the things that happens is that women don’t even think they’re qualified for something because it’s advertised in competitive language. The language of competition not only doesn’t appeal to many women, it actually puts them off.
This doesn't make sense to me because easily the most competitive path I've ever seen is premed. Almost all of the premeds I know are competing for the best grades, the best resumes, and the best internships. Organic chem is like a giant free-for-all where everyone tries to beat the curve. And yet, at least 50% of biology and medical students are women. Why are women turned off by competitiveness in CS (which I think is less common in my engineering classes where people often try to help other people and don't compete for the best grade), but not in medicine?
Aren't we just applying cultural influences to both genders in either case?
She didn't say she was put off by competition, she said she was put off by competitive language in the job listing. She recommended more focus on the collaborative side of the internship - mentorship, line by line code review, and being part of decisionmaking. "Things that have to do with collaboration and learning appeal a lot more to female candidates."
Couching something in mainly competitive terms does not just advertise that it's competitive, it also hints that there's a sort of pissing contest atmosphere at work. In the case of Fog Creek, it was an inadvertent, false signal, but what this woman is saying is that it's a negative indicator many women watch out for.
You can be at once highly qualified for a competitive field and drawn to that field for reasons having nothing to do with competition. Those female premeds are almost certainly more interested in working with patients than in beating their chest and bragging about how they got into a good med school. (And I'd venture the same holds true for the males.)
You misunderstand the quote. It's not saying that CS positions are too competitive. It's saying they're described as being about competition. Medical degrees are competitive, but they're not about the competition, they're about helping people. Meanwhile, CS is promoted by hosting coding challenges and competitions, and the top-tier jobs advertise how their teams are so much smarter and more accomplished than everyone, and so forth. This creates the perception that not only is the field competitive, but that the competition is practically an end in itself, where in medicine it's an obstacle to the actual goal of helping people (or getting a gigantic salary).
This whole endless search for the reason why "women aren't in computing" is just a modern day version of epicycle theory. In ancient times, they couldn't admit that the earth went around the sun, so they came up with the increasingly baroque epicycle theory, where planets were postulated to do loop-de-loops just so that no one would have to concede heliocentrism.
Today we face a similar taboo, held for similar quasi-religious reasons. Our latest epicycle is competitive job postings. This at least is laudably specific; most of these kinds of explanations aren't testable at all.
The obvious but taboo answer is that women will generally gravitate to fields which are more social/people focused and less technical/mathematical. That spectrum runs from teaching through medicine in the middle through CS.
These trends are due in nontrivial part to genetics. Women are just more social and men more systematizing, on average.
As programming went from rote punch card/data entry to something more like physics or math, the percentage of women dropped.
All this breast beating is about a refusal to accept that basic biological differences could possibly affect behavior. Indeed, not even the tenured President of Harvard can broach the topic, even if he only moots the possibility of differences in variance rather than mean!
It's not much of a debate when those who voice the "partially genetic" position are at risk of losing their jobs.
Why are women turned off by competitiveness in CS ... but not in medicine?
Maybe they are just more practical. The worst physician's salary averages about $50K more than the best programmer's salary. Nurses get paid as much as programmers. If you do pre-med but can't get into med school, you can still get into public health, physical therapy, dentistry, optometry, pharmacy, etc... If you do CS but can't get a job at Google, you can get into TPS reports or be unemployed. That last part is grossly simplifying, but compare getting a programming job someplace like Wyoming or North Dakota vs. getting a medical job in the same place.
" Honestly, when you hear the phrase 'the world’s best developers,' you see a guy. "
Thats the key right there - women are comfortable competing, they just have a hard time picturing themselves as the alpha geek hacker that this competitive language brings to mind for many people. At least thats how I interpreted it.
Also there are studies that women tend to underestimate their skills while men tend to overestimate them which might also be relevant, see Sheryl Sandberg's commencement address:
Premed and organic chem aren't advertised in "competitive language", though. How often do you see schools write course descriptions like "we're seeking the world's best chemistry ninjas to help us take our chemistry educating to the next level?"
This doesn't make any sense to me (not you, the statement). Some of the most competitive people I know are women. And if you've been on a university campus it's stacked top to bottom with women competing for highly selective majors. CS and Sft.Eng. seems to be an outlier in this, but chem, bio, business, and econ are populated with really smart graduate women.
Even when I was in highschool 10 years ago the top 10 students, 6 of them were girls. The salutatorian was a girl and she let everyone know how displeased she was for not getting valedictorian (beaten by 1/100 of a point).
Women are turned off of CS and I can assure it's not the competitive language.
Yeah, it's not a necessarily female response. I'm sure lots of male devs would be more attracted by constructive rather than competitive language.
But actually, I love that. They asked her for advice on marketing their program to women, and she gave them advice on marketing their program in general. Good show.
> Why are women turned off by competitiveness in CS, but not in medicine?
From my experience, the primary thing driving those who aspire to work in the medical field is not so much salary as employment security. They compete early on (in college and in medical school) so they wouldn't have to compete later when they enter the workspace. I think that the promise of job security (guaranteed employment) has a particular appeal to women. I suspect that their thinking is that once they graduate, they can relax at the high-paying secure job and invest their time and resources into growing children. On the other hand, to me, as a young man looking to enter the startup field, ventures with ongoing high risk and high payoff appeal more than employment guarantees.
I dropped out of premed and started programming and studying art sometime in college partly because I was turned off by people whose primary career motivation was job security and who did not have any serious creative pursuits besides their career goals.
That is a very interesting point you make about assumptions being applied to "both" genders. In particular, that advertising competition is considered to be a way to attract manly men to a tech startup. Is this really the best approach? Sure, the high school football player is interested in bashing in the head of his competition and causing them pain. Advertising for those competitive traits are undoubtedly an excellent approach to attracting the most sociopathic used car salesmen and wall street traders for who the customer is an enemy to be bilked.
But is that criteria what best motivates inventors and designers as well?
Myself, I design things because I like to make cool stuff for people to use and I am really good at it. I spend a lot of time thinking about and experimenting with usability. I have found that an interest in making cool useful things is something that brilliant talented designers share with me. I have yet to meet any brilliant designers who are motivated primarily by wanting to destroy their rivals.
It's my understanding that in the early days working with computers was considered manually labor, something akin to data-entry of today. The "real" scientists and business people would instruct their CS conterparts to do a task, and how that task was accomplished was neither interesting nor remarked upon.
As computation became cheaper, CS still retained many qualities of data entry especially in the business sector.
As such, the whole profession was looked down upon. Men didn't want to enter it since after all they could simply be scientists and businessmen instead. So those who took it up were first women, then social outcasts (I'm exaggerating a bit here).
---
Around the 90s, everything started changing.
CS was still looked down on, but computing was so cheap and easy that you didn't need to trust it to someone with a specific degree to do so.
As such, the scientists and business people I remarked upon earlier began using their own computers. And where they didn't, they didn't hire someone with a CS degree to do it.
Also, the programming aspects of CS were better separated from data entry. Programmers which once were reviled, now could command healthy incomes and thus it became an attractive job for men.
Women on the other hand could get any job they preferred, and did prefer to get jobs in their own interest instead of CS which they might have only taken before because it was one of the few 'low class' labors that still made use of the mind and education.
Somewhere buried at home I have an old Cobol programming book, talking about how, as a programmer, typing was beneith you. Instead you were instructed to write neatly on cards and supply these to the typist for her to type in.
That was my first thought, that these "computer analysts" of the 70s were glorified secretaries running punch cards through a system. It seems like I would have remembered or known a few more older female computer scientists if they were really 40%+ of the work force.
You might be right, but the female fraction of CS/math PhD's also dropped by a factor of 4 between 1920 and 1960 (see my other post). So the effect extends beyond "unskilled" computer jobs.
I worked many years ago as a substitute teacher in Oakland, CA. During that time, there was interesting pattern. The vast majority of the older teachers were black and the vast majority of younger teacher were white. At a glance, this would seem strange given that discrimination was being actively attacked. But what was happening was more socially prestiges opportunities were opening for black college graduates and so few of them wanted to go into teaching, a field with less prestige than, say, law or business.
I suspect something different but with related qualities is going on with women and programming.
* Women now have more and more opportunities in a number of fields (I recall a statistic claiming the average income of a young woman college graduate in New York was higher than that of the average male college graduate).
* Programming has become a less desirable, less socially prestiges occupation.
* Programming became a more hobby-based occupation - the expectation is more that a programmer have been tinkering with computers forever and thus (as per the article).
* Programming became a more male-identified occupation through the media and through the hobby aspect.
* Age discrimination pushes the previous women programmers out of the field (and contributes to the field losing social prestige).
I believe this is the major force. The reason why medicine equalized first was that it is the highest status profession. Law, business and accounting are similarly equalizing faster.
Low status professions are losing women. Usually low status non-labour professions like teachers, librarians and nurses were done by women primarily but computer science started off early equal so now it is skewed male.
It sucks to be in a low status profession but that's the way it is.
I wonder what the percentage of high school graduates who can program is, broken down by gender. My guess is there's close to an order of magnitude more 18 year-old males who can program than there are 18 year-old females, at least in the U.S., anyway. Furthermore, I'd guess that many if not most 18 year-olds who can program (male or female) are largely self-taught.
My thesis here is that teenage boys are much more likely to learn to program on their own than teenage girls are, regardless of raw aptitude. This might be true of technical skills in general, but programming (I would contend) is unusual in how easy it is to learn on your own.
This is just a hypothesis on my part, and I don't have hard numbers to back it up. It's a question I'd like to see asked, though.
To extend the argument, incoming freshmen who have an aptitude for chemical engineering are likely to start on a level playing field, regardless of gender.
If you consider the CS track, though, the same is not true. Regardless of base aptitude, many more male freshmen will know how to program than will female freshmen. Females (on average) start out behind, and never catch up.
Except you don't have to be able to program to be accepted to a CS program, so that shouldn't have a dramatic effect on why there are so few female students interested in CS.
Why did I (a boy) get into computers? I was a nerd and I had one friend and no social skills. I played no sports and did nothing but play with action figures and watch TV - until I found the computer. I never gave it up until I grew up, and now it's a job and sometimes a hobby (when i'm home long enough to play with it). Would you say it's more likely or less likely that an equal percentage of girls to boys would have similar experiences? Or would you say that girls might just have an easier time socializing and might be less prompted to lose themselves on the computer?
Why do we even care about which sex works more in that field? If we had the answer to this question, and somebody decided to increase the population of women in the field... Is it going to produce better code or something? What's the point other than just playing with social structures for fun, or exercising some strange need to reach some kind of artificial equilibrium anywhere we see what we perceive as an imbalance?
tl;dr there's not as many friendless geek women and who cares who's coding anyway
I'm so glad to see this message out there; a frustratingly small number of people are aware of the 1984(ish) peak in females in the field. My mom taught computer programming (Fortran) in a Chicago high school from 1967 until 1984, and was actually kind of surprised when I first asked her about gender balance issues in the field—they just weren't an issue then, and her classes were always more or less balanced.
But what they also were was everyone's very first exposure to a computer. Without exception, her students had never written any sort of program before, and they were recruited from good students in the math and physics classes, coming to programming with an open mind and no preconceptions. (A lot of them, girls and boys both, went into technical computer-related fields.)
The change, as has been noted elsewhere on this page, surely has to do with the introduction of computers, but my hypothesis is that it wasn't just home PCs (not in the 80s) but classroom PCs that were the problem: in a lot of places, computers in the classroom were a fad and showed up with no training of the teachers, so they sat in the back or the side, mostly unused... unless one or two of the students pestered the teacher to play with the computer, and then used the manual and/or trial and error to figure it out. Guess which students were doing that more?
But that, I think, wouldn't be enough. The knowledge should equalise after one or maybe two terms of college CS, right? But I'm pretty sure the real problem was that professors inadvertently reinforced and magnified the difference between students who'd had previous computer experience (primarily boys) and students who hadn't (of both genders). It turns out that as a teacher, it's very, very easy to look around the classroom, see that X% of the students seem to be getting something, and decide to move on. (You can't wait for 100%, usually, so it's always a judgement call.) That's fine if it's something you've taught well and only the weak students are struggling, but what if it's something you absentmindedly glossed over? Half the class understands it, so you must have covered it, right? This is very insidious, and even being aware of it is not always enough to combat it; and if the divide of "has experience" vs "no experience" partially reflects a gender divide, that divide will only get reinforced.
"In the past year, the number of women majoring in Computer Science has nearly doubled at Harvard, rising from 13% to 25% (still nowhere near the 37% of 1984). [...] In the past three years, the number of female Computer Science majors at MIT has risen by 28%. And, at Carnegie Mellon, the portion of Computer Science majors who are women has moved from 1 in 5 in 2007 to 1 in 4 last year."
Focusing on the elite computer science schools obscures the overall statistic (which I don't see mentioned in the article). These schools specifically recruit and admit as many qualified females as they can into their program. At CS4HS, a CMU/Google conference for high school CS teachers, we were told as much, and tasked to do our own part to diversify our CS classes.
This post is presumably part of the patio11 campaign to boost Fog Creek's SEO and conversion rates by publishing "content you can't get anywhere else". Looking good!
That's what I thought, but FogCreek and Joel Spolsky probably has billions of in bound links from Joel's writing. Surely they wouldn't need to attract in links?
I don't see any reason they need to be asked in the same article actually. Was there ever a time when 40% of primary school teachers were male? It's not clear to me that there's any strong parallel between the two professions at all.
The reasoning for the decline in male primary school teachers (and daycare workers) has very little to do with women in CS. Guys have much more danger points in the legal system when accused of something. The risk / reward ratio is too far gone. This does not happen to women in CS.
I think the rise of males in CS was due to the rise of the personal computer. As someone noted earlier, as computers become more common in the home and males started using them, they picked up a stigma associated with the type of males that used them.
Why does that have anything to do with primary school teachers? I'm fairly certain very little.
When I was an education major, other people in the field told me that it was great that I, as a man, was going into education, because I would be serving as a male role model.
Forgot where I read it but like true_religion said, some female programmers came into the field by way of secretary. As they kept typing instructions, they eventually figured out how computers work.
This photo set from Bell Labs taken in the 1960s is pretty interesting:
One thing to note is that despite computers being a novelty back then is that primary education was in a much better state and students had a stronger foundation in science and math regardless of sex. Many long-time teachers would say (with some nostalgia premium) that high school graduates of the 1960s are equivalent to college graduates of today.
Another thing that isn't touched on is that computer programming as it stands right now is not a very female friendly profession. Women will usually factor in the possibility that their careers may get derailed at some point by having a child. Careers where time away from the field doesn't obsolete your skills is a big plus for women. Medicine and law are excellent fields in that regard.
"Partly because it is so tricky to juggle kids and a career, many highly able women opt for jobs with predictable hours, such as human resources or accounting. They also gravitate towards fields where their skills are less likely to become obsolete if they take a career break, which is perhaps one reason why nearly two-thirds of new American law graduates are female but only 18% of engineers.
A study by the Centre for Work-Life Policy, a think-tank based in New York, found that, in 2009, 31% of American women had taken a career break (for an average of 2.7 years) and 66% had switched to working part-time or flexible-time in order to balance work and family. Having left the fast track, many women find it hard to get back on. "
Based on the handful of women I know who can program, there seems to be a few reasons why not many go into CS:
1) It seems they aren't exposed to it as much. They're less likely to read about it on the internet. Or learn about it from relatives. Or take classes in it.
2) The handful that I know who took programming in high school never (or barely) turned it into a hobby, even if they later declared CS as their major.
Meanwhile, I know tons of guys who got into programming by themselves, or because their parents did it. Also, all of the CS guys I know who took programming classes in high school did some outside of class for fun.
So, when some women become CS majors, they get intimidated. They see "everyone" outperforming them, since everyone is mostly guys with a pre-built set of skills. Even guys who are so-so at something quite frequently talk like they know stuff; that's just the way guys behave. This worsens the above impression. There's an actual culture difference. Can't stress the importance of this enough.
As a result, instead of thinking "These guys have years on me and I need to catch up and put lots of work in," many women think "I suck at this," and quit. Then next set has the same problem.
I'm a female developer. I'm not going for CS, but a Systems Engineering degree. I share classes with lots of women (well, in the best of situations, we're 1/3 of the total population of a classroom). Even knowing lots of women going for a SE degree, I can count with one hand the female developers I know. Most of them aren't interested in developing, but in functional analysis and leading teams.
> Most of them aren't interested in developing, but in functional analysis and leading teams.
But why is that so? Is it because we as a culture have decided that "men are focussed on building things" and "women are focussed on social interaction"? I'm interested in the thought process that actually motivates people to decide what they prefer to be working on.
When I look back on how I got started with programming, the overwhelming aspect for me was the incredible coolness of being able to make anything I could dream of. It's this feeling of creative empowerment that really drives me to this day. And somehow I never thought of this as being a gender-specific motivation, but I would like to hear more opinions on whether I'm mistaken or not...
The pictures in the article show an old IBM-style computing facility, the domain of the sages in white robes who tend the machine. This raises two questions in my mind:
1. Have hackers and the hacker culture risen in importance and influence in the broader tech ecosystem since, say, 1985?
2. Has this resulted in a change of computing culture contributing to the decreasing numbers of women entering the field?
One of the things present in Levy's Hackers was that the vast majority of the movers-and-shakers in the hacker community were men. Roberta Williams was, I believe, the only woman mentioned in the book with any direct involvement in computing. Has that culture risen in influence, and is it (partly) to blame? The IBM terminal & mainframe rooms with their hospital-clean appearance don't make press much any more.
"But that means that I can’t really talk to my friends about the stuff I do for my classes, which is frustrating. Sometimes, there’s a really cool idea presented in class, but it’s only cool if you already know the background information to understand it – to grasp how and why it’s cool. Trying to present enough background to explain why this concept is awesome during the course of a conversation really just doesn’t work, as they don’t get a deep enough understanding of the background to see why it’s cool and spending several minutes attempting to explain frustrates me and bores them."
As a male software developer, this frustrates me too. You just get eye-rolls and snarky replies of 'flux capacitor?'
I hear you on this one. I think it's fashionable to not have to know anything. Look at our role models, for example - celebrities. Not so many scientists or mathematicians, mostly glitterati or athletes. It's a bit worrying.
For better or worse, the thing that jumps out at me from that graph is that the numbers all look similar until you get to the code review, where half as many women made the cut as men.
If this is a statistically significant difference, it speaks volumes.
"What happened to all the talented female teachers?"
In the 1960s teaching was one of the few professional occupations considered "suitable" for women, and as a result many of the best and brightest women went into education. As other occupations opened up to women this resulted in a huge brain drain, with the average ability of teacher to drop dramatically.
I imagine the same happened in programming as well, as women has more choices open up to them they naturally moved on to other fields.
Irrespective of context, I second the recommendation for Red Queen.
As to the question, since my college years are in the "drought" years described in the OP: there is no way I would have done a CompSci degree in those days. The CompSci programme was in the mathematics department, and was primarily a pen-and-paper discipline (very algorithmic). In the meanwhile, the physics department had Vaxes! And Internet (well, DECnet at least). Nobody in their right mind who loved computers would have chosen CompSci over Physics.
While we analyze why there isn't much gender diversity as it is before. We must also understand how much the industry has changed over years. The volume of work that existed back in the pre - 80's era and now isn't even comparable. And with volume the culture of our profession has changed drastically.
If its your usual 9-5 job, where you have to apply routine steps everyday then it would have been OK. But being progressive in programming requires you not just to work hard(And in most cases working under difficult deadlines and overnight) you also have continuously keep learning and update yourself with things that come along everyday. This is pretty demanding if you have a family, kids and especially when you are pregnant etc. There are physical limitations in those issues. If I look at the way my career has been, I sort of had to stay and overnights and work on difficult deadlines many times over long periods. It becomes very difficult for a mother with kids to accommodate work and family in that kind of schedule. So she has to often opt to be one side. A general counter point presented to this argument is to ask the Project manager to be more come with a more accommodating plan.This is often not possible due to economic reasons, given the time, money and resource something needs to be delivered. This has nothing to do with male domination in the society, these are just unavoidable situations.
This is typical of many other professions. Why don't we find as many female cab drivers as male ones? Why don't we have as many frontline female soldiers/nurses?
Let alone all that, if the current biological situation was reversed. And men could stay at home(Do the house choses, kids, food etc) and women had to take all responsibilities of house, family, money and security for their whole life. How many women in mass(not individual cases) would be happy with such a tiring and demanding life?
Well I guess everything in the nature and the way things go have a purpose.
[+] [-] Locke1689|14 years ago|reply
This doesn't make sense to me because easily the most competitive path I've ever seen is premed. Almost all of the premeds I know are competing for the best grades, the best resumes, and the best internships. Organic chem is like a giant free-for-all where everyone tries to beat the curve. And yet, at least 50% of biology and medical students are women. Why are women turned off by competitiveness in CS (which I think is less common in my engineering classes where people often try to help other people and don't compete for the best grade), but not in medicine?
Aren't we just applying cultural influences to both genders in either case?
[+] [-] mapgrep|14 years ago|reply
Couching something in mainly competitive terms does not just advertise that it's competitive, it also hints that there's a sort of pissing contest atmosphere at work. In the case of Fog Creek, it was an inadvertent, false signal, but what this woman is saying is that it's a negative indicator many women watch out for.
You can be at once highly qualified for a competitive field and drawn to that field for reasons having nothing to do with competition. Those female premeds are almost certainly more interested in working with patients than in beating their chest and bragging about how they got into a good med school. (And I'd venture the same holds true for the males.)
[+] [-] lmkg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] temphn|14 years ago|reply
Today we face a similar taboo, held for similar quasi-religious reasons. Our latest epicycle is competitive job postings. This at least is laudably specific; most of these kinds of explanations aren't testable at all.
The obvious but taboo answer is that women will generally gravitate to fields which are more social/people focused and less technical/mathematical. That spectrum runs from teaching through medicine in the middle through CS.
These trends are due in nontrivial part to genetics. Women are just more social and men more systematizing, on average.
As programming went from rote punch card/data entry to something more like physics or math, the percentage of women dropped.
All this breast beating is about a refusal to accept that basic biological differences could possibly affect behavior. Indeed, not even the tenured President of Harvard can broach the topic, even if he only moots the possibility of differences in variance rather than mean!
It's not much of a debate when those who voice the "partially genetic" position are at risk of losing their jobs.
[+] [-] rdouble|14 years ago|reply
Maybe they are just more practical. The worst physician's salary averages about $50K more than the best programmer's salary. Nurses get paid as much as programmers. If you do pre-med but can't get into med school, you can still get into public health, physical therapy, dentistry, optometry, pharmacy, etc... If you do CS but can't get a job at Google, you can get into TPS reports or be unemployed. That last part is grossly simplifying, but compare getting a programming job someplace like Wyoming or North Dakota vs. getting a medical job in the same place.
[+] [-] rweba|14 years ago|reply
Thats the key right there - women are comfortable competing, they just have a hard time picturing themselves as the alpha geek hacker that this competitive language brings to mind for many people. At least thats how I interpreted it.
Also there are studies that women tend to underestimate their skills while men tend to overestimate them which might also be relevant, see Sheryl Sandberg's commencement address:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdvXCKFNqTY
[+] [-] mrkurt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yardie|14 years ago|reply
Even when I was in highschool 10 years ago the top 10 students, 6 of them were girls. The salutatorian was a girl and she let everyone know how displeased she was for not getting valedictorian (beaten by 1/100 of a point).
Women are turned off of CS and I can assure it's not the competitive language.
[+] [-] Cushman|14 years ago|reply
But actually, I love that. They asked her for advice on marketing their program to women, and she gave them advice on marketing their program in general. Good show.
[+] [-] bluekeybox|14 years ago|reply
From my experience, the primary thing driving those who aspire to work in the medical field is not so much salary as employment security. They compete early on (in college and in medical school) so they wouldn't have to compete later when they enter the workspace. I think that the promise of job security (guaranteed employment) has a particular appeal to women. I suspect that their thinking is that once they graduate, they can relax at the high-paying secure job and invest their time and resources into growing children. On the other hand, to me, as a young man looking to enter the startup field, ventures with ongoing high risk and high payoff appeal more than employment guarantees.
I dropped out of premed and started programming and studying art sometime in college partly because I was turned off by people whose primary career motivation was job security and who did not have any serious creative pursuits besides their career goals.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] bugsy|14 years ago|reply
But is that criteria what best motivates inventors and designers as well?
Myself, I design things because I like to make cool stuff for people to use and I am really good at it. I spend a lot of time thinking about and experimenting with usability. I have found that an interest in making cool useful things is something that brilliant talented designers share with me. I have yet to meet any brilliant designers who are motivated primarily by wanting to destroy their rivals.
[+] [-] true_religion|14 years ago|reply
As computation became cheaper, CS still retained many qualities of data entry especially in the business sector.
As such, the whole profession was looked down upon. Men didn't want to enter it since after all they could simply be scientists and businessmen instead. So those who took it up were first women, then social outcasts (I'm exaggerating a bit here).
---
Around the 90s, everything started changing.
CS was still looked down on, but computing was so cheap and easy that you didn't need to trust it to someone with a specific degree to do so.
As such, the scientists and business people I remarked upon earlier began using their own computers. And where they didn't, they didn't hire someone with a CS degree to do it.
Also, the programming aspects of CS were better separated from data entry. Programmers which once were reviled, now could command healthy incomes and thus it became an attractive job for men.
Women on the other hand could get any job they preferred, and did prefer to get jobs in their own interest instead of CS which they might have only taken before because it was one of the few 'low class' labors that still made use of the mind and education.
[+] [-] FeministHacker|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ry0ohki|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lutorm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] iuytghyjuyh|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] joe_the_user|14 years ago|reply
I suspect something different but with related qualities is going on with women and programming.
* Women now have more and more opportunities in a number of fields (I recall a statistic claiming the average income of a young woman college graduate in New York was higher than that of the average male college graduate).
* Programming has become a less desirable, less socially prestiges occupation.
* Programming became a more hobby-based occupation - the expectation is more that a programmer have been tinkering with computers forever and thus (as per the article).
* Programming became a more male-identified occupation through the media and through the hobby aspect.
* Age discrimination pushes the previous women programmers out of the field (and contributes to the field losing social prestige).
[+] [-] sunir|14 years ago|reply
Low status professions are losing women. Usually low status non-labour professions like teachers, librarians and nurses were done by women primarily but computer science started off early equal so now it is skewed male.
It sucks to be in a low status profession but that's the way it is.
[+] [-] curtis|14 years ago|reply
My thesis here is that teenage boys are much more likely to learn to program on their own than teenage girls are, regardless of raw aptitude. This might be true of technical skills in general, but programming (I would contend) is unusual in how easy it is to learn on your own.
This is just a hypothesis on my part, and I don't have hard numbers to back it up. It's a question I'd like to see asked, though.
[+] [-] curtis|14 years ago|reply
If you consider the CS track, though, the same is not true. Regardless of base aptitude, many more male freshmen will know how to program than will female freshmen. Females (on average) start out behind, and never catch up.
[+] [-] benmccann|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterwwillis|14 years ago|reply
Why do we even care about which sex works more in that field? If we had the answer to this question, and somebody decided to increase the population of women in the field... Is it going to produce better code or something? What's the point other than just playing with social structures for fun, or exercising some strange need to reach some kind of artificial equilibrium anywhere we see what we perceive as an imbalance?
tl;dr there's not as many friendless geek women and who cares who's coding anyway
[+] [-] blahedo|14 years ago|reply
But what they also were was everyone's very first exposure to a computer. Without exception, her students had never written any sort of program before, and they were recruited from good students in the math and physics classes, coming to programming with an open mind and no preconceptions. (A lot of them, girls and boys both, went into technical computer-related fields.)
The change, as has been noted elsewhere on this page, surely has to do with the introduction of computers, but my hypothesis is that it wasn't just home PCs (not in the 80s) but classroom PCs that were the problem: in a lot of places, computers in the classroom were a fad and showed up with no training of the teachers, so they sat in the back or the side, mostly unused... unless one or two of the students pestered the teacher to play with the computer, and then used the manual and/or trial and error to figure it out. Guess which students were doing that more?
But that, I think, wouldn't be enough. The knowledge should equalise after one or maybe two terms of college CS, right? But I'm pretty sure the real problem was that professors inadvertently reinforced and magnified the difference between students who'd had previous computer experience (primarily boys) and students who hadn't (of both genders). It turns out that as a teacher, it's very, very easy to look around the classroom, see that X% of the students seem to be getting something, and decide to move on. (You can't wait for 100%, usually, so it's always a judgement call.) That's fine if it's something you've taught well and only the weak students are struggling, but what if it's something you absentmindedly glossed over? Half the class understands it, so you must have covered it, right? This is very insidious, and even being aware of it is not always enough to combat it; and if the divide of "has experience" vs "no experience" partially reflects a gender divide, that divide will only get reinforced.
[+] [-] pflats|14 years ago|reply
Focusing on the elite computer science schools obscures the overall statistic (which I don't see mentioned in the article). These schools specifically recruit and admit as many qualified females as they can into their program. At CS4HS, a CMU/Google conference for high school CS teachers, we were told as much, and tasked to do our own part to diversify our CS classes.
[+] [-] dpritchett|14 years ago|reply
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588431
[+] [-] rmc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kscaldef|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kenjackson|14 years ago|reply
Why does that have anything to do with primary school teachers? I'm fairly certain very little.
[+] [-] sethg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lurker19|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flocial|14 years ago|reply
This photo set from Bell Labs taken in the 1960s is pretty interesting:
http://www.luckham.org/LHL.Bell%20Labs%20Days.html
One thing to note is that despite computers being a novelty back then is that primary education was in a much better state and students had a stronger foundation in science and math regardless of sex. Many long-time teachers would say (with some nostalgia premium) that high school graduates of the 1960s are equivalent to college graduates of today.
Another thing that isn't touched on is that computer programming as it stands right now is not a very female friendly profession. Women will usually factor in the possibility that their careers may get derailed at some point by having a child. Careers where time away from the field doesn't obsolete your skills is a big plus for women. Medicine and law are excellent fields in that regard.
"Partly because it is so tricky to juggle kids and a career, many highly able women opt for jobs with predictable hours, such as human resources or accounting. They also gravitate towards fields where their skills are less likely to become obsolete if they take a career break, which is perhaps one reason why nearly two-thirds of new American law graduates are female but only 18% of engineers.
A study by the Centre for Work-Life Policy, a think-tank based in New York, found that, in 2009, 31% of American women had taken a career break (for an average of 2.7 years) and 66% had switched to working part-time or flexible-time in order to balance work and family. Having left the fast track, many women find it hard to get back on. "
http://www.economist.com/node/18988694
[+] [-] afims|14 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, I know tons of guys who got into programming by themselves, or because their parents did it. Also, all of the CS guys I know who took programming classes in high school did some outside of class for fun.
So, when some women become CS majors, they get intimidated. They see "everyone" outperforming them, since everyone is mostly guys with a pre-built set of skills. Even guys who are so-so at something quite frequently talk like they know stuff; that's just the way guys behave. This worsens the above impression. There's an actual culture difference. Can't stress the importance of this enough.
As a result, instead of thinking "These guys have years on me and I need to catch up and put lots of work in," many women think "I suck at this," and quit. Then next set has the same problem.
EDIT: removed a bit of unintentional italicizing
[+] [-] flomincucci|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Udo|14 years ago|reply
But why is that so? Is it because we as a culture have decided that "men are focussed on building things" and "women are focussed on social interaction"? I'm interested in the thought process that actually motivates people to decide what they prefer to be working on.
When I look back on how I got started with programming, the overwhelming aspect for me was the incredible coolness of being able to make anything I could dream of. It's this feeling of creative empowerment that really drives me to this day. And somehow I never thought of this as being a gender-specific motivation, but I would like to hear more opinions on whether I'm mistaken or not...
[+] [-] maco|14 years ago|reply
That was the impression I had of SEs in general during my undergrad. The CS kids wanted to be developers. The SE kids wanted to be managers.
[+] [-] jwwest|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elehack|14 years ago|reply
1. Have hackers and the hacker culture risen in importance and influence in the broader tech ecosystem since, say, 1985?
2. Has this resulted in a change of computing culture contributing to the decreasing numbers of women entering the field?
One of the things present in Levy's Hackers was that the vast majority of the movers-and-shakers in the hacker community were men. Roberta Williams was, I believe, the only woman mentioned in the book with any direct involvement in computing. Has that culture risen in influence, and is it (partly) to blame? The IBM terminal & mainframe rooms with their hospital-clean appearance don't make press much any more.
[+] [-] ohyes|14 years ago|reply
As a male software developer, this frustrates me too. You just get eye-rolls and snarky replies of 'flux capacitor?'
[+] [-] elliottkember|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wisty|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterSear|14 years ago|reply
If this is a statistically significant difference, it speaks volumes.
[+] [-] ig1|14 years ago|reply
In the 1960s teaching was one of the few professional occupations considered "suitable" for women, and as a result many of the best and brightest women went into education. As other occupations opened up to women this resulted in a huge brain drain, with the average ability of teacher to drop dramatically.
I imagine the same happened in programming as well, as women has more choices open up to them they naturally moved on to other fields.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] frossie|14 years ago|reply
As to the question, since my college years are in the "drought" years described in the OP: there is no way I would have done a CompSci degree in those days. The CompSci programme was in the mathematics department, and was primarily a pen-and-paper discipline (very algorithmic). In the meanwhile, the physics department had Vaxes! And Internet (well, DECnet at least). Nobody in their right mind who loved computers would have chosen CompSci over Physics.
Obviously things have changed now.
[+] [-] kamaal|14 years ago|reply
If its your usual 9-5 job, where you have to apply routine steps everyday then it would have been OK. But being progressive in programming requires you not just to work hard(And in most cases working under difficult deadlines and overnight) you also have continuously keep learning and update yourself with things that come along everyday. This is pretty demanding if you have a family, kids and especially when you are pregnant etc. There are physical limitations in those issues. If I look at the way my career has been, I sort of had to stay and overnights and work on difficult deadlines many times over long periods. It becomes very difficult for a mother with kids to accommodate work and family in that kind of schedule. So she has to often opt to be one side. A general counter point presented to this argument is to ask the Project manager to be more come with a more accommodating plan.This is often not possible due to economic reasons, given the time, money and resource something needs to be delivered. This has nothing to do with male domination in the society, these are just unavoidable situations.
This is typical of many other professions. Why don't we find as many female cab drivers as male ones? Why don't we have as many frontline female soldiers/nurses?
Let alone all that, if the current biological situation was reversed. And men could stay at home(Do the house choses, kids, food etc) and women had to take all responsibilities of house, family, money and security for their whole life. How many women in mass(not individual cases) would be happy with such a tiring and demanding life?
Well I guess everything in the nature and the way things go have a purpose.