I have an honest question, I hope this doesn't get taken the wrong way. Is it possible that women just aren't as interested in writing software as men are? I don't think that there's some kind of artificial barrier preventing them from getting in to it; I think if anything, most male programmers would love having some women around.
I mean, there are women doctors, lawyers, politicians, executives, accountants, etc etc etc; don't you think it's possible that there aren't many women in this industry just because they're not all that interested in it?
I personally think it's a little intellectually dishonest to insist that both genders have the exact same preferences, wants and needs. We understand the differences in gender in every species in the animal kingdom (including the times when there aren't differences), but we refuse to apply a modicum of critical thought to ourselves.
Definitely not taken the wrong way. As a female compSci student, this really did come up as an issue. I had a friend who was doing great in our program, but after her first internship, she realized compSci was not at all what she was interested in. She didn't want "to sit behind a desk all day dealing with a computer" in the sense of just coming to work writing code. She did not find that interesting after having done it in the context of a workplace, so @icey really does have a good point.
As a woman, I can say a lot of us have a little bit more interest in the people-based aspects of life and for some of us, working with computers all day is off-putting. A lot of women I know who don't understand what I do all day (writing code), oversimplify and only see the computer and tend to think of me as having a job where I don't interface with people much. Just that perception (as false as it often is) is enough to be a turn-off and doesn't garner the field much interest.
Plus, it's often an issue of exposure why a lot of women aren't as interested in software in the first place. Before I got to college, I didn't know any other women who wrote code. My foray into compSci was helped along by an uncle who bought me a programming book for my 15th birthday. (hehe.)
This isn't always the case, but it's difficult to take up something you've never been exposed to. Even brief exposure is enough for some people and I'd argue tons of girls aren't getting that exposure.
I recommend this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5ObAgkqicQ to everyone here. Note she was interested in programming from a young age, but nobody encouraged her to be an engineer.
My kid has been in day-care for four years now and has been cared for by at least 25 different teachers. Not one of them was male. How can we correct this egregious disparity?
I think there's a pretty good case out there for the fact that sexism hurts men as well as women. Sometimes profoundly. I can only imagine how devastating it would be to want to devote one's life to caring for, raising, and teaching children, while trying to deal with suspicions of, as others have suggested here, intending to sexually abuse!
I think there's a lot of work to be done if we want a better culture than that.
I have a question for readers out there: are there any specific instances in which gender stereotypes impeded or prevented or dissuaded you from pursuing something you would have liked to that you'd like to discuss? Sexism isn't one sided.
To be honest, some of the worst experiences with sexism I have nowadays revolve around the ludicrous extrapolations of the evolutionary psychology du jour that come up anytime a debate surfaces around gender equality on HN. The porn ridden CouchDB presentation didn't really rate for me (though I didn't attend) - it was the reaction afterwards that was more stressful. A single person can just be socially inept, but when it's clear how pervasive homebrew theories for why men are bred to prefer risk and have more variation in intelligence and aim for high status and pursue young women and are bred to be polygamous and on and on, it becomes much harder to forget, from day to day, that sexism is around me.
Occasionally I find voices being raised around some engineering issue. I feel like I need to yell to be heard - and being visibly upset doesn't do much to quell the intensity. In certain dark moments this has had me considering leaving engineering, though I doubt women have a monopoly on the sentiment.
To be honest I think a lot of the things that would have kept me from my career choice are behind me. I've heard people express surprise that I take on a technical role in my company, or that I founded it. Even around the liberal Berkeley I sometimes hear surprise, from strangers, that I of all people would have studied physics. There was a time when that would have impeded me more, but I avoided a lot of it dropping out of junior high - which seems to be the time when a lot of girls drop out of many stereotypically nerdy interests.
Sometimes the worst sexism experienced by women comes from women. The worst of it that I've experienced probably shouldn't go here, but some of it I've dealt with through HN. This is probably more annoying than anything else, but I had the privilege of reading Bonnie Ruberg write in "5 Reasons Why I Want Digg For Girls" say that a project I was working on (I started a company in the area, it's doing well) was interesting to her because "only because they're the kind of things I know my male, Internet-loving friends could sit around and blab about for hours."
One gauge for the degree of cultural influence on technical career choices is the nationality skew. Andreescu et. al. (http://www.ams.org/notices/200810/fea-gallian.pdf) note that the Bulgarian, Russian, and USA IMO teams perform at roughly the same level, and their female team mates perform at a similar level as well. But the Bulgarian team has had 21 girls in its history, the Russian team 15, and the USA team only 3. This, they argue, demonstrates that the disparity cannot be due to country specific difficulties for girls in qualifying for the IMO - instead "some countries routinely identify and nurture both boys and girls to become world class mathematical problem solvers; others, including the USA, only rarely identify girls of this caliber."
There's also the issue of stereotype threat. As Diane Quinn writes (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0341/is_1_57/ai_75140...) "Stereotype threat occurs when a person is in a situation in which a negative stereotype about that person (or that person's group) could be applied to the person and used to judge the person's behavior." Shih et. al. performed a study in which Asian American women wrote a math test. Before the test was taken, participants were asked to identify their race or sex. Those who were asked their race rather than their sex performed significantly better.
It's not the same thing. Not even close. For most of the modern era, the best jobs have been closed off to women. Men have wielded the power, at least in the workplace. While we'd all like to believe that the effects of that power disparity are now gone, it would be naive to think so, especially once we remember that the top executives at most large employers began their careers in a time when they could not imagine competing with women in the workplace.
You don't need to spend much time in a typical office to realize that women face challenges men do not when it comes to being taken seriously in technical fields. Don't believe me? Find your closest after-work bar and eavesdrop on the conversations around you. If you have a wife or daughter (assuming you're a man), would you want them to be the subjects of some of the conversations you're likely to hear?
Yes, there are fields in which men face special challenges (or at least the assumption that they're gay if they choose to go into those fields). However, the highest paying careers are in fields dominated by men.
I believe that computer programming is a skill that will dominate the professions more as the business world catches up with its potential. Nearly all business functions can be improved with the addition of automation and data analysis that programmers can provide. If some ability to program is not a future requirement for success in the business world, the ability to talk well with programmers and have a grasp of what it is they do will be. I also believe that programming is one of the best paths of upward mobility for people of a low socioeconomic background. If either of these beliefs are correct, the fact that women face greater challenges than men in entering this field is an injustice and should be corrected.
My experience is that people, starting from when we are kids, do notice gender and that the path of least resistance is to do what other people of your gender are doing. So if you’re a girl interested in programming and you see very few other girls and women programming, that’s going to be a obstacle for you to overcome.
For what it's worth, I think it is important for children of either gender to see role models of either gender - i.e. I think it is good for girls and boys to have female geek role models, male primary school teachers and so on. I think it promotes a certain amount of gender blindness, which is a good thing.
That said, the author beating themselves up about this is unnecessary - I don't think tweens/early teens (when such exposure seems to count the most) are the main audience of his book.
If you ask me, one real problem is the fact that many female geeks chose gender-neutral or male pseudonyms online. I understand why they do it, but this reduces the already-small visibility of the gender further.
You can't ask "Do I have enough of X?" without first defining "enough".
So... what's "enough" women in programming? Anyone want to cross that minefield?
If you're not, then you should be aware that you've started something you can't finish, asked a question you've written into the preconditions that you can't answer. That's not necessarily useless, but it's less useful that asking questions you at least might be able to answer
I don't have an answer. But I wanted to ask the right question.
As with all definition questions, there are multiple valid definitions of "enough". I am seriously interested if you think you have one.
I think this is actually a very important question to ask, despite the third-rail nature of it. If we have a "goal" of "more" women, how will we know when we've succeeded? If we can't succeed, it isn't much of a goal, and if we can't tell if we succeeded, then how can we measure progress (objectively or subjectively)?
Is the question really about how many women programmers there are compared to men? I was hoping it was more of a "what can we do to make people in general feel like programming is less intimidating/closed off to them, and not just a niche subject?". Not just to women or to young girls, but to everyone. I suspect the number of women interested in programming would rise if we address that, and that would also attract the men that felt like programming was interesting but just not possible for them for whatever reason. Hell, it'd address the gender imbalance and issues with (or the complete lack of) good CS education starting from kids at a young age to college and beyond at the same time.
A lot of times I feel like a statistical fluke being a female coder, but I go to a gym with lots of classes for kids, and I have their parents and the kids themselves (a fairly even mix of girls and boys) ask me how to get started programming and learning more about computers. They don't have the resources to learn this in their schools. Their parents don't know anything. They don't know where to find anyone that can be a mentor besides me. It doesn't always have to do with gender. That imbalance might just be a side effect of a bigger problem.
I have been fortunate enough to work in an environment where fully half of the developers were women. It was in state government, which is to say, outside industry. My strong suspicion is that sex bias has little to do with the work, but much more to do with the attitudes of corporate software development, which are (inanely) time-to-market driven.
[+] [-] icey|16 years ago|reply
I mean, there are women doctors, lawyers, politicians, executives, accountants, etc etc etc; don't you think it's possible that there aren't many women in this industry just because they're not all that interested in it?
I personally think it's a little intellectually dishonest to insist that both genders have the exact same preferences, wants and needs. We understand the differences in gender in every species in the animal kingdom (including the times when there aren't differences), but we refuse to apply a modicum of critical thought to ourselves.
[+] [-] tiffani|16 years ago|reply
As a woman, I can say a lot of us have a little bit more interest in the people-based aspects of life and for some of us, working with computers all day is off-putting. A lot of women I know who don't understand what I do all day (writing code), oversimplify and only see the computer and tend to think of me as having a job where I don't interface with people much. Just that perception (as false as it often is) is enough to be a turn-off and doesn't garner the field much interest.
Plus, it's often an issue of exposure why a lot of women aren't as interested in software in the first place. Before I got to college, I didn't know any other women who wrote code. My foray into compSci was helped along by an uncle who bought me a programming book for my 15th birthday. (hehe.)
This isn't always the case, but it's difficult to take up something you've never been exposed to. Even brief exposure is enough for some people and I'd argue tons of girls aren't getting that exposure.
[+] [-] wglb|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChillyWater|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] misuba|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DaniFong|16 years ago|reply
I think there's a lot of work to be done if we want a better culture than that.
I have a question for readers out there: are there any specific instances in which gender stereotypes impeded or prevented or dissuaded you from pursuing something you would have liked to that you'd like to discuss? Sexism isn't one sided.
Some posts to seed the discussion:
- iamelgringo on his experience nursing http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=333168
- smoody on feeling isolated in an engineering culture in which women far outnumbered men http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=332894
- sanj making an analogy between a college experiences http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=332889
To be honest, some of the worst experiences with sexism I have nowadays revolve around the ludicrous extrapolations of the evolutionary psychology du jour that come up anytime a debate surfaces around gender equality on HN. The porn ridden CouchDB presentation didn't really rate for me (though I didn't attend) - it was the reaction afterwards that was more stressful. A single person can just be socially inept, but when it's clear how pervasive homebrew theories for why men are bred to prefer risk and have more variation in intelligence and aim for high status and pursue young women and are bred to be polygamous and on and on, it becomes much harder to forget, from day to day, that sexism is around me.
Occasionally I find voices being raised around some engineering issue. I feel like I need to yell to be heard - and being visibly upset doesn't do much to quell the intensity. In certain dark moments this has had me considering leaving engineering, though I doubt women have a monopoly on the sentiment.
To be honest I think a lot of the things that would have kept me from my career choice are behind me. I've heard people express surprise that I take on a technical role in my company, or that I founded it. Even around the liberal Berkeley I sometimes hear surprise, from strangers, that I of all people would have studied physics. There was a time when that would have impeded me more, but I avoided a lot of it dropping out of junior high - which seems to be the time when a lot of girls drop out of many stereotypically nerdy interests.
Sometimes the worst sexism experienced by women comes from women. The worst of it that I've experienced probably shouldn't go here, but some of it I've dealt with through HN. This is probably more annoying than anything else, but I had the privilege of reading Bonnie Ruberg write in "5 Reasons Why I Want Digg For Girls" say that a project I was working on (I started a company in the area, it's doing well) was interesting to her because "only because they're the kind of things I know my male, Internet-loving friends could sit around and blab about for hours."
One gauge for the degree of cultural influence on technical career choices is the nationality skew. Andreescu et. al. (http://www.ams.org/notices/200810/fea-gallian.pdf) note that the Bulgarian, Russian, and USA IMO teams perform at roughly the same level, and their female team mates perform at a similar level as well. But the Bulgarian team has had 21 girls in its history, the Russian team 15, and the USA team only 3. This, they argue, demonstrates that the disparity cannot be due to country specific difficulties for girls in qualifying for the IMO - instead "some countries routinely identify and nurture both boys and girls to become world class mathematical problem solvers; others, including the USA, only rarely identify girls of this caliber."
There's also the issue of stereotype threat. As Diane Quinn writes (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0341/is_1_57/ai_75140...) "Stereotype threat occurs when a person is in a situation in which a negative stereotype about that person (or that person's group) could be applied to the person and used to judge the person's behavior." Shih et. al. performed a study in which Asian American women wrote a math test. Before the test was taken, participants were asked to identify their race or sex. Those who were asked their race rather than their sex performed significantly better.
[+] [-] gensym|16 years ago|reply
You don't need to spend much time in a typical office to realize that women face challenges men do not when it comes to being taken seriously in technical fields. Don't believe me? Find your closest after-work bar and eavesdrop on the conversations around you. If you have a wife or daughter (assuming you're a man), would you want them to be the subjects of some of the conversations you're likely to hear?
Yes, there are fields in which men face special challenges (or at least the assumption that they're gay if they choose to go into those fields). However, the highest paying careers are in fields dominated by men.
I believe that computer programming is a skill that will dominate the professions more as the business world catches up with its potential. Nearly all business functions can be improved with the addition of automation and data analysis that programmers can provide. If some ability to program is not a future requirement for success in the business world, the ability to talk well with programmers and have a grasp of what it is they do will be. I also believe that programming is one of the best paths of upward mobility for people of a low socioeconomic background. If either of these beliefs are correct, the fact that women face greater challenges than men in entering this field is an injustice and should be corrected.
[+] [-] mcantelon|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frossie|16 years ago|reply
For what it's worth, I think it is important for children of either gender to see role models of either gender - i.e. I think it is good for girls and boys to have female geek role models, male primary school teachers and so on. I think it promotes a certain amount of gender blindness, which is a good thing.
That said, the author beating themselves up about this is unnecessary - I don't think tweens/early teens (when such exposure seems to count the most) are the main audience of his book.
If you ask me, one real problem is the fact that many female geeks chose gender-neutral or male pseudonyms online. I understand why they do it, but this reduces the already-small visibility of the gender further.
[+] [-] mdemare|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|16 years ago|reply
So... what's "enough" women in programming? Anyone want to cross that minefield?
If you're not, then you should be aware that you've started something you can't finish, asked a question you've written into the preconditions that you can't answer. That's not necessarily useless, but it's less useful that asking questions you at least might be able to answer
I don't have an answer. But I wanted to ask the right question.
As with all definition questions, there are multiple valid definitions of "enough". I am seriously interested if you think you have one.
I think this is actually a very important question to ask, despite the third-rail nature of it. If we have a "goal" of "more" women, how will we know when we've succeeded? If we can't succeed, it isn't much of a goal, and if we can't tell if we succeeded, then how can we measure progress (objectively or subjectively)?
[+] [-] silencio|16 years ago|reply
A lot of times I feel like a statistical fluke being a female coder, but I go to a gym with lots of classes for kids, and I have their parents and the kids themselves (a fairly even mix of girls and boys) ask me how to get started programming and learning more about computers. They don't have the resources to learn this in their schools. Their parents don't know anything. They don't know where to find anyone that can be a mentor besides me. It doesn't always have to do with gender. That imbalance might just be a side effect of a bigger problem.
[+] [-] boggles|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtrichardson|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimfl|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blacktastic|16 years ago|reply
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