Born for it – How the image of software developers came about

My 2 cents about why women are underrepresented in software industry is that not too many of them are interested in the beginning.

One big drive of male programmers, according to my observation (hundreds of samples), are video games, myself included. It is stereotyping, but it is statistically significant. Gamers are overwhelmingly MALE. That is the a big reason that I got to know different parts of computer hardwares, collecting parts from markets and assemble them, and eventually being thrown into this industry. As to girls, they may not have same level of motivation as the boys had. It was in the days, when computer programming was still kind of niche profession and by no means had that much of influence as it cast on the society today, so self-motivation is important.

Fundamentally, if we want to really solve the gender issue in this industry, it is not the duty of those established software companies to force reverse sexism to artificially inflate the gender ratio, it is the early stage education system to introduce programming to wider range of people. Once it becomes universal parts of people's curriculum, the problem will be there no longer.

Disclaimer: Male, Asian, not born in US, but works here.

I know it's my own bias, but no one was writing articles for me when I was "sticking out like a 'sore thumb'" in HS for being smart and nerdy instead of cool.

I totally agree that there's a problem of disrespect towards those who are new (apparently more if they are women), and I'm cool with focusing on fixing that. But describing the abundance of nerds in the field as "what can we do about it?", as if that was a problem? Give me a break.

</rant>

Granted this was 9 years ago, but when I was in computer engineering we had a few classes with only 1 female. All the nerdy types flocked to her and were very inclusive with team projects.

I'm a partner in a 6 yr old business and I've just recently started to see more women programmers. Most of my job postings would get zero female applicants. However, my last 2 engineering hires were women that came through our internal network and they've been excellent.

Account managers and project managers - generally women applicants. Engineers = male nerds of all types. I welcome more female engineers but it's challenging to hire them if there aren't enough and they don't apply.

EDIT: spelling

To give some background, I started in the late 80's and early 90's in Canada. There were very few womon in my CS program (I recall it was 5 our of 140 in the graduating class), but even still in my early career, I was never on a team without women. I would say that between 10-20% of the programmers I worked with were women of various cultural backgrounds. That's not a huge percentage, but compared to the numbers graduating it was quite high.

In the first 15 years I worked as a programmer I can only think of a single female programmer that wasn't particularly competant. Everybody else was excellent. I often had conversations with them about why they got into programming and the vast majority of women I worked with said the same thing: programming was the best way to get into management. They felt that every other avenue was blocked by the old boys club and that as a programmer there was no ceiling. As such, these programmer often came with other skills that those of use who were just looking for the new technical hotness (myself included) did not have. I think eveybody I worked with highly valued that diversity.

This is not to say that there weren't women who were just in it for the programming. I met several women in the course of my early career who had very similar interests and abilities to myself. It's just that in the companies I worked in 80-90% of the men would be obsessive-compulsive technophiles and 80-90% of the women would be level-headed get-the-job-done types. Those women usually did very well and were promoted quickly (and the technically-minded ones struggled to get into management, just like the technically-minded men).

Fast forward a couple of decades and I find the landscape seems different. At my present position we have yet to hire a single female programmer. The thing is that nobody applies. When we do get female applicants they often look excellent and I think we have given job offers to every women we have interviewed. Usually they are good enough that we try to stretch our budget to get them. We have been overbid (by a substantial margin) with every single female candidate. So while it seems like the available female candidates are still of high quality, they are in much higher demand than 20 or 30 years ago.

On the other hand, I have noticed a dramatic shift in the types of male applicants we get. Like I said, 20-30 years ago male programmers were often fit the stereotypical mold (in my experience -- YMMV). These days I would say that more than half of the applicants we interview have very little interest in programming outside of it being a high paying job. So you get some cultural mismatches. You end up with the old guard saying things like, "You're not a real programmer" when they are talking to someone who is cutting and pasting stuff from stack overflow. Of course, we used to say the same thing to the guys who were cutting and pasting from MSDN or passing off GNU software as their own. It's just that having the alpha dog barking at the pups to get them in line was the normal way of working.

I wonder if in the midst of this cultural change, women are getting a bit lost. On the one hand you are getting a lot more men coming into the field who are not technical primadonnas. So it is easy for a lot of women who get interested in programming late in life to identify with those men the most. However, I think along with that cultural change we get a lot of baggage. The old boys club gets sucked in along with it. Where I used to hear women tell me how great the computer industry is because there was no ceiling, now they tell me that they are actively and often blatantly discriminated against. At the same time, they see the technical alpha dogs barking up a storm and think, "I don't want to get anywhere near that person".

I suppose at the end of this long (and I guess pointless) rant, it's just one more perspective. I really wish more women would get into the field because I miss working with women. There seems to be huge demand too. I hope we can get over this cultural speed bump and make it happen.