We can teach women to code, but that just creates another problem

I don't really agree with this passage:

"Back-end developers often attribute front-end expertise not to mastery but to alchemy, wizardry or magic. Its adepts don’t succeed through technical skill so much as a kind of web whispering: feeling, rather than thinking, their way through a tangle of competing styles – in other words, those soft fuzzy things that women are supposed to excel at. That’s not true, of course; nothing on a computer is any more or less logical than anything else."

I think it's pretty well understood in the industry that front end computing can be relentlessly complicated and technical. 'd say dealing with state and synchronous javascript front end frameworks and apps is one of the more technically demanding and cutting edge roles in software development these days, full of churn and confusion and technical complexity. In fact, malaise is so widespread that the technical complexity of javascript front-end has created a blogging subgenre of javascript framework despair.

I'm bummed to be writing this, because I see merit in the claim that fields that employ a higher percentage of women experience wage supression due to gender bias and sexism. But this is an article that describes learning HTML and CSS as "learning to code", and then attributes differences in pay to gender rather than the nature of the work.

The difference in pay within a job and between different jobs may well have plenty to do with gender. But in this case (HTML vs say, Ember) we are comparing essentially different jobs, not different versions of the same job.

Oh one last thing - the author is entirely correct that learning to code, no matter how good you get at it, will not gain you entry in to the upper echelons of tech's ruling class.

Let me start by saying that anybody that has internalized how JS and its various frameworks work is way smarter than me.

In my experience, the Bootcamps and other 'get you a job quick' resources are pushing all graduates to front-end because it takes less understanding of how computer systems actually work, i.e. databases, and networking. I also think you can be more successful on the front-end without gaining "wisdom" (making mistakes you learn from over time).

I just reached out to a friend that runs a bootcamp in my city for any unemployed grads that had any interest in AWS, Java, or Python and got exactly 0 bites. When I go to their demo days, it's all pretty front-end stuff that just uses locally stored data.

I can't make assumptions about gender here, but the front-end seems to be getting flooded with lower-skilled, less experienced folks.

> Its adepts don’t succeed through technical skill so much as a kind of web whispering: feeling, rather than thinking, their way through a tangle of competing styles – in other words, those soft fuzzy things that women are supposed to excel at. That’s not true, of course; nothing on a computer is any more or less logical than anything else.

Front end CSS is definitely less 'logical' than backend, in the sense that for backend you need to ensure that your code is very structured, and you have to think through your program logic a lot more, but in front end, you do a lot more messing around with styles until things look good. There's still logic there, but to say that nothing on a computer is more or less logical than anything else doesn't really seem true once you are dealing with other libraries and frameworks.

Hey, we could group people by height, or hair color, or ability to put socks on without sitting down, or political preferences. Let's choose gender and base policy on that, what could go wrong? Surely it must be the best way to tell what a human needs. Or perhaps we're not concerned with the individual human at all, just the "average" human we can use to make our demographics seem "equal." Is equal 50/50, or it is moved by ratio of male/female in state, city, nation?

Or is it perhaps, a way for more people to get jobs in HR and consulting. Is it ok that many convenience stores are owned by immigrants? Should we make it more "equal" and ban them? What other demographic trends must be destroyed?

Perhaps we need more short people in basketball.

Google: "welfare state paradox"

I've worked primarily as a frontend developer in the UK and the Netherlands for 12 years now and my experience has been exactly the opposite.

Although men still outweigh women I wouldn't think it unusual to see a female Java developer (I've mostly worked in java shops)

However I can only recall ever even interviewing one female front-end developer. From my experience they are incredibly rare.

Maybe my experience isn't typical or maybe it's geographical. Or is the article too subjective?

> Back-end developers often attribute front-end expertise not to mastery but to alchemy, wizardry or magic...

What?

> ...in other words, those soft fuzzy things that women are supposed to excel at

Oh, right. Support for the narrative. That's why that BS is shoe-horned in there.

You can just as easily say design is less like programming, more like art. Maybe there is a gender imbalance in art? But it isn't a subject that I know of to have a gender stigma.

> The gendered attributes switch as you travel to the back of the stack

The back of the stack has the impression of being mainly technical (and often less client-facing), which is why the stereotype is of a "relentlessly logical, asocial sci-fi enthusiasts – bearded geniuses". Other than 'bearded', are these gendered attributes? If so, so what; it seems the job fits.

> The bearded savant of computer science lore

Does the author just throw in 'bearded' again because it fit the narrative?

TBH, the this is the Guardian; its sex-baiting, concern-trolling, virtue-signalling feminism section does more harm than good.

Just look at its coverage of Trumps Merkel snub: "Trump did to Merkel what men do to women all the time", another Jessica Valenti classic.

The headline is horrible. But the phenomenon they're describing has happened in other fields over history too - from secretarial jobs (once primarily male) to teaching and even to primary care medicine.

I really wish toxic articles like this were not submitted.