Why are most programmers white males? | Hacker News Reader

Why are most programmers white males?

brianknapp.me

I used to get teased for being so interested in computers and electronics during grade school, and for staying in at recess to program or read.

Being able to ignore social pressures and just be yourself is definitely a benefit of privilege. So it's easy to see how many of the rarest skills and ingenious founder stories are examples of someone going against the grain to do something he or she cares about.

When people decry privilege, they seem to think that it's a bad thing, that we should all feel the insecurity, the doubt, and the drive to conform that most people feel.

I think the opposite is true, we should strive for all people to feel the empowerment of privilege and the freedom to pursue whatever moves them.

As a corollary, it's not a coincidence that the top schools admit the most privileged applicants. Those are the people whose privilege has allowed them to think about what is important to them... not just simply trying to be popular, avoiding getting beaten up by the kids who hate nerds, or avoiding ticking off an abusive parent, etc.

Privilege puts a person years ahead when it comes to moral clarity, purpose, curiosity, and self-actualization. Metaphorically, everyone else is in some sort of minimum security prison.

I think you've got a valid point. I would add that genetics plays a part. I grew up the same way, but my family didn't have much money. However my parents were former athletes and ensured my siblings and I took part in a regular physical activity (in one form or another) from a young age. I think that staves off some of the aggression -- if you don't look like they could just give you a knock around regardless of your demeanor.

That and I was often told I looked angry or sad while I spent my spare periods or lunches reading. Woops.

I think this at least applies to younger ages.

edit: wanted to add, I'm sure this changed some time ago. I'm referring to the 90's and early 2000's in particular.

There are multiple factors, but basic discouragement, starting from childhood, is a big one.

100 years ago, when writing could make you a decent living, women were constantly discouraged from writing. Here's Virginia Woolf's character Lily in To The Lighthouse, dealing with nagging doubts:

"Then why did she mind what he said? Women can’t write, women can’t paint—what did that matter coming from him, since clearly it was not true to him but for some reason helpful to him, and that was why he said it?"

At roughly the same time, women were often employed as "computers" -- that is, people who did complex mathematical calculations. It was thought that women were good for this more tedious math, thus leaving men free for the higher math to which they were more eminently suited.

So, to review: When writers could support a family, women were discouraged from being writers. When math skill was not connected with a good salary, women were accepted as being good at math.

Nowadays, very few writers can make a living, while mathematically-minded coders can. So today's generally accepted wisdom is that girls are naturally good with words (which doesn't pay), while boys are good with math and computers (which does).

The fact that women aren't in coding isn't a bug, but a feature. Remember the Eniac? Programming that was brutally hard, and it was all done by women, and there does not seem to have been a particular amount of money or glory in it. Now there's both, and that's why women are discouraged from joining in the lucrative boys' club.

Once code starts being written by robots and the average developer can't find a job, then you'll see the field fill up with women.

Where do you see women being discouraged from programming? Because I see the opposite everywhere.

It's not the general wisdom, it's a fact. But not a simple one. There's an experiment (heard of it from an philosopher women talking about women in philosophy) showing that girls perform as good as boys in math, BUT, if asked to color a drawing before the math test, they perform less. Which means, I think, that we don't live in a void of emotions. Men tend to be more aggressive and a hard problem requires aggressiveness. Unfortunately this comes with a shown tendency towards sociopath behaviour, Angular vs React thingy. :)

Women, on the other side, go towards sadness and depression and anxiety. Which is hard on coding. Speaking from my own experience, as a white male.

All in all is unfortunate. Coding is a tiny thing in developing software, and I personally believe that it's much, much easier to work with women. But when they are surrounded by 90% men teammates, I can imagine that it's hard to be a woman in IT.

Good points. Being female puts a person at a disadvantage in certain ways, and particularly makes it more likely that teachers and parents will believe that the easier path of study is preferable to the one that requires more challenges, particularly in mathematics and science.

This does likely have an impact on how many female programmers we see today.

Men are disadvantaged in other ways, such as being taught to suppress emotions and to prefer aggression to problem solving. Many men are permanently damaged by this and the effects harm their employability and relationships for their entire lives.

I'm not suggesting there is equality/equivalence or that large-scale social biases and patterns don't disproportionately effect some people. Just making the point that there may not be an ideal and we may always be trying to correct for various excesses. One notable excess is the pressure put on working parents, which are asymmetrical and backward for both sexes in many ways.

Enough extra privilege to spend some of it being unpopular. Fascinating angle.

It is very similar to the concept of political capital.

That looks like a perfectly sealed argument. You're popular - surely it's privilege. You're unpopular - you have so much privilege you can even afford being unpopular! Society loves you - clearly privilege. Society shuns you - you're so privileged you can take on the whole society, clearly you have the whole privilege in the world!

If any outcome leads to the same conclusion, it usually means the argument is faulty, or at least redundant.

No. The privilege part is that you can be unpopular and still be safe and successful.

To the less privileged fitting in just right can be a matter of survival.

The problem here is that survival while being unpopular is taken as the evidence of existence of privilege. So whether you are popular or not, both is the evidence that you are privileged.

survival? Have we all been transported to Bartertown?

    Being able to ignore social pressures and just be yourself is definitely a benefit of privilege

That's not privilege. That's the benefit of being on the aspie end of the neurotypical<->autistic spectrum.

It's a lot easier to ignore (or even be unaware) social pressure and focus on tasks for hours on end when you have less dopamine in your brain than your peers.

This whole "everything is a privilege" argument is pure nonsense most of the time it's trotted out.

While you have correctly identified a trait of those who graze the autistic spectrum, you also appear to have discounted the possibility of being able to ignore social pressure otherwise. I think you are kind of proving the point of the person you are responding to. To me it came off as if the comment made you uncomfortable, and you responded in a way that is, in my opinion, short-sighted. I believe what he meant is that often times with privilege, people don’t feel the need to defend a certain viewpoint - because they aren’t negatively affected by it.

Disclaimer: I grew up poor as dirt in a house of 7 children, so I’m definitely not speaking from experience as far as being privileged goes. I never graduated college, I just read regular old books. I do have a younger brother who struggles with a slight case of autism though, and he has no interest in computers whatsoever. In fact his life is somewhat in shambles. Also, the term “asperger’s” has been deprecated.

I'd like to add though that I disagree with the parent comment about privilege putting people ahead in the moral sense. I believe that some of the most compassionate people have grown that way through hardship.

> I believe that some of the most compassionate people have grown that way through hardship

This is very true, and all of the most dedicated physicians I know were inspired as children to pursue medicine because of some situation they were involved in involving the health of a loved one (or their own health).

> putting people ahead in the moral sense

Compassion is not the only relevant aspect of morality. The way I'd argue my point is that one of the big reasons we can all sit back and think about how to make the world a better place is because our basic needs are met. Over time, as humanity has overcome basic scarcity and basic fear, we have been able to look outward and prioritize things like making the world better for others.

Someone who is privileged is more likely to have had an excellent teacher explain the labor movement or the holocaust, and is more likely to have vacationed to places where other ways of life (including far subpar standard of living) can be observed, or even gone on a humanitarian school-cation to help people in need. Experiences like this help to break a person out of his/her safe little world and help create an understanding of broader issues, problems, and opportunities.

Meanwhile, the middle class kid's family got a nice new TV allowing a great view of music videos and action films.

This is not about blame or credit. A person alive in 2017 America is more likely to think slavery abhorrent than a person alive in 1830 America. This isn't because there is something superior about modern people, it's because economic prosperity offers the luxury of thinking about others more empathetically.

There are always outliers, people who are morally ahead of their time or unusual for their class. Nothing about my argument in this thread applies to them. I'm talking about the average person.

Thus the average privileged person is simply ahead at the age of 18 relative to those from more humble backgrounds or from decades past.

What scares me most is the large percentage of Harvard and Stanford grads who go into investment banking and similar careers. Those are fine choices for someone whose goal is to "level up" his/her family's wealth status in a single generation, but they are not the sorts of careers chosen by people who had the chance to develop moral clarity and self-actualization early on. It suggests a great deal of cynicism or timidness that should really not be the result of the best education in the world.

This article makes some decent points around class and the expense of a computer in the 80s/90s. But it dodges more substantial questions, and a lot of the substance is either circular logic or confirmation bias.

There are plenty of asian men in programming, so this isn't a race thing. It probably is socioeconomic for the reasons the article points out, so that's fine - I think we can leave it at "white and asian people dominate programming because they tend to come from wealthier families".

I think the much harder question is why women aren't in programming. They make up 50% of the population and come from the same exact socioeconomic background as men. This question is important because the repercussions still haunt us today. The article starts this question with "girls weren’t interested in computers or video games at all", and then circles the logic with "people tend to do things that they see other people who are 'like them' doing". Well, I'd like to know why women weren't interested in programming. In my circumstantial experience it wasn't a conscious decision or peer pressure, it was coming top down from society. I saw many parents encouraging their sons to play with computers and completely ignoring that their daughters may want to also. The article completely avoids this topic, sadly.

edit: downvoted within 30 seconds - if you're gonna downvote, please at least reply and start a discussion about it.

> There are plenty of asian men in programming, so this isn't a race thing.

That whites aren't the only race disproportionately advantaged does not in any way support the conclusion that it isn't (in part or in whole) “a race thing”.

The article doesn't even argue that it's a race thing, it simply starts with the premise but explains it as socioeconomic. I agree with the article on that one. I am not white and I was never discouraged in any way from programming because of my skin color or ethnic background (I've been doing it in some form since I was 6 in the late 80s with full support from pretty much everyone, including a lot of monetary support from my upper middle class parents).

edit: it actually does get into race, but around blacks/african americans. But it didn't get into Asians - my point really is this isn't a white thing per se.

I once had plans to create a small scripting language, specifically designed for woman in tech. I always envied woman for the ability to hold such huge social networks in their memorys and manipulate them. Maybe if you you made a programming language whose basic datastructure is similar to another person, and who's classes communicated with each other.

Then i held a C-Introduction course at university for a womans only class and abandoned the idea. Its not that woman are not smart enough to grasp tech, quite the contrary, on average they where faster learners then men.

The problem is that woman constantly evaluate their surroundings, and value their prospects accordingly.

And sorry, Nerds dont make for a high-value surrounding. This is no shiny glass apple-shoe-box a programmer princess lands- this a dorm shoe-box filled with Ramen eating nerds, partially unwashed, seemingly stuck in infinite childhood( W40k as a break talk), which to make things more bewildering, is a bonus to the job, because you are able to grasp things faster with a playful mindset. Lots of Hitchiker and LoRs insider jokes between the Bachelors and the graduating Masters dont help to that either. Its like a great Insiders game - to which you have come much too late - and which compared to other groups doesn't look very glamorous.

Now, hold against this, the other study groups- lawyers, MBAs and doctors who hold at universities quite the social high life (every fraternitys part is famous, except for the Infoguys) already- and you begin to grasp why programing doesn't keep woman interested. Its small stuff, and its eroding away confidence, one day at a time.

I guess the question is why aren't the unwashed ramen eating nerds of the female gender interested in programming? Now let's not pretend they don't exist, they're key members of any university anime club. Why did they choose systems, civil, and chemical engineering over computer science?

I forgot the neurotics and otherwise social outcasts. Not that unwashed, but definitely not bragging material for someone who defines his value by the showman factor of the company he spends time with.

> Well, I'd like to know why women weren't interested in programming

A better question would be, what are girls doing in their child and teen years instead of isolating themselves in their basement playing video games/trolling online communities/learning a little programming?

Is it really a privilege for kids who are interested in programming to be isolating themselves like that in their adolescent years?

It's anecdotal but programming has always been social for me. It started when I was 8 going over basic programs with my father looking over my shoulder. It continued as my cousins and I planned out and tried to make games. I was lucky enough for every school I had to have a programming club and class. Our club spent hours after school together and went to contests across the state. To me it wasn't isolating anymore than any other hobby could have been.

Throwaway, because race is a sensitive topic, and below is a potentially unpopular way to look at things in regards to race (I am not addressing gender in this comment).

1. Whites actually do not make up a disproportionate number of the programmers in the US! Whites are 74% of the workforce and 72% of the programmers.

2. Asians do make up a disproportionately high number of the programmers in the US, they are 6% of workforce but 20% of programmers.

3. I'd suggest that programming is a job where intellectual ability (specifically math-type logic) is highly correlated with success. Everything else held equal - on average more intellectual ability will lead to a better programmer.

4. Black Americans have on average significantly lower math skills (measured by the SAT) than white Americans. The factors leading to this are widely debated, but the fact remains that the gap still exists in a big way.[2] Asians have, on average, much better math skills than whites and blacks.

5. This doesn't seem to me primarily a culture issue, it seems like an intellectual ability issue.

Conclusion: I am not qualified to say what drives the intellectual ability gap (education, infant diet, genetics, culture, etc). But the fact remains the highest IQ people (and therefore highest IQ groups) will continue to perform the best in jobs where IQ is a big factor for success.

[1]https://datausa.io/profile/soc/151131/

[2]I'm using SAT math scores to show this here, which of course have faults, but it's tough to argue they don't show an actual difference. IQ tests show similar results: https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-h...

Number 5 seems like a leap.

Do you agree that higher IQ (on average) makes a better programmer, and that as a group asians have higher IQs than blacks?

If so, how do you expect blacks (as a group) to have the same number of quality programmers as asians?

Again, I am NOT saying this needs to be inherently true in the future, that this is unsolvable, is genetic, etc. I am simply saying that today (on average) 18 year old asians have more intellectual ability than 18 year old blacks - and therefore, I would expect the asians (as a group) to do better in programming today.

Maybe in 20 years the IQs of the various race groups will be equal. And if that becomes the case and there is still a gap, then my thesis is disproven. But that is not the case today.

Supporting evidence:

https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/my-r...

The race numbers make a lot more sense when you look at it in context of local base rates. About 50% of engineers in Silicon Valley are white and about 30% are Asian. That's approximately the same as the demographics of San Francisco, San Mateo and Alameda counties.

The other thing to keep in mind is that these three counties do NOT represent the United States. IIRC correctly, for these three counties, approximately 37% of people were born abroad and moved to the United States. Another 35% or so were born in California. Only only 27% or so were born in all the states that aren't California.

I would also add that talking about Asians as one group is misleading as well. It's mostly five countries: China, India, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. The reason is that those 5 countries put special emphasis on two important subjects: (1) engineering; and (2) English.

> The race numbers make a lot more sense when you look at it in context of local base rates. About 50% of engineers in Silicon Valley are white and about 30% are Asian. That's approximately the same as the demographics of San Francisco, San Mateo and Alameda counties.

That probably has more to do with the numbers of people who move to those areas specifically for tech jobs. The demographics you describe did not just occur naturally - they are driven by SV employers hiring from all over the world. According to http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/37-percent-of-silicon-vall... 37% of the population of Silicon Valley isn't even born in the US, much less the urban areas of California.

"Asians do make up a disproportionately high number"

Are you referring to 1st gen Asian Americans? or Anyone from Asia?

One reason why Asian numbers tend to be disproportionate, especially w.r.t Indians and Chinese, is that only those with advanced degrees in STEM education (among Indians and Chinese) can get a temp work visa to US. They dont have access to Diversity lottery or direct International Student to Green Card option (get work auth on Green Card before 36 month OPT expires) that people from other countries get.

So, if you want to look at diversity numbers, it probably makes sense to consider US born people in the work force, instead of all people in the work force.

I think this hits the nail on the head, and explains why some people feel gilted by the recent push for diversity in tech -- like it or not it's only a popular issue because tech is now sexy where it absolutely wasn't before. Other fields have worse gender ratios by a fair margin (in both directions) but you don't see news articles about it -- maybe because there's no Zuckerberg of mechanical engineering.

The reason men are more inclined to program is autism. Thinking systematically and enjoying some level of solitude are traits that make a good programmer. It's no coincidence that men are 4.5x more likely to be diagnosed with autism[1]. Look at any early interview with Zuck or Gates or Musk or Jack - it's like an educational video on how to spot mild Asperger Syndrome.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html

This is what programmers tell themselves but it sounds bizarre to me.

1) There is almost no profession where thinking is required for which "Thinking systematically and enjoying some level of solitude" isn't helpful. Programming isn't special in this regard.

2) Having empathy with your users seems even more important to me, and a lack of this is the cause of a lot of shitty software.

Also, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't strike me as being Asbergery at all but maybe that's just because I work at Facebook.

You seem like someone who is way outside of the autistic spectrum.

Imagine the sound of other people talking sounding like nails on a chalkboard. Now imagine working a job in sales, biz dev, marketing, customer support, investing, legal, management, child care, or HR. How many hours can you go in a day without hearing that screeching sound? Maybe 1/2 hour if you tried hard? Now imagine working in a good programming environment where you can frequently spend 1-3 hours without talking to anyone, and when you reluctantly do it's for very short periods with people who understand you don't like talking. Or maybe you can just work at home and almost never deal with anyone.

Are you the type of person who wants to spend weeks at home, alone, no travel, no dinners, with almost no human interaction outside of say 4 family/close friends? A very large number of programmers I've met are.

There is a common misconception that autism means not having empathy with people, its more of lacking the tools to express that empathy and pick up on other social cues.

> Having empathy with your users seems even more important to me, and a lack of this is the cause of a lot of shitty software.

Ideally, yes, it would be nice, in practice - not at the least. That's why there is a separate occupation (or several) created to bridge the gap. But the gap is real, and yes, this is the cause of a lot of shitty software, but that's exactly what we've got. Not that "empathy with your users" is an easy thing - there is a vast diversity of users, and it requires extraordinary abilities to be able to predict their feelings and needs. That's why user tests and focus groups exist - because it's usually the only way to get some feeling of it.

Watch some early videos of Zuck and it'll be much more obvious. He's had a lot of training in public speaking and engagement and he's a ton better than he used to be now.

I'm not saying he's autistic, but he has the same temperament and characteristics as people who have mild Aspergers - essentially what the OP said.

Why are people asking more and more of these basically racist / 'genderist' / whateverist questions? Why is it that it is nearly impossible to open a newspage or magazine without being confronted with '...blah blah blah white males blah blah ...' or '... blah blah blah women wearing hijab blah blah ...' or '...blah blah LGBT people blah blah ...'?

I live in Sweden, one of the most egalitarian countries in the world, but if you were to believe the media we're about as bad as it can get when it comes to 'discrimination' and 'privilege' and such. Strangely enough those claims are mostly made by people from the 'upper class', living in the most comfortable (and, need I say it, 'white'...) areas of the capital and other big cities. People who send their children to remarkably homogeneous schools while they promote diversity everywhere.

This whole thing with identity politics better stop soon or we'll be back in the 18th century before you know it, with segregation everywhere. Because that is what this mostly leads to. The more people identify themselves with some special interest - be it based on skin colour, gender, religion, sexual preference, country of origin or any other factor - the more society will fall apart into disparate camps.

Back to the question, why is the majority of people in IT of a specific gender and a specific skin colour? Well, I can ask the same question about, say, horse riding: why is the majority of people of a specific gender and skin colour, at least in this country? Or let's take another profession, veterinarians, why are they mostly of a specific gender?

The answer to these questions is mostly that, for some reason, more males than females are interested in computer-related stuff. On the other hand, more females than males are interested in working with pets. Is this a problem? If so, what should be done about it? Should there be a mandatory stop on veterinary college for women to combat the female domination of the field? Should girls be forced to play football and boys be lifted in the saddle?

If so, why? What would be achieved by this, other than increasing the level of injustice - men who want to work in IT can not due to quota, women who want to work as vets can not due to quota...

If racism is bad, stop drawing attention to race. If gender is a social construction (...), why decry the lack of a specific gender (...) in a given field. Just... stop. No more identity politics, please.

> If racism is bad, stop drawing attention to race.

I understand where you're coming from. Not having to think about race, or gender, or whatever is a great long term goal that we probably share. However, I argue that saying we should stop thinking about it today is premature.

Most discrimination is unconscious, but has a significant cumulative effect. Consider the studies on blind interviews or auditions, showing that interviewers rate women higher when they don't know they're women. Or the studies showing that the same idea can be presented in meetings, more likely to be shot down when it's from a woman and accepted when it's from a man (sometimes even both in the same meeting). You don't need me to look these up for you. There have been many, they're easy to find, and you can even conduct your own experiment if you want. Or ask some women you know whether this has happened to them. Here's the key point:

   Discrimination does not require ill intent.

It's highly likely that nobody in these interviews or meetings means to be discriminatory, or recognizes themselves as such, but the outcomes happen anyway. Even if you are the most virtuously fair-minded person ever, that won't undo the effect of other people's unconscious discrimination. The only way to address discrimination is to consciously recognize it in others and in ourselves, and to explicitly address it when it happens. That means paying attention to different outcomes for different groups, which in turn means maintaining an awareness of who's in which group. Leaving our eyes open might be uncomfortable, but closing them simply doesn't work.

Discrimination exists, true. So does racism, partly due to the fact that humans develop a preference for 'their own' within a few months after birth [1]. Those habits die hard and can, in some, end up as debilitating racism where they consider anyone outside their own phenotype to be undesirable. In most people it just stays around in a watered-down form without doing real damage. Some people make conscious efforts to try to unlearn this latent racial bias, some even go so far as to hyper-correct against their own phenotype.

Having said this, I still stand by my wish to get rid of identity politics and to tone down or get rid of focus on race/ethnicity/gender/etcetera. The reason for this is that it leads to less cohesion in society, not more. As usual in politics it is the louder mouths which get heard while the more thoughtful ones get relegated to the back. This quickly leads to outspoken people pushing themselves forward as defenders of their identity group, decrying the injustice society supposedly does upon them and calling for special treatment. It does not take long for all nuance to be lost, for the discourse to polarise around these loudmouths. Disparate identity groups withdraw behind their barricades, hurling insults and epithets at perceived opponents and soon any chance of improving the original situation is lost.

I'm left-handed. If I were so inclined I could start a political pressure group to fight all the injustice this right-hand-dominated society foists upon me and my identity group. I'd throw myself up as the fearless leader of the oppressed sinister masses - see, even the word used for left has a stigma attached to it - and request, no demand that society adapts itself to my minority. I'd be in the media, be positively flooded with funding from government and NGOs, I'd be famous. What's not to like...

...but I won't. Why not? Because, even though there is a clear right-handed bias in society [2] due to the fact that around 90% of people are right-handed, I don't see how it would help to focus my identity around my left-handedness. Jimi Hendrix was left-handed as well but that did not keep him from picking up a right-handed guitar. Like him and countless others I learned to adapt to my environment and use it to my advantage.

[1] https://www.google.se/search?q=babies+racial+bias

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_against_left-handed_peopl...

Yeh $1500 computers.... you where looking at the wrong thing. Everyone else was looking at the not Microsoft market... commadore, Atari etc. I bought my first computer with Christmas money when I was about 10 for under £100 in the mid 80's. The whole girls weren't into computers is looking at the bubble from the inside and not looking at why there's a bubble. Parents in the 70's tended to point the boys at building and engineering toys and the girls at dolls etc. Those children followed on in the same fashion. That's left us in the gender bias we have now. As for ethnic groups... that's complicated and depends on local demographic, plus imigant families tend not to be overflow in spare cash....

I had the same reaction to the pricing in the article. I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas 1982. I think it was a few hundred dollars at most.

I got it because I begged my parents to buy it for me. My two older sisters had zero interest. None whatsoever. I spent 12 hours a day on it especially after I got my first 300 bps modem in 1985.

It cost about $1500 in today's money. Not-rich families would buy one for their kids, but it was a nontrivial expense to them.

My first computer was a TI-99/4A at about half that, and I was grateful.

I got mine for Christmas and it was $300 just for the computer. The floppy drive was another $300. Got the monitor which was another $300 about six months later.

Add in the dot matrix printer and 1200 baud modem and it was over $1000 for the complete system.

The video game crash of the early 80s put a stop to those cheap programmable computers. By the 90s, any cheap home computer, like the NES/SNES/Genesis/Gameboy was not programmable by the end user.

When I was a kid, I learned BASIC on a 10 year old Tandy 80 to write games like I had on my NES (which was marketed solely to boys btw). Eventually my dad dropped $2000 on a 486 (and subsequent upgrades) and that's when I was able to start writing C with the DJGPP toolchain, installing Linux, rebuilding machines out of spare obsolete parts, etc.

If my family wasn't well off, there's no way I'd have progressed past having known BASIC for a couple of summers.

I think this is a common refrain for anyone born between about 1980 and maybe 1995. By 2010, there were cheap laptops, netbooks, and whatnot.

I'm not sure you got the entire impression of what was going on in the early 90's and late 80's then. There was a massive scene in the Amiga and Atari ST market.... over here we also had the Spectrum and Amstrad things in the mid 80's with the BBC Micro too. The cheap home computer era only really came to a crashing halt once Windows 95 got bedded in. In 95 I'd just started Uni and there was still a large user base on the Amiga and Atari ST. I've intentionally not mentioned Apple here... as they have never been called cheap....

My family weren't at all well off when I was growing up in the UK, but my Dad had some contacts in a local IT business who had a spare BBC microcomputer that he got hold of around 1988 when they were throwing it away.

I was born at the end of 1984 and played games on it with him from around age 3, then started tinkering myself and learning how to load games and play them at around age 5. In another couple of years I was going to the library and checking out books full of lengthy game listings in BASIC, painstakingly typing them in, running them and saving them to tape. That experience basically ignited my love for computers and for programming. When the family managed to get a cheap PC I was about 9 or 10 and I spent as much time on there as I could, learning how to use MS-DOS 5, Windows 3.1 and playing games.

After this point I scrounged whatever hardware I could - I acquired an old IBM 286 with an EGA monitor that a local school wanted to get rid of, various other components, borrowed software off friends to copy the disks, etc. My parents were pretty supportive and at age 13 they were a little better off - I persuaded them to get me my own PC as a joint birthday and Christmas present, using an old monitor and peripherals we already had. I got access to the internet and started viewing the source of web pages, copying the HTML, learning what it did and editing it to make my own pages. I started to learn CSS, how to edit images and how to write Perl.

The story goes on and on - I'm mostly just going on a bit of a ramble about my past and fondly remembering all the experiences I had. The point is that yes, if your family is absolutely on the breadline while you're growing up then you probably won't have access to this stuff, but we were by no means upper middle class and I managed to get a great start with computing. It's mostly about passion and people looking out for you. I scrounged so much old hardware and software from people who didn't want it any more because I knew it'd be a fantastic learning experience, and I was lucky enough to have parents who encouraged me to do this and didn't spend the _entire_ summer telling me to go outside and "do something".

On the other hand, why are so many crystallographers women? Dorothy Hodgkin, Olga Kennard, Eleanor Dodson, Kathleen Lonsdale, it's easy to come up with all these and many more, they are among the greats.

You'd think it's due to J D Bernal. He was a pioneer of x-ray crystallography and was involved with many women, all of whom he treated with respect. That set the tone in the field.

I know that you said many more, but such a list surely isn't complete without Rosalind Franklin?

Definitively. And Jane Richardson. How we think about protein structure is due to her artwork.

Women also are majority in the biological sciences.

Yeah. I find that it's Computer Science in America that is the exception.

All engineering disciplines are the same way.

This is a topic of high interest to me personally. Over the past couple of years I have been teaching middle school students how to code on and off. I am also a female who has been coding for close to 20 years now.

In the classes I teach, the girls are usually far beyond the boys. They get this stuff so much quicker and at a much deeper level. They are so much more focused and really try to understand what everything means.

The boys need instant gratification. They want to hack and mess around with the code but most don't want to really try and understand what it all means. They also need way more confirmation from the other boys in the class. They all create their games and show them off to the other boys and then they all try to one up each other. This is how they are motivated. They also completely exclude the girls from this.

In my current class of 17, there are 5 girls. All 5 are far ahead of all of the boys and 3 of those girls are already doing the advanced stuff. 4 of those girls sit together and actually seem to be annoyed by the boys antics. This has been similar in all of the classes/workshops I have taught.

It has been a very interesting observation which has convinced me that the boys club type behavior starts very early. What I am not convinced of is that we should necessarily try and change the boys behavior as long as they are not specifically offending the girls. I worry that this would suppress their instinctual way of being motivated and learning. I can also understand however why girls bail out, which is unfortunate in itself being that even at this early age, they are so good at it. I am not really sure what the answer is other than trying to encourage girls to stick with it and give them that support early on.

"There is one other reason I think you see fewer women and minorities as software developers. People tend to do things that they see other people who are "like them" doing"

It helps when other girls are doing it with you like the 5 in my current class.

I hope your political beliefs aren't implicitly biasing your teaching against the males.

The primary education system seems to be failing males (more female college graduates every year) and it wouldn't help if you added to that.

I'm curious, would it be an issue to you if all the boys in the class were "beyond" the girls?

I am simply stating what I am observing and the different ways males and females learn and what motivates them.

I would never advocate not teaching males or giving females priority. Ever! I have a 13 year old son btw. He helps me in these classes.

As my comment states: "What I am not convinced of is that we should necessarily try and change the boys behavior as long as they are not specifically offending the girls. I worry that this would suppress their instinctual way of being motivated and learning."

I do believe that they learn differently and we need to try and find a way to appeal to both in the different ways they learn and how they are motivated.

I personally think the education system is failing both males and females but that is an entirely different discussion.

Your account almost sounds like an argument for separate boys' and girls' classes. Learning styles are definitely very different, especially at that age (I have a 12yo daughter BTW), so it's pretty intuitive that teaching styles should be also. Since it's hard to teach two ways in one class, the obvious answer would be separate classes. I'm not exactly advocating that, because there are compelling arguments both ways on this issue, but the specific experience you describe seems to point that way.

It is something I have thought about but worry could do more harm than good in the long run. Partly because that is not how things are done in the real world. I am not really sure what the answer or solution is.

> It was flat out unpopular and the only people I found that were really into it were nerdy white kids like me who somehow tricked their parents into buying a computer.

Indeed the seeds were sown a very long time ago. My father bought a PC with some inheritance money he had, then he immediately regretted it because I spent all my time and summer on it rather than playing sports or hanging out with friends!

Back then nobody realized how in demand our field would be. By the time I started college I had already been programming.

I'm black and my family wasn't upper middle class. My parents bought a computer when I was 11 years old and I lived on that thing. After I dropped out of HS and was living on my own at like 18, I would put dollars into the machine so I could build my music website as I didn't have a computer at the time.

The point is people who are interested will do what they have to even if they don't have large amounts of money.

I think your experience is highly admirable. But I think even you have to admit that most people, regardless of background, do not have the sort of will power and drive you exhibited.

So yes, any particular person could overcome the obstacles in their path. But most will not. And it's the "most" that will lead to skewed statistics over time.

I certainly agree. It was just my interest and I felt like it was fun for me to put something out that the whole world could see if they wanted to.

Is it even really a privilege to be into programming in your childhood/teen years?

Most kids are not Feynmans. They aren't naturally curious geniuses who are only stopped by a judgmental society and "biases". There is a whole other, more dominant incentive structure in place.

The way many kids/teens become interested in programming is through video games and trolling online forums/message boards. Now, why do some kids play videos games and troll the internet more?

Because the opportunity cost is low for them. Meaning that if they did not play video games/troll the internet, the other potential activities are not as fun for them.

A vital activity that other kids do is socializing and hanging out with family, friends, etc. in real life.

Is it really a privilege to be exiled from real life to the internet? Would those kids spend time on the internet playing video games and reading about programming if they weren't as "privileged" as they are and had opportunities to socialize in real life?

The 'white' part is pretty straightforward. THe 'male' part is trickier. If it's a simple matter of role-model discouragement, why has it been getting worse? Depending on which data set you look at, the percentage of CS graduates (bachelor's) who were female has been declining since the early to mid 80s. This matches my own experience, with a steady decline in the percentage of my developer colleagues who were female from 1989 until this year. It's not all about the so-called pipeline. There are many forms of discrimination and discouragement that apply even to women who are already in the field. That includes everything from differences in conversational style to pay disparities to actual assault.

To a large extent, most programmers are men because the people driving the culture - not just programmers themselves but execs, investors, etc. - have been men, and that culture has been more comfortable for other men than for women. (BTW I was going to use "male" and "female" but the objectifying way that "female" is used by the MRA/alt-right crowd made it sound creepy.) When those people stop injecting their old-boy-network ethos and habits into our workplaces, we might stand a chance of creating an ecosystem where someone who's not just like them can still feel like an equal.

According to National Science Foundation figures, the decline in female CS graduates stopped around 2008/2009. It bottomed out then and has been on the rise since.

According to the US department of education, it remained level through 2014.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/what-should-we...

According to AAUW (unsourced but with NSF as a sponsor) it remained level through 2013.

http://www.aauw.org/research/solving-the-equation/

There's no way this is positive or even neutral. Even the high of 35% was unimpressive. The long-term trend is still downwards, despite a mere couple of years at least 10% below that peak. Leveling off at 18-24% is still unacceptable, and we're still a few years short of being able to say even that is more than a statistical anomaly. When that number has reached its previous peak and is still trending upward, so that we're within a generation of full parity, then we might be able to say we're making sufficient progress.

Do you think there should be 50/50 parity in all professions from mining to nursing? I'm trying to understand why 35% would be impressive or not impressive. It's just a number and it's not clear that any profession or area of study has an established ratio that would be considered "natural" or unnatural.

Here are the NSF figures for total undergraduate degrees awarded by gender:

https://nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsb20161/uploads/1/12/at02-1...

This is a highly reputable primary source data that contradicts your secondary source articles. Can you please point me at primary source statistics that support your claims.

Don't bother. You already mentioned an statistic and he dismissed it on the exclusive basis of his arbitrary perspective and then provided less relevant alternatives as a show of his confirmation bias (not actual confirmation).

What this says is that this person is not interested in having a discussion, he just wants people to agree with him and will move the goalpost against any rebuttal of his view provided.

Thanks for the ad hominem. You might want to note that the person you're supporting just made a claim that is contrary to their own evidence. Next time, contribute.

Mentioning that you moved the goalpost is not an ad hominem; it's literally an evaluation of your argument, not of you. Specially given that I didn't address you at all.

Is it mentioning that someone used a fallacy itself a fallacy now? Of course not. Next time, provide actual arguments.

Are you seriously trying to claim that "What this says is that this person" is not an ad hominem? That's simply untrue, and obviously so to any reader. Also, I didn't move the goalposts. I asked for proof, and got back a non sequitur. The numbers didn't show what my interlocutor claimed they did, and I'm still waiting for piece #1 of the proof I originally asked for. You're awfully aggressive for someone who has engaged entirely in meta-argument without providing a single fact relevant to the topic at hand.

Your highly reputable source (appeal to authority) doesn't show what you claim. For the last four years, the percentage of computer-science graduates who were female according to their numbers is:

  18.2%   17.7%   18.2%   17.9%

That's pretty darn flat, and pretty darn low. You're the one claiming an uptick. Prove it.

> Do you think there should be 50/50 parity in all professions from mining to nursing?

Of course not (strawman). However, a male:female ratio of 7:2 is a huge disparity. Few fields are so skewed. It's also remarkably inconsistent with other data - e.g. gender ratios in other STEM fields, enrollment rates, quantitative measures of ability. It's too glaring an anomaly to be passed off with a shrug.

I said it bottomed out in 2008/09, which is why I included that table. It then stayed flat for a few years. The rise has been seen in the last 3 years, not the last 4 years on that table which ends in 2013. If you look at data since 2013, you'll see it is rising.

I'm looking around to see where I previously found figures for 2014-2016.

> If it's a simple matter of role-model discouragement, why has it been getting worse? Depending on which data set you look at, the percentage of CS graduates (bachelor's) who were female has been declining since the early to mid 80s.

It depends on your perspective. You don't have to see the situation through percentage of total market share.

The absolute numbers for female CS graduates are increasing. It is just that more males are enrolling and becoming interested in CS than females.

When did this all start? when video games became mainstream

> The absolute numbers for female CS graduates are increasing. It is just that more males are enrolling and becoming interested in CS than females.

I'm honestly not sure how that changes anything. "Why isn't the growth the same for women" is practically the same question as "why aren't the absolute numbers the same for women". The same explanations and the same remedies are likely to apply either way, and over time lower growth rates will still leave us with lower absolute numbers. So no, I don't think it really depends on perspective.

Is it even true that most programmers are "white males"? Is the scope the global population?

Well pretty much yes going by https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017

It could be closer: https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/01/IDC-software-developers

China + India + the portion of US/Europe that aren't white must be close to half. Region oriented stats though, so I don't know how much of the AsiaPAC total is Australia, Russia, etc.

I think they mean in the USA.

In near homogenous countries, it's unsurprising that there aren't very many counter examples to the demographic (e.g. very few white programmers in Ghana).

At a certain Java school in the South that is attended mostly by Indians, the gender ratio amongst the Indians is fairly even. The Americans, they are all white and male. What this means is open to interpretation.

I believe in Indian culture, engineering and programming are respected as solid, lucrative professions, while in general (white) American culture they're seen as second best to being say, a doctor or lawyer, which is where more high achieving women end up.

I have a background similar to the author of the post. I gather his scope is the US, or North America.

Personally, I had my foot in more than one world. I grew up not wealthy, lower-middle-class in rural Ontario. I rowed because of my parents' history as athletes and their involvement helping establish a club in the small town we lived in. I also skateboarded and preferred old punk music to the Tragically Hip (which was the popular stuff where I grew up. How things change). I was also notoriously uncool and didn't hit parties, and spent a lot of time on the computer I urged and urged my parents to buy after coming in contact with GUI's (after years of messing with the 286 my mom had from her days working in the city.)

From my perspective then, his outlook is accurate. On a global scale, totally off. It's far more complex than he makes it out to be.

I would contend that in North America, a lot of the business leaders in tech are white because of the economic advantage typically afforded to them. But it's not universally the case. To start any business, you need resources. That's either money to run a server and access to a half-decent computer, or more. You also need time -- the most expensive and rare of resources in NA.

Not in the traditional American frat boy sense.

I'm estimating that > 50% of programmers in the USA are recent immigrants or the American children of recent immigrants.

Everywhere, the majority of people in every field will be of the majority race of that country.

In USA, that is white; where I live, it's latino/hyspanic.

The gender disparity does seem to be widespread, though: For instance, of the 90 students that were accepted for SI in my University, only 10 were women. Of the 30 who ended up graduating, 5 were women.

Funny, that means that women have a higher success ratio, at least in that sample.

That part seems sketchy, by sheer force of population size of China and India it's very likely that "Asian males" is the dominant demographics globally. "White males" might have a solid #2, but "Asian females" wouldn't be that far behind.

The author makes a good point as to the high cost of computers in the US in previous decades, which meant kids who grew up using computers tended to be upper-middle class, but what about places like Britain where the Sinclair Spectrum and various Amstrad machines reigned in the 1980s-early 1990s? These were cheap machines. It would be interesting to see if this cheapness led to a more diverse set of programmers.

They were cheaper, but the social status of geeks was just the same in the UK.

The reason most programmers are white males is because traditionally only wealthy western countries had access to computers. As the cost went down, more people could afford to study and in silicon valley at least there are many Chinese and Indians, basically a reflection of world population than anything else. Plus, the majority if good jobs are still in the US where the majority of the population are white males.

This is completely separate than white male privilege. Programming was never something to make you popular and there was never any attempt at creating barriers to entry. It was a nerdy unsexy job till recently. The biggest gate to diversity is probably getting a visa.

I don't hear any white expat programmers complaining about why all the programmers in China are mostly chinese and being looked down on for lack of advanced math skills.

Because women are smart. The women I've worked with claim ignorance to programming, have no desire to learn programming, and give me a mile high task list of things to do. Then they take all the credit for my work while I'm being worked to the bone. I burn out and quit while they hire the next fresh programmer ready to accept work.

I've tried teaching employees to program, but when they realized how much painful/frustrating work they can now accept with this fresh new skill, they immediately stop learning how to program. Easier to give me all the work.

Become a manager and play the same game. But seriously, it may be a function of your workplace culture. Where I work, the programmers have a typical 8 hour work day, and their managers are very protective of their time. In fact, if I need some programming work done, I have to do it myself, even though I'm supposedly not employed as a programmer.

Another option is to find a role where you use your programming skill, but you're not developing software for someone. That's my case. My title is "scientist," and truth be told, I spend a considerable portion of my day programming, but I'm using code to solve problems, and my code will never be used by a customer.

I understand the logic. But data about the diversity among programmers around 20~25 years old must be significantly different from ~40 if he is right. We do not have to sit and wait 20 years hoping he is right. Is there any such data available?

About the cost of the equipment to learn. Is there any raspberry pi based computer that one can use to learn to code? Like, something below USD100? That would also help more class diversity.

That's pretty much every RPi. Computers are cheap now, and the RPi in particular is incredibly inexpensive and has more than enough power for people to learn programming skills.

There's little benefit to screwing around with a RPi, unless that's your hobby and you want to mess around with the hardware, when you can go to Best Buy and get a real laptop for $300.

By the time you've bought a keyboard, mouse, display, and storage for the Pi, you've spent just as much money.

I encourage everyone in tech to read Unlocking the Clubhouse, by Margolis et al. It doesn't quite propose how to solve the problem, but it certainly teases out a number of contributing factors. I think in the case in point, the importance of being encouraged/discouraged depending on gender cannot be understated. Of course, to the individual involved it'll feel 'normal' since it has always been that way, but on a societal level it is blatantly obvious that children are moulded into gendered expectation patterns from literally the moment they're born. (As to that last assertion, there's a study floating around on how adults react to a baby crying then told the child is either male or female. Quite saddening.)

I think in the US it is not the case the programmers are significantly disproportionately white.

https://datausa.io/profile/soc/151131/#demographics

That is so spot-on... the only reason people care about forcing diversity in tech is because its now a fashionable industry that gets you respect and makes you money. If coders were not lauded for being super-smart, rich, and working in "fun environments" nobody would care how big of a white sausage fest it'd be.

I was wondering if other industries (construction, commercial fishing, oil drilling, nursing, coal mining, aircraft maintenance) were as focused on diversity as tech. And if not, what made tech an outlier.

Interesting topic, but I think Why are most programmers in the USA white males? is a much more accurate title.

Asians are proportionally over-represented because programming broadly rewards IQ, and asians have the highest IQ. Men are over represented because they are naturally better, on average, at abstract mathematical reasoning.

There are social reasons as well, but this is the core of the issue.

What kind of question is this? Do you think there are many white male programmers in China for example?

It shouldn't surprise anyone that white people are majority in white coutries and that it reflects to working life too.

And why male? Because men like programming and only few women do.

Because white males were more likely to have access to computers 15-30 years ago?

This kind of article is trashy at best. We all know the answer alread, and the solution is found in the answer!

Encouragement from the time people are young. "Cultures" that can't respect what a kid wants to be curious about and lets them explore that shouldn't be allowed to persist.

Reading, scientific exploration of subjects, using their minds.

The society and culture that shuns learning and education need to die off.

The rest is race and gender baiting garbage.

How much of the beneficial parts of the "hacker ethos" are rooted in having to circumvent the disapproval and blockers that attempted to prevent access to the machine?

Nobody was encouraging me to dick around on the computer and learn what have turned out to be hugely beneficial skills. Instead it was "Get the fuck off that thing and go outside and stack the firewood!"

Well you had responsibilities as a child and presumably you have them now as an adult. That hasn't a thing to do with what I'm talking about.

Why are most prison inmates males?

Why are most coal miners males?

Yeah...20 years ago "girls didn't like video games" is a very weak narrative.

well, 20 years ago, being a nerd was awful until college. Just the worst possible childhood available.

it's the IQ folks.

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