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Comment by fhoffa | Hacker News Reader

Data wise: According to the latest Stack Overflow survey, Rust is the language that women are the least interested in.

Any thoughts on why?

  Row	WantWorkLanguage	responses	perc_female	 
  1	R	2477	11.87%	 
  2	Ruby	3743	11.03%	 
  3	Java	9409	8.42%	 
  4	Python	11878	8.22%	 
  5	SQL	10646	7.81%	 
  6	Scala	2972	7.64%	 
  7	JS	15451	7.37%	 
  8	Swift	4282	7.36%	 
  9	PHP	5039	7.22%	 
  10	C#	9640	6.21%	 
  11	C++	7178	5.20%	 
  12	Go	5500	4.87%	 
  13	C	4536	4.83%	 
  14	TypeScr	5435	4.51%	 
  15	Haskell	2208	4.35%	 
  16	Rust	2604	3.38%

  SELECT WantWorkLanguage, COUNT(*) responses, FORMAT('%.2f%%', 100*COUNTIF(v='Female')/COUNT(*)) perc_female
  FROM (
    SELECT SPLIT(WantWorkLanguage , '; ')  WantWorkLanguage, Gender v
    FROM `fh-bigquery.stackoverflow.survey_results_public_2017`
    WHERE WantWorkLanguage!='NA' AND Gender!='NA'
  ), UNNEST(WantWorkLanguage) WantWorkLanguage 
  GROUP BY 1
  HAVING responses>2000
  ORDER BY COUNTIF(v='Female')/COUNT(*) DESC

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I don't think this statistic actually means much without a lot more analysis. Here's some things that could (not necessarily do) contribute to it:

We may simply be seeing that female Rust users use stack overflow less than male ones (normalized to other languages). Rust provides lots of other places to ask questions, /r/rust (including the "Got an easy question thread"), https://users.rust-lang.org/, the rust irc (and various other irc's for various major libraries). These may simply be more attractive to women than stack overflow (normalized relative to how attractive they are to men). They all prominently display the code of conduct, are more welcoming to new users (at least in my mind), less likely to criticize you for asking a bad question, care less about having you maintain a identity that is linked to your real name, etc.

It could also be a result of gender differences in answering survey's. Maybe male rust users are more willing to say they "want work" in a language they are unlikely to find work in. Maybe they are more inclined to click "want work" in every language they are vaguely familiar with (v.s. actually being proficient in) than women. Etc.

We also might be seeing that the niche rust fits in simply has less female presence than most other languages. Perhaps on average women are less inclined to experiment with new languages. Are more likely to be working in the sciences maybe (which would explain R and Python being high). Etc.

I would hazard to guess that women are less interested in systems programming (domains that Go, C++, C, Rust target). These are generally older careers, while many efforts are focusing on younger female programmers who are going to be more interested in what is popular ATM (web, data mining). Adding age to this table might add more insight.

I'd be interested to see more statistics but at a guess there's more female programmers in industries where Rust isn't relevant? Swift is probably only interesting if you're in an industry that would target iOS for example.

Without a comparison to men, this is pretty hard to make judgements based on. For all I know from that data, there might be an even lower interest level among men for Rust.

The % is indeed a comparison to men.

(Of all respondents interested in Rust, only 3% are women. Compare with R 12%, and Ruby 11%)

Ah, okay, I didn't realize that; that changes my view on it quite a bit.

Now this is a wild guess on feedback I've read from women. There's currently less of them coding for fun than men for cultural reasons but plenty are willing to learn a language to make money. Those in the top 10 are all over job ads. That by itself might skew women toward those languages.

Interesting guess!

Let's see. What if I take all mentions of each language on HN's who's hiring threads, vs % of women interested in each language?

There is correlation!

Chart:

- http://i.imgur.com/mcN6Ghz.png

If we take out the 2 outliers (r, go) - the correlation is 0.61.

  SELECT *
  FROM (
    SELECT word, COUNT(*) c FROM (
      SELECT SPLIT(REGEXP_REPLACE(LOWER(text), r'[^a-z]', ' '), ' ') words
      FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` 
      WHERE parent IN (
        SELECT id
        FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` 
        WHERE title LIKE 'Ask HN: Who is hiring?%2017%'
      )
    ), UNNEST(words) word
    WHERE LENGTH(word)>1 OR (word='r')
    GROUP BY 1 
    HAVING c>30
  ) a JOIN (
    SELECT LOWER(WantWorkLanguage) language, COUNT(*) responses, ROUND(100*COUNTIF(v='Female')/COUNT(*), 2) perc_female
      FROM (
        SELECT SPLIT(WantWorkLanguage , '; ')  WantWorkLanguage, Gender v
        FROM `fh-bigquery.stackoverflow.survey_results_public_2017`
        WHERE WantWorkLanguage!='NA' AND Gender!='NA'
      ), UNNEST(WantWorkLanguage) WantWorkLanguage 
      GROUP BY 1
      HAVING responses>2000
  ) b
  ON a.word=b.language

(caveat: "go" is an overloaded word)

Be even better if you could do it against a summary of appearances in job postings at major job sites. That will represent more of the market women are working in probably. They might have summary data you can use on the languages if not the actual postings.

True - but since I couldn't find that on time, I created my own ranking with the data I had on hand.

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