Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
hackernoon.com
hackernoon.com
What's starting to bother me is that there is a trend where extroverted people (like her I assume) try to change education and workplaces to suit their style but introverted people get pushed aside. A ton of people sitting in a room and talking is good, working alone is bad, not inclusive and biased.
Am I the only one who actually enjoys working alone and is this a bad thing? Do we have to accommodate extroverts everywhere and always? I don't complain about HR and marketing not being inclusive towards shy introverts. Sometimes I am starting to feel like a small minority although I am a white middle aged male.
That would be ideal. I think the reason they have to "force" anything is because of the gender gaps that get reported. But yes, any manager shouldn't make assumptions about how someone wants to work, or will excel at work, based on gender.
Separately, I hope the gender gaps in computer science or math etc. can be corrected by exposing boys and girls to education and career choices in a gender neutral manner, which I don't think happens enough.
Edit to clarify.
Hopefully, this improves in the future, starting with medicine amd nutrition, there's more discourse happening about the individual characteristics. But I'm afraid its a hard problem, accurate genes and gut microbiome measurements could maybe improve things. But then correlating these with behaviourial traits and emotional well being is incredibly hard.
My last job (I'm not taking another), we were packed in like gerbils, cages stacked on top of each other and most of my coworkers were non-technical. Yes, many "programmers" are now non-technical people. They're not scientists anymore, they're janitors.
>It wasn’t my teacher’s fault; she tried hard to engage me and figure out why I wasn’t connecting well with the work. Nor was I facing discrimination or isolation based on my gender — it was an all-girls school, and every single other woman who took that computer science class that year became an engineer or scientist.
I felt compelled to make a comment myself because I am a woman, and I am kind of tired of broad, sweeping generalizations about women and how they learn or want to work.
I think there's something to note here, though, and that she was driven towards a particular field because of her childhood experiences. She sounds like someone who would have benefitted from guidance at that age. Human experiences are complex, and not only because of the number of varying factors that can shape and impact them. I don't think its simply about sex differences.
I would appreciate if someone clarified the argument that the author is making above, because as it reads, she's implying that women don't excel when tasked with individual work involving "ambigious and unclear paths to success". That certainly isn't how she meant it to be interpreted, right?
So why isn't female participation coming back up? It was higher in the 1970s and 1980s than it is now.
The reason female participation isn't larger is because of the education / training part of the pipeline. Having a welcoming workplace doesn't suddenly spawn people with skills wanting to work there.
Rather than being about a male-dominated "lone coder", Microsoft's guarantee of a private office means two things:
1) that a private office is a benefit to their target employees, and
2) that most companies at the time did not have a private office
Otherwise, they wouldn't advertise it as much. In more recent times, I don't think that Facebook's push to open offices is as employee centric as Microsoft's push to private offices. Instead, I think Facebook (and Apple) are trying to save money, since an 8' x 10' office in San Fran costs an employer anywhere from $8,000 / yr to $30,000 / yr. So, it would have less to do with providing benefits to their employees and more about their own bottom line.
Based on that, I'll say that measuring actual work in cognitively focused fields is difficult if not impossible.
The entire premise of compensation based on or a requirement built around a given minimum or maximum hours of work is crazy when the actual work that happens is mostly cognitive and not literally constructive. A job of that type practically demands a salaried payout and advancement based on overall project success/contributions (which might be incredibly fuzzy to measure and difficult to prove or compare as facts).
> "We’re now in an era where computer scientists are no longer universally considered to be ‘80s-style loners, but the structure of workplaces is still often dominated by the manner of thinking that was created by them (see also: “move fast and break things”[1])."
> "It was a manner of work utterly unsuited to everything we know about how women thrive and excel."
> "(Does the idea of being a lone hacker appeal to some women? Sure. [...] Population-level differences cannot be used to judge the abilities or inclinations of any individual.)" [Emphasis mine.]
The author's implication is that women (in general) are not as amenable to a lone environment as men are. I did find it frustrating that the author was not explicit about this. The piece concludes with:
> "Women succeed when they are in learning and working environments that address the biological realities about how women operate best. But, clearly, there’s a lot of misunderstanding around what this means."
But then the closest the piece gets to helping with the misunderstanding is to link to https://ncgsblog.org/2016/09/12/how-girls-learn-best/
Perhaps the author belives that individual work on unambiguous projects is amenable to women. The explanation you've offered excludes this possibility.
> I was frustrated because the course consisted of lone work...
> Despite the cargo shorts and the loner attitude, I learned like a girl..
> Instead of a lonely computer lab...
> The rise of the archetype of the lone, antisocial hacker...
> Does the idea of being a lone hacker appeal to some women?
> Computer scientists are no longer universally considered to be ‘80s-style loners...
I take this as the emphasis of the piece.
E.g, take a look at Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. These guys - and they were almost invariably guys - were nothing if not sociable, at least with eachother. What they were not is mainstream (there's a hipster gag in here somewhere but it's just too cheap and easy).
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had partners, and later teams. They might not have been the easiest people to deal with but "antisocial"? I don't think so.
I suppose in the 1980s it became possible to become a lone hacker simply because you actually could have an affordable computer at home in your bedroom. Even then though, there was a lot of socialising with other hackers at school (and a lot of bragging).
Programming, at least in my experience, has never been an exclusively solo pursuit (although I wouldn't go so far as to describe what a lot of what went on at my school as "collaboration").
Caroline works in an area (digital advertising/marketing) that involves lots of collaboration and working with people. I'm not sure there's just about any field in engineering or science in which at least individual contributors do the same degree of working with other people as opposed to working through problems individually.
Although she mentions it, I think Caroline also glosses over the shift that happens in the 80s a bit too quickly. She writes:
>The ’80s did see a masculinization of computer science as a field, but I think it’s simplistic to assert that it happened because pop culture pushed PCs as “for boys.”
I don't actually think that's the argument--or to the degree people do make that argument it's the most pertinent one. What did happen with gamers and the rise of the PC is that people who were interested in coding as a profession were increasingly expected to have started learning things on their own and to enjoy it as a hobby. This isn't really true to nearly the same degree of any other STEM field. Although I can't prove it, this seems to me the most logical explanation for why women entering CS peaked around that time.
That's an interesting point. When I was in college, programming meant spending hours in a crowded, noisy terminal room, that was definitely a social atmosphere. The students certainly interacted and collaborated, plus the advanced students helped the beginners.
One evening, I was sitting in my dorm, and my roommate came in: "There's a pretty girl down in the terminal room. Maybe she needs some help." Okay, I kinda knew what to expect, but went down there anyway. The "girl" was the top CS student, very sharp, and a friend of mine. I told her what happened, and she laughed.
The propensity to take risk seems to be quite a low-level drive, and we definitely see strong hints that hormones can have a measurable influence[1] on risk tolerance in both men and women.
If you look past ourselves in the animal kingdom, males are far more likely to engage and risky and aggressive behaviors because males that don't take large risks by and large won't manage to reproduce.
And what is riskier than expending a lot of effort and time on individual work with 'ambiguous and unclear paths to success'?
Gates also didn't work alone a lot of the time.
I'm a developer now; I could not have made it through a Computer Science major in college. I'd always been drawn to technology and my dad highly encouraged me to pursue IT, but I just didn't find CS itself interesting to me. I was highly, highly averse to the idea of "lone work on exercises that seemed to have little application to the real world, the expectation that coursework required coding and debugging for hours after school threatened my ability to excel in other classes or in varsity sports".
Maybe it is in fact a particularly "male" engineer thing to want to focus only on excelling at one's trade while neglecting everything else in one's life. I was not like that.
So I studied Neuroscience and Psychology because they felt more applicable and "hands-on". I dissected cadavers, ran behavioral tests on rats, crunched data.
Then later I discovered that I really did enjoy programming itself; I realized I loved building things. Now I feel like I could sit through dry lectures on fundamental and complex CS topics that my younger self would find boring. It sounds like the author liked building things too. Maybe if her program had been focused on that instead of other things, she would have felt more motivated.
To me, this seems like a classic case of someone deciding that they're simply not good at math because they were taught it the wrong way or weren't shown why it was relevant.
> Despite the cargo shorts and the loner attitude, I learned like a girl.
And:
> it was an all-girls school, and every single other woman who took that computer science class that year became an engineer or scientist.
Hmm, it sounds more like she has a different learning style, which is not necessarily down to her femaleness.
That said, I think that at a fundamental level, there are differences in how men and women think. But none are better than the other, we know that we gain richer insights when we take both into account. But in this current political climate, it's unwise to go too deep about this, because it can so easily slip into the really nasty domains. Remember the time when phrenology was used to justify gender and race discrimination?
This is why I dislike Damore. I don't care what his manifesto says, but I bet that he knew exactly what he was doing. Playing games is pathetic, dude.
I can sympathise with the writer as I have a similar story too. I'm permanently put off from going into engineering, but I've accepted that and moved on. (Incidentally it's education and design, to better design learning experiences for everyone!) And that's OK, the burden of guilt of "letting down your kind" is also terrible. Life's too short and there are so many other interesting, under-explored areas ... and you can still get involved in tech. The best bit about tech? It's just a tool.
Also, I feel like wanting to increase the human aspect of programming isn't just a girl thing. The people whom I know that best fit the solitary hacker type love sharing their work, offering advice, and collaborating on projects with friends and peers.
That's a nice sentiment, but it's not actually very true. With regard to this particular article, I think there are plenty of women who can thrive in the environment she described. I know some of them. So, I don't think this particular situation is caused by divergent information processing between men and women.
That being said, information processing is a multi-dimensional thing. The axes of difference between men and women may be different than the axes of variance among men and women. To say that "the differences among men and women outweigh the differences between men and women" is to ignore the fact that they may not be the same differences we're talking about.
This is a thorny question, because it obviously implies that men are better at some things and women are better at other things. This can reinforce biases, and entrench or seem to justify unfair treatment. But the fact that an issue may be fraught does not change the truth-value of its propositions.
It's literally textbook science. Like, if you pick up a university psychology textbook on sex and gender, you will probably find that statement in it.
It's based on evidence, not sentiment. That pattern is exactly what you see when you look at graphs showing the distribution of results broken down by gender on a whole bunch of physical and psychological tests.
That's a great way of describing learning. I love your professor's quote. Definitely going to use it :P
It's undeniable there are biological differences between men and women, but this seems far fetched. Biological differences don't manifest themselves in an intuitive way; for example, there is no difference between men and women's hair. However we perceive a large difference entirely due to environmental training.
If nothing else women get migraines more frequently than men do. Which seems unlikely to come down to environmental issues.
Maybe, which still affects how we think because we're still classified by gender in society. The assumption that I made earlier is probably intuited from personal experience and countless books like "Men are from Mars..".
I'm not shy if it does turn out that male and female brains are wired differently (that sounds really awful), but my point is really that ultimately, we all think differently. Because we're not just defined by our gender, there's so many other factors like upbringing, autistic or not, etc. And then there's also free will.
We should celebrate this diversity.
Well, according to his statement he was a top performer at Google, so we can assume he was not afraid of being replaced by a woman. Besides he just started a discussion in a response to, according to him, shady moves in regards of equality performed by Google.
It is worth to listen to the other side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEDuVF7kiPU
> This is why I dislike Damore. I don't care what his manifesto says, but I bet that he knew exactly what he was doing. Playing games is pathetic, dude.
I haven't read the manifesto and don't want to procrastinate now. Are you saying he knew his stuff about women being inferior for the work Googlers do (which I wholly disagree with) was him partially BSing and just stirring shit up or trying to get his sexist viewpoint across with any excuse possible?
That's not a fair comparison. I skimmed through the manifesto and followed the Damore case close enough to reach that strong opinion (I didn't just wrap myself in Guardianista commentary). After that, and watching his reactions, I just don't have the time nor care to study his manifesto line by line. Would you, if you find a person that you just cannot respect, and have many more to do and think about?
If there really were fundamental differences, that would not be possible. When I take someone elses viewpoint or way of thinking or anything else that is fundamentally different from what I know "into account", what I really take into account what I imagine that other viewpoint to be, cobbled together from the things I do know. I don't say this to contradict, I think empathy goes a long way and is a very real thing, even though it doesn't mean we magically see things how others do. And luckily we have communication. We can make our own viewpoints and feelings clear, and encourage others to be open about theirs.
I'm wary about fundamental differences and all that.. spectra, maybe (I'm not sold on mutual exclusivity at all), but even then certainly not with one dimension and two poles -- but assuming it were literally that way, then there would be only halves, and nobody with an overview. Just abstractions about the other, which are useless, realize the self and let the other self self-realize, communicate, done. Sorry for sounding like a hippie, no dig against hippies intended. It's really hard to talk about this stuff, but not for political correctness and not for the assholes who take all sorts of things and misuse them anway, just in general.
I'm not really sure if I understood your point properly - I've clarified elsewhere in this thread that this was an assumption, and gender isn't the only factor in the differences of the ways we think (so when I said "both" in my parent comment, this is because I am looking at the situation solely with the gender lens).
But I share with the general sentiment of your post. I'm don't really care for fundamental differences etc, even if we have them, so what, it still doesn't change the fact that diversity is generally a great thing. I also found empathy goes a long way, IMO that's the only way to deal with diversity and cut past discrimination. Of course there are also the intellectual and material rewards of diversity that we are all familiar with...
Goodness, it's so hard to explain this, forgive me if this is just more confusing than ever.
From my personal experience, exactly such courses have proven to have the most long-term value to me.
Many types of work bias toward people who are just fine with locking themselves in a room/the library stacks/a lab for a week to work through some problem. It's a completely different mindset from someone who likes doing sales or PR work.
It's not that there aren't people who can do a good job with both. But some things certainly come more naturally to some people than they do to others.
I recently learned guitar for the first time using one of those Guitar Hero games but you play with a real electric guitar. Two friends commented how if I haven't gotten to learning it after multiple attempts, gamification won't work. But it did. This isn't the first time gamification has worked on me. For whatever reason, gamification [and accountability] work[s] great for me.
If you ever want to chat or network, my email is in my profile, hit me up!
I will share this from my own experience of computing courses at school though, and this is admittedly going back to the late 80s/early 90s: they sucked. They were boring as hell. I had a year of IT classes in year 9 and I got crap grades throughout because I was totally unengaged and, frankly, already operating at a considerably more sophisticated level than the course material. I wanted to solve real problems and write video games, not bugger around with word processing and spreadsheets and deeply basic (no pun intended) programming "problems".
And that's not (just) being arrogant: it applied to plenty of the other card-carrying nerds in the room, although some of them were definitely better at playing the game and being willing to jump through the hoops. This was in a boys' school, btw.
I actually diverged from Comp Sci for quite a while: going into 6th form the schools merged and I realised there was no chance of me getting a girlfriend if I was into computers. Bad decision and, ironically, made no difference in that direction anyway. What it did do was ensure that I didn't even consider CompSci as an undergrad degree. Another bad decision, later corrected with a post-grad conversion course.
And so I finally ended up working as a programmer, which is what I'd always wanted to do, despite my best efforts in other directions.
Anyway, a roundabout way of getting to the point: clearly there's a lot the industry can do to make itself more attractive to females. I've worked with precious few female engineers over the years but enough to know the good ones are as good as any man I've worked with, and I'm sure a similar distribution of skill applies for women as for men. And this is the thing: as well as making the industry a more pleasant place for women to work, we need more women at the top of the funnel. For whatever reason or set of reasons - which I don't pretend to understand - girls are much more likely to either choose not to study, or drop out of studying, Computer Science. If we don't fix that we are always going to have a gender imbalance: I'd argue that one way to normalise women as engineers is to ensure there are more women doing engineering.
Overall we definitely need to get more women into STEM and programming specifically. I'm not sure about this post though.
She was not willing to do that and specifically cited it as a reason that she gave up.
I am not suggesting that these socializations are an inherent part of being male or female (and I would emphasize that you've got a serious problem if you're stereotyping an individual based on the bulk socialization), but I would suggest that if bulk gender parity is important, then forcing it without changing, or at the very least identifying/recognizing/selecting individuals who have deviated from, the pervasive gendered socialization is likely to cause serious problems.
As a side note, I personally find the consequences of this early socialization are also highly reflected in the very way that the gender debate manifests itself.
This does not quite jive with enrollment at my university. I am thinking specifically of maths as compared to other STEM fields. Of all seriously theoretical courses, maths has the most women, last time I checked, it was pretty close to 50/50.
Yet, math is much less collaborative than physics, that is the understanding has to be your own. If there is a people part to either, I'd argue its physics because it is closer to an application. I suppose one might say that maths has more of a people part, because much of math in practice is communication. That feels like stretching a definition though.
When looking at the enrollment numbers, what is most striking is the difference between CS and maths. Whereas maths is about 50/50, CS seems to be below 10% female. As far as subject manner is concerned, I'd say these two studies are very close. And yet, maths is way more popular.
Based on this, I'd argue that the low enrollment in CS has nothing to do with the subject matter, and much more to do with how comfortable women feel in either group.
Just taking this at face value, I think she failed because she was afraid of failing. I've always learned better from having to struggle with something than having someone explain to me how to do it. Its that torturous process of trial and error that unconsciously guides someone towards a solution. Being able to do that on your own is ultimately the hallmark of a professional.
That being said, I _am_ a man, and if what she is claiming is true (men learn more through lone-wolf trial/error, women learn better through collaborative team-work) then I can't say much about why trial/error is so important. Maybe its just more important to me and my context.
I think she has a really interesting point about the importance of putting the 'person' into the equation. I really prefer to watch a tech-talk over a blog post because hearing someone talk about something in a informal language gives a lot of life to whatever they're talking about. Their body language and tone conveys a lot of information about the technology: are they holding 'religious' assumptions?; is it a hard-learned lesson to avoid some pitfall?; are they avoiding talking about negatives to try and sell something?..
Watching the Q&A portion of a talk can be especially enlightening. You really get to see whether they're full of shit or legitimate based on how they react to critical questions.
Edit: I wasn't reading closely enough.
So my next question is, what would it take to have more women teaching CS and software development?
Arguments like this always start from the assumption that inequality is a result of failed education. It's like the people making these arguments have never met a boy or a girl. Boys and girls behave differently, think differently, and value different things.
Of course, we should strive to make environments inclusive as possible, and everyone should be free to pursue their (legal) ambitions, but why do we have to assume that any gender imbalance is a result of bias? Women become pediatricians more than other types of doctor. Is that because pediatricians are less sexist than other subtypes of medicine, or because women are naturally more interested in taking care of children?
> Rather, I was frustrated because the course consisted of lone work on exercises that seemed to have little application to the real world, the expectation that coursework required coding and debugging for hours after school threatened my ability to excel in other classes or in varsity sports (in spite of being a textbook nerd, it turned out I was good enough at rowing for a few colleges to recruit me), or to spend time buried in random books.
and
> that girls and women prefer collaborative rather than solo work, that they are more engaged in “things” if they can see the “people” aspect to it, and that they are prone to perfectionism and a fear of failure
I notice an inconsistency here: if women are "prone to perfectionism", why were "hours of debugging" a problem?
... Re fear of failure: computers are brutal. It either works or it doesn't, esp. when you're restricted to "artificial" problems as is often the case in university courses. It forces you to think in a strict and disciplined way (re. the above quote about "debugging for hours"). Yes, it can make you feel stupid because the negative feedback is immediate, and there's a lot of it, especially in the beginning.
Even for me, as a professional developer with ~20 yrs of experience, working with computers consists of mostly noticing just negative feedback. "The code works" is a non-event for 90% of the time. Of course it works, I engineered it to work. The 10% of cases when it is an event is in cases when I've used something new according to documentation and it actually worked! Yay!
However, "the code doesn't work" is an event in 100% of the cases. It requires analysis, drilling, fixing, maybe even leads to a bigger refactoring because a more fundamental issue was discovered, etc.
IMHO, and gender aside, if the person can't endure a constant stream of negative feedback, they should probably choose another field of work.
Seating still for hours, listening to somebody, remembering the whole thing to be able to spit it out the next day is not how little boys should be taught things. And I don't even think it's great for girls, but they seem better equipped to deal with it.
that girls and women prefer collaborative rather than solo work, that they are more engaged in “things” if they can see the “people” aspect to it, and that they are prone to perfectionism and a fear of failure
*editted formatting
A common method of quoting text on HN is prefixing the line with a ">". I personally like also wrapping it in asterisks to italicize the quote.
Like I just said for another comment, that quote doesn't seem to be true just for women or even possibly for women more than men. The few female programmers I've worked with weren't like that. There's guys who will be like that.
I always thought ways of learning best were more on the people and environment (and how it affects the person) than gender by a long shot. I don't see why males wouldn't suffer just as much as women in the issues marked in her quote.
She mentioned it a few times - girls like colaborative learning, not lone-wolf learning, and she also put a link in - https://ncgsblog.org/2016/09/12/how-girls-learn-best/
Contrast this with "Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." I think there's a big difference between nerdy obsession and grudgingly making something valuable. If nobody hired coders, it would still be my hobby.
I myself ended up trying to code PHP a couple more times. I didn't even think I knew the hang of HTML for years (I know there's not much to get). Until I did finally get the hang of basic coding then intermediate coding and so on, I never considered myself a failed coder before I got the hang of it.
I had my own reasons for "failing" at my high school coding (technically I got As but I knew nothing), just dividing things up by how genders might function or learn wouldn't have helped me. For example I personally had massive anxiety and confidence issues.
Not to dismiss issues with females not being in programming enough. We definitely need to get more women into STEM and programming.
In the real world it is perfectly legitimate to 'hire someone' to do your work for you and claim it as your own.
Programming isn't my only hat, but that is part of what I do now. And for some time I exclusively freelanced as a programmer.
Too bad it got modded down almost immediately.