Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdavis703 | Hacker News Reader

The first part of this had great citations to cite that women are more social. Where the data was lacking is that 1) software is perceived as anti-social and 2) that other anti-social careers face similar problems to software engineering.

For example if socialization was such a critical decider, why are some many women maids or professional housekeepers? Most people in this career don't get much on-the-job socialization. Or what about accounting and book keeping; which is a professional, white collar career that also happens to employ more women than men?

While socialization may be a part of the equation, there's a lot more going on here and simply blaming women for being "too social" just panders to common stereotypes.

View on HN

"why are so many women maids or professional housekeepers?"

Same reason so many men are janitors.

Or what about accounting and book keeping; which is a professional, white collar career that also happens to employ more women than men?

Women were programmers very early on. I think we should look for some common thread between computer programming in the late 1950's/early 60's and accounting and book keeping today.

While socialization may be a part of the equation, there's a lot more going on here and simply blaming women for being "too social" just panders to common stereotypes.

I don't think you should be characterizing it as "blaming." Things are as they are. I remember reading a paper in grad school finding that software engineers actually had more need of interaction than other fields, despite stereotypes. I think there is some important factor we don't quite understand.

Programming started as a field very similar to Accounting. You manually assembled a list of operations to get the necessary numerical result. There was creativity, but in the same vein of creativity in accounting it was confined to the realm of statistics and business intelligence. Computers were used to calculate numbers from other numbers, and rarely did much else. The set of computer instructions were limited, and nothing was automated so there was a lot of tedium in physically writing programming out on paper.

With the advent of personal computers and monitors the fields diverged rapidly.

The way I've read it, "programming" was the name of a job where you take a flowchart from a "systems analyst" and punch machine code onto card decks. Then computers became cheap enough to run compilers, and that job was automated away.

>software is perceived as anti-social

My experience is that this perception has a strong grounding in reality.

IME about 90 % of that is enforced and actively pursued by the workers. E.g. preferring HCCH-based reviews over pair reviewing, "don't disturb me", [noise-cancelling] headphones, locked office doors, mail and instant messaging over talking and so forth

Why is that different from anything that requires concentration?

Also, what's HCCH? [Human-computer-computer-human?]

> IM, email

Maybe programmers are just lazy and picky, so they want to get things done quickly and at their own workstation?

> Most people in this career don't get much on-the-job socialization. Or what about accounting and book keeping; which is a professional, white collar career that also happens to employ more women than men?

Another question would be, why in the early days of computing, programming was predominantly seen as women's work? Does it mean its social factor changed somehow?

See: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programmi...

> Or what about accounting and book keeping; which is a professional, white collar career that also happens to employ more women than men?

That's the difference though. Accounting is professional. Software engineering is often not. Moreover, while accounting is often asocial (not much social interaction), many software engineers (male and female) can be downright anti-social (against common means of social interaction).

> software is perceived as anti-social

IMO anti-socal wasn't the best choice of words. I'm pretty sure in this context she intended "social" to mean "a pursuit where the bulk of your time is spent interacting with people", and "anti-social" meant "a pursuit where the bulk of your time is spent time interacting with things".

Pedantic, but

> why are some many women maids or professional housekeepers? Most people in this career don't get much on-the-job socialization.

is this actually true? I've gotten the impression that housekeeping services often send multiple people to the site.

Maybe safety? Hotels seem to have just one housekeeper cover a block of rooms.

Perhaps software is perceived as anti-social because software developers are perceived as people you don't want to socialize with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com