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Comment by Perceval | Hacker News Reader

As I recall from my own primary and secondary education, being a nerd who likes reading about science and math, and spends most of his time after school on his computer is not exactly encouraged by society either. Your parents want to cut down on your time spent in front of the computer, your dad wants you to go outside and play sports, the jocks at school give you shit, the girls pay no attention to you.

Girls interested in computers may be portrayed as losers and antisocial and outcasts, but guys interested in computers have been portrayed as and treated by society as antisocial outcast losers for as long as there has been such a thing as a computer geek.

Given that amount of social pressure and shaming and exclusion faced by young computer nerds, one wonders why anyone would go into tech. But more boys do and fewer girls do.

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Popularity and clique mentality tends to be much more of an issue in female circles than with males. I would say that, if one were to assume either sex will get untold amounts of hell for dabbling in tech early on, a female will probably get it worse.

You also have to note that culturally, there is the "nerd" phenomenon backing guys being interested in tech. If a young woman decides to get into tech, she doesn't get the same label as a guy does, she's often labeled by her peers (which can be fairly brutal) as a loser, outcast, or just "not one of the girls".

Now, given that last point, take a female developer who's young and just trying to get into things: you'll never quite be "one of the guys", and by choosing this vocation you're throwing up a flag that states you're fine to never be "one of the girls". That's not a fun combination to go through your youth with.

Exactly the point I wanted to make, but pithier. Kudos.

Ah, appreciate you saying that. There was a part of me that was hesitant to post it as I'm not a female, but just going on what I see with siblings/friends. Glad to know I'm not totally off base.

You seem to be placing the blame for girls not going into to tech on other girls. Are girls' peer groups really the ones holding back girl in IT?

I don't see the "nerd phenomenon backing guys being interested in tech." It's a negative stereotype, not a positive one. Negative social stereotypes don't encourage people to take on an identity/vocation. No one sits at home, looking at the stereotype nerds on TV shows saying, "Gosh, I'd like to be a weakling with no style, no charisma, no popularity, no girlfriends, but a really sweet nitrogen cooling system for my computer."

Here's my view on this as a young female computer nerd: even with all the negative stereotypes attached to the male computer nerd, the fact remains that (a) he is typically male, and (b) he is not the only one of his ilk.

Let's consider the perfectly realistic scenario where society has only just recently realized that women are good for more than making sandwiches and childbearing, and can are capable of doing professional jobs as well as any man. Thanks, society! But since this change just happened recently, it is not unreasonable for there to still be fields that are male-dominated, despite the fact that women are just as able to work successfully in these fields. This is what gives us (a).

However, now that the floodgates have opened, women would really like to get into tech! But first, there's everything that cheez mentioned -- society's subtle socialization of women into their proper gender role. Boys are expected to tinker with and possibly break their toys, girls should be combing doll hair. And later, the boys who are nerds almost always find a nerd clique...which is almost entirely comprised of other boys. And the girl who wants to bond with somebody over her nerddom? All the boys are scared of her, for she is GIRL, a separate and incomprehensible breed from BOY. And there's condition (b).

Personal anecdote time: all of my friends (which is stretching it) in high school were guys because the other girls at my school thought computers and programming and video games were "a guy thing". and even among this group, I only had one who truly respected me (who brought me into the circle in the first place) -- to the rest, I was the token female to be awkward around and bounce sexist jokes off of. During that time, I was a huge tomboy and a huge jerk -- not because I don't like doing typically femme-y things, like wearing makeup and dresses, but because I felt like I'd be more accepted if I wore guy clothes and made dick jokes and, yes, sometimes even objectified women and acted homophobic (but only for men, because lesbians are hot, har har) for the sake of humor. Even being more "guy-like", though, never really earned me any respect -- even if I laughed at their jokes about "dumb bitches" and made my own, the fact remained that I was still born without a penis and could therefore never really relate. It was only after I got to college that I was able to recognize my disgusting attitude for what it was and realize that it was possible to be both femme and a CS major, though that would have earned me no love from most of my HS "friends".

tldr, men do have to overcome the barrier of being socialized to like sports and fast cars and what-have-you, but once they do, they've at least found more of their kind. Women, on the other hand, face that barrier two-fold -- both from outside and within the community, and that really, really sucks.

But I'm so glad that this conversation is happening, because I really do think that making the tech industry more welcoming to women is important -- and if it turns out that you're right, that at the end of the day more boys and few girls go into tech anyway, at least we're still a kinder, better, more accepting community. What do we have to lose from that?

Thanks for your post, it was very enlightening.

I think the narrative you're constructing is inaccurate. Even given that society only just recently realized that women could be equal members of the workforce, I don't think that tech fields were especially male dominated when they started out. In fact, there was an article recently arguing that women used to comprise about 40% of the IT field. Computing used to be seen as somewhat clerical work, so the inclusion of women into it was natural early on—it wasn't a field that women had to fight as hard to get into.

http://blog.fogcreek.com/girls-go-geek-again/

I know several women in their 60s now, friends of my mother, who were early systems analysts for IBM or otherwise involved in the tech field. IT is a field that women have left, not that they have been excluded from.

Second, taking from my mother's experience, she did have to fight her way into a field that was male dominated: graphic design. But that field is no longer dominated by males. Look at graphic design degrees awarded and you can see that women outnumber men now. Is graphic design somehow fundamentally different from IT? Are people in IT inherently more sexist than people in graphic design? They both use computers to do their jobs. But graphic design sees growth in the number of women, while IT sees a decline.

I just don't buy the early socialization argument, because there are just as strong pressures on boys to not be nerds. Simply because there are more male losers doesn't make having a 'clique' of losers an advantage over a loser girl. It's still discouraging whether or not you have a bunch of other negative charisma, zero social skill geeks to be miserable with.

As for your personal anecdote, I don't see how that's unique to tech at all. It sounds just like everyone else's shitty high school experience: you endure shitty fucked up social situations in order to fit in. Would have been no different had you been interested in other things and been in a different clique. If it hadn't been guys saying retarded fucked up shit, it would have been girls saying retarded fucked up shit.

You're definitely right. I know there are women who got into the field when it was just starting because it was considered clerical.

I was chatting with a school headmistress last weekend and she said that she was into computers but once she had the kids and tried to come back, technology had moved so fast that she had to change careers to education. Somehow, I get the feeling she would have done fine anyway but that's another anecdote. Places with paternity leave probably also have similar problems in high tech fields.

My sister is an excellent IT project manager but I don't think she has ever talked to me about how it was for her as a kid. What I do remember is that she had very few friends and those who she did hang around with were techno geeks.

I think female involvement in graphic design can be neatly explained by society's gentle nudging. It's "creative" work. It's drawing. It's art. Stuff women are "supposed" to be good at.

I disagree with much of what you say, but because I don't think continued debate will get either of us anywhere at this point, I'd like to return to the last point I made, which was: at the end of the day, does it matter whether or not gender binaries and socialization and sexism is the reason there aren't more women in tech? It sure as hell is a reason the women who ARE in tech are dissatisfied. Does it matter that sexism isn't unique to the tech field and therefore can't a barrier to entry, so nothing needs to be done about it? I still hold that it's a barrier to entry, though one that will hopefully be torn at just as it was in other fields (do you think feminists in those communities didn't also have these conversations?), but even if it wasn't, does that mean it's perfectly okay for these attitudes to continue?

The answer is no, so this debate is moot. If we fix the sexism problem and women keep shying away from CS/the tech industry, then a point to you. As for me, I'll just be happy that we all respect each other more from it.

We should be careful not to associate women in computer science with popular ideas of feminism.

It's more fair to say "woman" as that encompasses all their experiences and does not advocate any one particular political philosophy.

It's also not about rights at this point. I've never been on a software team that would not love to have more women. We code all day long, how else should we meet smart women? Trust me, the library doesn't work ;-)

Right now, the problem is society's filter leading up to professional work.

I'm confident it will be solved in the next few decades as more women gain positions of authority.

Once they can reproduce without input from a man, then it's over. Hopefully they'll remember how much it sucked to be powerless!

I saw your comment last night and it bothered me, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly why.

I think it's because it doesn't actually respond to my link, evidence, or argument. You acknowledge that I made a comment, but then reassert your prior point of view, and attempt to silence further discussion by declaring your position correct, making the point moot, and implying that I'm too recalcitrant to be swayed by debate with you.

If you're not willing to engage people in discussion, and not willing to entertain an alternate narrative on the basis of evidence, perhaps you're right that continued debate won't get us anywhere. Because you're not engaging in debate: you're not adding anything new in our back-and-forth, but rather declaring it pointless given that your original position was obviously correct.

You're right, but I think girls have an even less incentive. Based on my experience as a father of a girl.

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