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Comment by asimpletune | Hacker News Reader

I was not surprised to see that programmers marry other programmers

I am! Everywhere I've worked the gender imbalance is so extreme that it'd be impossible unless all the guys are married to each other.

Well it topped out at ~14%. At least it suggest women in programming quite heavily preferred their counterpart coders.

Preferred, or just ratio is so skewed that they married who they interacted with all the time. Men could not do that as much as the were not enough women.

In this regard women devs get added bonus of working tech. Relatively high salary and likely have higher family incomes as both partners work in high earning field. Where as male devs would often marry partners earning less.

Perhaps a disproportionate number of software devs are unmarried?

My own experience actually reflects this situation. On my team, the only married people are married to other software people or teachers. The unmarried all date teachers.

Obviously anecdotal but interesting.

If nearly all of the female software developers married other software developers (which is my experience), it would work out to the numbers they show.

I actually married a hairstylist. It turns out, a lot about programming and cutting hair are similar. She has to understand the requirements and implement it exactly right, the first time. I also learned that bartering is alive and well in that world. People would trade all kinds of things for a haircut that they didn’t have to tell their spouse how much it cost: vacation rentals, private box concert tickets, sailing charters, etc. My wife worked in a high-end salon.

Stupid question, what is a high-end salon?

A place where people go to spend way too much money on hair, IMHO. A standard mens cut were over USD$40 and I don’t remember how much other style’s cost though. You could even get a massage before/after with their dedicated masseuse. Before I met my wife, I didn’t know the difference between a $7 haircut and a $40 one.

I’d go for the $40 one if I ever have to pay for a haircut again. A $40 cut grows out good, so even if you don’t get a haircut for months after, you don’t look like a bum.

Computer programmers and software developers are in separate groups. Developers marry eachother more often than programmers do, whatever that means.

I'd wager someone with the title computer programmer nowaday is close to or in their middle age at least, so perhaps it is the larger gender disparity in coding work among that generation.

I am but I am not as well.

I have found male programmers to have a more diverse dating/marriage pool, though most are still "tech"-y office jobs e.g. designer. That's just middle/upper middle class sticking together though.

Female programmers I've met almost exclusively date or are married to other programmers.

Well, there is an incredibly skewed gender ratio in programming.

So, female programmers pretty much get the pick of the pack among their peer groups. (Not judging, just stating statistics)

The other 80-ish% men in programming still need to find love somewhere, so they cast a wider net.

Makes sense! Just surprised — obviously love > all, but I'd prefer to date someone in a different field of work myself.

Makes two of us.

Tech communities are all-encompassing to begin with. Tech cities, tech friends, tech hobbies, tech side-projects..... I need out of this echo chamber from time to time.

Than I'm an outlier. But the perception isn't.

The only one that I found that was stronger was Physicians which blows out the chart.

FTA "Other agricultural workers" is the highest at 23%.

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