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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

I would dare to guess that women are underrepresented among developers PRECISELY because of this culture and the underlying assumptions and attitudes.

Gender is irrelevant to logical analysis, which is the foundation of programming. If you don't have parity in your pool of candidates, there's a cause, and it's probably social.

Nursing and teaching used to be men's work. Women weren't thought to be capable of it. Too weak. Too sensitive. Too illogical.

Women aren't going into software development? Then there's a problem. Don't be part of it.

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> Nursing and teaching used to be men's work. Women weren't thought to be capable of it. Too weak. Too sensitive. Too illogical.

Do you have any citations for that? My impression is that nursing and teaching were considered women's work before they even existed as distinct professions. Nursing was originally done by women's religious orders, and was founded in its modern form by a woman, Florence Nightingale. And teaching was open to women in America since at least colonial times.

Better examples might be law and medicine, high-status professions that were once all-male but now are considerably more gender-balanced than software development. I don't know the reason for the disparity, but I doubt it's because software engineers on average act more fratty than lawyers.

With teaching, there have been laws aimed at preventing men from teaching for well over 100 years now. That's why the vast majority of elementary school teachers are women. In the era of modern American schooling, there has never been a period where women were not dominant.

I suppose you could make an argument that historically most itinerant teachers were probably men, but this really seems like a very different job than what we currently consider teaching.

[citation needed]

Please? I'm curious if this is local to you, or a more widespread thing.

Not sure if it applies to other countries outside America. I don't have a cite offhand unfortunately, you'd have to read some books about the history of education in America.

Could you give an example of one of the laws? This is new to me too

If I remember correctly there were many laws specifying that men were to be paid less than women and were to be subject to other degrading treatment. It's hard to find a good example of an actual law though because until recently virtually all states regulated education at the local level.

Do you remember the name of one of the books? I found some evidence of the opposite happening to attract men to the profession in OK, but I can easily believe that what you described happened in other states. And it's a pretty infuriating idea... To quote Steinem: “there are very few jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all the other jobs should be open to both sexes.

I found one cite from Gatto, which is probably where I heard it:

"Between 1840 and 1860, male schoolteachers were cleansed from the Massachusetts system and replaced by women. A variety of methods was used, including the novel one of paying women slightly more than men in order to bring shame into play in chasing men out of the business. Again, the move was part of a well-conceived strategy: "Experience teaches that these boys, many of whom never had a mother’s affection...need the softening and refining influence which woman alone can give, and we have, wherever practicable, substituted female officers and teachers for those of the other sex."

http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/6i.htm

Unfortunately he doesn't cite any of his sources because he wants you to look into the issues for yourselves. Every time I've fact checked him he's always been right or at least close enough, but the problem is with claims like this there aren't even really any hints as to where to look.

Thanks!

Also: "A state report noted the frequency with which parents coming to retrieve their own children from reform school were met by news their children had been given away to others".

I had no idea....

Google Books picks up the source for the quote, at least.

http://books.google.ca/books?id=7irAXGiBBoQC&lpg=RA1-PA8...

Until the 1840s, teachers were primarily men. I trust PBS pretty thoroughly. http://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/timeline.html

For sure, the demographics weren't in question, I was more trying to find out whether there were any state-imposed reasons. That article points out a lot of great social causes, though.

I don't know. I just wanted to add at least one actual source to the conversation... Social norms change, though, and this is actually an excellent example of a huge shift.

I don't know about laws, but a the tales from my one friend trying to go into elementary education weren't too pleasant. The system was very clique-ish, and a number of people seemed to not like his style, so one of them made up some ridiculous sexual-harassment-of-children story involving vampires which was conveniently completely retracted the moment after they were done using it as an excuse to kick him out...

Could it be, there's less women in programming because it's just starting to rise as someplace they're needed? Or as something just now becoming 'visible' enough to get their attention?

It could be something that starts out much earlier in life. I got into computers very early. The only person in my class at the time that cared for them was also a male. Even still, the act of programming itself just doesn't draw many people early on - which for the most part is why we currently have programmers. They got interested early.

Lawyers, Doctors - those are things that can be decided late in school. 'Hey, I think i'll go to school for this now'. Programming just doesn't have that draw - or didn't. Perhaps now that it does, we'll see far more females in the programming workforce in 4 years time.

At the expense of sounding non-PC, I have noticed that the vast number of females who I have worked with as programmers are foreign-born (I'm in the U.S.), mostly from India. Usually, I get the feeling that they did get into programming later on (probably were pushed down the path by someone when they went to university). I'm not going to try to analyze what this means but its simply an observation.

My impression is that nursing and teaching were considered women's work before they even existed as distinct professions.

It depends on which kind of teaching. Teaching of children has been seen as a woman's job for a very long time. On the other hand, professors and philosophers were classically men.

It's more than just women. I've been programming for 10 years and I don't like the culture. It's not the brogrammer stuff either. It's more the incredibly negative attitudes and litany of social faux pas.

Programming isn't the only job that pays well and rewards the highly intelligent. Women probably aren't going into software dev because they're socially acclimated enough to realize what a bad deal it is. Software skills change like the wind, and there is always a fresh crop.

Yesterday it was rails, today it's node. People who can hack people like programmers hack computers have far more valuable skills. Social skills don't become obsolete, a rolodex is far more reusable than most pieces of code.

If holding power over others and perpetuating inequitable power balance in capitalistic structures is your ultimate goal, I certainly would never admit to it as you just did.

As a programmer I mega-cringed when I read this and would certainly never work for you or any company you worked for if I read this.

So please, be more dismissive.

(Re: Downvotes - So I guess we should just treat programmers with derision and those with rolodexes as the bosses, case settled!)

Probably because people are reading the parent post completely differently than how you interpreted it. Nowhere did I think he was suggesting inequitable power balances. I'm pretty sure he just meant good social, sales, and marketing skills are more important than coding skills.

Build up your own rolodex and be on the list of names people turn to when they need programming work done. Most developers I've met don't really care that you know Rails but not Node. They care that you're a good programmer. It's really only HR departments and lazy companies that strictly adhere to "5 years experience in Node only!"

It also isn't one culture that permeates through all of programming. Go find a place with the right cultural fit for you.

Yes, doing that now, but as a company not individually. I'm creating it :)

> "Gender is irrelevant to logical analysis"

Brain chemistry is relevant to logical analysis. Gender has significant effects on brain chemistry.

There are also social problems that contribute. But the gender ratio would not be 50-50 even in a completely egalitarian society. Women like my wife [0] are rare, partly because of "brogrammers" chasing them off, but also because a smaller proportion of women are interested in the particular types of analysis that are relevant to programming.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Dove

Do you mean sex or gender? (Remember, words are assigned gender but cannot have sex.)

I'm not going to try to argue the brain chemistry thing^, but the social/culture aspect is a large problem and (as you bring up) can also partially explain why there are few women as well as men choosing to live effeminately in programming or technical jobs.

^Edit for clarity: Because I think its a totally loaded statement and don't want to even start down that path, not because I agree and assume its fact.

"Gender has significant effects on brain chemistry."

Quantify how sex affects the brain in specific ways that effect the likelihood of developing an interesting in programming and being an effective programmer. Until we can do this, essentially saying "physiology affects your organs" is a pretty empty statement.

That's like saying that until we can quantify how far Paris is from London, "Paris is far from London" is a pretty empty statement. Pretty sure that people understood that locations can be some distance away from each other before they could quantify exactly how much distance.

Huh? If someone knows neither where Paris nor London are, then yes, saying "Paris is far from London" indeed isn't useful. Is the distance between them a two hour drive? Do they lie half-way around the world from each other?

Except in pathological cases, we barely know how physiology affects large scale behavior, let alone how particular brain functions influence how one's interests develop and how they excel at activities, especially in the midst of the confounding environmental factors such as upbringing, schooling, and culture. We don't know where Paris or London are on the map.

But we do know the net effects of sex on developing an interest in programming, namely that there is a negative correlation between being female and having said interest.

The question is what comprises this effect and how much of it is nature as opposed to nurture.

Basically, it depends on if you approach it from a hollistic perspective (where the effect of sex is the compound of physical capability and social influences and whatever else) or a narrow perspective (how does the Y chromosome influence analytical capability).

In the wide perspective, the answer is clear - there are indeed differences in how males and females process their environment (https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:9JNbJB0PhGEJ:...).

In the narrow perspective, it may never be clear for environment influences genetic expression (http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/environmental-influ...). In other words, it's possible that the genetics expressed in a human are themselves socially influenced. Or, for a bigger picture, an individual having a Y chromosome is treated differently by their environment which in turn results in a different genetic expression and, by extension, different preferences and capabilities. Or to put it yet another way, nature influences nuture which, in turn, influences nature. It's a feedback loop.

Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_psychology#Intelligence

To summarise the above link, there is greater variation in adult men's intelligence and they are over-represented at the tail end as well as having a higher average intelligence. So we do indeed know where both Paris and London are at this point, we just don't know enough about geology to guess how they got there.

> But we do know the net effects of sex on developing an interest in programming, namely that there is a negative correlation between being female and having said interest.

Do we? That observation doesn't appear to account for the fact that the numbers are strongly correlated with culture, nor that women's presence in CS has been declining in Western countries but increasing in others.

This is kind of like saying we knew the net effects of race on personal productivity by looking at Japanese internment camps during WWII — it's a very shallow and facile view of the topic.

No, it's more like saying "Paris is some distance from London." Is it a significant distance from London? "Far" is more specific than "has an effect," in that it implies the distance is significant. In this case, though, we don't even know if the effect is on the area under discussion — it might not even be relevant — much less whether its magnitude is great enough to matter.

Quantify how sex affects the brain in specific ways that effect the likelihood of developing an interesting in programming and being an effective programmer.

I'm not sure I can be quite that specific, but there are some very well-established differences in the way men and women think, and the way the respond to stress. See here:

http://bible.org/seriespage/biological-basis-gender-specific... [1]

. . . particularly sections V and VII.

I wouldn't go so far as to say we know how gender affects brain chemistry specifically as it refers to programming, only that we know it does affect how we think, process information, and handle stress. And those things seem like they would be relevant. Don't they?

That is to say, I wouldn't say I know ALL of the differences between us are innate, only that I find it plausible that a lot of them are. And that I'm hesitant to treat statistically underrepresented women as necessarily a problem.

[1] You'll have to excuse the bible.org reference; the christian academic community seems to be about the only one in which one can have a serious conversation about innate differences between the genders without getting immediately taken out and shot. You have my assurance that the discussion in the article is interesting and scientific, and comes with copious footnotes to mainstream sources.

> the christian academic community seems to be about the only one in which one can have a serious conversation about innate differences between the genders without getting immediately taken out and shot.

(Sorry, I don't mean to harp on this too much, but after hanging out around a sociologist with a pet peeve, it has sadly rubbed off on me.)

This may be because in the academic community "gender" has an entirely different meaning that "sex." Sex (and the sex differences) relate to biological differences, male and female. Gender (and gender differences) relate to society, culture, and how one acts or the roles of the masculine and feminine _within that society_. So of course "gender differences" are not going to turn up a lot in the academic world since a self-identifying masculine male should have the same biology as a self-identifying feminine male. Googling for "sex brain difference" or something like that may help (in google scholar or a journal database, probably not plain google).

One other data point is that it is worth investigating women in technology in other societies. According to this (old) study: http://www.frauen.inf.ethz.ch/stats/international_stat_fraue... women are in the majority for a few asian countries.

Just some thoughts.

You don't have to apologize for linking to a Christian website. Last I checked, Hacker News didn't have a ban on religious links.

The problem with brain chemistry and other "hard facts" is that they are always cherry-picked to justify one's position post factum.

Example: where I grew up, girls were considered to be better at technical disciplines because in class, girls sit still and pay attention while boys clown around and pick fights.

On a larger note, please don't add to the fire saying that women are less interested in any kind of intellectual pursuits, be it aspects of programming or else. This is exactly the kind of dickery that needs to go away.

"The problem with brain chemistry and other "hard facts" is that they are always cherry-picked to justify one's position post factum"

And therefore, brain chemistry plays no role whatsoever?

"On a larger note, please don't add to the fire saying that women are less interested in any kind of intellectual pursuits"

Why not, if it is true? Is it wrong to say that men are less interested in knitting than women? I'd like to know making true statements about a population is "dickery".

Brain chemistry most likely plays some type of role, but if you are not in a position to quantify and explain to what degree and under what circumstance in a given situation, phrases like that lend themselves to lazy, armchair-scientist type sentiment that do nothing to raise the level of conversation.

> but also because a smaller proportion of women are interested in the particular types of analysis that are relevant to programming.

1) That's pure speculation. You have no way to be sure of that.

2) That same speculation is often, and very often used as an excuse for offensive discrimination.

So it's simply the most safe, skeptic, scientific and socially healthy attitude for us. To stay as far away from that speculation as much we can.

Brain chemistry is relevant to logical analysis. Gender has significant effects on brain chemistry.

Law involves a great deal of logical analysis and there doesn't seem to be any shortage of capable women lawyers, despite a good deal of institutional discrimination in the past.

This is a great example that should be mentioned more often.

Women are said to be better at language, but that didn't keep Shakespeare and Gabriel García Márquez from being great writers.

This pseudoscience typically accompanies discussions of gender and racial superiority.

Yes there is a problem this is obvious. However... as long as women make up such a tiny minority of CS graduates there is no short-term financial incentive for companies to not just market directly to men.

For example, if a certain recruiting tactic would double the number of qualified male applicants, but halve the number of qualified female applicants, it is clearly a short-term gain for a company.

That's why the statement quoted in the grandparent post is wrong.

Obviously it's bad for the industry to have a culture that is so exclusionary of 50% of the population, but that's more of a long-term goal. There is very little any company can do to e.g. increase the number of women graduating from CS programs in the next 3 years, since that number is more-or-less fixed now.

That's a good point. I suspect that a higher proportion of women in CS would solve a lot of the issues we're seeing right now in regards to sexism.

But at the same time, it's really difficult to attract more women into CS when the atmosphere isn't welcoming of women in the first place. It's a bit of a cycle really.

Many commenters on this site, pg included, have noted that the economics of hiring are rationally biased to false negatives. This makes sense, because the price of false positives is so high. Unfortunately, this tends to accentuate societal factors, such as prejudice.

I would argue that with developers, the cost of a false negative is higher. It is just that most companies don't understand the loss walking out the door. Interviews are fraught with 1001 ways to get a negative from a top 10 developer. The cost of hiring a bad one and figuring out they are bad is about 2 weeks pay, the cost of passing over a quality developer is the loss of a rare find and probably that developers social circle. Do not underestimate the cost of false negatives in relation to developers.

2 weeks pay? How is it supposed to work? I believe you are basically stuck with a bad hire for at least one performance review period, plus some time on top of that. Anything less and you have a potential wrongful termination lawsuit on your hands.

Quite a few organizations hire on a contract basis for a period of time to ensure that it is going to work out for both parties. It's fairly standard practice to avoid committing to the unknown on both sides.

This seems like it is probably the case. Due to the incentives that drive hiring decisions, individuals and companies may all be making (short-term) rational decisions, with the net result that women are excluded.

The consequences of hiring someone that doesn't fit into a particular company's culture are quite severe -- not to mention potentially expensive. There can be a lot of reluctance, some of it understandable, to hiring anyone who is different in any significant way from current employees. That most obviously includes women, but (at companies where most employees are young and single) also older workers, people with children, etc.

The lack of women is the most glaring, but I suspect if you ran the numbers that there are a lot of other groups underrepresented in software development. It's not so much that women are being specifically excluded, as it is that a certain type of person (male geek, to be blunt) is being specifically sought.

This is true.

My guess is that the "bro culture" is designed to attract a different population of men, who ordinarily would have gone to Wall Street or similar industries, but are attracted to the present web boom.

When the bubble's over, I predict the brogramming fad will fade. I certainly wouldn't want to work at a place with that culture if I could avoid it, but it seems like an essentially temporary phenomenon.

You are trying to build a narrative that it's men stopping women from participating in software development. I find that problematic and harmful. Where is your proof, other than pure conjecture?

My own conjecture is that women don't want to do software development because it's boring and difficult. I'm sure they could if they wanted to, they just do not. With a few notable exceptions to the rule.

It might not be the primary reason but it certainly doesn't help. Back in high school, I was really excited to join the robotics team and I really had a passion for it but I only stayed in it for a year before quitting. I was the only girl on the team and the attitude people took with me was infuriating. It felt like such a boy's club.

Sure, you can just pass it off as "boys will be boys", high school boys are stupid and immature. But even the adult mentors were so exclusionary. I had to fight tooth and nail to be involved in the programming and building aspect of the competition even though just wanted to stick me to making their website look pretty.

It took me a couple of years to get that bad taste out of my mouth. I initially didn't even go into college for a STEM degree before I worked myself up to take Computer Engineering.

When you have experiences like that in high school and you hear stories about sexism in the workforce, it's intimidating to enter a field even if you do enjoy it. I'm glad I made the choice I did but the vibe other women get from degrees like CS isn't conducive to promoting a better gender balance.

Thanks, it is interesting to hear from personal experience what it is like.

Not that this applies to you, but I have seen a female programmer (co worker) invoke the chauvinist card, when in fact she was no good as programmer.

She wanted to be involved, she wanted to do cool stuff. But she didn't have the basics dialed at all and didn't have the work ethic to pick it up at an accelerated pace.

As far as I have seen the guys in hard fields (as AI and Robotics) are pretty selective bunch and will not allow someone with average skills amongst them. You have to be flat out and you have to impress them with your skills. Be a gal or a guy, but if you haven't done you're homework beforehand then you're not welcome in their club.

On the other hand, competent and driven engineers have in my opinion always been accepted as an equal.

But I have only met a handful of women willing to put in the necessary work.

> I have seen a female programmer (co worker) invoke the chauvinist card

Incompetent people will invoke whatever card is convenient for them, whether it's sexism, racism, ageism, what have you.

> But I have only met a handful of women willing to put in the necessary work.

If I were to go by my experience of people in tech (which includes non-startup environments), only a small portion of people are willing to put in the necessary work - male or female.

There's a higher concentration of people of people willing to pay their dues in the smaller companies like startups, but I'm not convinced that percentage-wise, the "handful of women" you talk of is any worse than the percentage of men in tech on the whole, which includes the non-startup world.

Remember, the 501s outnumber the "hardcore" people by a huge margin, and a vast majority of the 501s are men.

> Incompetent people will invoke whatever card is convenient for them, whether it's sexism, racism, ageism, what have you.

Of course they will, but then the pathologic PC people will attack anyone calling them out on it. With this modern attitude that no one should ever get hurt, we are giving a carte blanche to the rotten apples. Just keep that in mind.

> There's a higher concentration of people of people willing to pay their dues in the smaller companies like startups, but I'm not convinced that percentage-wise, the "handful of women" you talk of is any worse than the percentage of men in tech on the whole, which includes the non-startup world.

The handful of women I talk about were absolutely brilliant and could and did go in stride with the best of us guys. And thus they were accepted as a part of the team. I have never thought of a coworker "she is incompetent because she is a woman" but I have thought of a coworker "she is incompetent and expects to get away with it because she is a woman".

Many women often try to play their sex to their advantage when in a bad position. e.g.: I have never heard of a woman demand to be given a ticket by a policeman, when in fact such would be the law.

Tech people just have really low tolerance for bullshit and don't care as much about etiquette. That is all I'm trying to say.

Being politically correct for the sake of it won't do much for quality of engineering being done.

She is talking about high school for chrissakes. A place you go to even before you go to college, which in itself is a place you go to so you can become good years later.

I got isolated in kindergarten for not being cool enough to hang out with the cool kids.

I'm not saying that there should be some kind of enforcement to get nerds accepted into society.

I am just saying that you either deal with it or go away.

As a guy in the tech industry, I myself can't stand working in a "sausage factory".

Homogeneity makes people complacent. The guard comes down, and the 'behaviour filter' that people would otherwise have in a more heterogenous environment disappears.

This type of thing bugs me because I worry that it desensitizes me and makes me careless when I visit clients, or change workplaces.

"Women don't want to do software development because it's boring and difficult".

Except it's a well known fact that until the 80's, roughly half of US programmers were women, and all around the world, the percentages of women in computing are growing, not shrinking.

And please don't say that people who stay away from technical careers do so because it's "difficult". You are one conjecture away from suggesting that white and asian males are intellectually superior to everyone else.

I did not say that software development was not difficult for Asians and whites. Just that it is difficult (and subjectively boring). Period.

What I am saying, is that getting a good paying, stable job is not as important for women as it is for men, so they don't have to collectively sacrifice as much. Which is purely my opinion.

Getting a good job is not as important for women as it is for men? Are you serious? And why is that, in your opinion?

Two (hypothetically related, depending on your answer) mini questions: Do you think it's equally as unimportant for ugly women? What about lesbians?

>And why is that, in your opinion?

The rules of sexual marketplace.

>Do you think it's equally as unimportant for ugly women? What about lesbians?

Both are a small minority. Ugly women still can't improve their attractiveness by having a job nearly as much as men can.

You know, I tried to hint at where your logic breaks down and be a little funny while at it, but you just don't get it. Let me be more direct.

1. It is most definitely not a small minority that would be excluded from high-paying jobs if these jobs are to go only to men, and only so they could use money to get women. You would have to exclude gay men, married men, men with girlfriends, and many more groups that when taken together, would comprise an overwhelming majority.

2. I really hope you take this next point the right way. If you genuinely believe that the formula of the sexual marketplace is money≈sex, you really need some introspection and perhaps a radically different environment - friends, reading material, TV shows, parents... whatever sources you are getting that information from. I am not trying to be glib. You are being misled, and you are the only person who will pay for it in the long term.

If you take my argument to a hyperbole, it is obviously not going to work. Men and women are not clones of each other. We have different values and different needs. Different challenges. According to those drives we act in the most efficient manner we can. Part biological, part cultural, part rational.

Sexual dimorphism exists. I have seen strong evidence for this.

> My own conjecture is that women don't want to do software development because it's boring and difficult.

Why would women find this more of a problem then men do? You're just replacing one unproven assertion with another, the latter that women are more sensitive to "boring and difficult" jobs than men are. I can't think of any compelling reason or even any evidence for that, given the number of "boring and difficult" jobs done by women.

Also, given the average salary and demand for developers in the current job market relative to other fields, women -- as a group -- would have to have a rather strong aversion to software development to be avoiding it purely because it's boring and difficult.

I don't see any reason to take that particular conjecture seriously.

>Why would women find this more of a problem then men do?

I did not say this. What I said that women have more of a choice not to have a career and still succeed in raising a family.

> What I said that women have more of a choice not to have a career and still succeed in raising a family.

Yeah, not so sure about that statement either, given economic times.

The census show that stay-at-home women have in general lower education and family income, and are more likely to be Hispanic or foreign-born.

The results indicate it's less of a choice and more of a lack of employment opportunities.

Also my personal research shows that women value steady employment in long time partners much more than men do.

I think that's debatable based on geography. You point to nurses and teaching being precedents but that was only true in certain geographies. The low interest in of women in programming is a global phenomenon.

It's important that we discuss the actual cause here if we want any hope in solving this. Let me throw out another one that I find has less weaknesses then the usual arguments: There is a tremendous lack of female programming role models. Yep, chicken and egg problem, but no one said this would be easy. Perhaps what we can do is start celebrating the ones we got more? I'm thinking of Marissa Mayer as a potential starting point but I don't know a lot about this part of psychology.

> The low interest in of women in programming is a global phenomenon.

I'm not sure that's completely true. I've been told that the gender imbalance in CompSci programs is less severe in India than it is in the U.S., for instance, relative to the overall gender imbalance in their workforce.

But in general it wouldn't surprise me if there is higher worldwide correlation among companies in software development than in other industries, because software development is so new, and because so many of the dominant companies are concentrated in the U.S. Other industries, e.g. healthcare, operate in very different environments from country to country, so you would expect them to be less highly correlated.

"The low interest in of women in programming is a global phenomenon." Huh. Source? according to this: http://www.frauen.inf.ethz.ch/stats/international_stat_fraue... "there is a wide range in participation in computing by women.... it is difficult to do a direct comparison between countries. ... participation is between 10% and 40% in most countries and courses, with a wide spread in this range. There are some countries and courses where women's participation is below 10%, some with participation above 40%, and a few where women are in the majority." ( I believe in Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, women are in the majority )

You'd dare to be wrong:

http://134.173.180.115/berger/pdf/Halpern2007.SciSexDif.Pub....

Do you see any evidence that the rank-and-file software developer lives on the far-right-edge of the bell curve?

Software developers are largely male for the same reason that construction crews and prisoners are - rather than the reason Nobel Prize winners in Physics are.

What, if anything, there is to be gained by encouraging women to join men in wasting their lives away in the IT salt mines, is another question entirely.

What, if anything, there is to be gained by encouraging women to join men in wasting their lives away in the IT salt mines, is another question entirely.

You make more than your peers and your boss. It takes a couple days to land multiple job offers, in any economy, all you have to do is stop saying no. The work is intellectually gratifying and the results are immediately visible. You are largely immune from corporate politics. The list goes on and on.

How can you be stuck in the salt mines when it's been the programmers' market for so long? I am genuinely interested - I hear this sentiment every once in a while and it always baffles me. I've done web development for 10 years (NYC/Midwest) and it's been nothing but gravy. Some lumps, yes, but gravy nonetheless.

> How can you be stuck in the salt mines...

> The work is intellectually gratifying

Most likely, this is where we differ.

The only programming work that I find truly gratifying happens to be my 100%-non-monetizable life project. (http://www.loper-os.org) Everything else is just a way to pay the bills. That is to say, salt mine labor.

In order to eat and pay rent, I burn my prime waking hours working on things other than my life project. I understand that, given our present social structure, this is unavoidable. But I don't have to pretend to like it. I suppose this makes me a "bad prostitute," rather than a "good" one.

Programming sucks. So I am not particularly upset that there aren't more women doing the work, just as the lack of female coal miners is likewise not a cruel injustice.

Sounds like you desperately need a new profession. If you don't do it for love, you're wasting your life.

I don't think you really understood my reply.

I have a life project. What is sometimes called a calling. (If you don't, you probably cannot process what I am saying and should disregard this post.)

So whenever I am doing some other work - anything at all - other than my calling - to pay for food and housing - I am acting under duress. Which isn't much fun. Of course, some kinds of forced labor suck more than others. I could be felling trees, or laying pipes, or something even more physically unpleasant. So overall, programming for money is far from the worst among possible fates.

And often, even persons who lack a calling and for whom all work is just work, "just switching professions" is not an option. For a different perspective on why many programmers stay in their line of work despite hating it, consider this book: "Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls: True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors" (http://books.google.com/books/about/Desperate_Journeys_Aband...). It is largely about shipwrecked sailors. One of the more interesting facts about these is how many kept at their profession despite suffering wreck after wreck - witnessing murder, cannibalism, and various other unpleasant things. The explanation offered by the author is that sailors typically entered their trade during childhood, and were largely unfit (by their own estimate as well as that of others) for any other work.

I started programming when I was nine years old. And perhaps you did so, or know those who did, at an even earlier age. This is not necessarily true for all such people, but switching professions after having your whole development as a person wrapped around computing can be like being asked to switch to being left- (or right-, as the case may be) handed, late in life.

This sounds pretty naive. Just because someone doesn't do something they love now, doesn't mean they're wasting their life. It may simply mean they like eating rather than starving.

> just as the lack of female coal miners is likewise not a cruel injustice.

It is for someone who really wants to work in a coal mine. (Or, for a more germane example, someone who wants to be an infantry soldier.) Not everyone shares your priorities or ideas on what constitutes rewarding work. Some people might find a well-compensated 9-to-5 job slinging code under fluorescent lights to be just the ticket, and they should get to pursue that to the best of their ability on their own merits.

Restricting certain people from (or pushing certain people into) certain jobs based on their gender, skin color, or other irrelevant factors beyond their control is a fairness issue that transcends the particulars of the jobs that they are being restricted from.

But where, then, is the agitation for an end to the discrimination which must surely explain (as per Official Truth) the scarcity of female coal miners and infantry soldiers?

Implicit in almost all discussions of unfair discrimination in the programming labour market is the assumption that being a programmer is overall a glorious and pleasant thing, and that a great many people would be happier doing it than they are in their present lives.

Notice that no one is angry that >99% of all persons who have sizzled in the electric chair were male.

What you describe is a complaint about jobs, corporate culture and how market demands change over time, nothing unique to programming.

If you had to choose again, what would you've done that wasn't 'salt-mine labor' then?

> What you describe is a complaint about jobs, corporate culture and how market demands change over time, nothing unique to programming

"Market demands"? What part of "non-monetizable calling" do you not understand? I'm not sure it even makes sense for me to talk to you at all. It is like trying to describe 15-dimensional geometry to a Flatlander.

> If you had to choose again, what would you've done that wasn't 'salt-mine labor' then?

I can say only:

"I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." (Charles Babbage)

But if you must know: I'd be an inventor. In the 1880s.

Hey, you asked.

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