Here Are No Women On StackOverflow… Or Are There? | Hacker News Reader

Here Are No Women On StackOverflow… Or Are There?

banane.com

30 pointsphwd58 comments

We have had article after article claiming it is obvious women are being oppressed in the tech industry. Every week there is one of these. Many make bigoted claims about male engineers, enforcing stereotypes of male geeks I have never actually seen in industry.

Where are the technical articles written by women? There are plenty of contributions complaining about oppression, while attacking men and claiming absurd stereotypes. Where are the technical contributions?

I'd imagine they are read as if they are written by men and don't get added to the woman category.

The internet still seems rather men oriented I know if I don't know the gender of a person and can't make a guess by their username I default to using male pronouns and most other men seem to do this as well. (I wonder if the women of the internet do this or if they default to she or something else entirely.)

> The internet still seems rather men oriented I know if I don't know the gender of a person and can't make a guess by their username I default to using male pronouns and most other men seem to do this as well.

This is not a property of the Internet; it is a property of the English language.

A property of the English language? I don't think so. Perhaps you were referring to a dominant tendency English-speaking cultures?

This is not a property of the English language. It is a property of the person reading the article.

Here's Lady Ada (real name Limor Fried) who runs a $1M+/year tech company out of a live/work space in NYC. https://www.adafruit.com/about/ And here's her story about ridiculous levels of harassment in the tech scene. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3165434

More than that, where is the defense of masculinity? Why should anyone, men and women included, have to apologise for their nature? Yeah, men, on average, are more to the point when they speak. Yeah, women, on average, are more in touch with their emotions.

Let's pull our collective heads out of our asses, admit that we're not identical and learn to respect each others' differences, the fact that those differences are based averages and that exceptions occur both ways.

Not to mention that we're on the fucking internet. There is no gender, race, colour or creed here. Everybody pick a neutral username and, hey, presto! Problem solved.

I'm a woman. Or am I... Ooooh! Who gives a shit.

Where are the technical contributions?

A selection of some of the major early contributions in chronological order;

first programmer - Ada Lovelace

foundational paper for computerized algebra - Grete Hermann

original programmers of the ENIAC - Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Fran Bilas, Kay McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff, and Ruth Lichterman

first compiler written - Grace Hopper

first person to use a computer in a private home & first developer of an operating system (LAP) for the first minicomputer - Mary Allen Wilkes

And all of this was done before Mary Keller became the first American woman to earn a PhD in Computer Science, in 1965, and it wasn't until 1989 that IBM had their first female fellow, Frances E. Allen.

If you are claiming to be finding it hard to find technical contributions to computer science by women and that you see no evidence of discrimination, it means you are being willfully blind, at best.

Wil van der Aalst – business process management, process mining, Petri nets

Hal Abelson – intersection of computing and teaching

Serge Abiteboul – database theory

Samson Abramsky – game semantics

Leonard Adleman – RSA, DNA computing

Manindra Agrawal – polynomial-time primality testing

Luis von Ahn – human-based computation

Alfred Aho – compilers book, the 'a' in AWK

Amos Nuwasiima – PHP Programming book

Frances E. Allen – compiler optimization

Alexander Scaranti – Image Processing, Image Retrieval

Gene Amdahl – supercomputer developer, founder of Amdahl Corporation

A. Annerl – multidimensional processing, computational complexity theory

Andrew Appel – compilers text books

Bruce Arden - programming language compilers (GAT, MAD), virtual memory architecture, MTS

Sanjeev Arora – PCP theorem (Hahaha. Right, I want to see who came up with Ketamine theorem.)

A. E. Hugo - parallel computing on heterogeneous multicore architectures[citation needed]

John Vincent Atanasoff – computer pioneer

Ali Aydar - computer scientist and CEO of Sporcle

Leonard Ayunar - Computer Programming Enthusiast, 1997 - At Present Software Developer

That's just surnames beginning with A. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_scientists

Hal (Harold) Abelson is a man :)

If you haven't already, shame on you; You should check him & Jerald Jay Sussman's EPIC 1986 SICP course for (I think) HP employees (SICP: Structure and Interpretations of Computer Programs). videos are available here: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...

[EDIT]: I notices that you've apparently listed male computer scientists (it's 5:23am here). But I won't remove my comment as the SICP link might be useful for others.

I wasn't trying to find a massive list, droithomme asked "where are the technical contributions" by women in computing, not "who has the biggest list". Really, all I needed to write down was Grace Hopper. Compilers being fairly useful in the field.

Did everyone miss the point of that comment? Most of the names on my list are not women.

I know they are not. I was commenting on that. I assumed that you posted a big list to demonstrate the lack of women in CS.

[edit] reading over, I could have been a lot more clear. I should have said "which group" rather than "who"

I think grandparent poster was referring to blogs and articles on the internet today, not all of computing history.

Unless the thesis is that women have suddenly got crap at computing, I think that historic references are valid.

Well, for a start, did you look at any of her other blog posts, or did you just assume that all she does on her blog is complain about oppression and attack men with absurd stereotypes?

Everyone seems to ignore the hundreds of articles that are written by women. Their technical articles get maybe 10 comments, while gender related articles get hundreds. I know personally my one gender related post has 50% more viewers than my top non-gender related post, and that one is one that people often find via google to help solve a specific problem.

The problem with "we should focus on women's technical achievements!" is that it rapidly becomes "but we shouldn't focus on women's technical achievements because they are women! We should focus on technical achievements!" which even more quickly magically morphs into "We should focus on men's technical achievements!" Wired represented Grace Hopper with a picture of a dude in glasses last week. The NYT thinks men invented the internet. How many men even know that Liskov of the Liskov substitution principle is a woman? Or that Alan Turing is gay?

As long as we don't address benevolent sexism and erasure, the best intentions for meritocracy will continue to fail.

Thank you, you may be the only one that caught my point. Technical articles by women don't often get submitted here and those that are don't get many upvotes, but articles claiming discrimination or industry wide hostile work environments are quite popular and usually feature long discussions and front page status.

> enforcing stereotypes of male geeks I have never actually seen in industry

The irony of this is awesome because I see it every week in the comments for these posts on Hacker News.

I for one dont care who answers my question, man, woman, member of long lost indian tribe from amazon or a teapot, as long as the question is answered and i can get on with my work.

In fact, I fail to see the point of this article. Even its title fails to make a point. It does succeed in producing headline-baiting effect which implies sexism in StackOverflow community.

If the goal is to get the most and best answers, and you're not engaging all demographics, then you can get more and better answers by doing that.

It seems that there are 3 types of people answering question on StackOverflow:

1) People genuinely wishing to share their knowledge

2) People that are chasing gamified elements of the reputation system

3) People that belong somewhere between #1 & #2

I dont see anything that prevents any demographic from participating as long as fall into one of these 3 categories. And i dont see how being of a particular gender or race or ethnicity precludes one from sharing their knowledge on StackOverflow

Then you're not paying attention to the society around you. You really think women and men have equal proclivities for engaging in public competition?

>or a teapot

Whoa, let's not go overboard here.

This article is interesting because I had never considered gender to be a component of the community at StackOverflow. To me, it is about questions and answers, both of which are measured for quality. It seems to be a pure meritocracy.

In the end, I don't think it matters what the gender of the participants is. But if for some reason the site could better serve people of either gender, it'd be interesting to know what tactics could accomplish that.

exactly. In fact based on the screenshots, the authors answers were greatly appreciated by people that asked the questions. More often than not when asking or answering questions on SO I pay attention to persons reputation and answer accept rate. I dont even look at their name. The article mentioned some anecdotal complaints from women on some engineering forum which make no sense to me whatsoever. Id love to hear from a female SO user whether they did in fact turn away from SO because of lack of women on it?

The idea of a question/answer site as a meritocracy is not monopolized by Stack Overflow. We forget that there is more than one way to solve this problem, and this is a particular solution with particular tradeoffs. I myself find Stack Overflow a bit unpleasant to contribute on; I always feel like it's a race, and it's very hard to separate one's desire to be helpful from one's desire to win points by playing the game faster or harder. It's easier and possibly more rewarding overall (just in terms of points) to focus on answering broadly, frequently and with speed than with quality.

As a man, and a not particularly competitive one, I don't know if what chafes me about it is also what chafes women, but I think there is definitely room for other interpretations of social question answering. Either deep changes or simply different reward schedules, combined with a different initial community, ought to produce a site with a completely different "feel." Whatever it is that women are reacting to about Stack Overflow, there is bound to be a different solution they would like better, and the competition between sites could be beneficial.

It's important to have a diverse group of people asking and answering questions. If the diversity is so low that the site can't even attract a non-minority like women, that doesn't bode well for the quality of the community.

That is understandable, but are there issues with Stack Overflow which can be changed which are not tied to the purpose of the site?

For example, one problem reported by the women that were asked about Stack Overflow was that one-upsmanship was an unpleasant theme. In what way could it be made less competitive without lowering the quality of the submissions?

In the US at least, men use one-upsmanship as part of friendly social interaction. Women are generally not exposed to light-hearted competition in the same way, so they feel more put down by it then the men really intend. You could see it as a socialization problem (women have little experience with friendly competition) or a communication problem (men don't realize that their actions seem overly aggressive to women).

Why? If I'm able to get quality answers what advantage does racial/sex "diversity" in and of itself bring to the table. Should I feel extra good about getting a quality answer from a black female programmer over a white male one? If so why? It would seem to me that using diversity to assess community quality on a programming Q&A site is a poor measure given it has no bearing on programming ability. Unless of course one is purely interested in aesthetics.

If I'm able to get quality answers what advantage does racial/sex "diversity" in and of itself bring to the table.

I think this is a wrong assumption. Qualitatively, it should be obvious that a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds would yield more answers. (Also a larger group of contributors can post more content to the site.) Empirically, multiple studies have shown that diverse groups are better at creative problem solving. Example: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=685821...

It's not obvious at all unless you're talking about a diversity of programming backgrounds in which case I agree. C++ doesn't work differently when it's used by a black or female programmer. Same goes for programming perspectives in general. I don't design my classes differently because I grew up in the inner-city (nor would I need to tailor an answer for someone who did). I think your taking an argument usually reserved for social environments that are more dependent on interaction and group dynamics (e.g. a classroom) and trying to apply it to a more static engineering one. And while that study did find that increased diversity improved performance on "business measures", it did not find a causal link that specifically pointed to diversity as the reason, although I'm not sure it would have much bearing here anyway. Being creative in a broader business/social context is not the same as solving the type of specific engineering/programming questions generally found on SO. Programming skill is completely divorced from race/gender/class and that's something we should all be happy about.

Hmm, maybe start with the idea that the world isn't all about what works for you?

It's a meritocracy based on public competition. For whatever reason, nature or nurture, that appeals to men in our culture more than women.

I honestly think that a lot of the perceived sexism on anonymous places, like the supposed gender downvotes in this instance, just is the Internet being the Internet.

Okay, this may be a little sexist, but my impression is that women take negative stuff on the Internet (wether it's a mean comment or a downvote) more personal than men does. It may be because the emotional part of the brain is more developed in women's brains or just because they often don't have the same Internet experience as many men does. Stack Overflow can be a tough and ruthless place, but that doesn't make it sexist at all, even if some women are turned off by it.

Anyway, by looking for a meaning for something that doesn't make sense, like the downvotes in internet communities like in this case, you'll most likely find something (but often not the real reason). It's easy to "see" ghosts - that doesn't make them real.

Sexism is real and should try to be prevented, but unfortunately sometimes it seems to go a little bit overboard - either by actively looking for it (and finding it everywhere) or making it sound like there aren't any differences between men and women.

I think you make a good point, I don't know why you're being downvoted.

After all, the author of the article specifically mentions: "They don’t want the grief of getting downvoted (because they are a woman)"

But the constructive question this leads to is: suppose the upvote/downvote/karma/etc. model is fundamentally "competitive" and men find themselves more comfortable with it than women do. (I'm not saying this is the case, I'm just saying "suppose".)

Then, is there an alternate model that could be used which women would find more rewarding, and participate more in? That would still promote good content and behavior, and be able to counteract negative influences like vandalsim, garbage answers, etc.?

I don't have the answer, but would love to hear insights.

"StackOverflow is a meritocracy, therefore women should feel just as welcome as men." Some women tell you that it's not. Is your first reaction: [a] we should honestly try to listen to their feedback , or [b] publicly hypothesize that they're probably just whining because they can't take the heat? One of these answers leads to change, the other demonstrates how an egalitarian space turns unwelcoming.

Sick of hearing how sexist Internet forums are? Good! Let's keep working to change that. Other than discouraging people from pointing it out I mean.

To whom are you responding? I cannot find your quotation anywhere else in the discussion, but I used the word "meritocracy" and I'm worried you interpreted my comment elsewhere in the thread as hostile.

Not at all. It's a rhetorical quotation; I'm not responding to any one person. (I suppose that's part of the issue: it's rarely any one person that's behaving badly; it's the cumulative effect.)

I'm starting to get tired of the hand wringing around the issue of an anti-woman bias surrounding the software development/tech space.

Out of curiosity, does the same standards of equal representation exist for predominantly woman dominated communities in the case of men?

There's some occasional hand-wringing about it in nursing and teaching but it's very much in the minority.

None of the incessant navel-gazing that occurs here.

Men tend to do better than women in female-dominated fields, it's been called by some the glass escalator: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2012/05/21/a-new-o...

I know I shouldn't feel this way but I never see the poster of questions or answers as women? I'm not saying at all that I think the value of a woman programmer is any less than a mans, I just do not encounter women in programming, full stop.

I actually started reading that post then as if it was from a man and I thought they were making a sexist remark about "are my women here". When I discovered it was a woman, I read it again in a different context completely.

I don't know what other peoples regions are like but whenever I encounter a programmer anywhere, they are male?

Wow, at all? That's surprising. Certainly there are more males in tech, but that's still unusual. If you don't mind me asking, what region are you from?

Sadly, even as a woman, I myself am often guilty of assuming other programmers are men, if I don't have any evidence to the contrary.

There was a new york times article recently about the same problem in a different, and far more gender-balanced, field: medicine. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/assuming-the-doctor...

I have never in my years encountered a woman developer, ever. I live in UK near Manchester.

I have encountered my fair share of female SEO's but never actually a developer?

I don't think from my point of view it can even be classed as stereotypical when it's just the way it appears to be? (Where I am at least)

I don't think it matters either way but it is equally something that I have ever thought about.

One of the best coders I know is female. She left the UK to work out in the far east where she is considered less of an oddity.

Well as I was writing that post I got to thinking, woman (in my opinion) generally have a better idea of logic. Organisation and planning come second nature to a lot of women I know, where men (in general again) it takes more to get the planning right.

This makes me think that women would be better at programming, as a generalisation.

This obviously cannot be applied to all people but in my opinion and experience women are more logical and organised.

Maybe you don't go to the right/enough events.

I'm a bit of a hermit but even I know several female developers in the north (mostly in Manchester and Leeds) from events like BarCamp Manchester, Leeds Hack, and GeekUp. Maybe there are tech events up here that women don't attend but I haven't come across one yet.. meaning perhaps I don't go to enough events either ;-)

Don't feel guilty about it, but you can be aware of the issue and account for it. It's stereotyping. Most of the time, stereotyping works for us in our lives - the stereotype of 'a chair' and 'a tree' and so forth all make sense. If someone says 'can you go out the back and move the chairs under the tree?', you'll know what to look for because of stereotyping. Occasionally you see chairs that take a bit of figuring out before you realise they're chairs.

The problem is when stereotyping fails. When it fails with a chair, there is no problem. When it fails with people, those people are marginalised and it seriously affects them. Given the preponderance of men in programming, it's easy to stereotype a male programmer, but it's something we're aware of being wrong. So don't feel guilty about it, but work to fix it.

Apart from the stereotyping there is a separate issue, being that a lot of men start treating another user quite differently once they find out they're women (hostility, sexual advances etc). That's unforgivable.

So there’s good news, there are women on StackOverflow. The visible ones are far below the representative % of women in the industry. So you can safely determine that it’s an unfriendly-to-women place.*

Oy vey...

Lets put this all to rest:

@spolsky says that 24% of SO visitors are women

https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/215906113470742528

If most of the SO community was female but you didn't know about it, would your observations somehow differ from these? Would you notice?

This might be a crazy idea, but if more men posed as women, women would feel less intimidated to participate, and douchebags would have less effect on the actual women in the community.

If more men posed as women online, they'd know how bad men are to women online.

define online plz

There are plenty of venues where this is true, i just dont believe SO is one.

douchebags can profess their douchebaggery across the gender lines. Furthermore, douchebags can be of either gender. The only way to fight douchebags is to call them on their douchebaggery and to down-vote them into oblivion. Lets not fight evil with fake, Lets fight evil with real.

Typo in title.

Here -> There

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