Learning how to attract women to web development
devbootcamp.com
devbootcamp.com
Why?
That's a serious question.
My hobbies include writing, blacksmithing, cooking, and ceramics.
In writing, around half the people are women.
In blacksmithing perhaps 3% are women.
In cooking probably 90% of the blogs I read and people who take classes are women.
In ceramics it's again 90% female.
I have absolutely no desire to increase the percentage of women blacksmiths...and I have absolutely no desire to decrease the percentage of women pot throwers.
Why should I want to change these?
Why do you want to change the ratio in web development?
Citation required.
Positive stereotypes like this create just as hostile a work environment as negative ones.
The author cites several studies to back up those assertions. Agreed on the positive stereotype bit, though--I think people rely far too much on anecdotal evidence simply because the way that people talk is difficult to distill and quantify.
Further, women in technology and leadership positions has been correlated with business success: http://reclaimingleadership.com/why-you-need-women-leading-i...
Web development is a profession, not (just) a hobby, and if women move away from it just due to the fact it's already a high ratio of males then it's a problem
I’d bet there is at least a small group of automotive mechanics that are interested in increasing diversity in their field.
A lot of industries that have issues attracting certain kinds of people don't have explicitly diversity goals as a part of their makeup. But that doesn't mean that people aren't trying to break into those industries and have a career there.
Keep in mind that the kind of work you do isn't just influenced by your hobbies and likes, but also by what is considered acceptable for a certain person based on gender/race/etc., stereotypes about kinds of work, and classism (among other things).
Then perhaps it is society that needs changing. But from the inside out. This patching from the outside in is never going to significantly affect the roots of the problem.
As you said, the problem is that women are discriminated against in the industry. I don't think attracting more women will necessarily solve that problem. The problem is with the attitude of many of the men. Attracting more women might even make it worse. Men might start resenting them.
Fixing the attitude problem might attract more women--or it might not.
This is a good example of why I think "diversity" initiatives are missing the point. The point isn't to have equal proportions of races/sexes/nationalities/etc., the point is to ensure that they are all treated equally and justly. Many diversity movements do the exact opposite and treat people differently based on their sex or skin color. I think this is unjust and can often make problems worse, not better.
Back to the topic: I love the welcoming attitude, though. The intention is good, if a bit misguided. If more men adopted the same attitude as Dev Bootcamp, "Women, we value your contributions and will treat you as equals," then the problem would be solved.
> This is a good example of why I think "diversity" initiatives are missing the point. The point isn't to have equal proportions of races/sexes/nationalities/etc., the point is to ensure that they are all treated equally and justly. Many diversity movements do the exact opposite and treat people differently based on their sex or skin color. I think this is unjust and can often make problems worse, not better.
To begin with, the people who are underrepresented in tech are already treated differently on the basis of gender, race, etc. Knowing that and aiming to make sure that you include those people at some ratio isn't unjust. In the case of dev bootcamp chicago, they knew it would be easy to sell seats to the wider dev community that consists mostly of men, so they made a conscious effort to get the word out in spaces that inhabited mostly by women before going to their usual sources. That is most certainly fair considering that had they not done so, it was likely that men would greatly outnumber the amount of women attending.
The status quo is what's unjust. Do you agree? If so, how can correcting for that be unjust?
I disagree. Discrimination is not always unjust depending on the motivation and the outcomes of it. If the motivation is to correct for existing systemic discrimination, and if it is successful in doing so, I do not see the injustice.
I can see both sides of that. But ideally, you want to fix the systemic issue not just try to correct for it, because your correction is almost guaranteed to add more unfairness to the system not reduce it.
In the US, more degree earners are women now than men, so that is one large untapped talent pool for the tech industry. We ignore it to our detriment.
Not in STEM, which constitutes the vast majority of the degrees relevant to Tech/IT.
That's an assumption. We don't know. :-)
I don't know that future neuroscience is going agree with that statement. The male and female brain do differ on average, and it would seem that these differences may be related to the types of thinking that STEM encourages. Math maybe not so much, but engineering? Maybe. We don't know for sure yet. A lot of people love to think that there's no difference between men an women, but science chips away at that idealism every decade.
But there's no reason to treat men or women any differently with regards to STEM, true. We just have to remember that there may be some base-level biological self-filtering that happens. And if it does, that's OK.
People who work professionally in STEM fields in the US tend to be straight white males. This is okay, so long as the reason for the disparity is not that the culture in these fields tends to disparage members of the community who don't fit this profile. If we agree that women and men are roughly equally qualified when it comes to development, then the disparity in terms of participation is worth being investigated. This sort of statement (1:1 ratio) implies equality which will hopefully resonate with the community and ultimately tend towards a zeitgeist wherein people--regardless of gender or any other irrelevant criteria--are welcomed based on their merit.
Take a look biology. Back in the late 1990s, the majority of biology graduate students were female. When I was in industry, the number of females working on biology was also very close to 50%.
So why have women felt comfortable entering the field of biology when it used to be dominated by males?
There are lessons to be learned here.
I don't know about the US but in Europe this is not true. There are quite a few gay males (5% to 10% which is what you'd expect) in the courses that I took in maths, physics and computer science, and there are a lot of women in fields like biology. The number of women in mathematics and physics is also higher than in computer science, although still less than 50%.
Except in cases of extreme naivety, it's a challenge, or worse, a roadblock, posed to force a reexamination of the underlying assumption.
In this case, the underlying assumption is that the field of web development would be enhanced by a more equal ratio of women to men.
Your "why?" implies a host of reasons, bounded only by imagination, why this might not be the case — why we might be better off leaving this to the men — but luckily, you don't have to actually voice any of them.
So no, it isn't a serious question, and doesn't deserve a serious response here.
I asked my question crisply and respectfully, taking the pro-diversity folks as serious and being people of goodwill.
I think it's disrespectful of you, not to mention logically deficient, to immediately start your attack by asserting that my question was not intended in good faith.
If you can't muster up a simple, respectful response to a simple respectful question, it doesn't speak well of your self examination on this topic.
You seem to be saying the reasons behind having a 1:1 ratio are self-evident. And not saying that nicely.
As an example, I can tell you, I go to a lot of startup events and they are often centered around activities like ping pong or beer drinking. I know many women interested in entrepreneurship and try to get them to go with me, but they tell me they don't like ping pong or would feel uncomfortable. And, at the events themselves, there are typically only one or two women who actually came.
Changing the ratio would involve creating an atmosphere that would encourage women who already have an interest to act on it and thus be better represented.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177994
1. "Even science recognizes that diversity is important: research from both the Kellogg and Sloan Schools suggest that cognitively diverse teams perform better on hard problems."
2. "Beyond that, though, hiring for diversity will set up better recruiting opportunities. Consider Harvard’s graduating computer science class: forty-one percent of the students are women, and an inability to hire talented females will start to significantly impact your ability to recruit altogether."
3. "A number of studies, like one from CMU, have shown that people perform better in math and sciences if fifty percent of the participants are women, so gender distribution was a key metric in future Hacker School classes."
And regardless, this whole "invite women first" thing doesn't really address the basic gender imbalance problems in the industry.
In my experience (and I'm aware that this is perfectly anecdotal), the problem with getting women to be professional web developers has more to do with the industry's attitude toward women and less to do with inviting them in. It does no good to invite 60% women to a conference if they're all going to be treated badly or like sexual objects the entire time.
I have two female friends that I am mentoring in web development, and they are super ecstatic to have this extra skill, and they're actually pretty good at it (better than some of my male coworkers, if I'm being honest). But most often they go to conferences and get dismissed because they're women or get harassed because they have boobs (even though some of these men have bigger man-boobs).
I hear this over and over again: they don't feel comfortable at industry events or even in the workplace
TL;DR - I don't think it's about "attracting" women so much as making the industry gender-agnostic. It shouldn't matter whether I'm male or female, so long as I put out good code.
Getting more women to show up may be the easiest part of "changing the ratio". We have lots of other work to do in order to make this stick, which includes working with employers to ensure our students, regardless of gender, are successful after they're hired.
"Before taking the mandated Intro class last year, when I heard 'computer science,' I pictured nerdy boys, who turned into nerdy bearded men, slouched over huge computers and click-clacking out codes that meant nothing to me. There’s nothing wrong with nerdy boys, comp sci just didn’t seem like something I would ever be interested in.
"This image was quickly shattered in that first intro class. Computer science started to resonate with me when I worked on my first project, creating a simple animation of a string quartet using Netlogo. It was while I was working on this that I realized comp sci isn’t about nerdy boys sitting at computers and coding out nonsense that turns into violent video games and complicated math problem solvers. No, comp sci isn’t this at all. Comp sci, as I have found in my classes at Stuy, is a medium for expression, a place for creation and creativity."
http://betabeat.com/2012/06/real-tales-of-learning-computer-...
This is both true, and probably effective for changing women's perception of the field and attracting more to it.
This explanation sounds offensive, but to me it's quite uplifting. Instead of giving women gifts to compensate for our "creepiness", we need to become non-creepy, and women will come. It's a winning proposition for everyone, no?
What I'd hope people key in on is that computer science is a medium of expression, creation, and creativity. I don't think anyone here would disagree with that, but it's apparently not so obvious to everyone, and worth driving that point home when selling the field, particularly to women who may value that aspect of a career as much or more than men.
Why, I disagree. In the majority of programming jobs that exist in the world, any attempt at creative expression will be shot down.
In fact, if the feel-good stories are true and women are indeed better than men at communication and creativity, that might be already sufficient to explain why there are so few of them in programming jobs, writing Java beans to automate payrolls and such. If you had such strengths, would you want such a job?
Here 'yoga' is playing the role 'pizza and beer' does at most hackathons - I know there's tons of exceptions, but generally speaking, women like yoga more than men, and men like eating pizza and drinking beer more than women.
I bet you could adjust the gender ratio even more if you mixed in more female-leaning activities - for instance, you could bring in a pedicurist.
The social engineer in me wonders what our profession would look like if every technical course over a couple of decades was followed by getting your nails done and a wine tasting.
If having a predominately male crowd at a hackathon is a bad thing, doesn't it also follow that having a predominately female crowd is bad as well?
N.B.: I wouldn't call 40/60 predominate, so to me, it seems like their methods were nearly good enough.
Male crowd, female crowd, whoever the organizers want at their event is perfectly fine by me - after all, it's their event. I'm just interested in the tools they use to get wherever they want to be.
Sell me on the fact that I'll be leaving with a product I want to make - something generic like a blog or a store or a social media site. Sell me on the fact that I will be able to know how to design it, maintain it and expand on it by graduation. Sell me on the fact that I'm also going to be around total novices and where gender ratios are equaled out. Show me success stories of men and women alike.
Everyone has ambitions and dreams. Not everyone wants to do poses and color their nails.
Although it's interesting, because I like being targeted. If someone organized a nearby tech event that was accompanied by a big rack of ribs and an evening of firing off guns into the desert, I'd sign up for that sucker in a heartbeat.
Perhaps that's because I would never think 'oh, the organizers of this event are just putting these activities together to attract more people like me' - the social engineering wouldn't be obvious to me, and if it was I just wouldn't care.
I wonder why the organizers didn't just say 'okay, this event has 50% tickets for men and 50% tickets for women'? That'd certainly be the simplest way of getting to the ratio they wanted, and it wouldn't involve mixing in other gendery activities.
In reading more about it on their site and an AMA someone did about their experience five months ago, it's a mandatory morning activity they've been doing for awhile now and there don't seem to be any complaints (though a blog, http://newbietoruby.wordpress.com/, says that while he enjoys it, it took two hours out of his day and sometimes stressed him out).
Parties would have classy wine that people better understood and everyone's nails would look fantastic. Plus, rough cuticles from keyboard usage are a thing of the past.
I think the same sort of feeling would surround women trying to break into a male-dominated activity.
I try to think about what might convince me to take steps into a knitting program (assuming I actually wanted to learn). If I expected that it would be completely women I would be more uncomfortable, but if it was more 'professional' and less casual, I would probably be less anxious. I think a professional environment with a sort of "we're here to learn, not chat, not network" would make things easier because there's less social pressure, it's more focus on the task.
Likewise, I think a "Beer and Pizza knitting workshop" would be as much a turn-off. I think it's just the idea that it's an emphasis on the social side of it. I know what I am doing is socially different, and the more social and friendly the atmosphere is the more awkward it is to picture.
For instance, if I'm going to a class, and the image I conjure is a row of desks or something, someone teaching a technique, maybe coming by individually, helping with a difficult process, answering questions. That's pretty neutral, I can picture myself there. If the image I conjure is a bunch of guys standing around the tailgate of a pick-up truck drinking beer, eating pizza, belching, and talking about their colorwork and cast-on techniques, I'm going to feel uncomfortable. Not only that, I'm going to feel patronized by the class.
Now, obviously regardless of the circumstances, the class is not going to be at all like either of those images in my head. But what would cause me to choose to sign up or not has far more basis on that picture.
I think if you want to encourage women to join your class, advertise it in a way that makes it look like it's not judgmental, like it's not patronizing. Something that's not some apparantly watered down "web design for women" class. Keep it professional, respectful, and above board. Include women in your advertising material.
If I wanted to learn to knit, and I came across a class that wasn't billed as a sort of chatty woman's group but instead just a class on techniques; if it made it apparent in their description that men were welcome; and it wasn't directed at specifically ignorant men who wanted to learn so they could say they can do it too; then I would be comfortable going. Past that, I would have to know it exists, so if there was some sort of men's knitting mailing list that I was on, it would be a good place to send it.
Could you elaborate further on what you did exactly to get the male attendants percentage to decrease and the effect you think it had?
I'm assuming that you expected the female name to draw attention to the fact that a woman was in charge, or something similar, but I will however note than on the second Tweet posted, there were more comments from Males than Females.
Makes me think: "Hey baby, why don't we go back to my place and I'll demonstrate my database schema"
lol. silly.
On the whole quite simple - and in their case effective.
But that's not to say it needs to be 1:1. (There's no high-paid profession that is 1:1, is there?) I think it's valid to question that we need to have an equal ratio, although I agree we have to improve a lot.
*we as in the general HN audience, which is safely assumed to be largely male