Alpha male programmers aren't keeping women out
loudthinking.com
loudthinking.com
I think the truth is quite the opposite. Programming and IT have historically attracted a large number of social rejects, who, despite scoring high on self-evaluated liberalness, have no idea how to talk to women. Whether the individual problem is general awkwardness, sexist beliefs, bitterness towards women, or inability to engage with women or fawning all over them, if half the guys in an IT department have one of these problems then it's going to be a very unwelcoming place to be for a woman.
I remember in my undergrad that the ratio of men to women in CS classes created a problem in and of itself as any remotely attractive woman had to fight off all kinds of unwanted attention from a steady stream of unattractive guys. To me it's no surprise that by senior year they had dwindled to a handful.
Part of the problem -- ironically -- is that programmers are in many ways a very tolerant bunch. We have to be, because many of our colleagues, including some of the most talented ones, have a lot of trouble reading social cues. Call it autism. Call it Asperger's. Call it "quirkiness". Blame it on a tendency to spend too much time mainlining Perl code. But you'd be lying if you claimed this correlation wasn't real. I've manifested the phenomenon myself at times.
Anyway, you won't last long in programming if you can't develop a tolerance for socially awkward people. But that tolerance is much harder to develop when those awkward people are constantly hitting on you. Especially if you are female and they are male. [1]
As a woman, what can you do to dissuade the socially awkward? Subtle social cues often don't work. Ridiculously obvious social cues, like sending a memo or writing a blog post, might help, or not: They might not get the message across to the recipient (trying to teach an autistic person to be socially appropriate can be like teaching photography to the blind) and they tend to be public, which runs the risk that you'll be labeled a "troublemaker". You could try appealing to the guy's colleagues, but they might just conclude that you're too "thin-skinned" for programming. After all, they are all highly tolerant of socially-awkward men. They have to be.
Or you could resign and find a different field.
Other fields don't seem to have this problem to the same extent. I expect that's because they're more efficient at screening out the people who aren't good at reading social cues. Given that I'm rather fond of many of my socially-awkward friends, that's not my favorite solution. I guess the only alternative is education, mutual tolerance, and careful social engineering, but nobody said that process would be easy.
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[1] It's uncomfortable for men when they are hit on by socially-awkward women. But the potential consequences aren't the same. As a straight male engineer, the idea that I could lose my job because I rejected a co-worker's advances is kind of laughable, the thought of being groped in an elevator is absurd, and the very possibility that I could be raped without going to prison first is almost unthinkable. And, as it happens, I wasn't sexually abused as a child -- unlike an estimated 5-15% of men and 15-25% of women -- so I certainly don't have debilitating flashbacks when some guy shows me soft-core porn and invites me to laugh along with it. Lucky me.
This may get me a ton of down-votes, but I'm genuinely curious: is the gender gap in programming actually a problem? If so, why? In what ways would the world of programming be more interesting if it was more evenly split between men and women?
I'm not trying to sound misogynistic or anything, just haven't thought much about this topic and I'm not sure I understand why it's considered a big problem. Would love to hear people's views.
I agree. This is really one of those places where I think to myself, so what?
The only real problem I see is that a guy who goes into the field is going to be surrounded by other dudes, which is one of my biggest regrets with this profession.
Very few engineering schools let themselves get to such an extreme gender imbalance, but if you really were picking between an 80/20 split and a liberal arts school, I'm highly confident that you are much better off for having picked the liberal arts school.
Is it? I see evidence of quite a few groups that are all-female and want to stay that way.
http://tripletsdad.blogspot.com/2008/10/at-home-dad-banned-f...
More women will get into engineering, because of exposure, high salaries, and employer demand.
Likewise, Male engineers will actually meet women.
At Pitt, where I went for undergrad, the count for Computer Engineers/Electrical Engineers was something like 525. Only 38 were women.
On the other hand, if you were well adjusted, you had no problem meeting women outside the engineering building.
But like DHH, I don't think it's anything to do with male programmers. They act no worse than men in other fields, maybe better.
And I don't think this problem is programming specific. It also happens in math, physics, and a variety of other fields.
So, where is this bias coming from? Who teaches girls to take up girly interests? I think it's primarily their mother.
This ought to change. http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/
There is another option: programming hasn't done a good job of appealing to women. It's entirely possible that it's not a case of women being shut out, but rather they haven't been sold on the profession to begin with. In short: an image problem.
I know this doesn't apply to the situation we have here with this ruby presentation full of porn, but as long as we are generalizing this specific instance into the "why aren't there more women in CS?" question, I thought I'd throw it out there.
It's not like programming is the only profession with this problem. As a male, I haven't been particularly sold on being a nurse either, despite the fact that (in my area) it pays roughly the same and the few male nurses I know love the flexibility to move around the country almost at will. I just never considered it for a career because of the gender bias regarding that profession held by society, not by the members of the profession itself.
It might simply mean that women enjoy a comparative advantage
http://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativeadv...
at doing something else, whatever the something else is, and they are happy to live in a world in which they trade their ability to do what they do to enjoy the benefits of modern computer technology developed mostly by males.
Philip Greenspun's comments on women in science
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
may not be completely apropos, because programming as a career isn't exactly the same as research science as a career, but those comments illustrate that simple guesses about what the problem is just might be mistaken.
There's a woman I work with who was a programmer for years, but now works as a technical writer because she was tired of dealing with the cultural problems she had at multiple companies. I've worked with other women programmers who had to deal with bullshit that I'd never accept due to my white male privilege.
Imagine you are purple.
You are in a room filled with green people and a green lecturer. The lecturer's presentation is nothing but slides of purple people making goofy faces. All evening, everyone who approaches tries to get you to tell a joke. You try and show your new project off, but no one seems to take it seriously.
You object in private conversations afterward, and the green people all tell you they weren't offended--what's the big deal?
In my opinion, the problem isn't with the people in the field of computer science. The problem is with the pipeline. There are fewer girls than guys who explore computing when they're 12. If that can be "fixed", which assumes that it's something to be fixed in the first place, that's probably where it needs to happen.
Is that really the pipeline? If you go in to a 1st year CS/IT class, how many have been tinkering with programming for years? That's a genuine question. I don't know. I just suspect that it's a minority. Possibly as big a minority as business students who have tinkered in business or biology students that have tinkered in biology.
There were a lot of threads a few weeks ago about "what to do about all the incompetent programmers". The two problems are related.
This seems to assume that women must magically all have the same personality type and/or no personality selection bias in their career choices. Since women are comfortable going head-to-head with alpha-male lawyers, they therefore should be totally comfortable with geeky programmers. I don't buy it -- all women are not the same, just like all men are not the same.
It seems to me that women who become lawyers or businesspeople likely have A-type personalities themselves. Accordingly, they are probably more likely to view competition or confrontation with males in the workplace as a motivating challenge. Women who become programmers are probably, just like male programmers, a bit more introverted and geeky. Accordingly, confrontation/competition with males in the workplace is probably less likely to be motivating, and more likely to be intimidating -- especially when you consider that many "meek" male programmer types tend to drastically overcompensate for insecurity in physical situations with hyper-competitive and vitriolic behavior in virtual environments (I wonder what the gender and programmer/non-programmer ratios are like on 4chan).
In other words, just because male programmers don't rank as alpha-males relative to the general male population doesn't mean they don't behave like alpha-males in their own environment, especially relative to the female personality types interested in becoming programmers.
My 2 cents.
It's not programmers that keep women out of programming (or IT in general). It's not the tools, the bad hours, the awkward guys, or the 'girls are bad at math'/'girls can't program' stereotypes. Right from the beginning I was pushed away from computers (before I'd even decided what field I wanted to apply myself to) by teachers, career advisers, college lecturers, friends, strangers, employers and sexist colleagues.
I remember being 13/14 and sitting down to an 'interview' with a career adviser. We had to answer a series of questions on screen which were supposed to tell us our ideal career. Every time I answered I could see that various computer related careers were climbing up the list, and yet I was told by the chap doing the interview that I should be a vet or a police officer. Neither made much sense to me.
My computing teacher in school used to prioritise computer access to the boys for after school 'computer club', and although I did ICT at college (A levels in the UK), lecturers informed me that I would only be able to use the qualifications to get into admin/secretary jobs (boys were told otherwise). I was one of only two girls on my course at college, and the other girl dropped out by the end of the second year due to family pressure. My last boss used to make derogatory remarks about the fact that I was female, and colleagues supported my male colleague over me.
It's the attitude from everyone else that women can't and shouldn't get involved with computers that pushes women into other fields. I was lucky to have a very supportive family and a partner that wholeheartedly supports women in IT to push me through - oh, and being a stubborn bugger helped too :)
The working conditions aren't the best, the weeks tend to run long and the tanning possibilities under fluorescent lights just isn't great. Throw in a couple examples of, umm, undersocialized folks and I know how I'd vote if I get a do-over.
For instance: medicine? If you have a hard time tolerating the undersocialized folks in software, you probably won't enjoy being vomited on either. Or any of the other hundreds of perils of being in the medical field. Being a doctor might be fulfilling, but it is NOT a pleasant profession.
We in the tech industry have it really good. It's very tough to find an industry with this combination of pay, flexibility, interesting work, and work/life balance.
I make the assumption that you can invent and refine interesting things without offending people gratuitously. Perhaps DHH does not.
However, society does socialize people into gender roles. Women are taught not to go for math (which computer science, at least at an academic level, depends on) and the sciences just as men are taught to forgo sociology. Remember, there are departments that are mostly women at colleges and it's equally telling to ask why there aren't men in those departments - not as a matter of discrimination, but a matter of socialization. Anyway, women tend to be pushed away from certain paths just as men are pushed away from certain paths (while I find nursing to be an admirable profession, what percentage of nurses do you think are male? And I think it's decently clear that from a young age, many of us have the image of doctors being male and nurses being female).
It's a big problem in our society, but I don't think that programers and computer science departments are to blame. We train children from very young ages to go into certain roles. Once you're along a path (any path at any point in life) there is a high cost of switching. If you've been pushed away from math and science through high-school, the chance that you can switch that in college is very low. You have to make up a lot of work that the other students already did - and you're throwing away the work you've done on an alternate path. Having not had biology and chemistry in high-school, medicine was simply out of the question for me in college unless I intended to work much, much harder than my fellow students - and the premeds were an over-achieving bunch.
And, really, this is more of a problem if you're going toward the science than if you're going toward the social sciences or humanities. Why? At my school, computer science was an 18 course major; nuroscience 21 courses; biochem was up there too. What did you need for history? 8 courses. Sociology? 10. Anthropology? 9. And you could usually take those courses at the same time while the sciences tend to build on each other in a linear fashion to a greater extent.
It's harsh. Even if you want to change into a science, sometimes the barrier is too high. We need to do a better job teaching children that it's unacceptable for both genders to forgo science and math. Otherwise, you end up (like me) in a freshmen bio class realizing that you have to learn everything that everyone else knew from high-school without falling behind on this course. And I'd say that the majority would take the path of least resistance and go for something they weren't missing knowledge in.
> men are taught to forgo sociology
> We train children from very young ages to go into certain roles
I don't want to argue about this, because it will just end up being an anecdote battle. But, for the record, my anecdotes are the opposite of yours. I've never observed a teacher discouraging a female student from going into mathematics. I've never seen anyone discourage a male student from going into sociology. And as far as I can tell, in the US, there is very little specialization before ~11th grade. Obviously your anecdotes are different. Is there any reliable data on the subject? (What would even constitute reliable data...?)
We're an arts and crafts "industry". Only a fraction of our time is spent thinking about the problem in the abstract. A great deal of it is spent wrestling with our primitive tool kit to realize the concept.
When programming becomes entirely an intellectual field, you will see the same gender ratios as you see in other mature sciences.
http://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Computing-Jane-Mar...
It's not an alpha male thing, though that's some of it. It's a socialization thing. Guys had more exposure before college, are more likely to learn the material on their own rather than in a group (how women usually prefer to learn), and so appear to be far more competent earlier. Girls who make it over that initial hump do as well or better, but not many do, because there's not a lot of interest in helping them through it.
Reference: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-har...
Assume that there are women present, even if you don't hear from them, and act civilly. That will make room for more women to come in. Thanks.
The reason women aren't, on the average, as measurably good at math as men is strictly due to cultural differences. Women are more prone to experiencing stereotype threat in mathematics ("girls aren't as good at math as boys"), which makes them suffer in early mathematics performance, which makes them less likely to take increasingly more advanced math classes.
I have yet to see a study that conclusively proves (or even suggests) that women have inferior innate capacity for doing mathematics.
Women indeed may employ different strategies to solve certain classes of mathematical problems (e.g., those involving mental rotation) but that does not mean that they "aren't as mathematically inclined."
I hope you are never put in a position of power over a female engineer in the workplace. Christ.
Citation? Testosterone has been proven to enhance spatial ability[1]. Why wouldn't there be other differences in cognition between the sexes? You haven't seen a study that proves such a difference with math, but where's the study that disproves such a difference? Until there is one, you're more wrong than he is, and your condemnation is ridiculous.
Here's an article that illuminates how stereotype threat may cause most differences:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...
And, here's a fun fact, although I think IQ is a worthless measure beyond a few standard deviations, the person with the highest measured IQ is a woman. (Although, she famously misinterpreted the mechanics of the Monty Hall problem, but that's normal human statistical fallibility. See Steven Pinker et al for more on that.)
A white person's working memory will be significantly less affected by a prototypical derogatory race-slur than a black person subjected to a prototypical derogatory slur against the black race.
Social context is important.
The most obvious and direct proof is the huge variation in math scores by country. If there was no social bias against women in mathematics, you would expect girls to be equally worse than boys in every country (they way girls are shorter than boys in every country, for example).
eg see: http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...
and note the significant difference in the gender gap in math between, say, Turkey and Sweden.
Arguing about mathematical skills is irrelevant to the debate anyway. I can tell you for certain that at least half the male programmers I deal with seem to possess no particular mathematical insight.
The real question is not whether more women should be in computing. The question is whether there are women who would be enthusiastically in the field if they had been encouraged to be, and whether their absence is impoverishing the field. I have no data to answer to this question and I doubt you do either.
PS. I am female, if that matters.
What I was really trying to address is how anyone who suggests that there may be innate factors that affect outcomes for groups of people is immediately tarred and feathered. There's nothing wrong with such hypotheses. What's wrong is when people use characterizations of groups to prejudge individuals.
Some of us here believe in evolution. And evolution doesn't bring about nice politically correct results. The best explanation for observed sexual behavioral dimorphism (for example, the 2009 math SATs by gender) is most parsimoniously explained by genetics.
The question isn't so much if there are differences, but if they reasonably correspond to the gender gap in programming. There are obviously social factors at work since fields like being a high school math teacher, which usually requires a degree in mathematics, is dominated by women, but being a computer programmer, which requires less mathematics, is not.
If the gap was, say, you know, 10% I might say, "Yeah, there you go. Gender differences." But given that a lot of software shops are upwards of 95% male, I don't think you can claim that the remaining 5% of women that crossed the bar were the only ones smart enough to write PHP.
And see, that's the thing. If all of the great programmers were men and the bad programmers were about 50/50, that'd support the gender gap thesis more. I mean, certainly most women that are in the top 10% of their class could be trained to be poor PHP programmers. It's not rocket surgery. But they're not there and there is a dearth of bad male PHP programmers (who may be otherwise intelligent). So it seems to be a little more complicated than "innate ability".
The problem is that ability is distributed along a Gaussian. Small differences in the norm make for huge differences in the tails. So everybody can balance their check book about the same, but don't expect any women to win the Fields medal within the next millennium.
Now, the female dislike of programming jobs goes beyond this tail effect. I think that as a big a problem is that programming is not a socially rewarding occupation, and women like socializing.
I'd say it goes so far beyond that effect to render it pretty much meaningless. This discussion wasn't about who's more likely to win a Fields Metal, it's about women in programming. The gap between winning a fields medal and being a competent programmer is ginormus.
Assuming I read you correctly, we'd both agree that there's not a strong correlation between the percentage of men and women with the basic mathematical ability to be programmers and the percentage of men and women who in fact are programmers.
I think the real answer lies in some mix of actual physiological differences between men and women and roles that are engendered by society. Given the number of roles that people were sure of 50 years ago that women couldn't do that they are now debunked (as politicians, executives, doctors, lawyers) I tend to err on the side of the latter. This is especially poignant in the country where I live (Germany) where the Chancellor is a woman with a PhD in quantum chemistry.
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math.htm
He comes up with an expected upper bound of 29% participation in the technical workforce by women given current best measurements of sex differences.
Here is your argument
genetics/evolution => In this world, there is some sexual behavioral dimorphism. && 2009 sat => In America, there is a specific type of sexual behavioral dimorphism.
Here is my argument
math tests => female performance at mathematics varies culturally => genetics does not determine everything and we have to take environment into account
And let me be absolutely clear that I am not suggesting that mathematical ability is not heritable. See this study for evidence that it is indeed:
[1] www.atypon-link.com/AAP/doi/pdf/10.1375/twin.8.6.585
P.S. I believe religion is a social phenomenon that makes much sense (as to why it exists, and, as you probably care, why it came into existence!) with a valid psychological perspective. And I am willing to elaborate on my logic if you are curious.
You have replaced a simple explanation for which abundant evidence exists with a complicated explanation. You could spend time inventing even more complications for your theory to explain things like why there aren't any cultures that have the opposite effect on female mathematical behaviour, and why very high mathematical ability seems to be linked to androgyny in females, or you could just junk the theory as unlikely.
Unless you'd rather rather say something politically correct than true, that is. But nobody would chose opinions about the world like that, would they?
I wish these erroneous mindsets were less common because they further the cultural divide, which is inefficient for society.
And I'm not your buddy, guy.
I said there's no math in programming, which is not entirely accurate because some algorithms and stuff can be considered math. But still, let us keep in mind that HN is populated with über-hackers, the kind of people who are genuinely intelectually curious and learn stuff on their own. Thus, we discuss AI, ML and NLP here on HN often. But let us keep in mind that 90% or more of the programmers in this world are coding monkeys who don't care about elegant code and intellectual pursuits, they care about a pay check and going home before 19:00. Am I wrong?
By the way, I am a graduate student in EE. Feel free to bash me ;-)