Why Aren't There More Women Programmers? | Hacker News Reader

Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?

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39 pointsgebe69 comments

Good post in whole, but part of #3 really caught my eye:

>>When I go to Kindergarten Moms Night and someone asks what I do, "computer programming" usually ends the conversation

I don't this is specific to women - I run into exactly the same thing talking about my tech job with friends, family, strangers, etc.

There's also always an underlying question that gets avoided in these types of articles - what's the "correct" percentage of people of a particular gender/race/whatever in a profession? Obviously we should aim for a society where no woman is pushed away from programming if that's what she wants to do, but is there any reason to think every job should match society demographically?

Agreed. I always wondered whether one of the main reasons why there are less female than male programmers is that, well, most women simply prefer other professions.

I wish we were more specific though. It's not just 'male' programmers. I've lived in American cities with large African American and Hispanic populations, yet the vast majority of the programmer demographic I've worked with or have worked under or have met are white males with some limited degree of representation of Asian men.

And it's not that I don't care about women's issues, but I feel annoyed when I get grouped with other men just because I'm a man, despite the fact that race could also play a role in opportunities.

I completely agree. Gender is the easiest to measure, of the diversity metrics, and it's an accepted conversation in our political climate. Talking about race is far more uncomfortable. Which probably means it's a bigger problem.

While there are few women in programming, there are a lot more women than Hispanics or people of color. In my opinion this is even worse than the gender disparity. Are the reasons the same? I suspect so, especially #3.

I didn't mention race in the original post, because I'm white. I have no credibility there.

Thank you for bringing it up.

Simply prefer? That's a rug under which you can sweep quite a bit.

Suppose that 200 years ago you took a poll and most women "simply preferred" not to vote. What does that tell you about whether the womens' suffrage movement was right or wrong?

The comparison doesn't seem applicable here. Women's suffrage was about gaining a right that was, at that time, forbidden. Preference shouldn't play a role in basic rights, but it certainly plays a role in an individual's choice of career.

Voting is a basic right now, but apparently it wasn't then. That might tell you something.

But if you really can't get the point without a more specific analogy, try doctors. Or going to college.

>Suppose that 200 years ago you took a poll and most women "simply preferred" not to vote. What does that tell you about whether the womens' suffrage movement was right or wrong?

A better comparison would be if most women didn't vote even though they could. (Because of thugs at the booth perhaps?)

The suffrage movement was certainly right. As is encouraging women (or for that matter, any person, regardless of gender/race etc.) to become programmers. I'm just saying that we may have to accept the fact that different genders, while deserving equal rights, may simply have different interests.

> simply prefer other professions

Women are pushed away from CS because of sexism. A culture of sexism you contribute to with this comment.

If it is normal for women not to want to do programming then the corollary is that women who do enjoy programming are 'abnormal' and 'not like most women', perhaps you could call it 'unfeminine'. Given that attitude, readily demonstrated by half of HN here, how could girls possibly sense an external pressure not to be programmers?

I don't know where you got that. I never said that it's not normal for women to want to do programming. I only said that it may be that most women prefer other professions. Just as most men prefer other professions than being, for example, accountants (most accountants are women). That being said, there are quite a few women programmers I really admire. Bodil Stokke comes to mind, for example.

Even if that's the case, I can't help but wonder what contributions they could have made to the state of the art if they were interested to begin with.

From my (poor) understanding of neurophysiology, it seems to me that women should actually generally be better than men at jobs like software development and engineering. So the fact that women are generally less interested in these things is alarming to me.

If that's so, then we have a major social stigma around technical interests that is preventing all but white and Asian men from gaining even a basic interest in these fields. And this is a travesty of the highest order.

What we know is there's a lot of unfair factors pushing jobs away from being demographically evenly distributed. We have no evidence that something other than that is "natural", so until then, yes, I think we should assume the correct percentage is demographically even. Especially given the centuries of history where we ignored the opposite and were totally, ridiculously, hideously wrong about all sorts of things.

As a web devloper from a relatively small town, I run in to number 3 quite a lot. I usually answer questions about my job saying "I make websites". Even then people take me as a wizard of all things electrical and ask me general computer questions.

As for the correct percentage of gender/race/whatever in programming, I don't think that really matters. I think a certain amount of people in general have the mindset to be a programmer and think the way a programmer does, and I don't really see anything like gender or race playing a part in someones ability to be a programmer.

> what's the "correct" percentage

Whatever numer of people that, barring societal interference, in an isolated vacuum with neutral exposure to all professions, choose the profession based only on personality and aptitude.

Maybe some market pressure towards in-demand professions, but that should be mostly extrinsic to someone in their developmental years until after they are exposed to most possible career paths.

Like the OP mentions, it isn't something that the software industry alone can solve, and IMO, all the affirmative action only does the inverse draw that doesn't actually attract those with a passion, but those for the easy access or money. It require society collectively to get over itself and stop thinking you can't do STEM without a Y chromosome, and it needs to stop demonizing the intellectually curious girls. But that is hard, because the parents of those girls were raised the same way.

I think people are unnecessarily scared of affirmative action. In the 1960's, law was 95% men. Sandra Day O'Connor could only get a job as a secretary at a law firm despite graduating third in her class at Stanford. After aggressive affirmative action, today the mostly even gender ratio in large law firms is completely self-perpetuating.

I think that teaches us two things:

1) It's foolish to jump to conclusions about the "natural number" of women in programming. If you equalize the ratio and it sticks when you remove the affirmative action, that's the natural number.

2) Affirmative action can work when it comes to gender issues, even if it has been less successful for race issues. I think that's because gender doesn't have heritable socioeconomic status like race. A girl is equally likely as a boy to be born into a family that can say afford college, but that's not true of say blacks and whites.

So I went to an undergrad for engineering, and my freshman class was 72% male, 28% female, and my major was probably 85% male, 15% female. At my first job, we never broke two women out of a team that was maybe a dozen engineers by the time we left. At my second job, there was briefly one woman but the rest of the time it was zero out of 8-9 engineers.

My law school class was 55% male, 45% female, and my firm was pretty close to even.

My experience makes me believe that the reason that there aren't more women programmers is mostly that there aren't more women programmers. I think men and women, generally, interact socially in different ways. By the time I left engineering, I found the fairly homogenous and almost exclusively-male mode of social interaction rather tiring. It was refreshing to be in an environment with a diversity of people who had different ways of interacting socially.

I don't think most of the typical canards really matter. Yes, programming is a nerdy profession that rewards people who can work solitarily for long hours on detail-intensive work. But so is law, so is medicine, so is accounting, and those fields have almost even ratios of men and women. I don't think there is anything about the work that deters women.

> By the time I left engineering, I found the fairly homogenous and almost exclusively-male mode of social interaction rather tiring.

Yes. This is one of the things I dislike the most about the startup world. I grew up with strong female authority figures, most of my direct academic advisors were women, and the first startup I worked at had a female CEO and a female CTO... over the years I've discovered that I tend to fare better with female leadership.

With an exclusively male office, there are some days during which the only woman I interact with is my girlfriend.

I think that in all these other professions managers understand (and respect) what their employees do.

Most of the good programmers are here by choice. Even if this choice meant being the nerdy kid in the room through school / life. To be fair - no one thinks of a doctor/lawyer as a geek, but our job comes with that distinct tag. It is just that we have learnt to ignore / live with it.

This is going to sound ignorant - but: Is it difficult / different for a woman to ignore that tag and still do cs (assuming she wants to)?

You don't need to be the nerdy kid in the room to be a good programmer.

I'm not sure on #2. When I was a teenager I had no idea about tech conferences, open source figureheads, and I barely noticed the gender of writers. Do boys? Mom not programming, and not having any female friends/relatives who do, seems more of an issue - and leads into #3.

I'm not arguing #2 isn't a problem, though. Sadly, I'm not in tune with how kids get role models these days to have any useful suggestions how to fix it. I was a mentor for Technovation, teaching high school girls Android development, but by that age perhaps it's too late.

I think there's also an aspect of not realising what programming is, so not thinking you can do it because it seems a lot scarier than it really is.

It's also difficult to make progress when you have certain self-aggrandizing individuals who are out there falsely claiming that software development is a den of misogyny. If you were a young woman considering going into software development and you read Jezebel earlier this year, you might be led to believe that female developers are subject to a constant barrage of sexual dick jokes and are fired if they complain about it.

My entry into programming was through making website layouts as a teenager. This was back in the days of geocities, expage, angelfire. There were lots of girls around my age doing this kind of thing, making personal pages, fanpages, CSS templates for other people. Then livejournal appeared, and now tumblr. Some of us made the transition from CSS to learning Ruby on Rails, but not a lot. I don't know why. But I don't think it's fair to say that girls aren't interested in code.

Well, the exact numbers on the right-hand side are still unknown:

    [girls interest in code] = [interest induced by predispositions] +
                               [… by unalterable social pressure] +
                               [… by alterable social pressure] ± chance

I remember when I went to interview to get into a computer repair class at the nearby trade school. Right before the interview a girl walked in and the instructor (who was herself a woman) immediately said "Oh my god, a girl!" (Or something else that was similarly disparaging. It's hard to remember now.)

After the interview I asked why she said that, and her reply was something to the effect of 'I have to prepare her for how the boys will act.'. It was a significant factor in my decision not to go.

The problem of representation of women, isn't just in our industry. Nearly all branches of engineering are the very same. In fact I find software to be a far more attractive profession for women than other engineering branches.

In my total 4 years of engineering course. The branch with the least representation of girls was mechanical engineering, I say this because in all 4 years I didn't see a single girl take up mechanical engineering, same with civil engineering. Electronic and Communication was a little better, the best was Computer science, which seem to have only girls.

But that's sort of understandable, in the first year of engineering we had this subject called 'machine shop', you basically would have to build models with metal pieces, then there was a good enough amount of sheet metal work. You had to learn to use the hack saw, welding, soldering etc- there was also a good deal of carpentry. To give you a clue, even boys(most of them geeks and nerd types) from my branch(Electronics) found it exceedingly difficult to finish 40% of the models we were supposed to finish. They would be very physically tiring exercises, which we were never subjected to. Girls couldn't manage even 10% of them, in fact many of us helped them personally so that they could get passing marks.

Now I understand why no girl would ever want to get into things like mechanical and civil engineering. You have to work in male dominated cultures, where the work is almost designed such that a man could excel doing it- while you struggle to catch up. And you will be facing outright physical limitations. Now imagine doing this for years, Its a deal breaker to even begin with.

Coming to programming, the problem begins only when the going gets tough. I've seen a good deal of representation of women in large companies. The problem starts when you get into the rockstar culture, where you are expected put 16 hrs/day + traveling as a norm. When you start depicting whole night 'hackdays' as a sign of coolness. When learning new stuff needlessly happens just because its new etc. Now you are setting up a culture which is difficult for most women who have kids and family.

Make it appealing to girls. Before it was independent career woman. The general appeal today is successful female entrepreneur. Next may be passive income hacker? Just need one show/movie to glamorize a self made woman via engineering and bam, you'll get more interest, though it may be superficial. Who knows maybe you will never get the numbers you want because it is simply less appealing to women, much like nursing and grade school teaching may never appeal as much to men.

Well, just don't make this mistake... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA

This is just a subset of the broader question of "why aren't there more women in tech?". I honestly think, in no small part, that the answer is "because the tech hobby community is so toxic to women". Note that I don't mean the professional industry, but rather more generally that women who may be interested in computers / tech in general get zealously singled out and demeaned. This drives women away from exploring their interest and in turn cuts off any chance they'd have taken at turning that interest in to a career.

It's sickening how toxic the community is to women. Misogyny is often a cornerstone of 'internet humour' (e.g.: comments about getting back in the kitchen) and people act surprised when women are marginalised and driven away from indulging their interest in technology as a hobby. It's so normalised that even other women repeat the misogynist comments. I'm sure there's a fascinating psychology paper here on 21st century stockholm syndrome.

I really don't understand how people can be surprised women are systematically driven from the tech industry when their exposure of it is so constantly toxic.

An excellent case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Sarkeesian#Kickstarter_c...

preemptive edit: Just to repeat, I don't think that the professional industry is systemically misogynist. It's the hobby community centred mainly around the internet (which is, let's face it, the primary medium through which interest in tech and programming especially is explored) which kills any interest in the field before it can reach the stage of becoming a possible career option.

> This is just a subset of the broader question of "why aren't there more women in tech?". I honestly think, in no small part, that the answer is "because the tech hobby community is so toxic to women".

I don't think that's the barrier you seem to think. If women really thought programming was a worthwhile way to spend their time, they would create their own software companies/clubs/whatever and enforce any behavioral and attitude rules they cared to have.

Can women program? Absolutely -- at least as well as men. Do women want to program? Apparently not.

> I really don't understand how people can be surprised women are systematically driven from the tech industry when their exposure of it is so constantly toxic.

Women are not being driven out of the tech industry, they're being driven out of male-dominated enclaves. Women don't like the testosterone-drenched parts of the business, and they don't care to create a more congenial atmosphere for themselves as they have in many other professions. No one knows why, but it's misleading and counterproductive to explain that women can't produce technically successful companies and environments because men won't let them. Men don't have that kind of power any more -- the only thing stopping women is women.

The bottom line is that gender equality is not something men give to women, it is something that women take, because it's their right. The only question is whether women will choose to do it.

Maybe it's our prehistoric roots. You could compare programming to hunting: no talking.

I'm pretty sure hunting a mammoth involved an unbelievable amount of teamwork and communication, actually. Whereas picking fruit can be done very easily without talking to the other fruit-pickers at all.

Mammoth has ears. Fruit don't.

Why aren't there more <gender> <roles>? female bricklayers male seamstresses and on and on and on.

Is it really a problem? People do what they want, less women want to program, I see no problem with this.

Not seeing a problem isn't evidence that the problem doesn't exist. Announcing that you don't see a problem is a way of denying that there's a problem.

And announcing there's a problem is not evidence that the problem does exist.

> People do what they want, less women want to program

Fewer women want to program because they're taught from a very young age that they can't.

As a result, we're losing out on a bunch of great programmers, which I think is a loss. I also think it's sad that girls are made to feel like these things are off-limits to them. I think the world would be a better place if every kid thought they could do whatever job they wanted to.

Whose teaching them they cant?

Everyone on this page who says something like 'I'm pretty sure that women don't normally like programming'.

I don't know. My programming teacher in high school was literally on his knees begging the last two girls to continue to the next level.

It sounds like you're suggesting that since one teacher is encouraging two girls to program that therefore everyone in every girl's life is just as encouraging to them as they are to the boys.

Is that true for anyone? If someone I really respect is encouraging me, that's very persuasive but there are so many forces at work when choosing a career, I don't think there's any way to quantify that decision. But of course teachers make a big difference, for better or worse. This particular teacher, I know one of his female students is a successful 3D graphics engineer, another classmate works at Intel, etc.

Because maybe a lot of women know some things the OP does not!

Before we ask women to charge into programming, we should be quite clear on why there are so few women in programming now and just what will happen to the women who go into programming based on our encouragement based on our guesses of what the situation will be like and what the results will be.

It took me a very long time to get some understanding of women. A first lesson is, in both obvious and deep ways, they are not much like men. In a word, they are different.

Be careful.

I agree with point #2 "seeing people like me do it" but even taken down a notch to exclude the difference in gender. Personally, I have two sisters both of whom do programming after seeing my dad and I both do it. The other variables in their cases are just like everyone else in this community which has the same percentage of women in cs than other places (i.e. not sv).

*female

'women' is a noun, 'female' is an adjective. We wouldn't say 'men programmers', we say 'male programmers'.

There's a lot that can be said about this but I want to give a personal answer to a question that has come up in this thread already, and that comes up often in these kinds of discussions.

It's usually framed as something like, "why do we care if there are more women in the programming world or not?" Here are a few answers that are true for me. Maybe these will resonate with some of you.

- I often meet women or read accounts written by women who struggle to simply exist in the world of programming without feeling like they are being called out as women all the time. This includes everything from being assumed to be ignorant of concepts to losing out on opportunities to being sexually harassed. As a male programmer, this makes me uncomfortable and unhappy as well--I want my female colleagues to feel welcomed and to equally "own" the identify of "computer programmer" (or software engineer, or what-have-you). Having more women programmers would help this, in many ways.

- I think it is possible we are missing out on some brilliant programmers coming into this field who could contribute things we haven't yet conceived of. Having more women programmers is not going to upset the balance in a zero-sum game; it's more for everyone. So having more women programmers could potentially help the world as well as provide all of us with more excellent colleagues.

- I would like to have more women colleagues because I enjoy the experience of working with women. Yes, I think women are different from men--but this is obvious if only because women will always experience the world differently from men. So I think having this perspective can only enrich a project and provide a more fertile ground for a successful project or team to grow.

I want to add one more thing. I get the sense that a lot of male commenters on HN feel immediately defensive about this subject, and feel like somehow they are going to lose something if they acknowledge that there is anything wrong or anything that could be fixed, or at worst, acknowledge that there is something that they could have handled better in the past.

But consider this: working in development, a concept that comes up again and again is software having a "smell." It seems obvious to me that the constant issues that come up relating to sexism in the industry is a very strong smell, albeit within the social fabric of the larger programming community. And it's equally obvious that the defensive, knee-jerk reaction is not productive. Consider, how would you approach this if it was a bug, and just wouldn't go away? If you were a good developer, first you would spend serious time trying to understand the problem and dig into it deeply, before you started writing code willy-nilly, right?

Maybe my statuesque coder arms need some sexy recursive algorithm tattoos to flex in her general direction ;-)

oh great, it's this thread again

If you are a looking for a name for that feeling, it's "entitled". As in, "As a guy, I am entitled not to be bothered by the problems women have getting into programming."

To which I say: so what? Does it all have to be about you?

Me, I have a cousin. She's 7. At the family reunion, she saw me using a screwdriver to take something apart. She immediately elbowed her way into the seat next to me, and politely insisted on me giving her the screwdriver. She then helped me take apart, fix, and reassemble the broken thing. She's a born engineer.

With God (or, our local equivalent, Paul Graham) as my witness, I declare: I'm getting her into tech. She's a natural, and I want to learn about anything that might keep her from a STEM career. Anybody who thinks that isn't relevant on a site called Hacker News can fuck right off.

Totally and wholeheartedly agree, I do not think gender has anything to do with it. It should be more about a willingness to learn and an interest in the subject.

Agreed. If woman want to be programmers they will. It's just that men gravitate towards it more... I don't see anybody writing articles titled "Why aren't more men playing with barbies and makeup?"

Edit: not saying men don't. I grew up in a household of girls. I DID play with barbies. Not makeup though.

If you think it's a problem that men aren't playing with makeup, write the article. Or heck, just read one of the ones that Google will find you.

Also, note that "it's just that men gravitate towards it more" is not an explanation. It's a way of avoiding actually thinking about the topic. Gravity is about mass, not gender.

But a lot of women (more than you'd think) are actively told from an early age that they are not capable of learning math, and that they can't reasonably have a successful career in science or engineering.

This even despite the fact that there are a lot of other women who weren't taught this nonsense, and have been very successful in scientific and engineering fields.

I don't think it's a matter of women not gravitating toward programming. It's more likely a matter of girls being taught that they're not capable of it and not having successful role models who are in these industries.

If you want to prove that fewer women than men become programmers because of obstacles, it's not enough to point out the obstacles faced by women, you also need to argue that the obstacles faced by men are less severe. I think you'll have a hard time arguing that, considering how nerdy guys are treated in school by both girls and other guys. Girls who go into programming don't take such a big hit in attractiveness.

They don't? Can you prove that?

I would say women who study computer science get a huge boost in attractiveness. Every year there are around 100 boys and 2-5 girls in first year of computer science at my university. As a computer science student you don't see many other girls, so after a while the girls can choose whoever they want. To be honest it's really sad, there are girls who realized that they can date two guys at the same time. The guys know about each other.

Why would I have to prove it?

Given that "fewer women become X because of societal obstacles" has been proven true for many professions over the last couple of centuries, I think the burden of proof is on somebody who wants to claim that programming is some strange special exemption.

I don't think programming is an exception, it's probably similar to many other jobs where we haven't proved that societal obstacles are the reason.

Given how many times this has come up on this site, it is becoming more akin to beating a dead horse and may serve to simply annoy and hurt the 'women in tech movement' if you will, than help it. I have yet to see proof of causation between male social tendencies in tech industry and a barrier to entry for women in tech industries. Anecdotes are not substantial. As you say, so what? Does it all have to be about you?

I have a hunch that on account of the fact that your cousin is female and has engineering proclivities that you will give her significant unabated attention, hell you swore before God...This all really because she is female regardless if reality requires extra help or not (unproven as of yet). I'm pretty sure that's sexist entitlement.

I have yet to see proof that tech is any different than medicine or law, where societal barriers were demonstrably the only things keeping women from equal participation. The centuries of discrimination, both blatant and subtle, were very substantial.

Also, the pseudo-clever "nuh-uh, you're the real sexist" stuff is the kind of bullshit that I only ever see from anonymous accounts. If you want to make (idiotic) personal accusations, own your words.

jesus that was an angry reply! my comment had nothing to do with the subject matter and everything to do with how frequently it is talked about here and in the 'community', with the same points and round-about discussion

So it's just coincidence that, out of all the common topics on HN, this is the only one you've complained about?

The reason some of us talk about it is that it's important to us. Just like every article here. Do you complain about every post on HN that isn't personally important to you? No, you skim on by. Why would you click through and comment negatively on this one? Because you want us to stop talking about it. You might ask yourself why.

why aren't there more women ironworkers?

roofers?

plumbers?

auto mechanics?

machinists?

coal miners?

underwater welders?

oil riggers?

merchant marines?

Historical restrictions that have been legally stripped away, but left behind a strong layer of discrimination and occasionally even hostility, creating an extra layer of difficulty for young women attempting to enter the trades, and a social sense that 'women don't do that' which works to discourage them from having the idea in the first place. Gosh, you might be on to something.

I was just thinking along the same lines, but with pilots.

To flip the question somewhat, what is an industry which managed to successfully turn around its gender balance? From mostly men to a somewhat more natural ratio. What can we learn from that industry?

Medicine & Law

Several of those jobs depend on physical strength, an area in which there are significant physiological differences between men and women. Men have more muscle mass on average both in absolute amount and as a percentage of body mass. Men have a greater capacity for muscular hypertrophy due to higher testosterone levels. There are also differences in food processing that tend to give men more muscle and more energy. See [1] for more.

Typically, there is a 40-50% difference in upper body strength, and a 20-30% difference in lower body strength. Men also have significantly higher grip strength.

Those are averages, and there is overlap, but generally the pool of people qualified for jobs that depend a lot on physical strength is simply going to have a lot more men then women.

Programming is not such a job, so you can't really look to coal miners or oil riggers to explain why there aren't more women programmers.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_physio...

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