Why are there so few woman developers?
blog.hackerearth.com
blog.hackerearth.com
As opposed to middling intelligence? I'll assume this is a language miscommunication.
>most of them quit half way >Male dominated workplaces seem to be a contributing factor to this.
Chicken and egg problem: speaking from experience it's really hard, for your entire career, to be around men and more men all day long. Hiring women is hard. Getting women into programming via Dev Bootcamps has been the best attack on this I've seen, and it's a fun way to do it.
>I think it’s coded into a woman’s DNA to not take their careers as seriously as a man and the change of that mindset starts at home.
Stop right there! Cultural assumptions abound!
>If there is any hope for an equal representation of genders in IT, it has got to change from the grass roots level.
Correct. More dev bootcamps please.
>what difference will women bring to technology. Well, I don’t know about difference
What did women entering law, politics and medical fields do? Maybe nothing immediately obvious but the social ramifications these last hundred years or so have been massive, if nothing else I got to grow up having role models.
Edit: links for related dev bootcamps or intro classes:
Boston specific meetup: http://www.meetup.com/PyLadies-Boston/
Throw in that boys are overrepresented in high-functioning autism / aspergers numbers by a 7:1 ratio, and you've got a possible biological explanation for at least some of the gender bias in the field.[0] The linked study has a 12:1 ratio for aspergers!
This is just a hypothesis but I'd love to see it studied further. There might be some biological bias at work here, instead of making it a purely cultural thing (and without bringing in the evo-psych malarky).
[0] http://www.la-press.com/gender-ratios-in-autism-asperger-syn...
There is still a lot of disagreement about what Aspberger's and autism actually mean. There is a growing body of study that says it's not an inability to empathize with others, but more likely a hypersensitivity to stimulus. Regardless of whether or not that is true, with such a drastic difference in opinion on the nature of the disease, it seems unlikely that studies on the occurrence of the disease would yield meaningful results.
I have a few problems with the study you linked to. It looks like they are basing the data off of interviews of parents who brought their kids in for testing, comparing the diagnosis rates for these kids. Wouldn't this more likely show that "boys with disruptive behavioral issues are 12 times more likely to have it blamed on autism than girls of the same age", not that "boys are more likely to be autistic"? They collected data over an 8 year span for a 20 year span of birth-years, but never indicate the age of the subject at the time of diagnosis. Given that the test is almost completely behavioral in nature, wouldn't it stand to reason that age is a significant factor in behavioral development, and thus the likelihood of being diagnosed with behavioral issues?
I remember the other study you mentioned, it was in the early 2000s. I remember because one of my professors conducted our university's part of the study and made his students fill out the questionnaire during class. They asked questions on the narcissistic personality disorder spectrum on the hypothesis that lack of empathy correlated to Aspberger's syndrome. From there, finding a statistically significant skewing of the data supporting the idea that computer science students lack empathy, they then concluded that Aspberger's-afflicted people are attracted to the pure, analytical nature of programming.
Talk about leaping lizards of logic, Batman.
Without an associated correlation of lack of empathy in other analytical fields, I just think the far more likely answer is that, as a culture, we tolerate dickish behavior out of programmers more than any other analytical field, and thus people either learn dickishness or people who are prone to dickishness find a certain degree of survivability in programming. My experiences online with communities such as YouTube and 4chan indicate that dickishness is extremely easily learned behavior.
Girls, from birth, are subject to absolutely enormous pressure (even if it's subconscious) on the part of nearly everyone they ever come into contact with, to be "girls" and not "men".
If you haven't noticed it before, try having a daughter, and realize that you do it too. I don't care who you are. You do it too.
In a sense, it's hard to consider this as something strange - of course, people talk to each other differently, dependong on who they are. You talk to children differently than you talk to adults, for example. What is difficult is to adjust to the idea that women on men, on certain levels, should be addressed in the same way, and on other levels, addressed in different ways.
An alternative conclusion we can draw from the statistics described in the article is that women are just as capable of pursuing careers in computer science if they so choose. The fact that there is a skewed gender distribution may not necessarily be a problem, but merely a difference in preferences. As long as we have no law or other system that discriminates against women or men, there may be no one but our biology to blame for such skewness.
[1] Behavioural gender differences become evident at very early ages, before any external pressure is exerted upon children. This is a widely studied issue, see for example:
Alexander, G. M., & Hines, M. (2002). Sex differences in response to children's toys in nonhuman primates (Cercopithecus aethiops sabaeus). Evolution and Human Behavior, 23, 467–469.
Bailey, J. M., & Zucker, K. J. (1995). Childhood sex-typed behavior and sexual orientation: A conceptual analysis and quantitative review. Developmental Psychology, 31, 43–55.
Bauer, J. A., Shimojo, S., Gwizada, J., & Held, R. (1986). Sex differences in the development of human infants. Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, 27, 265–273.
Berenbaum, S. A., & Hines, M. (1992). Early androgens are related to childhood sex-typed toy preferences. Psychological Science, 3, 203–206.
Liss, M. B. (1981). Patterns of toy play: An analysis of sex differences. Sex Roles, 7, 1143–1150.
There was another study published recently that suggested that male and female babies might get subtly different breast milk.
Basically it's extremely difficult to separate what's genes and what's environment/culture. Because a baby is treated differently, fed differently and spoken to differently, based on gender, their entire lives (and before, depending on your definition of life).
Well, that's somewhat reasonable so far - certainly there are cultural factors impeding what would occur in different conditions, and maybe causing societies to miss some talent and individuals to fail to realize their potential. But the goal should be only to attain whatever percentage naturally results when any undesirable interferences are removed, and that condition is so poorly defined that we can't say that near 50% would be the outcome.
The correct approach, IMHO, is to attack any problems that are found in upbringing, education system and workplace culture - not with a goal of increasing representation of any group, but instead to remove any unfair treatment, sexism, loss of valuable contributions and so on - just because those things are undesirable - and then whatever results will be OK.
edit: managed to get in long enough to grab the text, it's up on http://pastebin.com/5eQnCXkX with links put back in. Apologies to the author for denying them ad revenue, but your site seems to be creaking under the HN strain.
I don't know why this particular company didn't suffer from gender imbalance in their computer science depts. There was no "affirmative action" directive coming from above; we hired the best human for the job.
It's possible that success breeds success. The more women worked there, the more women were comfortable there. Many programmers had migrated from the business side of the company (which needed to be pretty technical) so that may have been a factor.
However, I also have to wonder if the scarcity of women in software is simply the result of better career decision making among women.
The sf chronicle (sfgate.com) recently released a list of jobs and what they pay in SF. RNs (registered nurses) earn an average salary of about $112,000 a year. Application developers, on the other hand, earn about $111,000 a year.
http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2013/12/17/what-the-most-co...
Interestingly, physicians and pharmacists aren't listed (perhaps there aren't enough of them to make the list). Laywers, in spite of recent issues in the legal world, are still listed as having an average salary of $166,000 a year in San Francisco.
Nursing is 90% women. Pharmacy is about 56% women. At UCSF, the entering medical school class is 58% women. At Boalt law school (UC Berkeley), the entering class is 54% women.
Average don't tell the whole story. There's good and bad in everything. Many lawyers give up, so there is some survivor bias here (though you could certainly say the same thing about developers - many people believe firmly that there is bad age bias after age 40, something that doesn't appear to happen in health fields).
In terms of career stability and earnings, long term, I actually think that all of the fields (except perhaps law) listed above are probably better choices for academically talented students.
I post this a lot, but here it is again - the RAND institute concluded that the american aversion to graduate degrees in STEM fields is rational and market driven, a response to poor prospects and pay relative to the options available high achieving students in other fields.
http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html
We should at least consider the possibility that avoidance of STEM degrees and software development careers may actually reflect better career decision making. We say that young women are generally outperforming young men academically, but not in STEM. Well, maybe avoidance of STEM is just another manifestation of how women are making better choices in life than men are.
Thanks for putting up the mirrors. Do read and tell us what you think :)
Why man and woman? Why homo sapiens cannot asexual reproduction? Is this where the evolution fails?