Enough women in Coders at Work? | Hacker News Reader

Enough women in Coders at Work?

gigamonkeys.com

49 pointsmqt50 comments

I have an honest question, I hope this doesn't get taken the wrong way. Is it possible that women just aren't as interested in writing software as men are? I don't think that there's some kind of artificial barrier preventing them from getting in to it; I think if anything, most male programmers would love having some women around.

I mean, there are women doctors, lawyers, politicians, executives, accountants, etc etc etc; don't you think it's possible that there aren't many women in this industry just because they're not all that interested in it?

I personally think it's a little intellectually dishonest to insist that both genders have the exact same preferences, wants and needs. We understand the differences in gender in every species in the animal kingdom (including the times when there aren't differences), but we refuse to apply a modicum of critical thought to ourselves.

I recommend this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5ObAgkqicQ to everyone here. Note she was interested in programming from a young age, but nobody encouraged her to be an engineer.

Thank you for that; it definitely provided a perspective that I hadn't thought of previously.

However, I don't know that I agree that if people were encouraged the same that it would somehow make the balance 50/50 or even remotely close to that. Of course, my perspective is limited to personal experience.

I have a lot of geeky girls in my family and I know a lot of women who are geeks, and they've all been interested in other geeky pursuits - medicine, psychology, civil engineering, EE, chemistry; none of them have had a remote interest in software specifically. Why? Because it was too boring for them.

Maybe we should bring it on ourselves to make the work seem more interesting if we really want to try to bring some balance to the gender mix.

It may seem boring to them, but we know that it isn't - at all. To me, chemistry seems boring. It's a problem of perception.

I can easily imagine a society where 90%+ of the programmers are women, where programming is thought of as a typically female profession, requiring skills such as accuracy and conscientiousness.

I think Fran Allen (the only female interviewee in Coders at Work) made the point that you see more and more women going into Earth Sciences, Biology, Chemistry... Even Engineering and Maths have more balanced gender ratios than CS. Her opinion was that it was because those fields are perceived to be more socially relevant, wheras a lot of people think CS is just about making games.

I don't know if I agree with her totally (I think the negative perception is more a conflation of IT with CS - people think CS is more about using Powerpoint than an intellectual pursuit) - but there is definitly a case for fixing the public perception of Computer Scientists.

No one encouraged me to be an engineer either (doctor? yes. lawyer? yes. engineer? no.). I'd wager that many people here were actively discouraged in some way from going down the path of technology or entrepreneurship.

Most nontechnical parents who see their son or daughter spending countless hours on a computer just think that he or she is wasting his or her time.

(That last sentence would be a good place for those mythical gender-neutral English pronouns.)

Your parents aren't the only ones responsible for encouraging you. I'm sure your interest in technology originally came from some inner drive. But a hacker can only get so far without a community of peers, whether it be your colleagues in college or others at meetup groups or friends on IRC or others on Hacker News. These communities become the crux of not only your technical development, but also your motivation. I've seen more than a few girls in college give up on computer science because it was harder for them to make friends in class or join a group to do problem sets with. There is definitely SOME problem here.

> Most nontechnical parents who see their son or daughter spending countless hours on a computer just think that he or she is wasting his or her time.

I definitely encountered that. The same parents who called me lazy for sitting in front of a computer from ages 14-18 are now quite happy with how things turned out--a day job with a high salary and a startup in the works lol. You never know what that kid could really be up to...!

No one encouraged me. Period.

Definitely not taken the wrong way. As a female compSci student, this really did come up as an issue. I had a friend who was doing great in our program, but after her first internship, she realized compSci was not at all what she was interested in. She didn't want "to sit behind a desk all day dealing with a computer" in the sense of just coming to work writing code. She did not find that interesting after having done it in the context of a workplace, so @icey really does have a good point.

As a woman, I can say a lot of us have a little bit more interest in the people-based aspects of life and for some of us, working with computers all day is off-putting. A lot of women I know who don't understand what I do all day (writing code), oversimplify and only see the computer and tend to think of me as having a job where I don't interface with people much. Just that perception (as false as it often is) is enough to be a turn-off and doesn't garner the field much interest.

Plus, it's often an issue of exposure why a lot of women aren't as interested in software in the first place. Before I got to college, I didn't know any other women who wrote code. My foray into compSci was helped along by an uncle who bought me a programming book for my 15th birthday. (hehe.)

This isn't always the case, but it's difficult to take up something you've never been exposed to. Even brief exposure is enough for some people and I'd argue tons of girls aren't getting that exposure.

My kid has been in day-care for four years now and has been cared for by at least 25 different teachers. Not one of them was male. How can we correct this egregious disparity?

Perhaps by avoiding treating every man as a child rapist in waiting. At some point paranoia transforms into prejudice.

That disparity is pretty egregious. Modeling for children that men can also give care is actually pretty important.

I agree, the lack of male teachers is a far more serious problem than the lack of female coders. Too many boys nowadays grow up without fathers. If they don't have any male teachers either, they'll hit puberty before they meet anyone whose behaviour is worth emulating.

How about if they just emulate the female role models in their life?

What's the pay like for day-care as opposed to programming?

You can probably make more taking care of pets than children.

Which is sad.

Another way to say this is "People would rather take care of children than pets." I don't think that's sad at all.

So you're saying a glut of childcare workers is responsible for lowering the cost of childcare wrt petcare. I think that's unlikely. It's more that sectors of society value pets above children, they pay more for the care of pets - the same way that people leave millions for the care of pets and ignore the plight of poverty stricken humans.

People pay a lot to take care of the people they're related to, and the pets they own. When people could own people, they spent a lot of money maintaining those people. I guess we might be more evil than slave owners, but I think we're basically operating with the same instincts in a different legal environment.

It's not the same thing. Not even close. For most of the modern era, the best jobs have been closed off to women. Men have wielded the power, at least in the workplace. While we'd all like to believe that the effects of that power disparity are now gone, it would be naive to think so, especially once we remember that the top executives at most large employers began their careers in a time when they could not imagine competing with women in the workplace.

You don't need to spend much time in a typical office to realize that women face challenges men do not when it comes to being taken seriously in technical fields. Don't believe me? Find your closest after-work bar and eavesdrop on the conversations around you. If you have a wife or daughter (assuming you're a man), would you want them to be the subjects of some of the conversations you're likely to hear?

Yes, there are fields in which men face special challenges (or at least the assumption that they're gay if they choose to go into those fields). However, the highest paying careers are in fields dominated by men.

I believe that computer programming is a skill that will dominate the professions more as the business world catches up with its potential. Nearly all business functions can be improved with the addition of automation and data analysis that programmers can provide. If some ability to program is not a future requirement for success in the business world, the ability to talk well with programmers and have a grasp of what it is they do will be. I also believe that programming is one of the best paths of upward mobility for people of a low socioeconomic background. If either of these beliefs are correct, the fact that women face greater challenges than men in entering this field is an injustice and should be corrected.

I think there's a pretty good case out there for the fact that sexism hurts men as well as women. Sometimes profoundly. I can only imagine how devastating it would be to want to devote one's life to caring for, raising, and teaching children, while trying to deal with suspicions of, as others have suggested here, intending to sexually abuse!

I think there's a lot of work to be done if we want a better culture than that.

I have a question for readers out there: are there any specific instances in which gender stereotypes impeded or prevented or dissuaded you from pursuing something you would have liked to that you'd like to discuss? Sexism isn't one sided.

Some posts to seed the discussion:

- iamelgringo on his experience nursing http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=333168

- smoody on feeling isolated in an engineering culture in which women far outnumbered men http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=332894

- sanj making an analogy between a college experiences http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=332889

To be honest, some of the worst experiences with sexism I have nowadays revolve around the ludicrous extrapolations of the evolutionary psychology du jour that come up anytime a debate surfaces around gender equality on HN. The porn ridden CouchDB presentation didn't really rate for me (though I didn't attend) - it was the reaction afterwards that was more stressful. A single person can just be socially inept, but when it's clear how pervasive homebrew theories for why men are bred to prefer risk and have more variation in intelligence and aim for high status and pursue young women and are bred to be polygamous and on and on, it becomes much harder to forget, from day to day, that sexism is around me.

Occasionally I find voices being raised around some engineering issue. I feel like I need to yell to be heard - and being visibly upset doesn't do much to quell the intensity. In certain dark moments this has had me considering leaving engineering, though I doubt women have a monopoly on the sentiment.

To be honest I think a lot of the things that would have kept me from my career choice are behind me. I've heard people express surprise that I take on a technical role in my company, or that I founded it. Even around the liberal Berkeley I sometimes hear surprise, from strangers, that I of all people would have studied physics. There was a time when that would have impeded me more, but I avoided a lot of it dropping out of junior high - which seems to be the time when a lot of girls drop out of many stereotypically nerdy interests.

Sometimes the worst sexism experienced by women comes from women. The worst of it that I've experienced probably shouldn't go here, but some of it I've dealt with through HN. This is probably more annoying than anything else, but I had the privilege of reading Bonnie Ruberg write in "5 Reasons Why I Want Digg For Girls" say that a project I was working on (I started a company in the area, it's doing well) was interesting to her because "only because they're the kind of things I know my male, Internet-loving friends could sit around and blab about for hours."

One gauge for the degree of cultural influence on technical career choices is the nationality skew. Andreescu et. al. (http://www.ams.org/notices/200810/fea-gallian.pdf) note that the Bulgarian, Russian, and USA IMO teams perform at roughly the same level, and their female team mates perform at a similar level as well. But the Bulgarian team has had 21 girls in its history, the Russian team 15, and the USA team only 3. This, they argue, demonstrates that the disparity cannot be due to country specific difficulties for girls in qualifying for the IMO - instead "some countries routinely identify and nurture both boys and girls to become world class mathematical problem solvers; others, including the USA, only rarely identify girls of this caliber."

There's also the issue of stereotype threat. As Diane Quinn writes (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0341/is_1_57/ai_75140...) "Stereotype threat occurs when a person is in a situation in which a negative stereotype about that person (or that person's group) could be applied to the person and used to judge the person's behavior." Shih et. al. performed a study in which Asian American women wrote a math test. Before the test was taken, participants were asked to identify their race or sex. Those who were asked their race rather than their sex performed significantly better.

re 'homebrew theories' on risk:

"That’s an important first clue to how culture uses men. Culture has plenty of tradeoffs, in which it needs people to do dangerous or risky things, and so it offers big rewards to motivate people to take those risks. Most cultures have tended to use men for these high-risk, high-payoff slots much more than women. I shall propose there are important pragmatic reasons for this. The result is that some men reap big rewards while others have their lives ruined or even cut short. Most cultures shield their women from the risk and therefore also don’t give them the big rewards. I’m not saying this is what cultures ought to do, morally, but cultures aren’t moral beings. They do what they do for pragmatic reasons driven by competition against other systems and other groups."

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

My experience is that people, starting from when we are kids, do notice gender and that the path of least resistance is to do what other people of your gender are doing. So if you’re a girl interested in programming and you see very few other girls and women programming, that’s going to be a obstacle for you to overcome.

For what it's worth, I think it is important for children of either gender to see role models of either gender - i.e. I think it is good for girls and boys to have female geek role models, male primary school teachers and so on. I think it promotes a certain amount of gender blindness, which is a good thing.

That said, the author beating themselves up about this is unnecessary - I don't think tweens/early teens (when such exposure seems to count the most) are the main audience of his book.

If you ask me, one real problem is the fact that many female geeks chose gender-neutral or male pseudonyms online. I understand why they do it, but this reduces the already-small visibility of the gender further.

There are hardly any pseudonyms in this thread that aren't gender-neutral. frossie? boggles? roundsquare? dandelany?

Well that's my point - since most people here are male, failing any other clue, a person could assume everybody is male and not be proven wrong.

For what it's worth, of the examples you listed: I am not posting under a pseudonym, it's my real name (trivially googlable) and not at all gender-neutral in my culture - and personally I don't think Dan Delany is that gender neutral :-)

No one knows if your name represents you though - I could be "redbloodedmale17" and still be a 40 year old woman. I thought dandelany was from "dandelion", possibly feminine, even if it is Dan Delaney then Dan could be for Danielle (f), Daniel (m), Danika (f), Dante (m), ... on the internetz know one knows your a dog.

Woof!

You can't ask "Do I have enough of X?" without first defining "enough".

So... what's "enough" women in programming? Anyone want to cross that minefield?

If you're not, then you should be aware that you've started something you can't finish, asked a question you've written into the preconditions that you can't answer. That's not necessarily useless, but it's less useful that asking questions you at least might be able to answer

I don't have an answer. But I wanted to ask the right question.

As with all definition questions, there are multiple valid definitions of "enough". I am seriously interested if you think you have one.

I think this is actually a very important question to ask, despite the third-rail nature of it. If we have a "goal" of "more" women, how will we know when we've succeeded? If we can't succeed, it isn't much of a goal, and if we can't tell if we succeeded, then how can we measure progress (objectively or subjectively)?

Is the question really about how many women programmers there are compared to men? I was hoping it was more of a "what can we do to make people in general feel like programming is less intimidating/closed off to them, and not just a niche subject?". Not just to women or to young girls, but to everyone. I suspect the number of women interested in programming would rise if we address that, and that would also attract the men that felt like programming was interesting but just not possible for them for whatever reason. Hell, it'd address the gender imbalance and issues with (or the complete lack of) good CS education starting from kids at a young age to college and beyond at the same time.

A lot of times I feel like a statistical fluke being a female coder, but I go to a gym with lots of classes for kids, and I have their parents and the kids themselves (a fairly even mix of girls and boys) ask me how to get started programming and learning more about computers. They don't have the resources to learn this in their schools. Their parents don't know anything. They don't know where to find anyone that can be a mentor besides me. It doesn't always have to do with gender. That imbalance might just be a side effect of a bigger problem.

"Is the question really about how many women programmers there are compared to men?"

I don't know. Is it? My post just riffed on "enough", and briefly mentioned "more". There's no hint of a measure. That was by design.

If it isn't, what is the goal here?

(I'm not trying to be a jerk, or really addressing you specifically. I'm trying to Socrates the conversation up a bit, except unlike Socrates I don't really know where I'm going. This conversation just goes in circles with too many people saying "What we have is bad!", but that's not, well, to borrow a word from another culture, actionable.)

The trend is not a reflection on Coders at Work but on the industry as a whole. No need for apologies.

Saying "That's the way it is, no need to worry about it" is a great way to maintain the status quo and not promote any change.

and saying "there aren't enough [insert gender/race/other meaningless criterion] in here, so let's add some" is a great way to be full of shit.

What you've done here is to create a straw man by asserting that gender and race are always meaningless criteria. Adding more developers who don't happen to be white and male to the workforce and to books like these helps to create more developers who don't happen to be white and male to the workforce, which aside from being good for those particular people can only lead to a wider variety of ideas in the memepool, which can only be good for those of us who care about ideas. That would be those of us reading this site, unless I've missed something.

which aside from being good for those particular people

I'm not sure that being a software developer is really that great a prize, unless you happen to be one of those small minority of people who just happens to have a brain which really enjoys software development.

can only lead to a wider variety of ideas in the memepool

Any evidence for the idea that inter-group differences between male and female programmers in terms of the kind of ideas they produce is significant?

more developers who don't happen to be white and male

I can understand the gender-imbalance thing, but do you really think there's a significant dearth of non-white developers? I could have sworn I saw a bunch of Asians and Indians around here somewhere...

"I'm not sure that being a software developer is really that great a prize..."

How many software developers give it all up to become housekeepers? Not everyone is best suited for any one job, of course, but that hardly suggests that any one arbitrary class alone is not well suited for it.

Considering the average salary, benefits, and job conditions when stacked against many - although certainly not all - careers, being a software developer can be a pretty sweet prize indeed. Finding a non-niche comparable career that is not male dominated to a similar degree is left as an exercise to the reader.

"Any evidence for the idea that inter-group differences between male and female programmers in terms of the kind of ideas they produce is significant?"

I haven't so far turned up any studies specifically answering the question of significance. However, my assertion that including a greater demographic spread "can only lead to a wider variety of ideas in the memepool" seems self-evident; it could hardly lead to less variety or the same amount, even if the difference would wind up being less than we might hope for.

"I can understand the gender-imbalance thing, but do you really think there's a significant dearth of non-white developers? I could have sworn I saw a bunch of Asians and Indians around here somewhere..."

Asian and Indian, yes. Black and Latino, not nearly so much in my experience.

> including a greater demographic spread "can only lead to a wider variety of ideas in the memepool" seems self-evident

Men are interchangeable? Women are capable of thoughts men aren't? Every rationale for such a statement I've come up with is appalling.

The set of all men plus all women is greater than the set of all men. If you find that concept appalling, more power to you.

A larger set to recruit from is merely an easier way to find more developers total, unless there's some reason more women would be valuable but more men would be useless.

There are certainly some experiences in life that are unique to each gender. I don't know how much this would affect development though...

can only lead to a wider variety of ideas in the memepool

That's rather a weakish argument, I would think. I suspect that people coming from different cultures would be far more likely to think differently about things than someone who comes from the same culture but happens to have a different set of genitalia.

Mind you, I'm just pulling this out of my ass myself, so it's entirely possible I'm wrong. Haven't run across any studies about this sort of thing in my casual perusals of the net, though.

"Mind you, I'm just pulling this out of my ass myself, so it's entirely possible I'm wrong. Haven't run across any studies about this sort of thing in my casual perusals of the net, though."

Still, this is common enough reasoning put forth to have "diversity" in programmer squads and gatherings.

I recall looking at a picture of the Clinton White House staff (I think, or cabinet maybe), where the intent was to show the range of sexes and skin colors. Look, diversity!

Yet, as a read the names, I was thinking "lawyer, lawyer, lawyer, not sure, lawyer, lawyer, ..." and wondered where, exactly, was the diversity?

What is the argument that a geek with black skin will have different geek ideas to offer than a geek with white or yellow skin? Or that genitalia confers a unique technical point of view?

I prefer to be among a technical group where there's a diversity of informed opinion, but I'm skeptical that such diversity has a correlation with sex and race.

I'd prefer to hang with a mixed crowd of Lispers, Smalltalkers, PHPers, and embedded system developers, than a Rainbow Collation of nothing-but-Java developers.

Modded up, but please no PHP.

> What you've done here is to create a straw man by asserting that gender and race are always meaningless criteria.

As opposed to the much more popular one of asserting that gender and race never aren't meaningless.

If you think that was the extent of the article's point, you didn't read it.

Yes, but hand-wringing over symptoms is a great way to not actually accomplish much change. The solution to "books about programmers don't have enough women in them" is probably not "write about more women in such books".

Seibel's discussion of the matter seemed pretty fair and sensible to me, on the whole.

How exactly did you get that from the above statement? It wasn't saying "nothing is wrong" it was saying "if something is wrong, the problem is here, no there."

I have been fortunate enough to work in an environment where fully half of the developers were women. It was in state government, which is to say, outside industry. My strong suspicion is that sex bias has little to do with the work, but much more to do with the attitudes of corporate software development, which are (inanely) time-to-market driven.

Women have different and distinct priorities in life.

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