Hacker News Reader

Comment by nathan_long | Hacker News Reader

This story makes a compelling case that women stopped programming because

- 1. Computers started being sold as consumer products - 2. They were marketed almost exclusively to boys - 3. Boys played with computers and learned about them, while girls were made to feel that computers weren't for them - 3. Men showed up to college with more computer experience - 4. Women felt they must not be "naturally good" at computers, based on how men already knew more

While I think people sometimes exaggerate how much of gender differences come from society, advertising, etc, the facts of women's history in programming are clear, and I think the cause is well-argued here.

We need to fix the perception that women aren't welcome to program. We're missing out on talented developers.

View on HN

In the Eastern Bloc countries nobody bothered to market computers, for many reasons including closed off markets and economical disasters. They also valued gender equality a lot. But the end result was absolute the same - massive male domination in everything computer-related.

So i's not marketing.

Could it be the operating systems or the UI? There are fewer choices nowadays you know. At least one person I know completely lost interest in the field because of the switch from DOS to Win 3.1.

GUI lived alongside with keyboard-based text UIs for most of 90-s here. Actually it was women who stick to Norton Commander lookalikes for many years. I still don't think it made any gender-balance difference.

> So i[t]'s not marketing.

The article seems to agree, since the underlying reason is attributed to institutionalized sexism in the mainstream culture.

Grew up with Atari 800xl in 1980s in communistic Poland and confirm the same. It is quite obvious what happened but first what I really don't like about the article: Object ovation of women. You have "agents" who decide for themselves -- men -- and objects who need to be told/encouraged or have stuff explained as otherwise they will apparently not understand why they should study CS. Or have mammography ( when was the last time you seen an ad explaining men to have prostate checked? ), participate in politics, etc? You don't tell agents what to do. Agents take action by the definition of being an agent. Objects on the other hand need to be told. Feminism is objectifying women this way.

And explanation of why not these many women are in the CS percentage wise today as in 1984? Easy. As CS became very popular instead of being highly scientific niche subordinate to mathematics department, it just became as any other engineering department - overflown with men.

Btw, I studied English language for my Masters. Hihhly recommended : male/female ratio 1 to 7. 😉 And no, there are no articles encouraging men to take foreign languages as their University Major. As we are not objectifying them as feminists are objectifying women. We know that advising agents would be inappropriate. But if you want to spend 4 or 5 years with chicks around you -- go study foreign language. And you can still pick up programming after partying with them for five years 😉

I talked with some of my female friend who were studying CS, and asked them why they many of them gave up on programming and moved on to management or so other non-technical position.

The answer was that programming was boring and exhausting. From what I understand being code monkey who spends 40 hours a week debugging, writing crap code and checking tests with the most repetitive and non-creative manner doesn't gave them as much sense of an achievement as it gives to some men. Hell, I have doing that kind of job and only push on due to money and fact that 95% jobs in the area looks exactly like that. (And the rest 5% requires you tho know right people.)

I would say that there is relatively little of masochist women who would want to debug that race condition hell in C++/Java. There you have to endure a lot of frustration before reaching a (short) moment of satisfaction. On the other hand in some Rails startups that I know, where effect of your work was immediate and one didn't felt that she was hitting the wall all the time there was a lot more of girl programmers - about a half of the team. But there are very few of such startups in my neighborhood. All in all I've got more men around.

TL;DL - women are less of a masochist when it comes to frustrating jobs.

"They were marketed almost exclusively to boys"

You mean exactly like chemistry sets? Yet chemistry is the most equal major in terms of gender of graduates.

I like Planet Money, but this story is unconvincing.

Chemistry sets went the other way and have almost entirely gone out of fashion due to health and safety issues.

Yeah, the new chemistry sets are much safer. Bleh.

A shift happened where computing was seen as something girls didn't do. If not marketing then what caused it? (IMO it started when computing became synonymous with math, if people thought girls couldn't do math then they also couldn't be good with computers).

I don't have data on this, but I'd imagine the popularity of computers in the home in the 1980s was outshining that of chemistry sets. In the NPR piece they talk about how computers were marketed to boys for playing games.

And chemistry is also taught in high schools, so both male and female students interested in it would've had some experience before attending college. The same is not true for computing.

When I studied CS , only a small minority arrived with programming skills, a much larger number came with knowledge of gaming and by extension computer building because it was much easier to afford a PC required for the newest games if you could build it yourself.

Gaming has been a hell of a gateway drug for programming.

What do you mean?

Many people who get into programming, do so because they either want to make games, or like computers because of games. This was widely true among my CS class at WashU, and also many of the professionals I currently work with.

I concur.

I got into programming because I couldn't complete a level in a game, and I resorted to cheat-codes and hacks.

First it was the missing-no hack in Pokemon, then getting the console for "sv_cheats 1/god/impulse 101/noclip" for Half-Life and then rules.ini for the Red Alert series.

Hand hacking rules.ini for Red-Alert made a massive impression, any of the game's dynamics could be altered, you could spew out units for $1, bolt a tesla-coil on a tank etc...

Cheats and trainers got me to look into the workings of a computer program, plus the midi music from trainers is addictive :)

Using ResourceFork to give my tiny shuttle Class 6 Plasma Cannons in Escape Velocity...

I spent an inordinate amount of time as a kid using ResEdit to make cheat plugins for EV:Override.

> I got into programming because I couldn't complete a level in a game, and I resorted to cheat-codes and hacks.

While I programmed long before then, that's certainly the reason I started poking at hex editors, and why I remember off the top of my head that 0x63 is 99 and 0x64 is 100.

UNIX itself started because Ken Thompson wanted to port his game Space Travel to the PDP-7: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/spacetravel.html

If I wanted to get involved with making games, it would probably be in order to design games. Not coding per se.

Up until the mid 90s, designing games generally required that you also program them.

In the 80s, even the musicians had to hack assembler (Martin Galway, for example)

Yup. I started programming at 13 because I wanted to make my own better (obviously) StarCraft. Poking around in existing games and trying to make my own during my teens is the sole reason I work as a programmer today.

I would add:

6. Males are far more likely to enter jobs they're not suitable for

Of all the "programmers" without any aptitude that seem to plague corporate IT departments, virtually none of the ones I've come across have been female. If you take out these frauds when counting programmers, then the gender balance in many IT departments becomes more like the early 1980's. Added: When programming became a perceived status job, the frauds turned up to cheat aptitude tests, lie on their CV about experience and studies, and what not.

Fucking men, man. What an egotistical, useless bunch. /s

I've met more than a few women who majored in computer science and were then diversity-hired into corporate positions involving programming, with no skills or aptitude for it beyond sophomore-level class projects. They tend to get shuffled around to less technical positions eventually.

I was one of those boys who bought a TRS-80. The thing is, I don't remember it as a peer accepted pursuit for me either. This was before anyone noticed, let alone Hollywood recast it as their version of Revenge of the Nerds. This was when being a nerd was not nice.

While I did get some quasi support from people who thought it might help in a career someday, the much more common response in those days was "who needs a home computer?"

Update: I agree that we should encourage everyone with an aptitude now to go into higher ROI fields (of which CS is one), I do think it is a bit reconstructed history to make TRS-80s actually "cool" and "non-cool kids excluded."

Indeed, the TRS-80 was not even a game machine. PCs as game machines came a bit later, and as price effective ones, much later.

"They were marketed almost exclusively to boys"

Back before anyone was really marketing computers in any mainstream way, I remember gathering around the few that were available in the school library or in a math teacher's classroom.

The only people interested EVER were boys.

It had nothing to do with marketing.

Which came first, tool-toy companies interested in boys, or boys interested in them?

Maybe it doesn't matter. Once a group becomes predominantly one culture, it rapidly slides to that corner of the culture space. Lots of reasons - people hire people they feel comfortable with. People value people they understand more, regarding them as more intelligent or harder working.

You say "ever" but the early history of computing was filled with women. Something caused a change.

The field was too small at the time to draw any useful conclusions.

I was interested in high school but felt like I wasn't allowed in the computer room. It was full of boys who knew the teacher, and I didn't know the teacher and wasn't a boy, and just didn't really want to deal with the social discomfort given that I had a computer at home and could use that for an hour in the evening. Instead I skipped class in a computer-less room with the IB coordinator's blessing.

That hour or two a day of skipping class or eating lunch would have had a different effect if I'd spent all the time playing with computers.

I started making up for it in college as a CS class was required, I couldn't afford my own computer & so discovered the trash and Linux, and there was a badass female sysadmin who demonstrated perfect ease in owning the computer lab.

This seems to miss an explanation for why the marketing was directed at boys in the first place.

The segment mentions that most "tool toys" are marketed at boys. Specifically mentioned Tonka Trucks but think plastic saws, hammers, etc.

They couldn't find any data one way or another about if that marketing made sense.

My younger sister would've been more likely to enter tech if there was less barbie and more this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIGyVa5Xftw

My take on that missing piece: once computers went personal / homebrew / RadioShack they switched categories. The new category was "tinkering with electronics", which has a long established cultural perception of being a male activity (and those personal computers were therefore marketed to males)

But why is tinkering almost exclusively for men?

That, I don't know. We'd probably need to go much further back to find an answer.

I know I'll get banned and cursed for years for that but here you go:

Oh stop it, those are gender differences and girls also enjoy their differences, even if they're unfortunately imprinted by culture. They're untouchable, they are given what they ask (which is: often dolls), they're social. And the few that are in IT, they don't show up at the Java User Group, even if it's their job, even if it's free, even if it's at the same time as for boys.

They do show up more often at higher-class networking parties where they may make connections with product managers and be promoted, rather than stay programmers like us for a bit longer.

Of course there will be counter-examples, but I see girls in IT getting promoted MUCH faster than boys. In my 14-people office? 4 women-project-managers, 1 woman-architect (who doesn't know GIT), 1 female programmer (with 2 years of experience) and 8 male programmers. Yes, I'm making this observation about my team to imply that women have better jobs, sooner than boys, and it does imply that males don't get promoted as easily as women, at least in the world around me, and I'm saying an IT career is an excellent path for a girl.

Before anyone says "Women get promoted quicker because they're just better at their job", I'd note they turn over this exact argument when it's directed to boys, by suggesting they didn't get the education, incentive, support or opportunity. It's not about anyone being better. It's about how we reach fairness.

I do see that some of the world is different for girls, but unfairness is reported more often than advantages.

Edit: "Why are there less girls at the JUG, is it because they're uncomfortable with 95% men?" > Or that they aren't involved much and reserve their evening time for their social life. The only way to be sure would be to ask them, and they'll probably remark they'll be promoted whether or not they attend the JUG, if you've followed the story of my team.

It seems to me that you are considering only symptoms of more underlying driving forces here. For example: Why is it that they don't show up at the Java User Group? Maybe they feel uncomfortable in a room with 95% men? Then you would have to explain why there are 95% men in that room in the first place.

Women probably get promoted relatively earlier for reasons like token women and the fact that they less commonly have computer experience since early on.

... which will hopefully explain why Lego markets the normal* range to boys. Or not.

Of course there's the Lego Friends range targetting girls, but it is once again about houses, cooking, flowers and rainbow poneys, and not at all as educative as Lego Technics.

*Such as the Lego City and Lego Creator ranges which must be the legos we encounter the most.

Seems fairly self-evident - personal computers grew out of the electronic hobbyist industry. The first home PCs were kits for Radio Shack geeks. The PC market was firmly established as a split-off from the electronics-geek market until the early '90s or so.

The best explanation I've come across so far is Roy Baumeister's Is There Anything Good About Men? [0], which explains gender determinisms by regarding the evolutionary history of our species. The article was already posted several times on HN [1].

[0]: http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm

[1]: http://hn.algolia.com/#!/story/forever/prefix/0/Is%20There%2...

It seems like a lot of CS programs focus more on filtering than teaching, which just intensifies the trend.

I completely agree. I had never programmed before my first college course, and while I had a lot of fun in intro programming courses, I always felt way behind everyone else and didn't do particularly well. Those first couple of classes filtered me out of any chance at getting into the CS major, and I ended up transferring schools to study it.

> We're missing out on talented developers.

As a sought after developer in a niche area I appreciate the lack of competition.

But then again I am a selfish, cynical bastard.

I find this explanation extremely hollow. Most programmers didn't start programming when they were kids. They started when they realized it was a good paycheck.

Yep I didn't actually see a computer till I was in my early 20's.

Any data on that? I tried searching for info on when the average programmer started, but couldn't find anything. I always figured most programmers started young, but that might just be because so many in my group started really young.

No data, just anecdotes

Among my friends I always thought I was the odd one out because I _didn't_ start programming as a child.

I'm another that didn't start programming until one of my required courses as a physics undergraduate student. We did have an 8th grade programming class but everyone took that and obviously it didn't spur me into any interest in programming.

But the "gendering" of computers affects everyone, regardless of how or when they get to the table. I've known many women who found themselves regularly condescended to and even verbally abused by their CS professors, and many of them just dropped out entirely rather than face an academic discipline that quite vocally didn't want them involved. (Is this the norm? I hope not. Is it common? I fear so.) And once they get into the industry, they continue to face scorn and opprobrium, although some sub-disciplines (particularly database administration, ETL and data modeling) seem to fare better than others. Not distinct to the comp-sci field, as any female executive or high-grade salesperson will attest, but I'd like to think we're better than them.

Hmm.. I wonder if that's true of younger programmers, but I don't think I've met a single one around my age (early 30's, late 20's) who didn't start when they were young. I got my start near the end of high school and I felt _impossibly_ late. I still do, frankly.

I started when I was 21. So at least you can feel that you're better than me.

> I don't think I've met a single one around my age (early 30's, late 20's) who didn't start when they were young.

This is probably partly confirmation basis and partly insufficient data. I doubt every time you meet a fellow developer you ask them how old they were when they first started programming.

I'm 35 and didn't start coding until about four years ago (when I decided to go back to school and switch careers) - there's another dev on my team that started even later, and I know several that never wrote a line of code before college. So yeah we're out there.

That you know about. The article shows a drop-off starting in the 1980s, which was when the home computer revolution happened. Computer games magazines at the time printed out programs for users to type in themselves, because for the first generation or two of hardware there wasn't a whole lot of software to buy. Also, pre-built home computers were heavily marketed for their education potential.

Maybe today that's the case. I doubt it was true in the 80s or even the 90s. I think the "Gold Rush" mentality in programming is a post-1999 phenomenon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com