Why women make gifted coders
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
Rather than frame the subject as someone beating the statistics, fighting the institution, frame as someone who is just a straight up talented person whose skills speak for themselves.
Let the reader infer that this talented developer is female, as if it was a totally normal, acceptable thing, which it should be.
All this article does say is "LOOK EVERYONE THIS IS A WOMEN THAT HAPPENS TO CODE", as if the only thing that makes a female programmer valuable is their gender.
I remember it well because it was the most hamfisted writing I've ever seen. Until I started reading the tech press, that is.
The coverage of social issues in tech is a case study of writers snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Which isn't surprising, they're just following the lead of outlets like Jezebel who have done more to set women back than the C-suite of the Fortune 500 ever could.
I very much hope Linda Liukas has been quoted out of context, because this is one of the most ignorantly reductionist portrayals of the role of IT that I've read. I can scarcely imagine any social problem that hasn't had software applied to it in some shape or form, even if it's just collecting statistics on said problem.
I also question the implicit assumption that the majority demographic for users of dating websites and social media is "twentysomething-year-old boys".
I also question the implicit assumption that the majority demographic for users of dating websites and social media is "twentysomething-year-old boys".
That's not actually what it says, though. It just means the problems that get solved are the most common problems affecting 20-year-old boys, not that those problems aren't shared by must vaster demographics.
I'll try again with an analogy. Say the biggest problems for society are feeding and clothing their children, getting a job after hitting fifty and paying for medical care, with dating much further down their priorities.
On the other hand, 20-year-olds USUALLY don't have kids or major medical problems, and so dating is much more important for them than those things.
Now if the 20-year-olds build a dating app, of course most users will not be from their demographics, simply because there are many more non-20-year-olds than them. But it doesn't mean that the time and money investments in that dating app reflects the needs of society as a whole.
The question is, are the twentysomethings really the problem?
There are a bunch of people doing startups and many of them fail, so the stuff that sticks doesn't depend on the "makers" but on the "takers".
And, like you said, the "takers" are the non-20-year-olds, of which there are many more.
So the complaint is really that capitalism doesn't solve societies problems, but it does a great job at solving middle-class twenty-something males' problems.
There's plenty of money to be made selling to people with low disposable income, simply because there are many more of them than well-off twenty-somethings, and because many of their expenses are subsidized.
The reason Walmart is so large it because it's nearly impossible to compete with them. It is much easier to compete for the well-off twenty-something's spending.
- The software industry is more than just twenty-something males writing dating and social media applications.
- The software industry will produce what it thinks it can make a profit on, which is an imperfect proxy for what people (and governments) want, which in turn is an imperfect proxy for what society needs. But, absent a centrally planned economy or other non-market mechanism, two imperfect proxies are the best we've got.
- Much software is general purpose, and can be applied equally to frivolous and worthy matters: operating systems, databases, networking, web browsers & servers, office tools, etc.
- If one is going to complain that the software industry is not addressing society's problems, it would help if one would specify what those problems are.
- As for it producing what it thinks it can make a profit on, that only explains why it doesn't reflect the needs of society, it doesn't refute that the claim.
- Is it really "much"? How many production-quality web servers do we have, really? How many operating systems? They are certainly extremely important, but represent little of the actual effort and investment expended.
- I don't think complain is the correct term for what she's doing, and besides she didn't exactly write the article herself, so it wasn't her decision to specify anything.
If so, in what way does it not reflect those needs? What are those needs? How could the industry reflect them?
And that's setting aside the fact that 'twentysomething-year-old boys' basically invented the modern economy.
Well, no. It became male-dominated when it became a subject of tinkering, so one could do that at home. Now that it's established that it pays good, it started to gain attention from women.
I agree with you that home computers where the turning point, but it has nothing to do with being "sexy", but with the gender roles prejudices in families, which heavily biased who got computers for birthday and Christmas, while before it was purely an academic activity, therefore more accessible to women (by that time).
By now it should be clear that by "sexy" I mean "desired to profess".
All combined, "the 'sexyness' theory" doesn't need to explain why at the peak 38% of the CS workforce were women. It's not meant to explain anything, it's meant as merely an observation that it's untrue that men only got to IT when it paid well. It was the opposite: IT was already a male-dominated field when it started to pay well.
That said, back in '84 when women still composed a good chunk of the workforce, programmers and system analysts earned $60-$100k/year (2015 dollars), which is close to the current average ($80k in 2013).
So it seems to me that it already paid well when it became male-dominated - even if that wasn't the reason it did so.
Short rely because on phone did not read article her
If you in for tinkering, you will move on to something else once the clots of curiosity are gone.
Might be projection on her part - there are professions she could see herself wanting to do, because they paid well - Assumes all the men are the same.
My parents wanted me to be in Finance, Accounting or in Medicine because those jobs paid well and had prestige. I went in Software Engineering because I tinkered with programming since I was 13.
I'm sure she'd be similarly offended by reading same sexist remarks from the article, switching genders:
"Why men make gifted coders"
"Liukas believes that the profession only became dominated by women after people realised that it was well paid and highly creative."
Secondly when you talk to any journalist you have to be ultra careful they don't twist what you say into some thing that fits their agenda or their own biases.
Ugh, you were so close to making the right point.
1. It became a subject of tinkering.
2. Boys are socialized to be tinkerers.
3. Girls are not socialized to be tinkerers.
4. It became male dominated.
The fundamental, underlying problem is with the way girls are socialized in the home to be pretty caregivers instead of intelligent problem solvers.
"We offer the hypothesis that toy preferences reflect hormonally influenced behavioral and cognitive biases which are sculpted by social processes into the sex differences seen in monkeys and humans."
So yes, there may be some biological/neurological biases, but that they are then socially reinforced, which is exactly my point.
And last I checked, one of the things that makes humans humans is our ability to grow beyond our basic wired-in instincts. So I fail to see how that article can be seen as a pass for what is clearly a cultured gender bias.
Your 4-point history is also off because it implies there was a gender neutral computer science that was then taken out of balance by socialization. The only thing you seem intersted in addressing is that girls aren't encouraged to tinker with things - that in and of itself is a fair point. You don't need to create a false history and a false biology to address it.
Focusing purely on socialization, while it will make you friends, will also prevent you from seeing the other reasons STEM fields are predominantly male.
Which is exactly the case.
During the 60s and 70s, computing programs were far more gender balanced (still biased, but nowhere near as askew as today), in part because coming out of World War 2, women were far more likely to have been in the field, for the same reason they were included in manufacturing and other previously male-dominated professions: the men were at war.
The extreme male gender bias you see in computing today is a result of a regressive trend whose seeds were sown in the 80s and 90s, corresponding with the PC revolution.
Why not?
Writer Rebecca Burn-Callander couldn't find a good angle for her article, so you're now a sexist.
The fact that more men work in most tech offices today doesn't mean that I, the reader, should be shocked to learn that coding ability isn't based on gender.
However, I did find the link to what I assume is her website, helloruby.com. It's very nice and I admire what she's doing.
Now where's the article for why men are gifted coders? Or is it just because we're monsters?
Really? Babbage couldn't program his own machine?
In any case, Heron is a much better bet:
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2007/07/programm...
Of course, he wasn't likely to have been the first, either.
Not gender, race, socio-politics, genderists or media pressure.
[1] Is that even measurable?
Liukas is doing great work, but this headline is garbage.
Generally not, no. The headline is garbage because most women, being people, do not make good programmers.
Its weird to see how the field gets divided into "computer science" and "coding".
In coding the act of typing code, networking, and teaching Joe Shmoe how to build a website is paramount. It doesn't require any real skill, doesn't solve hard or important problems, but everybody can feel good afterwards.
And back in the day CS was considered the soft option real Engineers had done physics or EE Degrees.
Just the realisation that there exist some sub community in the computer world where you can be "one of the most powerful people in coding" without any history of contributing to open source projects whatsoever. https://github.com/lindaliukas
It helps to make it clear that a developer isn't as important as a business person or journalist.