What happened to all the female developers?

http://blog.fogcreek.com/girls-go-geek-again/

by buzzcut • 15 years ago

279 260 15 years ago

blog.fogcreek.com

gonehome2• 15 years ago

"In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the systems analysts in America were women. ... the percentages of women who earned Computer Science degrees rose steadily, peaking at 37% in 1984."

While that's definitely higher, still seems like the field was male dominated (the majority were male).

Cushman2• 15 years ago

That 37% dropped to 20% by 2006— nearly halved. It might not seem like a large percentage difference, but consider that that's the difference between the field being under 2:1 male and 4:1 male. That's the observation of interest here.

gonehome2• 15 years ago

Definitely true, I was actually surprised the field wasn't originally the majority female since I remember reading that the original programmers were nearly all women.

aninteger• 15 years ago

The title "Systems Analyst" sometimes has absolutely nothing to do with software development. I know a couple of female Systems Analysts that know nothing about software development. I'm not even exaggerating.. they use a computer, sure, but they do not write or develop any software.

gaius9• 15 years ago

This question makes no sense unless it is also asked in conjuction with "what happened to all the male primary school teachers"?

kscaldef• 15 years ago

I don't see any reason they need to be asked in the same article actually. Was there ever a time when 40% of primary school teachers were male? It's not clear to me that there's any strong parallel between the two professions at all.

BDFL_Xenu• 15 years ago

It is a good question to ask though, as there are societal pressures against men going into any profession related to children (e.g. the pedophile scare). But asking it _here_ is just cheap whataboutery to silence the discussion.

kenjackson4• 15 years ago

I think the rise of males in CS was due to the rise of the personal computer. As someone noted earlier, as computers become more common in the home and males started using them, they picked up a stigma associated with the type of males that used them.

Why does that have anything to do with primary school teachers? I'm fairly certain very little.

gaius9• 15 years ago

Because it's only a "problem" when an industry is male-dominated it seems. Question is do we want equality, or not?

protomyth• 15 years ago

The reasoning for the decline in male primary school teachers (and daycare workers) has very little to do with women in CS. Guys have much more danger points in the legal system when accused of something. The risk / reward ratio is too far gone. This does not happen to women in CS.

rakden3• 15 years ago

The point isn't so much a direct comparison but more pointing out that their are different societal pressures on all of us that influence what we do. A male is less likely to be a primary school teacher because there are many factors that make it difficult for them. The same is true of women and CS. There are various forms of societal pressure that are most likely making CS a harder field to enter.

sethg• 15 years ago

When I was an education major, other people in the field told me that it was great that I, as a man, was going into education, because I would be serving as a male role model.

lurker197• 15 years ago

Pedophile mania.

true_religion3• 15 years ago

It's my understanding that in the early days working with computers was considered manually labor, something akin to data-entry of today. The "real" scientists and business people would instruct their CS conterparts to do a task, and how that task was accomplished was neither interesting nor remarked upon.

As computation became cheaper, CS still retained many qualities of data entry especially in the business sector.

As such, the whole profession was looked down upon. Men didn't want to enter it since after all they could simply be scientists and businessmen instead. So those who took it up were first women, then social outcasts (I'm exaggerating a bit here).

---

Around the 90s, everything started changing.

CS was still looked down on, but computing was so cheap and easy that you didn't need to trust it to someone with a specific degree to do so.

As such, the scientists and business people I remarked upon earlier began using their own computers. And where they didn't, they didn't hire someone with a CS degree to do it.

Also, the programming aspects of CS were better separated from data entry. Programmers which once were reviled, now could command healthy incomes and thus it became an attractive job for men.

Women on the other hand could get any job they preferred, and did prefer to get jobs in their own interest instead of CS which they might have only taken before because it was one of the few 'low class' labors that still made use of the mind and education.

FeministHacker• 15 years ago

Somewhere buried at home I have an old Cobol programming book, talking about how, as a programmer, typing was beneith you. Instead you were instructed to write neatly on cards and supply these to the typist for her to type in.

JoshTriplett• 15 years ago

Ouch, that hurts to read quite apart from the offensive stereotype. Barring the pervasive use of shorthand, I don't think someone writing by hand has any hope of keeping up with even a moderately skilled typist, even when writing English rather than code.

MostAwesomeDude• 15 years ago

I'd like to think we've grown a lot as a culture since then. I mean, seriously, do we really want to return to a time when the ALTER verb existed? :3

ry0ohki• 15 years ago

That was my first thought, that these "computer analysts" of the 70s were glorified secretaries running punch cards through a system. It seems like I would have remembered or known a few more older female computer scientists if they were really 40%+ of the work force.

btilly• 15 years ago

I've certainly known some. Anecdotally the ones that I knew tended to start in the mainframe world. Not so many in the Unix world. Which is kind of surprising given that I don't have many connections to people in the mainframe world.

If my small dataset isn't a coincidence, then someone who lived in the Unix world could easily be blissfully unaware of how different other environments were.

maco3• 15 years ago

I don't know about the 70s, but one of my (female) professors worked on the code that took Apollo into space in the 60s.

lutorm2• 15 years ago

You might be right, but the female fraction of CS/math PhD's also dropped by a factor of 4 between 1920 and 1960 (see my other post). So the effect extends beyond "unskilled" computer jobs.

Locke16892• 15 years ago

And she said that one of the things that happens is that women don’t even think they’re qualified for something because it’s advertised in competitive language. The language of competition not only doesn’t appeal to many women, it actually puts them off.

This doesn't make sense to me because easily the most competitive path I've ever seen is premed. Almost all of the premeds I know are competing for the best grades, the best resumes, and the best internships. Organic chem is like a giant free-for-all where everyone tries to beat the curve. And yet, at least 50% of biology and medical students are women. Why are women turned off by competitiveness in CS (which I think is less common in my engineering classes where people often try to help other people and don't compete for the best grade), but not in medicine?

Aren't we just applying cultural influences to both genders in either case?

rdouble11• 15 years ago

Why are women turned off by competitiveness in CS ... but not in medicine?

Maybe they are just more practical. The worst physician's salary averages about $50K more than the best programmer's salary. Nurses get paid as much as programmers. If you do pre-med but can't get into med school, you can still get into public health, physical therapy, dentistry, optometry, pharmacy, etc... If you do CS but can't get a job at Google, you can get into TPS reports or be unemployed. That last part is grossly simplifying, but compare getting a programming job someplace like Wyoming or North Dakota vs. getting a medical job in the same place.

true_religion3• 15 years ago

Or perhaps there's more prestige in a medical degree than a CS degree.

Or perhaps there is a perception that doctors are really helping people, as opposed to CS professionals. Didn't we just have a spate of articles that complained that startups weren't doing enough to "help the world".

gaius9• 15 years ago

That is actually the only plausible explanation at this point in history. The average woman looks at the long hours and job insecurity in high tech and thinks "this is just not worth it". Men, historically, have always done these kinds of jobs and still do. We don't see feminists agitating for more woman refuse collectors do we?

saturn4• 15 years ago

> The worst physician's salary averages about $50K more than the best programmer's salary. Nurses get paid as much as programmers

I was all primed with a fiery response about how good programmers in hot markets should be pulling more than 200k, lousy markets at least 100k, and anyone who wasn't is either a lousy negotiator or not good, but then I remembered where I was. The crème de la crème. Yeah, "staff programmers" (as I call them) might well earn less, on average, than nurses. And it's a guaranteed, standardised wage, none of this grasping meritocracy competitive nonsense.

The thing about programming is that it gives you a chance to shine. I mean really shine. God bless the nurses, etc, but realistically speaking any one nurse is not going to change the world just by being a bloody good nurse. I think the attraction to the high-stakes sink-or-swim pure meritocracy game is a very male thing.

krakensden• 15 years ago

> The worst physician's salary averages about $50K more than the best programmer's salary

And they have to spend ten extra years in school, none of which is guaranteed to do anything but leave them poorer.

Duff4• 15 years ago

More than that, medicine is more portable.

At a typical large company, the ingress point into the company is at an entry-level position. Many women want to interrupt employment when they have children, which isn't practical for a IT person or programmer at a bank or government agency.

My mother, to use a fairly typical example, is a nurse. She took 5-6 years off at various times when my siblings were born or when daycare costs became prohibitive. Impact on her career? Not too bad -- hospitals need nurses, especially nurses with the specialist certifications she had.

seanalltogether• 15 years ago

Perhaps it's because medicine is way more academic then programming. I think programming has more in relation with a skilled trade then with an academic based career, and the skilleds trades are notoriously male dominated.

Cushman2• 15 years ago

Yeah, it's not a necessarily female response. I'm sure lots of male devs would be more attracted by constructive rather than competitive language.

But actually, I love that. They asked her for advice on marketing their program to women, and she gave them advice on marketing their program in general. Good show.

jamii• 15 years ago

> I'm sure lots of male devs would be more attracted by constructive rather than competitive language.

I usually look for some measure of professionalism. There is nothing wrong with being passionate about your work but talk of ninjas and rockstars stinks of arrogance and is always offputting. Things like this are much more attractive, personally:

Rethinkdb: "While everyone at RethinkDB has the determination to move heaven and earth to succeed, we prefer to get stuff done quickly and go home to our families, instead of living our lives in the office."

Jane St: "We put aside ego, politics, and appearance to focus on truth. We try to admit when we are wrong, talk about our mistakes, and challenge our previous conclusions."

Basho: "If you are smarter than everyone else, the absolute smartest person you know -- as in you win every argument because you are so smart and no problem cannot be solved by a quick application of your smarts -- please do not apply. We are human and will disappoint you."

yardie• 15 years ago

This doesn't make any sense to me (not you, the statement). Some of the most competitive people I know are women. And if you've been on a university campus it's stacked top to bottom with women competing for highly selective majors. CS and Sft.Eng. seems to be an outlier in this, but chem, bio, business, and econ are populated with really smart graduate women.

Even when I was in highschool 10 years ago the top 10 students, 6 of them were girls. The salutatorian was a girl and she let everyone know how displeased she was for not getting valedictorian (beaten by 1/100 of a point).

Women are turned off of CS and I can assure it's not the competitive language.

imajes4• 15 years ago

so what is it, then?

mrkurt2• 15 years ago

Premed and organic chem aren't advertised in "competitive language", though. How often do you see schools write course descriptions like "we're seeking the world's best chemistry ninjas to help us take our chemistry educating to the next level?"

yummyfajitas4• 15 years ago

Just as often as course descriptions say "we're seeking the world's best javascript ninjas".

mapgrep• 15 years ago

She didn't say she was put off by competition, she said she was put off by competitive language in the job listing. She recommended more focus on the collaborative side of the internship - mentorship, line by line code review, and being part of decisionmaking. "Things that have to do with collaboration and learning appeal a lot more to female candidates."

Couching something in mainly competitive terms does not just advertise that it's competitive, it also hints that there's a sort of pissing contest atmosphere at work. In the case of Fog Creek, it was an inadvertent, false signal, but what this woman is saying is that it's a negative indicator many women watch out for.

You can be at once highly qualified for a competitive field and drawn to that field for reasons having nothing to do with competition. Those female premeds are almost certainly more interested in working with patients than in beating their chest and bragging about how they got into a good med school. (And I'd venture the same holds true for the males.)

Locke16892• 15 years ago

A very good point, I'd agree with this.

palish• 15 years ago

Perhaps someone would like to paste some job listings from other fields, like realestate or nursing, so everyone can see how they compare with CS?

imajes4• 15 years ago

hate to do this, but... "this".

CS is one of the very few industries i've ever been been around which engages in the "i'm better than you" pissing contest, EVERY SINGLE DAY, and yet asks itself why everyone looks the same.

I really do hope that at some point, we lose our sneer and arrogance and stop thinking that we're better than everyone just because we have some kind of exclusive skill that's alien to most.

rjd4• 15 years ago

Indeed, I never after for a job which is worded competitively.

I done a lot of contracting over the years. Usually 3-6 month placements and I've learnt to spot a company culture from the ad. Sort of like after you've been looking at house ads for a while you start to understand the lies that are going on.

Disclaimer: before reading on I'm jaded and bitter from years of dealign with a/holes, liars, and bad contracts. So its best to make up your mind as whats suits you. But my learnt experiences:

Worded competitively usually means you are working for a money first workplace, and the boss will usually be sleazy sales men.

with it you get extremely short times lines, under cutting competition, lots of pressure to finish perfectly first iteration (i.e. no time to refactor code which organic grew as you worked), and any bugs in the first and only iteration are a big deal... many projects I've worked on just don't have a testing cycle or bug fix cycle. They chew developers up and make them bitter and cynical.

The other ones to watch out for are ego stroking, the old "rock star developer". Thats usually a sign when over times come they will to pay you with ego rewards instead of money. The play will use every manipulative trick they can think of get you to work for free, and make you think you are doing it because you love it. Don't fall for that, working is a partnership and they need to offer you the respect and payment you deserve, even for work you like doing.

Buzz words are a keen sign you are going to be working with a bunch of sales men. It can also mean its a design agency who don't under stand what they are saying.

For example I've been to some great interviews listing HTML 5 as a pre-req ... where 10 minutes in I've been trying to end the interview and escape. When they tll you they are building every website in AJAX, MVC, REST, and HTML 5 head for the door.

IMO that is showing a lack of understanding of technologies and a failure to do proper analytical process into work. Firstly HTML 5 doesn't have great legacy support, its pre-mature in my mind to be using it for a lot of work especially considering most of these people are build simple ecommerce and brochure sites... often meaning yoga re dealing with small businesses who can't afford to retro fit when they discover 20% of the user base can't complete purchasing because of IE 6. Mobile is a different story its ready, but thats the analytical process, choose the right tool, and if you see people nailing in nails with nails walk away.

Another two which go instantly on my nervous list are gloating about team culture or how great the office is. I don't let these stop me chasing a job, but I do get extra cautious when going threw the interview process that those items are intact true.

Because in 15 years of programming I've never really had a bad team. A few toxic characters for sure, but most teams are great. Often it can actually be a good sign, they are after team fit, and that can be the best thing ever.

Most developers are just normal average people, usually with one freakishly intelligent person, and a few play doh eaters. "Amazing" teams often have several gifted people, and I don't like working in those teams to much, conflict always arises because people have cleverly thought of a solution, and instead of implementing they fight. I prefer normal teams with mixed backgrounds and age spread, so water cooler talk in the office is at least interested and I find I bond better with genuine people, and that makes them easier to deal with because I can approach them problems and negative issues.

I won't take a position with a crap office full stop, I'm actually effected by environment. So before accepting a job I ask to see the offices. Its extremely important to me.

In saying that I'm not sure what it has to the work advertisement, it usually sets off my paranoia that either the job is boring as hell and they couldn't think of anything else for the ad. Or the complete opposite they have built an nice office to stroke your ego, or compensate for work overload.

Mz• 15 years ago

I would add that in my experience, men who routinely engage in this kind of pissing contest are more likely to come across as "sexist pigs" in some sense. I've been in social situations where the signal was "you can't run with the big dogs, you are just a girl". Having good computer skills does not guarantee that one has the social savvy necessary to find the right way to deal with that kind of message.

In fact, if "typical" girl programmers are anything like your stereotypical boy programmers, it may be that they are highly likely to lack such skills. There have been a number of articles posted to HN where women in the industry complain about these sorts of issues (while I read between the lines and wonder how she could have done something so dumb given the context) and I do kind of get the impression that most women really don't know how to effectively deal with stuff that may not really be intended as sexist but is frequently just kind of juvenile (for lack of a better word).

lmkg• 15 years ago

You misunderstand the quote. It's not saying that CS positions are too competitive. It's saying they're described as being about competition. Medical degrees are competitive, but they're not about the competition, they're about helping people. Meanwhile, CS is promoted by hosting coding challenges and competitions, and the top-tier jobs advertise how their teams are so much smarter and more accomplished than everyone, and so forth. This creates the perception that not only is the field competitive, but that the competition is practically an end in itself, where in medicine it's an obstacle to the actual goal of helping people (or getting a gigantic salary).

rweba• 15 years ago

" Honestly, when you hear the phrase 'the world’s best developers,' you see a guy. "

Thats the key right there - women are comfortable competing, they just have a hard time picturing themselves as the alpha geek hacker that this competitive language brings to mind for many people. At least thats how I interpreted it.

Also there are studies that women tend to underestimate their skills while men tend to overestimate them which might also be relevant, see Sheryl Sandberg's commencement address:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdvXCKFNqTY

jamesteow4• 15 years ago

"Also there are studies that women tend to underestimate their skills while men tend to overestimate them which might also be relevant."

In general, men have far more pressure to be confident than women do.

gdilla• 15 years ago

Aren't we missing something here? Med schools try to have 50/50 gender split in their incoming classes. Heck, patients certainly 50/50. Med schools don't even want gender diversity, they want gender parity. CS departments can't fathom such a thing. And while employers like diversity, they don't need parity. Startups need skills, not stats, so it's not a priority for them either. I'm not saying females are not on par with their male counterparts in s/w and medicine by any means. But at least their are role models and courtship in medicine.

_delirium2• 15 years ago

I think a lot of CS departments would be happy to aim at 50/50 gender parity, if their application pipeline were anywhere near close enough to support it. When applicant ratios are in the range of 90% male, it's very hard to get more than 20-30% women in the incoming class, even if you really go out of your way to aim at gender balance.

It took med schools a few decades too, over which they first removed overt barriers (like "medicine isn't for women" attitudes among faculty), then successfully convinced more women to apply, and then finally accepted many of those applying women. CS's troubles are complex, but I think one of the stickiest ones is that interest/disinterest in studying CS seems to develop around high-school (same as studying math), so the imbalance somehow has to be addressed at the pre-university level. Med-school doesn't seem to have the same differentiate-by-age-15 aspect.

vacri3• 15 years ago

Gender parity is more significant for medicine as there are a great many patients who have trouble working with a doctor of a particular gender. It's not always same-gender pref either - I know of two women who prefer male gynaecologists because they're less rough when examining.

Given the importance of medicine to leading a happy life, it's important to get as much information out of patients as possible - so it's in the interest of the industry to make sure that the client-facing staff have plenty of both genders.

It's much less important in programming as users and programmers rarely interact. Was Firefox written mostly by men or by women? It doesn't matter to me as I don't interact with them in order to use the service Firefox offers.

bluekeybox• 15 years ago

> Why are women turned off by competitiveness in CS, but not in medicine?

From my experience, the primary thing driving those who aspire to work in the medical field is not so much salary as employment security. They compete early on (in college and in medical school) so they wouldn't have to compete later when they enter the workspace. I think that the promise of job security (guaranteed employment) has a particular appeal to women. I suspect that their thinking is that once they graduate, they can relax at the high-paying secure job and invest their time and resources into growing children. On the other hand, to me, as a young man looking to enter the startup field, ventures with ongoing high risk and high payoff appeal more than employment guarantees.

I dropped out of premed and started programming and studying art sometime in college partly because I was turned off by people whose primary career motivation was job security and who did not have any serious creative pursuits besides their career goals.

bugsy6• 15 years ago

That is a very interesting point you make about assumptions being applied to "both" genders. In particular, that advertising competition is considered to be a way to attract manly men to a tech startup. Is this really the best approach? Sure, the high school football player is interested in bashing in the head of his competition and causing them pain. Advertising for those competitive traits are undoubtedly an excellent approach to attracting the most sociopathic used car salesmen and wall street traders for who the customer is an enemy to be bilked.

But is that criteria what best motivates inventors and designers as well?

Myself, I design things because I like to make cool stuff for people to use and I am really good at it. I spend a lot of time thinking about and experimenting with usability. I have found that an interest in making cool useful things is something that brilliant talented designers share with me. I have yet to meet any brilliant designers who are motivated primarily by wanting to destroy their rivals.

marquis3• 15 years ago

There's a core issue here I point out to my male colleagues, which I find to be true of myself as a female developer: as a stereotypical trait (I am generalising here, beware!) girls don't find sitting in front of a computer alone all that interesting. I personally value my personal time alone and am fairly unique in this respect (my boyfriend would love it if I wanted to hang out and work with him! But I focus best alone). So I would simply posit that changing the language to focus on the collaboration aspects appeals to more females.

I'd love to work on a team of mixed genders (that includes all known genders) - I have yet to have the pleasure. I find working in a team of hetero males can be exclusionary and exhausting, and prefer to work remotely much of the time rather than be in a room of constant male posturing (which many of you do unawares and outside of the work office I'm quite happy to enjoy watching the escapades).

alexgartrell• 15 years ago

Can you explain what you mean by male posturing?

bugsy6• 15 years ago

"girls don't find sitting in front of a computer alone all that interesting"

To be honest, the nature of the work is that most time working is spent in solitude. It's the same if you write novels or compose operas. Do we also say that writing novels is unfriendly to girls because sitting in front of the typewriter alone is not all that interesting? It is interesting if you are a writer or developer or opera composer because that is the nature of the work.

However, it should be noted that all these fields also have times when you are not deeply immersed in a project during which you socialize, travel, or even party. Many IT shops are run like slave ships with 16 hr days 7 days a week, that is not possible and yes such shops are deeply dysfunctional, and a turn off for psychologically healthy women and men.

However, if one doesn't like being alone and primarily loves to socialize with people, developing software and writing novels are the wrong careers. Not because of a conspiracy. Because of the way the work is. I would also likewise not recommend high pressure sales jobs to introverts.

lurker197• 15 years ago

I don't know where you are finding yourself totally surrounded by hetero males in software these days.

temphn2• 15 years ago

This whole endless search for the reason why "women aren't in computing" is just a modern day version of epicycle theory. In ancient times, they couldn't admit that the earth went around the sun, so they came up with the increasingly baroque epicycle theory, where planets were postulated to do loop-de-loops just so that no one would have to concede heliocentrism.

Today we face a similar taboo, held for similar quasi-religious reasons. Our latest epicycle is competitive job postings. This at least is laudably specific; most of these kinds of explanations aren't testable at all.

The obvious but taboo answer is that women will generally gravitate to fields which are more social/people focused and less technical/mathematical. That spectrum runs from teaching through medicine in the middle through CS.

These trends are due in nontrivial part to genetics. Women are just more social and men more systematizing, on average.

As programming went from rote punch card/data entry to something more like physics or math, the percentage of women dropped.

All this breast beating is about a refusal to accept that basic biological differences could possibly affect behavior. Indeed, not even the tenured President of Harvard can broach the topic, even if he only moots the possibility of differences in variance rather than mean!

It's not much of a debate when those who voice the "partially genetic" position are at risk of losing their jobs.

scilro• 15 years ago

Your argument falls apart when you posit "worse at math" as an essentialist trait caused by genetics, without so much as a link to a single study showing this. Saying "Women are just more social on average" does not prove that it is genetic.

You can probably name at least one woman amazing at math, or one woman amazing at programming. The fact that you can name even one counterexample refutes the proposition that all women are predisposed against mathematical thinking genetically.

rakden3• 15 years ago

Just pointing this out as a woman who is in CS. There is rampant sexism within the field on the lower tier levels.(Still in school so I have yet to deal with higher level positions) Your grunt programmers, techs, and general support staff are down right scary. I have been hopping around company to company for a bit now and some of the places are just down right creepy. I worked one job where open sexism was encouraged and there was a massive boys club mentality. There was one guy who kept joking about how sexy I was and pulled pulled on my hair whenever he walked by.

Also as a whole I have found that even if I am more knowledgeable than everyone around me, I still have people come up and in some of the most condescending ways possible. Many times I am talked down to like I am some sort of child. (I once had someone try to explain how multicast and ssl works to me. They are studying for their A+, I am about to get my CCNP and also churning out all sorts of neat code for our department to help automate a lot of the boring tasks.)

I would say its not so much a genetic issue, but more the field itself has many cultural issues it needs to get past.

Last note: Filing complaints about a lot of these problems would most likely hurt me in the long run. I figured out after my first couple jobs it is easier to ignore them than try to find a new job.

Edit: Regarding skills themselves. It is a much simpler answer to claim that society 'encourages' woman into positions. Even if there was such a gap (Not saying it may not exist mind you) their would still be tremendous overlap and there would be some males within female bounds and females within the male bounds. The odds of that gap being massive enough to overshadow cultural issues is highly unlikely.

Also these stories are not representative of my whole experience in the field. They have been cherry picked to help illustrate a point.

ladyphp2• 15 years ago

Med school appeals to the motherly side of chicks..in fact all of healthcare appeals to our motherly side

wisty• 15 years ago

It could also be about riskiness. Computing moved from stable and secure to very risky and with nightmare hours, though I'm not sure when.

diolpah2• 15 years ago

A cursory look at the graph indicates that the only place women suffered was on their own code. Resume, phone skills, interpersonal skills, all great.

diolpah2• 15 years ago

The downvotes are appreciated. Where am I wrong?

cjzhang• 15 years ago

Why didn't you just say "women can't code?"

Also, the sample size is crap and the deviation is crap relative to the sample size, so you can't make very many truly meaningful observations from it.

known• 15 years ago

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." --Oscar Wilde

groby_b5• 15 years ago

You're not wrong, but it's a touchy subject. Gender issues are always tinged with "discrimination" overtones.

And, just to be clear, there is _plenty_ of discrimination and bias against women. But that shouldn't detract from the fact that you're pointing out a major outlier in their data.

Unfortunately, without knowing the test, it's hard to even guess what happened there. Is it focusing on syntactic vs. semantical correctness? Does it require deep specialist knowledge, or broad generalist knowledge? How is it graded?

Or is it simply a function of the tiny sample size?

Without pointing out what you conclude from that data, people will infer what you concluded. And since it's a loaded subject, they will often arrive at "what a misogynist jerk" without ever knowing what you were trying to say.

Corollary: When pointing out data on a loaded subject, it might be beneficial to point out what you conclude, and why. At least that way, only one of the two factions can flame you ;)

(Disclaimer: I am a woman, so I obviously disagree with the "women can't code theory". I'd still love to find out _why_ women are filtered out by that test so disproportionately, simply because it might hold clues as to why women are not interested in CS)

robryan2• 15 years ago

I think more than anything you point out that the sample size is to small to really take anything meaningful from it.

ovi256• 15 years ago

You're getting downvoted, no doubt because the thing you remarked is a thing-you-can't-say. I completely missed it myself, but it's very telling: code screen eliminates women in a 28:5 (5.6) ratio, compared to men's 26:10 (2.6). A classic rebuttal is that the test could be biased.

Reducing complex phenomena to one factor so that they can be digested on a 30-second news segment or put into soundbites by any politician is an unwelcome consequence of modern media. I have no doubt many factors cause demographic changes such as the one discussed. Testing for the weight of each factor needs scientific work and controlled experiments which are pretty much impossible to carry out, unfortunately. Until then, things will be talked and written about, but remember, it's all fluff. Someday, some historian will even write the definitive history of women in early computer science, and I have no doubt his conclusions will be as disputed as the fall of the Roman empire is today.

But these discussions will still serve as vehicles for political agendas, most of which will be of the variety "more people should be like me".

gaius9• 15 years ago

How on Earth can you gender-bias a coding test!? The compiler doesn't know if you're a boy or a girl!

dpritchett5• 15 years ago

Tiny sample size aside, a given woman is nearly four times as likely as a given man to receive an internship offer from Fog Creek provided both have reached the phone interview stage. From there, women are twice as likely to decline Fog Creek's offer, presumably due to having more & better internship options.

Survival rate by stage:

  Submitted resume gets reviewed:
      1.05 : 1 in favor of women.

  Reviewed resume gets a code review:
      1.02 : 1 in favor of women.

  Reviewed code gets a phone interview:
         1 : 1.96 in favor of men.

  Completed phone interview leads to an in-person interview:
      1.31 : 1 in favor of women.

  Completed interview leads to an offer:
      2.92 : 1 in favor of women.

  Candidate declines offer:
         2 : 1 in favor of women.

sequoia• 15 years ago

diolpah is referring to this graph, btw: http://blog.fogcreek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Gender-N...

@diolpah it is a very small sample, it probably carries no scientific relevance. It is, however, the author's fault for using it, not yours. Your analysis looks correct as far as the tiny dataset presented is concerned.

EDIT: "Because we can’t ask applicants their gender, we guessed based on first names." Nevermind. The author is a jackass for even including these data in the first place, it's as good as meaningless, even within that small cohort. Alex, Ashley, Sam, Pat, Lindsey, Jessie, any hippy name (see: my name), Quinn, Casey, Rowan... crap pseudoscience is crap.

olliesaunders2• 15 years ago

Anyone would be down-voted for saying this. Thank you for doing us the service of saying it.

dpritchett5• 15 years ago

This post is presumably part of the patio11 campaign to boost Fog Creek's SEO and conversion rates by publishing "content you can't get anywhere else". Looking good!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588431

rmc• 15 years ago

That's what I thought, but FogCreek and Joel Spolsky probably has billions of in bound links from Joel's writing. Surely they wouldn't need to attract in links?

dpritchett5• 15 years ago

You should really read the thread and post I linked above, Patrick goes over exactly what they're getting out of the new arrangement.

Also, Joel's stopped blogging for the most part so Joel on Software links might not maintain their current worth forever.

I'm not sure it's possible to have "enough" inbound links, assuming you are able to make a profit on each new customer. Given a certain level of profitable business and submaximal SEO, effort aimed at improving SEO and conversions will be the highest bang for your buck.

joshuacc• 15 years ago

1. The fact that Joel's blog is on a separate domain means that Fog Creek doesn't reap all the SEO benefits that it could have from links to his writing.

2. Having people visiting the same website where the software is actually sold gets them one step closer to purchasing.

3. There's the "top of mind" marketing effect of constantly having Fog Creek's blog posts on the front page of HN and other tech news aggregators.

curtis4• 15 years ago

I wonder what the percentage of high school graduates who can program is, broken down by gender. My guess is there's close to an order of magnitude more 18 year-old males who can program than there are 18 year-old females, at least in the U.S., anyway. Furthermore, I'd guess that many if not most 18 year-olds who can program (male or female) are largely self-taught.

My thesis here is that teenage boys are much more likely to learn to program on their own than teenage girls are, regardless of raw aptitude. This might be true of technical skills in general, but programming (I would contend) is unusual in how easy it is to learn on your own.

This is just a hypothesis on my part, and I don't have hard numbers to back it up. It's a question I'd like to see asked, though.

curtis4• 15 years ago

To extend the argument, incoming freshmen who have an aptitude for chemical engineering are likely to start on a level playing field, regardless of gender.

If you consider the CS track, though, the same is not true. Regardless of base aptitude, many more male freshmen will know how to program than will female freshmen. Females (on average) start out behind, and never catch up.

klaut• 15 years ago

that;s just so wrong. speaking from my experience, I was one of the 10 girls in a freshmen class at uni (100 of us) and yes, i was the only one that knew how to program (taught myself) but then, maybe only 10 out of all the other boys knew how to program.

benmccann• 15 years ago

Except you don't have to be able to program to be accepted to a CS program, so that shouldn't have a dramatic effect on why there are so few female students interested in CS.

curtis4• 15 years ago

This is true, but I'd contend that people who already know how to program are a lot more likely to enter a CS program, so you still get an imbalance.

The situation I'm describing is based on my experience in the U.S. In other countries it might well be the case that hardly anybody male or female, learns to program before college. If my theory is correct, then there should be less of a gender imbalance in CS programs in those countries.

bad_user• 15 years ago

But you have to know about what programming and computer science is about before WANTING to apply to a CS college. Or you can just rely on the media or your parents to tell you that CS pays good money - but that's just disastrous.

I think that CS does not appeal to females simply because females are more social than males; spending endless hours in front of a computer is not really that attractive.

jamesteow4• 15 years ago

True, but it's intimidating when a large part of the class has already had years of experience.

pflats• 15 years ago

"In the past year, the number of women majoring in Computer Science has nearly doubled at Harvard, rising from 13% to 25% (still nowhere near the 37% of 1984). [...] In the past three years, the number of female Computer Science majors at MIT has risen by 28%. And, at Carnegie Mellon, the portion of Computer Science majors who are women has moved from 1 in 5 in 2007 to 1 in 4 last year."

Focusing on the elite computer science schools obscures the overall statistic (which I don't see mentioned in the article). These schools specifically recruit and admit as many qualified females as they can into their program. At CS4HS, a CMU/Google conference for high school CS teachers, we were told as much, and tasked to do our own part to diversify our CS classes.

sp3322• 15 years ago

Here you go: It seems like sometimes the family computer is bought mainly for the boy to use and then he’s kind of forced to share it with his sister.

That pretty much explains it, doesn't it? Girls are discouraged from using computers because they learn from a young age that computers are the "domain" (property / territory) of boys.

mctavjb9• 15 years ago

Happily not the case in my family. The Apple II Plus was my Christmas present in 1980. My younger brother (now an MBA) was content playing video games when I wasn't hunched over the keyboard writing BASIC programs with alarming numbers of GOTO statements.

Do you really think that girls are discouraged from using computers in this day and age? I'm always excited to meet women who can code or who show even the slightest interest in learning how to actually program a computer because there don't seem to be very many of us (even in a place like Boston). That being said, most women that I know who are approximately my age or younger are at least reasonably adept at using software that other people wrote.

sp3322• 15 years ago

No, I just meant that if the present is given to the brother, then girls learn that computers are for boys. Especially if he defends it from her :)

flomincucci• 15 years ago

I'm a female developer. I'm not going for CS, but a Systems Engineering degree. I share classes with lots of women (well, in the best of situations, we're 1/3 of the total population of a classroom). Even knowing lots of women going for a SE degree, I can count with one hand the female developers I know. Most of them aren't interested in developing, but in functional analysis and leading teams.

Udo6• 15 years ago

> Most of them aren't interested in developing, but in functional analysis and leading teams.

But why is that so? Is it because we as a culture have decided that "men are focussed on building things" and "women are focussed on social interaction"? I'm interested in the thought process that actually motivates people to decide what they prefer to be working on.

When I look back on how I got started with programming, the overwhelming aspect for me was the incredible coolness of being able to make anything I could dream of. It's this feeling of creative empowerment that really drives me to this day. And somehow I never thought of this as being a gender-specific motivation, but I would like to hear more opinions on whether I'm mistaken or not...

pnathan• 15 years ago

Is it because we as a culture have decided that "men are focussed on building things" and "women are focussed on social interaction"?

I think that that is the root of the problem, that collective decision, that outsourcing of our moral responsibility to our bodies.

philwelch6• 15 years ago

Is it because we as a culture have decided that "men are focussed on building things" and "women are focussed on social interaction"?

"Decided" or "observed"?

maco3• 15 years ago

"Most of them aren't interested in developing, but in functional analysis and leading teams."

That was the impression I had of SEs in general during my undergrad. The CS kids wanted to be developers. The SE kids wanted to be managers.

elehack• 15 years ago

The pictures in the article show an old IBM-style computing facility, the domain of the sages in white robes who tend the machine. This raises two questions in my mind:

1. Have hackers and the hacker culture risen in importance and influence in the broader tech ecosystem since, say, 1985?

2. Has this resulted in a change of computing culture contributing to the decreasing numbers of women entering the field?

One of the things present in Levy's Hackers was that the vast majority of the movers-and-shakers in the hacker community were men. Roberta Williams was, I believe, the only woman mentioned in the book with any direct involvement in computing. Has that culture risen in influence, and is it (partly) to blame? The IBM terminal & mainframe rooms with their hospital-clean appearance don't make press much any more.

ig1• 15 years ago

"What happened to all the talented female teachers?"

In the 1960s teaching was one of the few professional occupations considered "suitable" for women, and as a result many of the best and brightest women went into education. As other occupations opened up to women this resulted in a huge brain drain, with the average ability of teacher to drop dramatically.

I imagine the same happened in programming as well, as women has more choices open up to them they naturally moved on to other fields.

lutorm2• 15 years ago

If you plot women's share of doctorates in different fields, it's pretty telling that CS is the only field in which the fraction of women dropped significantly between 1920 - 1960. In 1920, 20% of mathematics and CS PhD degrees went to women, by 1960 it was down to 5%. It took until around the turn of the century for it to get back up to 20%. (See http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf06319/)

peterwwillis2• 15 years ago

Why did I (a boy) get into computers? I was a nerd and I had one friend and no social skills. I played no sports and did nothing but play with action figures and watch TV - until I found the computer. I never gave it up until I grew up, and now it's a job and sometimes a hobby (when i'm home long enough to play with it). Would you say it's more likely or less likely that an equal percentage of girls to boys would have similar experiences? Or would you say that girls might just have an easier time socializing and might be less prompted to lose themselves on the computer?

Why do we even care about which sex works more in that field? If we had the answer to this question, and somebody decided to increase the population of women in the field... Is it going to produce better code or something? What's the point other than just playing with social structures for fun, or exercising some strange need to reach some kind of artificial equilibrium anywhere we see what we perceive as an imbalance?

tl;dr there's not as many friendless geek women and who cares who's coding anyway

blahedo• 15 years ago

I'm so glad to see this message out there; a frustratingly small number of people are aware of the 1984(ish) peak in females in the field. My mom taught computer programming (Fortran) in a Chicago high school from 1967 until 1984, and was actually kind of surprised when I first asked her about gender balance issues in the field—they just weren't an issue then, and her classes were always more or less balanced.

But what they also were was everyone's very first exposure to a computer. Without exception, her students had never written any sort of program before, and they were recruited from good students in the math and physics classes, coming to programming with an open mind and no preconceptions. (A lot of them, girls and boys both, went into technical computer-related fields.)

The change, as has been noted elsewhere on this page, surely has to do with the introduction of computers, but my hypothesis is that it wasn't just home PCs (not in the 80s) but classroom PCs that were the problem: in a lot of places, computers in the classroom were a fad and showed up with no training of the teachers, so they sat in the back or the side, mostly unused... unless one or two of the students pestered the teacher to play with the computer, and then used the manual and/or trial and error to figure it out. Guess which students were doing that more?

But that, I think, wouldn't be enough. The knowledge should equalise after one or maybe two terms of college CS, right? But I'm pretty sure the real problem was that professors inadvertently reinforced and magnified the difference between students who'd had previous computer experience (primarily boys) and students who hadn't (of both genders). It turns out that as a teacher, it's very, very easy to look around the classroom, see that X% of the students seem to be getting something, and decide to move on. (You can't wait for 100%, usually, so it's always a judgement call.) That's fine if it's something you've taught well and only the weak students are struggling, but what if it's something you absentmindedly glossed over? Half the class understands it, so you must have covered it, right? This is very insidious, and even being aware of it is not always enough to combat it; and if the divide of "has experience" vs "no experience" partially reflects a gender divide, that divide will only get reinforced.

maco3• 15 years ago

Have you seen this article? http://geekfeminism.org/2010/08/10/restore-meritocracy-in-cs...

One way teachers can even the CS 101 playing field is by doing something totally different than what the kids taught themselves or learned in high school (which is probably object oriented programming, these days).

klipt2• 15 years ago

The tone of that article seems to be "some college students are trying to game our grading system by learning programming in advance. Let's crush them by making them program in an obscure language!"

To me that sounds like "some elementary school students are trying to game our grading system by learning reading in advance. Let's crush them by making them read in an obscure language!"

joe_the_user• 15 years ago

I worked many years ago as a substitute teacher in Oakland, CA. During that time, there was interesting pattern. The vast majority of the older teachers were black and the vast majority of younger teacher were white. At a glance, this would seem strange given that discrimination was being actively attacked. But what was happening was more socially prestiges opportunities were opening for black college graduates and so few of them wanted to go into teaching, a field with less prestige than, say, law or business.

I suspect something different but with related qualities is going on with women and programming.

* Women now have more and more opportunities in a number of fields (I recall a statistic claiming the average income of a young woman college graduate in New York was higher than that of the average male college graduate).

* Programming has become a less desirable, less socially prestiges occupation.

* Programming became a more hobby-based occupation - the expectation is more that a programmer have been tinkering with computers forever and thus (as per the article).

* Programming became a more male-identified occupation through the media and through the hobby aspect.

* Age discrimination pushes the previous women programmers out of the field (and contributes to the field losing social prestige).

sunir• 15 years ago

I believe this is the major force. The reason why medicine equalized first was that it is the highest status profession. Law, business and accounting are similarly equalizing faster.

Low status professions are losing women. Usually low status non-labour professions like teachers, librarians and nurses were done by women primarily but computer science started off early equal so now it is skewed male.

It sucks to be in a low status profession but that's the way it is.

afims• 15 years ago

Based on the handful of women I know who can program, there seems to be a few reasons why not many go into CS: 1) It seems they aren't exposed to it as much. They're less likely to read about it on the internet. Or learn about it from relatives. Or take classes in it. 2) The handful that I know who took programming in high school never (or barely) turned it into a hobby, even if they later declared CS as their major.

Meanwhile, I know tons of guys who got into programming by themselves, or because their parents did it. Also, all of the CS guys I know who took programming classes in high school did some outside of class for fun.

So, when some women become CS majors, they get intimidated. They see "everyone" outperforming them, since everyone is mostly guys with a pre-built set of skills. Even guys who are so-so at something quite frequently talk like they know stuff; that's just the way guys behave. This worsens the above impression. There's an actual culture difference. Can't stress the importance of this enough.

As a result, instead of thinking "These guys have years on me and I need to catch up and put lots of work in," many women think "I suck at this," and quit. Then next set has the same problem.

EDIT: removed a bit of unintentional italicizing

SanjayUttam• 15 years ago

Totally off topic, but, is that Font intended?

ohyes• 15 years ago

"But that means that I can’t really talk to my friends about the stuff I do for my classes, which is frustrating. Sometimes, there’s a really cool idea presented in class, but it’s only cool if you already know the background information to understand it – to grasp how and why it’s cool. Trying to present enough background to explain why this concept is awesome during the course of a conversation really just doesn’t work, as they don’t get a deep enough understanding of the background to see why it’s cool and spending several minutes attempting to explain frustrates me and bores them."

As a male software developer, this frustrates me too. You just get eye-rolls and snarky replies of 'flux capacitor?'

elliottkember• 15 years ago

I hear you on this one. I think it's fashionable to not have to know anything. Look at our role models, for example - celebrities. Not so many scientists or mathematicians, mostly glitterati or athletes. It's a bit worrying.

andreiursan• 15 years ago

my experience: Where I work, on my floor we are either a proportion of 50% - 50% or 40%-60% (in favor for the Girls). Hey, but this is Romania, we don't have feminist movements and so on. Different society. Even in college we are something like 40%-60% (males win here) but we don't take it as a big deal... Btw found CS girls in college that were smarter than me on some fields of this domain :), and I know where to ask if I have a question about those fields.

other answer: Depends on the "society" although while I was in the USA everybody was blaming it... and believe me is not because of it, is because of those who like to blame it ;).

Last but not least... my girlfriend is a developer.

jwwest• 15 years ago

I can barely put up with all of the jerks in our industry as a man, I don't want to think about what it would be like as a woman.

flocial• 15 years ago

Forgot where I read it but like true_religion said, some female programmers came into the field by way of secretary. As they kept typing instructions, they eventually figured out how computers work.

This photo set from Bell Labs taken in the 1960s is pretty interesting:

http://www.luckham.org/LHL.Bell%20Labs%20Days.html

One thing to note is that despite computers being a novelty back then is that primary education was in a much better state and students had a stronger foundation in science and math regardless of sex. Many long-time teachers would say (with some nostalgia premium) that high school graduates of the 1960s are equivalent to college graduates of today.

Another thing that isn't touched on is that computer programming as it stands right now is not a very female friendly profession. Women will usually factor in the possibility that their careers may get derailed at some point by having a child. Careers where time away from the field doesn't obsolete your skills is a big plus for women. Medicine and law are excellent fields in that regard.

"Partly because it is so tricky to juggle kids and a career, many highly able women opt for jobs with predictable hours, such as human resources or accounting. They also gravitate towards fields where their skills are less likely to become obsolete if they take a career break, which is perhaps one reason why nearly two-thirds of new American law graduates are female but only 18% of engineers.

A study by the Centre for Work-Life Policy, a think-tank based in New York, found that, in 2009, 31% of American women had taken a career break (for an average of 2.7 years) and 66% had switched to working part-time or flexible-time in order to balance work and family. Having left the fast track, many women find it hard to get back on. "

http://www.economist.com/node/18988694

maeon3• 15 years ago

Of all of the female computer programmers I've gotten to know well and worked with (maybe 4 or 5), none of them were half as good as the average male programmer I've gotten to know.

Programming is, and always will be a male profession. The only thing that will change this is if we force women to learn programming, but even then you can't make them like it. I think the solution here is to realize that there is a physical pre-programmed revulsion to everything that Higher math, Physics and Programming have to offer.

zerohp• 15 years ago

I've had the opportunity to work with several women programmers. I don't think they were worse than average but none of them live to write software and use technology as a lifestyle. I have never met a female programmer that was self-taught.

I think the answer to the original question (in the title here, not the Fog Creek post) is that the rise of personal computers, and parental influence on girls at the time drove them away from it. Prior to the personal computer, most programmers were being introduced to the field in college. At the dawn of personal computing, parents viewed it as a male activity, like radio or electronics. Once this generation reached college, the males had many years of experience exploring their curiosity at home that the females did not have. College course work had to adapt to this with increased expectations of incoming freshman into Computer Science programs, which left those without computer experience intimidated and struggling.

Jem2• 15 years ago

> I have never met a female programmer that was self-taught.

Hi, how you doin' :)

britta• 15 years ago

"there is a physical pre-programmed revulsion to everything that Higher math, Physics and Programming have to offer."

This is not consistent with my understanding of myself or all the other women I've known, and it does not seem to make sense based on the women that you've known either - maybe the female programmers you've met weren't awesome at what they did, but why would they have chosen this profession if they felt a deep revulsion every day when they were learning how to program?

I am sorry that you imagine that all the many women who enjoy making contributions to these fields are fighting against some inherent evolved dislike for them, instead of reaching deep into their personal enthusiasm for these fields and fighting against the sexist attitudes and cultures they often run into.

Jem2• 15 years ago

Of all of the male programmers I've worked with, none of them were half as good as they thought they were.

WalterSear• 15 years ago

For better or worse, the thing that jumps out at me from that graph is that the numbers all look similar until you get to the code review, where half as many women made the cut as men.

If this is a statistically significant difference, it speaks volumes.

kamaal3• 15 years ago

While we analyze why there isn't much gender diversity as it is before. We must also understand how much the industry has changed over years. The volume of work that existed back in the pre - 80's era and now isn't even comparable. And with volume the culture of our profession has changed drastically.

If its your usual 9-5 job, where you have to apply routine steps everyday then it would have been OK. But being progressive in programming requires you not just to work hard(And in most cases working under difficult deadlines and overnight) you also have continuously keep learning and update yourself with things that come along everyday. This is pretty demanding if you have a family, kids and especially when you are pregnant etc. There are physical limitations in those issues. If I look at the way my career has been, I sort of had to stay and overnights and work on difficult deadlines many times over long periods. It becomes very difficult for a mother with kids to accommodate work and family in that kind of schedule. So she has to often opt to be one side. A general counter point presented to this argument is to ask the Project manager to be more come with a more accommodating plan.This is often not possible due to economic reasons, given the time, money and resource something needs to be delivered. This has nothing to do with male domination in the society, these are just unavoidable situations.

This is typical of many other professions. Why don't we find as many female cab drivers as male ones? Why don't we have as many frontline female soldiers/nurses?

Let alone all that, if the current biological situation was reversed. And men could stay at home(Do the house choses, kids, food etc) and women had to take all responsibilities of house, family, money and security for their whole life. How many women in mass(not individual cases) would be happy with such a tiring and demanding life?

Well I guess everything in the nature and the way things go have a purpose.

ladyphp2• 15 years ago

Asking why there aren't more female developers is like asking why there aren't more guys who go into nursing or more guys who wanna be fashion designers or a chef.

Perhaps its personal interest, societal view that industries like games and computers are more masculine...

Honestly, who cares if the developer is a chick or a guy as long as the application or site being built is useful

fauigerzigerk• 15 years ago

But the most common explanation is that the rise of personal computers led computing culture to be associated with the stereotype of the eccentric, antisocial, male “hacker.”

I think that's right, but the question is why girls did not use the opportunity that presented itself and put their own cultural stamp on it.

6ren• 15 years ago

Do the influxes of women correlate with industry stability?

Women tend to not like to waste their time, but men will take high risks for high returns (according to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2767867). So, men will explore, discover, invent. Some get rich; most get nothing. Women prefer reliable reward for effort e.g. law and medicine.

But the computer industry has been characterized by periodic disruptions of new hardware (mainframe, minicomputer, desktop), and while those revolutions were opportunities to make a fortune, they were not stable. Currently, the early land-grab of the web seems to have subsided and its future looks secure (e.g. smartphones aren't dethroning it). If we have entered a period of stability, it may be more attractive to women.

What happened to all the female developers?

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