When She Codes, The Revolution’s Coming

http://www.torontostandard.com/business/when-she-codes-the-revolutions-coming/

by queenstreet • 15 years ago

115 137 15 years ago

Is Ladies Learning Code awesome and feminist, or just awesome?

It's a fantastic movement, and the feminist in me is very happy to see the profession moving away from such a male focus. My only concern with articles like this (and female friends who participate in similar learning) is that learning HTML hardly makes you employable as a hot-shot startup whizz. In fact, it's arguable that HTML isn't even programming, it's really just basic computer use skills these days. I suppose we all have to start somewhere (I started with HTML too), but I hope these "ladies" don't stop with HTML.

zmanji• 15 years ago

The first event was learning Ruby. See: http://ladieslearningcode.com/events/

prophetjohn5• 15 years ago

The first event that I see on that page is "HTML and CSS or Beginners."

It seems like the class the author took was "WordPress with Wes Bos," since she mentioned that he was the lead instructor

grncdr• 15 years ago

A comment on the OP from somebody associated with Ladies Learning to Code mentions that they have a much broader range of courses available, with more planned for the future. It's great to see this program meeting success, the number of similar initiatives that just sort of wither can be depressing.

martythemaniak• 15 years ago

They talk about needing to know enough to effectively communicate with developers, not being a start up whiz.

guard-of-terra• 15 years ago

If you know HTML+JS+CSS (and know it really well), then you're the hottest technical specialist on the market.

Compared to back-end programming it's harder to learn by accident (surprisingly so), it requires less common character traits, it's less rewarding in the weird programming sense than coding neat gems in ruby. But the demand is huge because most projects has bigger front-end than back-end these days.

mpeg• 15 years ago

It's not really arguable - HTML is not programming, it's markup.

But the point is not to make someone employable as a "hot-shot startup whizz"; just to teach them some basics so they can communicate with devs as equals. And anyway, it would be worrying if just taking a few coding lessons would qualify someone to be employable as a programmer at all :)

prophetjohn5• 15 years ago

> I left Ladies Learning Code having accomplished my goal. I built a WordPress.org

What does this actually mean? The sentence itself seems to indicate that the class was focused around learning to program by building a WordPress clone. My suspicion based on reading the whole article is that she took a class showing her how to use WordPress to create a blog. If she doesn't know the distinction, I'm skeptical that she really learned to program in any meaningful way.

I do think it's great that people who are mostly technically illiterate are making efforts to change that, though.

sequoia• 15 years ago

Wordpress dot com is a blog hosting service based on wordpress. Perhaps she meant they were setting up a web server to run multiple blogs with multiple users, using wordpress as as a platform (and specifically the MultiSite feature https://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network ).

I can see how this would be a useful endeavor. In any case, yes, her language may be imprecise here but remember to be forgiving to people who are just learning!!! You are skeptical of her skills; I am skeptical of the notion that you have enough information to evaluate her skills or the class. :)

prophetjohn5• 15 years ago

No, you're right; I don't really have enough information to evaluate her skills, mainly because she didn't talk about what she learned. So, the language she used to describe technical things is the only way I could try to evaluate her technical knowledge.

And upon further review, it seems pretty likely that the class she took is this one: http://ladieslearningcodejan14.eventbrite.com/

lizzard4• 15 years ago

As a developer for BlogHer, a women's media company with a big network of independent women bloggers, I hear lots of people who don't know the correct terminology say things like this. When they say "a WordPress.org" they mean "a self-hosted WordPress site".

prophetjohn5• 15 years ago

I know what she meant, just like I know what my mom means when she points to her computer tower and calls it a CPU or calls her browser a search engine. I was just trying to make the point that her vocabulary didn't reflect a person who was particularly competent at programming. I later realized that she likely only learned enough HTML and CSS to customize a WordPress page, which just means that I assumed wrong about what the "Learning Code" portion of the program name implied.

josscrowcroft• 15 years ago

So I'm reading this, then I skim down and see how long it is. I read some more.

Is it me or did this make no real point at all?

Ladies learning code. Good idea, because more people coding is good, ladies or otherwise. I fail to see why the author is so amazingly hung up on whether or not it's feminist.

prophetjohn5• 15 years ago

The writing definitely struck me as pretty meandering. I was pretty sure I was going to read about what the class was like and what she learned at first, but then it just kind of veered off into debating whether or not it was a feminist organization with no real direction. It's only tangentially about learning to use WordPress.

ceol27• 15 years ago

You're missing the point of the article. It's not about getting you introduced to the class; it's about discussing why this class is dedicated to women but not identifying as "feminist".

antirez• 15 years ago

> “If we allow the future of the web, software, hardware, video games, etc. to be conceptualized, created and maintained by just one sector of the population, it’s impossible to expect that it will serve the needs of the entire group.

I don't think it is so bad, if there is an user base soon or later a web site will be created serving the needs of this user base, because this means profit for the site creator. It seems strange to think that to represent everybody's need the web needs to be developed by everybody.

Just to make a more concrete example, games appear to be really developed with men in mind, but this is because the population of players is mostly dominated by teenager males.

rabidsnail• 15 years ago

The population of players of video games is dominated by teenager males because the developers of video games have teenager males in mind.

Game developers have teenager males in mind because the original game developers _were_ teenager males.

Farmville and Wii Sports show that there is a vast market for video games aimed at women that is only now starting to be explored.

mekoka5• 15 years ago

The population of players of video games is dominated by teenager males because the developers of video games have teenager males in mind.

I would not be so sure. We all played games like pac-man, goonies, super mario and such. I remember when we were kids that we had tons of somewhat gender neutral games, but boys were the ones mostly interested in playing. Looking back, I'm more convinced today that it was a cultural issue. Girls were simply conditioned to do "girl things". Eventually, game developers skewed their production toward their dominant market. This conditioning still exists today, but is slowly disappearing and game developers will, in time, adjust accordingly.

cpeterso• 15 years ago

> The population of players of video games is dominated by teenager males because the developers of video games have teenager males in mind.

As of 2011, the average age for a video game player is 37, a number slowly increasing as people who were children playing the first arcade, console and home computer games continue playing now on current systems.

Plus, video games (and consoles) are expensive. It helps to have a job. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_culture#Demographic...

nupark2• 15 years ago

> It seems strange to think that to represent everybody's need the web needs to be developed by everybody.

It's not that strange. It's hard to represent the needs of people that you don't fully understand.

When it comes to an under-represented cultural/social/racial group, I simply don't understand the market, what they want, or what is important to them. I don't come up anything like the ideas that entrepreneurial members of that group will come up with, and even once I've heard the ideas, it often takes a radical shift in my thinking to see the advantages.

Women make up roughly 50% of the population, but many industries repeatedly fail to provide the products that women would prefer -- as you've almost accidentally elucidated above with your comment regarding video games.

politician• 15 years ago

So, I know a few developers at theknot.com, the life events site whose entire market is women. Apparently, most of the ~40 developers are men, yet they seem to serve the needs of their target market successfully.

The idea that men can't write code which women can feel comfortable using is absurd.

Craiggybear3• 15 years ago

I don't know. Women have always coded. I was taught assembler (my first programming job) by a woman.

They have always been there (admittedly in smaller numbers then men) but they have always struck me as being excellent coders.

We have women like Ada Lovelace and Grace Murray Hopper as fine computing minds to emulate and admire.

Women have always been able to take to coding in my experience and be first class at it. They tend to be good at languages -- better than men generally -- and that includes programming languages, too.

pjscott• 15 years ago

> Women have always been able to take to coding in my experience and be first class at it.

When you say this, I'm not sure what you mean. Here are some possible interpretations:

(a) Most women can be first-class programmers.

(b) Among first-class programmers, some are women.

Craiggybear3• 15 years ago

All of the above. Probably.

mangodrunk4• 15 years ago

Don't include Ada with Hopper as Ada didn't really contribute anything and she is incorrectly considered the first programmer. Hopper actually did something and she did influence the field.

Craiggybear3• 15 years ago

That's simply not true. Countess Lovelace was a brilliant algorithmic wrangler. She was one of the first of her time to realise that any mathematically definable problem could be reduced to a series of true/false branches and that from that a machine (mechanical or electronic) would be able to make calculations of almost any type.

She also was behind a lot of analysis of stuff like log table errors.

This is probably more the definition of a Systems Analyst, but that job doesn't exist anymore, so we would regard her as a coder.

mekoka5• 15 years ago

Avery Swartz, a mentor at another table, works as a freelance website designer. “A lot of my clients are women. They don’t necessarily want to work with a man because they are afraid of the intimidation factor, the tech speak, the ‘jargon’. I want women to feel empowered, to know that they can take an active role.”

This is not a gender problem, it's pedagogical. My granddad would be intimidated to learn to code for those exact same reasons. I assume that having a name like Ladies Learning Code somewhat entices women to approach programming with the perspective that the pedagogy will be different. Playing on the notion that there's an alternative way to explain code to different gender might be a good marketing ploy, but I'm wondering if it's not also doing a disservice by perpetuating the myth.

Cushman4• 15 years ago

You're missing the point-- it is about gender. Women don't want to work with, and especially learn from, men because they are afraid that the man will not know how to speak to them as an equal. They're afraid he'll hide his discomfort behind jargon, and that he will be unable to be nice without being patronizing. Heaven forfend that this man, like many highly technical people, is socially awkward in general! In that case, he may be outright incapable of communicating with them.

They're not afraid of this by chance; this is a rational fear arising from a hundred, a thousand previous encounters with men, even trained teachers, who were abjectly unable to interact with women in a way that left them feeling comfortable. This is of course not to say that such men do not exist, as they surely do. But after a decade or two of experience, why roll the dice?

jdp23• 15 years ago

Well said. It's a pedagogical problem; and it's about gender.

lizzard4• 15 years ago

I totally agree with you, except I don't think fear is quite the right way to frame it, and perhaps more that many women know they will be talked down to, make a rational decision that they don't want to put up with that, and do something else with their time.

invalidOrTaken• 15 years ago

This was on my mind earlier, but, finding myself unable to put it into words, I didn't comment.

My first thought when I read the article was "lol 'built a wordpress.org,' nice." Then I realized I was being an idiot and that it's great that they're learning. But something didn't jive---excluding my little sister, at no point can I remember teaching a female anything technical without getting either impatient or patronizing.

But, as I think about it, both are signs that I wasn't really there to teach. I was either trying to impress them, or uphold my self-image of being smart, or something else that wasn't teaching.

As a single guy of no particular attractiveness studying a technical subject, I consider myself a member of what one could call the aspirational class of the social world. I don't feel satisfied with where I am in life. Considering the low value we place on teaching in our society, I'm pretty sure teaching would not be a good way to remedy this.

I wouldn't be surprised if many male teachers of technical subjects aren't really happy to be teaching at all. Wallowing in their discontent or outside ambitions, perhaps they're unable to fully engage in the empathy required for good teaching. Questions "obvious" from the instructor's point of view will be brushed off or scorned, reflections of his self-hate. A male student hearing this will think, "Fuck him, I'll learn this anyway." A female student will think, "Why on earth am I hanging out in this environment?"

rue• 15 years ago

> They're not afraid of this by chance; this is a rational fear arising from a hundred, a thousand previous encounters with men, even trained teachers, who were abjectly unable to interact with women in a way that left them feeling comfortable.

This is a somewhat prejudiced argument; try switching the roles, or maybe adding ethnicity in there, and you'll see. “Everyone knows” etc.

Of course, that's not to say it must be untrue. The (at least perceived) alternate pedagogy does seem to work, so I'm all for it!

kd12213• 15 years ago

It's not about gender. From your point of view it's about character weakness. A woman has bad experiences with men, so she should be trained to seek haven among women? If she wants to get a mortgage, should she do so only through a female mortgage broker? If she wants to buy a car, does it have to be sold to her by a woman? Or more generally does she need to attend a women-only class that teaches her to negotiate with salesmen? Sounds like a form of community codependency to me.

A better solution might be to teach women (and men) to accept and understand different styles of communication. And that class shouldn't be gender-specific.

In regard to programming, another commenter had a great solution. Get some books, make a github account, learn to code. You have complete anonymity on github. It's a place where all aspects of your individuality can drop out of consideration except the most important in the context: your ability to understand and write code.

yummyfajitas7• 15 years ago

It is about gender. Men don't want to work with women because they are afraid that the women won't be able to reason logically. They're afraid she might hide her insecurity behind politics and power trips, and she will be unable to be assertive without being controlling. Heaven forfend that this woman, like many women with careers, is bitchy in general! In that case, she may be outright incapable of working with logical technical types.

They're not afraid of this by chance; this is a rational fear arising from a hundred, a thousand previous encounters with women, even women in management, who were abjectly unable to interact with men in a way that left them feeling comfortable. This is of course not to say that such women do not exist, as they surely do. But after a decade or two of experience, why roll the dice?

Now that I've flipped the genders, do you see how offensive your comment is?

My general view: if women are avoiding computing due to the stereotypes and intolerance as you describe, then good riddance.

radarsat1• 15 years ago

I agree that it's not a gender problem, or at least not only a gender problem. But the problem being more general does not necessarily imply that the solution should be equally general. I think a class like this might be just thing thing to get a certain class of women interested in programming, which is never a bad thing, even if it doesn't help people like your granddad. A similar class for older people might be just as successful. Sometimes being very targeted with your demographic is a better approach than trying to solve an entire, huge problem in one shot.

Of course, I imagine there are plenty of women who would never attend a class called "Ladies Learning Code," but they might be receptive to a different strategy. The point is that having multiple fronts in this war on computer illiteracy may be more effective than having a single big one.

prodigal_erik2• 15 years ago

Never a bad thing? The median male developer is so inept at writing correct software that the industry would be better off without him. If these women weren't irresistibly drawn to the work, how can we expect them to be substantially better, rather than merely doubling the amount of crap we're already struggling with? If anything, we need a much tougher filter before we go out and entice the masses.

kd12213• 15 years ago

Also, I fear that groups of women programming might not get the same experience as if they were also programming with men. I'm skeptical of the value of gender-biased environments helping defeat perceived gender biases found in a particular activity. It seems it would only further promote gender biases.

The program fails if most of the women, upon exiting the program, start programming with men and say "This isn't like Ladies Learning Code!" and either quit programming altogether or simply join other groups of women to program.

akoumjian2• 15 years ago

What I find interesting is that "tech jargon" is listed as the number one reason these women feared getting involved in the technical side of there businesses. It is not as though men are born knowing this jargon; they spend both work and free time learning it as a part of their interests.

I know this is an old question, but how are we raising our young women to shy away from these things? Why is it acceptable to let young girls get away with not having to learn the small bits of technical language that will help them develop an interest and feel confidence with these subjects at a young age?

lizzard4• 15 years ago

Why? Because misogyny is a tool that can be wielded in many directions. And it gets wielded to defend privilege and power. Once a field is defined as powerful, part of an elite, girls often are driven out of it as that field or interest is redefined to be a male thing. Boys, and girls too, ostracize and mock girls who are "into computers" because they are going outside a gender norm. If you think this doesn't still happen, hang out with some kids in a computer lab.

jacoblyles2• 15 years ago

Your world model doesn't fit the fact that women have been gaining in every elite profession I can think of over the last 50 years. Take the example of the gender breakdown of law and medicine students:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/equality-for-women-bet...

Also, I would like to journey to this mythical world of yours where programming is considered an "elite" job.

SolarNet2• 15 years ago

This, most definitely this. It wasn't until I went to university until I noticed it (And a very feminist [In the fact it has a large women's studies program] university at that, considering it was originally an all girls school).

Our major's lab probably isn't as bad as some, but there are still plenty of times that I could see a woman not feeling welcome in that room. I try to call them out on it, with the help of some other people, but it's only a marginal thing.

We also got some grant money to teach a general intro to CS class (marketed to freshmen, with a word choice aimed at females) that was very successful (and covered topics from basic programming, to algorithms and data structures, and touching on a lot of fields like cryptography, AI, graphics, ect.) 2 quarters after that class and our ratio of female majors has gone from 1:9 to 1:7. (Which may also be other factors)

But at least our majors lab has stopped singling out women for their gender...

nahname• 15 years ago

You are confused if you think it is just girls who are ostracized for being "into computers". I'd agree that it may be worse for girls, but I would explain that being due to girls having a much larger propensity to emotional hurt one another than boys.

akoumjian2• 15 years ago

I think maybe you read the first part of my statement and not the second. Please read my original statement.

Of course I think this still happens. I'm not shocked, just frustrated. I'm wondering what we can do as individuals to change this.

berntb• 15 years ago

I approve of people learning to be programmer professionally or as a hobby, I think it is a good thing.

But this repeated media phenomenon of people learning to code is something that really worry me -- it is like 1999 again.

It feels like when mainstream media writes that it is time to invest in the stock market; when e.g. Time write about how good it is going, it is so far over the hill that soon there will be a crash...

moocow012• 15 years ago

Obviously nothing to do with more women learning to code (sounds great to me), but I share your fear. The hype makes me cringe a little bit. I wish it didn't but I've seen this cycle too many times. Every time there is an overhyped market, the deflation gets preceded with a media push of 'you should get involved with this' because its the wave of the future.

geargrinder• 15 years ago

Maybe the next Request for Startups should be "By Women, For Women."

Seems there might be an opportunity to address the other half of the population, for their ideas and for the market.

eternalban3• 15 years ago

"If we allow ..."

Who is this we and how is this authoritarian power exercised?

Interestingly enough, Age discrimination in the industry continues to be ignored while the (IMO) highly debatable notion of sex discrimination in the field is the subject of countless articles and debates. At least the Japanese are honest about the fact that they don't want programmers older than 30 years of age.

The barrier to entry in this field is low. Github, for example, doesn't ask you to check a box with your sex when you open an account. Nor do I care one bit when I [pull] a project if the author was a woman.

ceol27• 15 years ago

There's nothing debatable about gender discrimination existing in the industry. It's not your opinion. It exists.

Age discrimination exists as well, but that's not what this article is about, and you shouldn't try to grab focus with it.

eternalban3• 15 years ago

My personal experience in the field does not support your apparently strongly held assertion. Thus "IMO".

> "you shouldn't try to grab focus with"

Please do not question my motivation. I had a point to make.

rdouble• 15 years ago

At least the Japanese are honest about the fact that they don't want programmers older than 30 years of age.

When I lived in Japan it seemed like nobody even got a job until they were 30...

moocow012• 15 years ago

We always talk about ageism in the US but thats really the double whammy if both of these statements are true. I guess you'd have a year long career as a programmer.

angrycoder• 15 years ago

I personally have worked with half a dozen programmers over 40 and 2 over 50. All of the people I currently work with are over 30, myself included.

I have worked with one female developer in my entire career.

Drbble3• 15 years ago

I have worked with more female coders than over-40s. Maybe the industry is changing, and that change is visible at younger companies with younger staff.

Also, minorities tend to congregate in supportive environments, so you will find a bimodal distribution of organizations with peaks at many or no women, and trough at 1 or few women.

hippee-lee• 15 years ago

My take on the article is that she had a problem - she needed to better understand how things worked underneath the web software that is Wordpress. The meeting she wrote about helped her do that. It also raised (meta?) questions related to gender issues in the technology field.

As the married father of a four year old daughter, I do get the sense of comfort that is prevalent in ladies clubs. Watching my daughter play with boys and girls, just boys and then just girls I have observed a noticeable difference in the intersections between the children. I have also noticed the differences in my wife's book club (all women) when its her turn to host. It's not that they exclude me or the other guy's we are friends with but, the books they read are not to my taste so I would not be able to contribute anything meaningful to the discussion. Although I do still need read The Girl With THe Dragon Tattoo book on their recommendation.

So reading about an women's club where they go into the basics of coding is a good thing even if most of the members never become elite programmers - they will have learned a valuable skill in a comfortable setting. That is something they can take back to work and apply now: how to talk to the programmer in a meaningful way. For my daughters generation (not just girls) I am coming to suspect that a line will be drawn between those who can make use of the technology underneath the productivity tools their generation is raised on (web/office being the most prevalent today) and learning to code in anything is a step towards being successful in any field, not just web and software.

gtani• 15 years ago

It's growing movement

http://sfrubyworkshops.com/

byrneseyeview• 15 years ago

First sentence:

"The magazine I also work for, is rebuilding our website in WordPress."

I couldn't find anything valuable in the first few paragraphs. Can anyone post a quick summary of any specific facts from the article that were surprising, or are going to affect the reader's behavior in the future?

mycodebreaks• 15 years ago

Honestly, I really do not understand why women being programmers is such a hyped concept. I have seen many women as doctors, lawyers and in science. Women might be more interested in other professions, which I think is the only reason that keeps women from working as programmers or engineers.

Definitely, the problem, if it is a problem, is due to choice women make, not due to their abilities.

ceol27• 15 years ago

Women becoming programmers is hyped for the same reason women becoming doctors and lawyers was hyped decades ago: diversity fuels innovation. They're interested in other professions because the culture surrounding programming is such a "boy's club", it's like a nigh-impenetrable shield. And it's not so much they're interested in other professions as they are pushed away from programming.

The lack of women in programming isn't their fault. It's ours.

lrhot912• 15 years ago

Please name a couple of diversity-fuelled innovations

blahedo• 15 years ago

This is pretty great. Its first-order effects would be good enough: a successful class that turns people from mere users into content creators. Great!

But the second-order effects may be more important. Nearly anyone, when first introduced to computers, is "just" a user---they use the computer in the ways that are taught to them. Those of us that progress into general programmers generally had some transition phase where we were sort of "just users", typing something in or following instructions, but those things we typed in were our gateway to the next level. For me, it was typing in BASIC listings from magazines in the mid-80s on the family Apple IIe, and then figuring out that I could tweak them and make the programs do new things that weren't in the original article. For some of my students these days, it was typing in WoW macros and then learning to tweak their own.

A couple years ago, I had a student whose original entree into programming came via a web design class mostly involving HTML and largely done using a front-end app (Dreamweaver maybe?). But it was a start, and it inspired her to learn more about HTML and then eventually to take AP CS and major in it in college. I think her sex and her gender are only statistically relevant here---there most certainly are girls that play video games and will want to write macros, and there are boys that can will be well-served by an HTML-first curriculum. But she suspected, and I agree, that teaching people structured content creation will have long-term effects of increasing the ratio of females in all areas of CS.

But whether that speculation is accurate or not, let's not be dissing this person's experience because it's not programming-y enough. We don't need to be gatekeeping the secrets of the High Priesthood here; everyone needs to start somewhere. And whether Ms. Mlotek eventually goes on into "true" programming or not, she's more computer-empowered than before, so we should be happy for her, and if not her then others who go through this program, both male and female, will find their way into programming and other CS disciplines. And that is something we should all be happy about.

(PS: For those of you complaining that the post was more about feminism than programming, she warned you right there in the subhed: "Is Ladies Learning Code awesome and feminist, or just awesome?". What did you think it would be about?)

mkramlich• 15 years ago

Fortunately you can learn from books, magazines, videos and websites and the computer itself and none of them care what gender, race or age you are. Just settle down and start learning. And most of those methods are free too.

lizzard4• 15 years ago

That is true, and yet it is also true that it's helpful for many women to learn coding with each other's social support.

petegrif• 15 years ago

Good for you guys. Awesome!

ricefield• 15 years ago

Is it just me, or is the title an allusion to the Biblical name 'Methusaleh' (meaning, when he dies, the flood comes)

sgrossman2• 15 years ago

The title is a reference to the song "Rebel Girl" by the seminal Riot Grrrl band Bikini Kill.

Drbble3• 15 years ago

"seminal", huh. I doubt whether they would take that as a compliment.

vectorpush2• 15 years ago

Amazon.com will sell you many great books regardless of gender. Github.com will let you study quality code regardless of gender. Codeacademy.com will teach you some fundamentals regardless of gender. Google.com permits queries for all genders.

Are sexism and discrimination real problems? I think they are. I also think programs like Ladies Learn Code are important and encouraging, but there are no powerful men or fumbling neckbeards preventing women from accessing the knowledge that would empower them as developers.

lv0• 15 years ago

i liked this maybe can help my talented but apathetic teenage sister want to pick up coding.

patrocles• 15 years ago

unlol. Trolling with intent to kill...

although to get back to the lulz, it's Trolling with Intent to Bikini Kill ;)

When She Codes, The Revolution’s Coming

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