Why are there so few woman developers?

http://blog.hackerearth.com/2013/12/women-programmers.html

by raghuHack • 13 years ago

10 25 13 years ago

blog.hackerearth.com

timje13• 13 years ago

It's down, does anyone have a mirror or copy?

edit: managed to get in long enough to grab the text, it's up on http://pastebin.com/5eQnCXkX with links put back in. Apologies to the author for denying them ad revenue, but your site seems to be creaking under the HN strain.

saching90• 13 years ago

Check, its up again.

evadne• 13 years ago

5-hour-old Google mirror: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:m91Zysh...

raghuHack• 13 years ago

Openshift has failed us :(

Thanks for putting up the mirrors. Do read and tell us what you think :)

nakedrobot2• 13 years ago

I'm tired about all these "Why aren't there so many female engineers?" articles. What is the mystery? The answer is very clear.

Girls, from birth, are subject to absolutely enormous pressure (even if it's subconscious) on the part of nearly everyone they ever come into contact with, to be "girls" and not "men".

If you haven't noticed it before, try having a daughter, and realize that you do it too. I don't care who you are. You do it too.

In a sense, it's hard to consider this as something strange - of course, people talk to each other differently, dependong on who they are. You talk to children differently than you talk to adults, for example. What is difficult is to adjust to the idea that women on men, on certain levels, should be addressed in the same way, and on other levels, addressed in different ways.

marquis2• 13 years ago

I loved my Dad. He let me hang out with him in his workshop, he did cool tech stuff with computers (back when having their guts spilled out on the floor was the norm). I grew up loving tech because I loved my Dad, and it just become something I gravitated to. Might not be the entry point for all women but Dads - hang out with your daughters and spill the guts of your computers on the floor and make the lights blink.

hedgew• 13 years ago

That pressure is not only external - it's also internal[1]. Often it's a wasted effort to try and treat your children in gender-neutral ways, they simply prefer to play with dolls and robots, and then you're just forcing your preferences on your children. Work with children and the extent to which our preferences are coded into our genes becomes even more evident.

An alternative conclusion we can draw from the statistics described in the article is that women are just as capable of pursuing careers in computer science if they so choose. The fact that there is a skewed gender distribution may not necessarily be a problem, but merely a difference in preferences. As long as we have no law or other system that discriminates against women or men, there may be no one but our biology to blame for such skewness.

[1] Behavioural gender differences become evident at very early ages, before any external pressure is exerted upon children. This is a widely studied issue, see for example:

Alexander, G. M., & Hines, M. (2002). Sex differences in response to children's toys in nonhuman primates (Cercopithecus aethiops sabaeus). Evolution and Human Behavior, 23, 467–469.

Bailey, J. M., & Zucker, K. J. (1995). Childhood sex-typed behavior and sexual orientation: A conceptual analysis and quantitative review. Developmental Psychology, 31, 43–55.

Bauer, J. A., Shimojo, S., Gwizada, J., & Held, R. (1986). Sex differences in the development of human infants. Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, 27, 265–273.

Berenbaum, S. A., & Hines, M. (1992). Early androgens are related to childhood sex-typed toy preferences. Psychological Science, 3, 203–206.

Liss, M. B. (1981). Patterns of toy play: An analysis of sex differences. Sex Roles, 7, 1143–1150.

timje13• 13 years ago

Interestingly, when mothers learn the gender of their child, they talk to their daughters in the womb more than they talk to their sons.

There was another study published recently that suggested that male and female babies might get subtly different breast milk.

Basically it's extremely difficult to separate what's genes and what's environment/culture. Because a baby is treated differently, fed differently and spoken to differently, based on gender, their entire lives (and before, depending on your definition of life).

marquis2• 13 years ago

number of intelligent women coders

As opposed to middling intelligence? I'll assume this is a language miscommunication.

most of them quit half way Male dominated workplaces seem to be a contributing factor to this.

Chicken and egg problem: speaking from experience it's really hard, for your entire career, to be around men and more men all day long. Hiring women is hard. Getting women into programming via Dev Bootcamps has been the best attack on this I've seen, and it's a fun way to do it.

I think it’s coded into a woman’s DNA to not take their careers as seriously as a man and the change of that mindset starts at home.

Stop right there! Cultural assumptions abound!

If there is any hope for an equal representation of genders in IT, it has got to change from the grass roots level.

Correct. More dev bootcamps please.

what difference will women bring to technology. Well, I don’t know about difference

What did women entering law, politics and medical fields do? Maybe nothing immediately obvious but the social ramifications these last hundred years or so have been massive, if nothing else I got to grow up having role models.

Edit: links for related dev bootcamps or intro classes:

http://railsgirls.com

http://hackbrightacademy.com

http://women2.com/tag/dev-bootcamp

taude• 13 years ago

And PyLadies: http://www.pyladies.com/

Boston specific meetup: http://www.meetup.com/PyLadies-Boston/

timje13• 13 years ago

I'd like to see someone explore the link between autism spectrum disorders and computer science. I remember seeing a study of majors in the states (does this ring a bell? I can't find it) that put the average CompSci major actually on the spectrum, where the other majors didn't come close to this prevalence.

Throw in that boys are overrepresented in high-functioning autism / aspergers numbers by a 7:1 ratio, and you've got a possible biological explanation for at least some of the gender bias in the field.[0] The linked study has a 12:1 ratio for aspergers!

This is just a hypothesis but I'd love to see it studied further. There might be some biological bias at work here, instead of making it a purely cultural thing (and without bringing in the evo-psych malarky).

[0] http://www.la-press.com/gender-ratios-in-autism-asperger-syn...

moron4hire4• 13 years ago

can we please not do that? we finally got past the last set of assholes crooning about how "autistic, therefore good at programming" they were.

bowlofpetunias• 13 years ago

I don't think it's a good idea to ignore facts just because they are inconvenient and/or some assholes try to abuse them.

tekalon• 13 years ago

Anecdotal: Both my sister and my husband are on the spectrum. Both studied some form of math, physics, computer science. Not being on the spectrum myself, I have observed that I've learned/taught myself STEM subjects differently than they have. I mainly see this just as how the world is seen by those that are neuro-diverse.

moron4hire4• 13 years ago

Our culture bludgeons us over the head with the concepts that A) women are supposed to be social creatures, more-so than men, and B) programmers are supposed to be anti-social, but we put up with it because "aint nobody got time to understand what they do, amiright, yuck yuck yuck". So, when people internalize those messages, it isn't difficult to figure out the result. At least in America, programmers tend to act like anti-social assholes and women tend to have a lower tolerance for anti-social behavior.

bluedino• 13 years ago

Another question: Why are there so few African-American developers? Diversity at a developer meetup is a bunch of white guys along with a splash of Indian and East Asians.

merrua• 13 years ago

There are a lot of woman developers. Whenever I hear people asking this question, I automatically think, What you mean is "Why am I ignoring all the woman developers?". Where developers can be replaced by authors/bloggers/ceo's etc. There isn't 50/50 but there is a lot of them out there.

tiredofthis• 13 years ago

Why are there so few man nurses? Innate preferences in the sexes, that's why. Deal with it already, I'm tired of this gender theory bullshit being pushed on HN.

moron4hire4• 13 years ago

I'm assuming you understand just how completely unlikely your statement is to find any sympathy, considering you made this account to make this statement.

ds9• 13 years ago

The actual title is "Why do we not have enough women programmers?". And I question the premise. The writer does not directly address this point, but an implicit premise is that if the proportion differs much from 50% we should look for something wrong.

Well, that's somewhat reasonable so far - certainly there are cultural factors impeding what would occur in different conditions, and maybe causing societies to miss some talent and individuals to fail to realize their potential. But the goal should be only to attain whatever percentage naturally results when any undesirable interferences are removed, and that condition is so poorly defined that we can't say that near 50% would be the outcome.

The correct approach, IMHO, is to attack any problems that are found in upbringing, education system and workplace culture - not with a goal of increasing representation of any group, but instead to remove any unfair treatment, sexism, loss of valuable contributions and so on - just because those things are undesirable - and then whatever results will be OK.

xname• 13 years ago

Why are there so few male nurses? Why are there so few male elementary teachers? Why are there so many male soldiers?

Why man and woman? Why homo sapiens cannot asexual reproduction? Is this where the evolution fails?

geebee• 13 years ago

This is a tough one for me. I hope I don't have to say that I am very opposed to discrimination against women, and I think we should take this problem seriously.

However, I also have to wonder if the scarcity of women in software is simply the result of better career decision making among women.

The sf chronicle (sfgate.com) recently released a list of jobs and what they pay in SF. RNs (registered nurses) earn an average salary of about $112,000 a year. Application developers, on the other hand, earn about $111,000 a year.

http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2013/12/17/what-the-most-co...

Interestingly, physicians and pharmacists aren't listed (perhaps there aren't enough of them to make the list). Laywers, in spite of recent issues in the legal world, are still listed as having an average salary of $166,000 a year in San Francisco.

Nursing is 90% women. Pharmacy is about 56% women. At UCSF, the entering medical school class is 58% women. At Boalt law school (UC Berkeley), the entering class is 54% women.

Average don't tell the whole story. There's good and bad in everything. Many lawyers give up, so there is some survivor bias here (though you could certainly say the same thing about developers - many people believe firmly that there is bad age bias after age 40, something that doesn't appear to happen in health fields).

In terms of career stability and earnings, long term, I actually think that all of the fields (except perhaps law) listed above are probably better choices for academically talented students.

I post this a lot, but here it is again - the RAND institute concluded that the american aversion to graduate degrees in STEM fields is rational and market driven, a response to poor prospects and pay relative to the options available high achieving students in other fields.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html

We should at least consider the possibility that avoidance of STEM degrees and software development careers may actually reflect better career decision making. We say that young women are generally outperforming young men academically, but not in STEM. Well, maybe avoidance of STEM is just another manifestation of how women are making better choices in life than men are.

big_maybe• 13 years ago

In my last job I led a dev team made up of 8 women and 1 man (we did internal front-ends). The rest of the programmers in the company, including web, platform, DBA, IT, QA, devices etc. had plenty of excellent women working there.

I don't know why this particular company didn't suffer from gender imbalance in their computer science depts. There was no "affirmative action" directive coming from above; we hired the best human for the job.

It's possible that success breeds success. The more women worked there, the more women were comfortable there. Many programmers had migrated from the business side of the company (which needed to be pretty technical) so that may have been a factor.

KrisAndrew• 13 years ago

A lack of women in a given profession usually means there's no work-life balance there.

Why are there so few woman developers?

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