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Full disclosure: I'm a working female software developer, blah blah blah... > I want to be that girl who no one thought she could, who had all the odds against

by krstck 11y ago

Full disclosure: I'm a working female software developer, blah blah blah... > I want to be that girl who no one thought she could, who had all the odds against her, that everyone thought was dumb, and yet she becomes incredibly successful in computer science. Then I want to turn that success around and use it a pedestal to expose every wound, every failure, every painful vulnerability I have, even with my hands trembling, because that is what I believe is what motivates women and gives them the strength and personal recognition of ‘if she can do it, so can I’, which then lights the spark to explore the field and helps women find their inner-strength to go for it. I think this is a great sentiment, but....and maybe I'm just not hanging out in the right parts of the internet or whatever...but I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect. Maybe they just aren't upvoted to the top of HN or r/programming, heh. I've had a hard time articulating why I feel so prickly about promoting specifically "getting more women into tech", because I feel like it's starting to become this giant show pony. I think it's great that this lady is going into this field, but I feel really weird about this characterization that CS is supposed to be so super scary and women need special hand-holding and encouragement to attempt it. I started programming when I was a kid because I wanted to make stuff. Nobody told me it was supposed to be hard or supposed to be for boys or whatever. I think we're doing a huge disservice by promoting this idea that programming is some super elusive thing - if we want more women in programming, then let's talk about how cool it is to build stuff, instead of how we can be role models or whatever. Just the opinion of one "woman in tech", I don't speak for anyone else but myself.

ma2rten 11y ago
I agree, but I feel this post is not really about that. It applies to guys equally. It's just that the author happens to be female. At least it was very relatable to me.
- fossuser 11y ago
  Yeah the core of the article is that it's good to admit ignorance and ask questions - that's how you learn quickly. Paradoxically people will actually think you're smarter for it anyway - it's often when you pretend you know something you don't that you appear dumb. The gender commentary is a distraction.
- iherbig 11y ago
  I think the problem that krstck is trying to address is not so much that the anecdote is invalid, but that prefacing it with "I'm a female programmer" colors the rest of the anecdote. Instead of it being a general anecdote which may be relatable to everyone in the field, it's specifically an anecdote about being a woman in computing. And krstck is saying there are certain problems that come along with that coloring of things.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
visarga 11y ago
> I think we're doing a huge disservice by promoting this idea that programming is some super elusive thing It's certainly not super elusive but it requires a specific kind of people that don't get anxious/frustrated when tackling complex systems, often badly documented. Some hate this kind of work, others love it. It involves having a certain type of personality as much as high IQ. Most men feel helpless when tacking such problems, too.
- c3534l 11y ago
  > a specific kind of people that don't get anxious/frustrated when tackling complex systems Eh, you learn to not let that get to you because you build up experience working through it over time. I think that's a learned skill, not an innate, immutable trait. Also: > Basic Cognitive Skills, as measured by standard cognitive ability tests, are not shown to be helpful in predicting programming proficiency from http://pro.sagepub.com/content/27/7/647.short http://pro.sagepub.com/content/27/7/647.short
  - prawn 11y ago
    There'd be a huge percentage of people who if you started them down the CS path would bail very early through frustration, not feeling comfortable with the topics, etc. I imagine many of us learn to get better at aspects of it. Or we're more comfortable with what the job entails and so can make light of the frustrations and soldier on.
    - c3534l 11y ago
      That's definitely true. I suppose if I were teaching a CS course, I'd point out that it can be difficult at times and that being confused or challenged intellectually is a necessary part of growth, not something to be avoided.
bladecatcher 11y ago
Reminds me of this video, where Maddox explores similar theme on women in video games https://youtu.be/MpJGkG1g-Lk https://youtu.be/MpJGkG1g-Lk
- VeejayRampay 11y ago
  This is nice and all, but it's also a tad simplistic. It makes the huge assumption that women will be treated equally on their way to making video games. The video game industry is controlled by a huge majority of men, how do we know that any woman trying to enter the field will be treated fairly? The same goes for any field where there's a big unbalance in gender representation by the way.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > The video game industry is controlled by a huge majority of men, how do we know that any woman trying to enter the field will be treated fairly? The same goes for any field where there's a big unbalance in gender representation by the way. I don't think this is really related to gender in any non-superficial way. It's the nature of business that the establishment wants to keep their high status and limit access to newcomers. Gender, if targeted, is an excuse. If you're not of wrong gender, you're of wrong skin colour. If you're not of wrong colour, you're from wrong country. Etc. What do you think would happen if suddenly women were to become majority in game development? Yeah, we'd see what could be perceived a discrimination against men. The solution is to find a way to level the playing field for everyone, without going into specific characteristics - because those are transient and change depending on who's on the top of the hill.
akamaka 11y ago
My first boss was a woman who had started her career in the computer field in the mid-1970s, and nothing seemed unusual about it at the time. As years have gone by, I read an increasing amount of talk about women having a different experience with programming, but my experience of actually working with women programmers stays the same. They are just part of every team I've worked with and deal with the same day-to-day challenges as everyone else.
towlejunior 11y ago
>CS is supposed to be so super scary and women need special hand-holding and encouragement to attempt it. This. I think this is really damaging. A misogynist sees this characterization and thinks, "Lol. See, what did I tell you?" An employer thinks, "Hiring women requires hand holding." A young girl thinks, "My friends won't want to do this with me."
- greyskull 11y ago
  I want a world where we don't have to have this conversation at all. But, until we get there, don't we still need some role model type people for those women who are intimidated? I may be completely off base here: any time there's a big social shift, it takes a bunch of effort by a relatively small number of people. Right now, the industry is male-dominated, and many women are either too intimidated to start or this is not even on their radar. "Role model" type people do help, and maybe at some point a few years down the line, we've bolstered the female population enough where people enter and exit naturally like any other balanced profession.
  - Dr_tldr 11y ago
    There's a difference between a role-model and a self-promoter. The role-model hacks away at lots of projects, has an active github, and develops lots of experience until they're at the top of their field. The self-promoter writes a lot of blog posts about "being" in tech instead of actually "doing" tech. The cottage industry devoted to writing blog posts about how hard it is to be a woman in tech and all the sexism and hardship all women face along the way seems to be doing their part to continue to intimidate and discourage women from learning to code. But for the self-promoter, this continued imbalance offers basically limitless opportunities for career progression through pointing out sexism rather than through technical ability. Easily 90% of the female engineers I encounter are from East or South Asia where these blogs aren't widely read. It's an interesting correlation, even if by itself it proves nothing.
    - qznc 11y ago
      I don't like it but active promotion feels necessary in a world, where attention is the secondary currency.
enraged_camel 11y ago
Exactly! About 3 years ago, a lady by the name of Jennifer Dewalt submitted her website on Hacker News, in which she had developed 180 websites in 180 days [1]. It was basically a documentation of her self-learning process, starting from scratch and every day's project a little more advanced than the previous day's, and it was impressive. I emailed it to my sister, who at the time was trying to decide what to do with her life. She was very inspired and started learning JavaScript. The funny thing is that none of the "you should go into tech because..." type articles I had sent her previously had made a dent. Yet apparently all she needed was a "doer" role model! I, too, feel that if more women focused on doing stuff instead of writing about the difficulties they experience, we would see more women in tech. Dewalt became a YC fellowship founder[2] and I'm sure her leadership by example has inspired many more women than just my sister. [1]https://jenniferdewalt.com/ https://jenniferdewalt.com/ [2]https://zube.io/blog/how-i-built-180-websites-in-180-days-and-became-a-yc-fellowship-founder/ https://zube.io/blog/how-i-built-180-websites-in-180-days-an...
- viraptor 11y ago
  Here's another blog if you want to ever follow up with more advanced "this can be done" examples: http://www.windytan.com/p/posts.html http://www.windytan.com/p/posts.html
  - tonyarkles 11y ago
    jvns.ca as well
- yxhuvud 11y ago
  For what it is worth though, if we remove the gendered aspect from the article then what remains is the insight that asking questions and alerting other people to what you don't understand is a great way to actually get the information you need and to gain skills. The advise really works for everyone.
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  >Yet apparently all she needed was a "doer" role model! // Do you perhaps mean a "doer _female_ role model"? Maybe the problem here is that [younger] females are particularly sexist and so won't consider males as role models?
viraptor 11y ago
> I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect. I wonder how much of that is bias of what information is put up front. I mean, I see a meta-post on female programmers probably just as often as I see posts about Qubes. Both include female programmers, but it's not as apparent in the second case. I'm sure there are some more posts where it's just not "advertised"... or at least not until someone comments that it was written by (gasp) a woman, when it suddenly becomes super-relevant to the discussion. Or to put it another way, if this post was treated with s/girl/guy/, would anybody mention anything about "being a male programmer"? It would be likely received as just a post about learning. The community seems to be exposed to more "female programmer" posts now and they stand out. Even this post self describes as "female programmer" post to, but only the second paragraph mentions it directly.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  It seems a variation of the good old there are no girls on the internet.
- tdkl 11y ago
  > Or to put it another way, if this post was treated with s/girl/guy/, would anybody mention anything about "being a male programmer"? Bingo. There's a recent post on HN trending right now about mistreatment : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11429590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11429590 The difference is that the person is male and the comparison of comments here and there is - peculiar.
lsc 11y ago
>I think this is a great sentiment, but....and maybe I'm just not hanging out in the right parts of the internet or whatever...but I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect. My observation of women I know personally is that they're a lot less likely to write publicly about things they have a less than perfect grasp of than, say, I am. I do a lot of things that I am, quite frankly, unqualified to do, and most of them turn out crap. You can spend time with google and see megabytes and megabytes of text that came from my keyboard, and the vast majority of it is garbage. I have, however, produced a few things that I think turned out to be pretty decent. in '09, I finished a book about the virtualization technology I used in my business. (To be clear, I co-authored the book, it wasn't just me, not by a long shot.) - but my point is that throughout my life, I've always felt like only my successes counted. I've always felt like falling on my face wasn't a big deal. And part of that was unhealthy; I kind of saw falling on my face as the default situation, the ground state. But part of it was healthy, too, in that the world really has been pretty forgiving of my mistakes, especially my technical mistakes. (my business mistakes, on the other hand.) Where am I going with this? my impression is that many of the women I know personally who work in my field feel super uncomfortable with failure, especially with the kind of failure that comes from publicly being provably technically wrong, as you are, from time to time, if you publish technical documentation. My impression is that they fear falling on their faces more than I do. Part of that, I'm sure, is just that online, I think, people are just meaner to women. There seems to be this presumption that because I'm a white guy, I didn't get the job because of some quota... which seems really silly to me, for obvious reasons, but it's there. I also think that men are socialized to deal with rejection more than women are, from an early age, and I think that if you aren't used to dealing with rejection, you are going to be a lot less likely to put yourself in a position where you are going to be rejected. And, if you are like me in that your technical abilities are a huge part of your sense of self, being proven wrong after writing up a thing does feel like a rejection, especially if the criticism is framed in a "you are not competent to write technical documentation" sort of way. For me, that's a rejection of what it is to be me; probably the worst feeling another person can inspire in me using only text. This goes back to the mean thing. People are very rarely mean to me in this way... and if people were often mean to me in that way? I would probably stop writing. And it could be a lot more than gender; most of the women I'm thinking of went to good schools, both high school and college, while I barely made it through a terrible high school and have no college to speak of (though I'm working on changing that part) so I have a much different idea of how you learn. It's easy to see how going to a good school, or preparing to go to a good school could give you a different outlook on failure; Just failing one class can bring your grade average way down (I mean, way down by the standards that good colleges have) and a lot of kids feel like they only have one shot to get into the school of their choice. I've never experienced anything like that; If I do really horribly at a job, I can always just leave it off my resume.
klunger 11y ago
> I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect. I used to wonder about this myself. But, then I met some ladies that write technical blogs anonymously, or under male or gender neutral pseudonyms. This was because of the harassment they experienced themselves, or witnessed in others, when they originally set out to write as a woman in tech. So, I suspect that women writing about getting women into tech is one of the few ways that they feel comfortable publicly contributing to their field (even if not from angle they may have originally preferred).
- gurkendoktor 11y ago
  Why would women be harassed for blogging about programming, but not for meta-blogging about the experience of being a female programmer (as the OP)? Is one really less dangerous than the other?
  - EliRivers 11y ago
    Why would women be harassed for blogging about programming There are a great many total dickheads on the internet. Really. It's hard to comprehend just how many utter dickheads are running around out here. The exact reasons why? I've never really understood all of it. Some of it is because it makes them feel like big men, showing off to their dickhead friends; I've seen them come back to crow about it and they seem to get some kind of approval from their peers.
    - tomp 11y ago
      You haven't really answered parent's question.
      - EliRivers 11y ago
        Perhaps I need to repeat it in fewer words; "because they gain peer approval by doing it". I also edited what I said to remove some of the additional discussion and data, to make it simpler to see where I said it was for peer approval.
nindalf 11y ago
I agree with your sentiment - I read most of the technical articles on HN and reddit and I rarely find that a woman has written them. I suspect that since only a tenth of developers are women, at best you're likely to see 1 in 10 articles written by women. Its worth discussing why the actual rate feels a lot lower than that. Having said that, here's a fantastic article I read recently - [1]. Unlike most articles about switching languages, she tried several approaches to fixing her problem in the existing language and shared why it was impossible to do it. [1] - https://medium.com/@theflapjack103/the-way-of-the-gopher-6693db15ae1f#.twtdbvbzo https://medium.com/@theflapjack103/the-way-of-the-gopher-669...
- cauterized 11y ago
  Actually, industry-wide, more like 20-25% of software developers are women. It's only in Silicon Valley and the startup milieu that 10% is the norm.
m4x 11y ago
> if we want more women in programming, then let's talk about how cool it is to build stuff I really agree with this. Girls just don't seem to be interested in programming when they are young. Then they go to university, and largely avoid CS because a) they haven't developed any prior interest in it and b) it is perceived as a difficult and male-dominated field. The ones who do enrol in a CS course often struggle because it's their first foray into programming and they aren't familiar with any of the concepts, unlike many of their male peers who have done it before and cruise through all the 100 level courses If we want to see more women in CS, get them interested at a younger age and suddenly CS will seem more appealing and they will find it just as easy as the other experienced students. We need to show girls that programming is a good outlet for their creativity and foster their interest at a younger age
- humanrebar 11y ago
  > it is perceived as a difficult It is difficult. Why would that impression be problematic?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - naasking 11y ago
    Expertise in computer science probably isn't intrinsically more difficult than any other field, like medicine which now has more women than men.
    - humanrebar 11y ago
      Sure. But would it make sense to get women interested in medicine by downplaying how difficult it is?
  - m4x 11y ago
    I didn't word that very clearly but I meant difficult in the "I will have to fight to get ahead because women aren't necessarily well respected by the men in CS" sense It is also technically difficult, but if that is a turn off to a prospective student of any gender then they might not be suited for a career in software engineering
AlyssaRowan 11y ago
Absolutely. What troubles me - partly why I nearly always stay the hell out of discussions like this, the other part being that it seems to induce sealiony arguments I don't care much for - is that an underlying attitude, though well-meaning, often seems to come from a reaction to the field being male-dominated: "women can (program|science|engineer|etc) too". I don't feel that the unspoken "too" part is all that helpful. Of course human beings can do things. This isn't some kind of secret "boys' club" invasion. For me, curiosity was the key. I saw my elder brother and dad doing stuff, and I wanted to join in and learn. No-one ever told me I couldn't: or if they did I was too hungry for knowledge, and too headstrong and precocious to listen - I can't honestly say a lot's changed about me! <g> If there's a solution to whatever problem we may have, maybe it's just that, and it's not just for girls, it's universal. I rarely gave a moment's thought to my peers' gender because I was thinking about the important part, what I was actually doing: and for the most part, save for a couple of sexist teachers (who were - an even bigger crime - totally useless at the subject they were trying to teach) nor did they.
- anon4 11y ago
 Maybe if we make it a secret boys' club and let them "invade" it and act all shocked when they do, they'll get it out of their systems and we'll be able to go on?
- StavrosK 11y ago
 I think that's spot on, and this kind of mentality definitely sounds like a show pony. I'm wondering if some female developers mistake "not being very good at what they do" for gender bias, because I've noticed that the women who are great at what they do don't talk as much about sexism. I don't have enough data to draw any conclusions, and maybe I'm just bitter because a conference we're trying to get off the ground was accused of sexism when all 8 speakers were men. The kicker is that none of the 70 talk proposals the conference received was by a woman...
 - atom-morgan 11y ago
 > I'm wondering if some female developers mistake "not being very good at what they do" for gender bias Or they mistake a rude person at work as being sexist or racist when they're really just rude.
groundCode 11y ago
> I think we're doing a huge disservice by promoting this idea that programming is some super elusive thing very true! The heart of the article is really just pointing out that like anything, learning computer science is about admitting what you don't know, asking questions and perseverance. I guess it's because I'm not female that the "female in tech" portion of the article didn't really stand out against the greater take away (for me anyway) of what it takes to actually learn. On the role model front though, I do think that they can play an important part in encouraging someone into learning a subject where they haven't had any encouragement/support from family or school.
mcv 11y ago
It's possible that when women who do write about the tech itself, and don't emphasize the fact that they're women, people tend to not realize they're women. That said, I've definitely seen interesting tech articles by women. But I'm also aware of cases like Kathy Sierra being chased off the internet by trolls like weev. As much as women would like to focus just on the tech, sometimes the "women in tech" issues are unavoidable. In any case, this particular article doesn't seem to be about "women in tech" so much as about "how to get into tech when it doesn't come naturally", and I think it's very insightful and inspiring, and relevant for men just as much as it is for women.
p4bl0 11y ago
Wouldn't it be possible that when the matter is technical you/we do not pay attention to the gender, or worse, assume the author is a male?
anouk_anca 11y ago
> Nobody told me it was supposed to be hard or supposed to be for boys or whatever. This is an ideal situation, but sadly not what many women experience, myself included. Role models are necessary because these negative gender stereotypes are real and need to be explicitly countered, ignoring them and simply focusing on gender-blind education is not enough IMO.
- johnbm 11y ago
  Education isn't gender blind, girls are doing vastly better than boys, have been for ages, and women earn 2/3rds of all college degrees in the west. It's still not enough. Because until a field is 50% women, it is seen as evidence of discrimination, no matter the choices women make, or the endless programs and job fairs aimed uniquely at women in STEM. Women: want to enjoy tech? Stop believing this claptrap that you are a victim. The day you define yourself as a techie, instead of a "woman in tech," is the day you actually gain "equality." Not to mention, the gender stereotypes mostly come from other women, especially the ones with gender studies degrees.
stkni 11y ago
Full disclosure: I'm not female but I have two daughters :) This is bang on the money to me. The important part is having the interest/curiosity & opportunity to take tech apart and see what makes it tick. We need more women in software development, but women should not necessarily take it up because we need more women in software development.
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>but I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect. Ok, but as a male, I don't blog about everything technical I do. Most of the code I write or fix is just sort of quietly sent into internal code-review or pushed to an unpublicized github repo. I don't see what the problem is with a woman blogging about social/political stuff rather than technical stuff, since I figure it's plenty likely she's doing loads of technical stuff without yelling about it.
riotdash 11y ago
You are not in the wrong part of the internet. This is reality. There are many great female programmers and software engineers and they are usually the ones who don't make these self-pity filled blog posts which have all the traditional meaningless magic words: "empowerment", "misogynist" etc. and they don't join all these WOMEN ONLY coding clubs where people don't really give a fk about technical stuff, but instead just wanna be in the "coding scene" taking Instagram pictures of their cute macbooks, gluten-free salads, vitamin water bottles etc. Those girls who actually want to code and not "to code" discuss about technical aspects of software development with other people no matter what their race/gender/whatever is, instead of posting endless blog entries about "how are my emotions today as A FEMALE PROGRAMMER IN THIS HORRIBLE WORLD WHERE ALL MEN HATE WOMEN crycrycry ".
- SolaceQuantum 11y ago
  I'm really confused by this statement. I've gone to female-oriented conferences (that were also open to male attendance) and much of the discussion was about the technical aspects of whatever people were doing both in employment and in hobby. Anything from the details of SEO to hobbyist arduino projects. Only rarely does someone bring up being a woman, and usually it was something like "a coworker/other peer referred to me with a rude comment concerning my being female, how do I navigate this" which seemed perfectly reasonable to ask a group of women about. Do you have some kind of study or article I could read that verifies your view? I do apologize; I haven't gone to many female-oriented conferences or meetups other than the several I can drive to.
  - junko 11y ago
    Sorry I don't have studies or articles, my views are formed by my own experience. Surely that's still valid? (Sorry I didn't mean that in a snarky way) As a female, I've been to a few female-oriented tech events myself. And I don't hear very intimate stories, except general ones such as the "how do I deal with a sexist remark" as you mentioned. But I do hear, and see, from my close female tech friends ... I think it's because it's generally too complicated to be expressed and more than that, there's an associated shame - for example, for a long time I didn't want to talk about it because I thought that people can't be that discriminatory and therefore it MUST be something that I've done. Cue in unhealthy self-analysis and reproach, and it was only after many years, I considered sexism (and other types of discrimination) though not without grudge. But on the other hand there are also women in tech who seem to be tougher - sometimes I think the scornful "you're-letting-our-race-down" looks on their faces hurt even more. I think that any activism for empowering women for tech needs to deal with the deeper issues, beyond the random colleague sexist remarks. Sticks and stones can't hurt, but a lack of self-worth, leading to imposter syndrome, can. Though I'll be honest with you, when I go to tech events I don't even think about my femaleness let alone gender issues. And that itself means something, that most people aren't generally discriminatory! So I'm still positive, but is there a need to build confidence for women in tech? Yes. I will also add that my own experience of getting discriminated may not just be due to one factor (i.e. gender) as I happen to tick a few other "minority" boxes.
ralfd 11y ago
> but I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect. One of my most favorite programmer figures quickly became Natasha Murashev... https://www.linkedin.com/in/natashatherobot https://www.linkedin.com/in/natashatherobot ...better known as NatashaTheRobot. Not because she is a woman, but because her Swift/iOS Newsletter is superuseful and interesting and she focuses on technical details instead of "did you know I am a girl?!". https://twitter.com/natashatherobot https://twitter.com/natashatherobot http://www.thomashanning.com/interview-natasha-the-robot/ http://www.thomashanning.com/interview-natasha-the-robot/ Similar to Erica Sadun who writes all this Apple/iOS dev Cookbooks.
akavel 11y ago
> "I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect" I disagree. That is, I kinda agree and I totally disagree. I mean... argh, this is so hard to phrase for me here: I kinda "agree" - that one sees "more of" the writing about the meta-topics by women. But I disagree with the underlying fact (that women actually do "write more about meta-topics than technical aspects"). The problem (but also kinda non-problem?) here is, that women do write, but a reader often may not notice when the technical-aspects writer is a woman!... I know this is true, because I totally was once corrected here on HN for answering "he something" when it was a she - and started looking more carefully since. And now I see there totally are woman technical-bloggers, and many of them highly notable ones! (off the top of my head: Julia Evans, Joanna Rutkowska, Limor Fried/ladyada, ... just to start with.) With that said, I believe the visibility paradox is a kinda self-fulfilling prophecy and/or hard to untie conundrum: either you have technical-aspects woman writers who don't emphasize being women (and thus can currently often get overlooked), or you have technical-aspects woman writers who do emphasize, and thus easily fall into category of "women writing about meta-topics more than technical aspect"... thus I believe we "see" more of the latter mostly because we typically don't recognize the former :/
- sosuke 11y ago
  I can agree with your feeling. When I read a technical article I don't think about gender but I would say 'he' unless I knew with certainty the author was a 'she'. Even when a picture of the author is present I might never notice it, read and enjoy the technical piece, and move on. Hell I might even consider that I would say he, instead of checking gender, because I project myself into the story. Anyhow, I believe you've gotten it right. We don't highlight gender unless that is the topic to be discussed. Otherwise we don't notice, I wonder what the real numbers are a little but I don't care. The person that looks for gender, to harass, is someone I can't identify with or empathize with. I don't understand them at all. So people of every shade of gender please keep writing technical posts and I'll keep enjoying them! Thanks!
spangry 11y ago
> if we want more women in programming, then let's talk about how cool it is to build stuff, instead of how we can be role models or whatever. “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- arien 11y ago
  But in this particular case, doing cool stuff is the actual reward of computer science. In other words, it's the endless sea of things you can achieve through it, not the fact that you can be cool while doing it :)
  - mseebach 11y ago
    YMMV. For me, I don't really care about the nuts and bolts of engineering (I know others do), it's just the vessel in which I take to the vast and endless sea. FWIW, I have a totally unscientific gut-feeling that feeling cool about the process and the tools (rather than the outcome) is a slightly male-heavy preference.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - omginternets 11y ago
      Here's some scientific validation of your gut feeling: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James_Rounds/publication/38061313_Men_and_things_women_and_people_a_meta-analysis_of_sex_differences_in_interests/links/0fcfd50a5a3350c86a000000.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James_Rounds/publicatio...
dkrich 11y ago
Completely agree with this. Reading this I got the sense that the author has the impression that struggling to learn new, complex topics and feeling uncomfortable falling behind is a male vs. female thing. It isn't. I struggled greatly in my early days of CS and had many of the same pressures the author did as I felt I fell behind my classmates. Some people pick things up very quickly, while others take more time before it "clicks." It's embarrassing and frustrating no matter who you are. I have worked with many programmers and PM's over the course of my education and career and many of the sharpest people I've worked with were female. However there is one thing that has always bothered me which I do believe affects an outsized proportion of female programmers. Many times when I'm in a meeting or on a call discussing a project, I've noticed that somebody will ask a question and then immediately follow it up by apologizing and saying "I'm not technical, so bear with me." If you are female (or male- it just so happens that it seems that this person is almost always a female)- Don't. Ever. Do. That. First of all, what does that mean, "I"m not technical?" You don't have an understanding of what is being discussed? Then you should carve out time to meet with people to gain an understanding so that you know what's going on prior to the meeting. That isn't male or female or only applies to some group of people who were destined to be "technical", it applies to everyone. Second, when you say something that is self-deprecating, the intent is usually to gain favor with others at your own expense, but I think somewhere there's an assumption that the other people still respect you anyway because of the other things you do. But whenever I hear that, I immediately get annoyed because I then wonder why the person is asking questions and attempting to manage timelines for something they clearly don't have an understanding of. It causes me to lose respect for them. I can't help that, they just told me that they don't know what's going on, laughed, and made no attempt to gain an understanding. If you go around telling people you aren't "technical" and laughing, you're giving them license to question your abilities. Instead, it would be far more constructive to ask people to explain what they mean by X, even if you think X is something really simple. I personally haven't worked with many people who would have a problem taking a couple of minutes to provide a basic background, and if anybody does, then they aren't doing their job and that will reflect poorly on them, not you.
ksou32 11y ago
The "who had all the odds against her" part made me feel sick. I'm seeing nothing about sleeping in a car, or any hint of a struggle aside from academia. Maybe it's just because my childhood was so shitty, but I can't feel empathy here. You don't need a CS degree to become a well paid programmer, I couldn't even afford to finish college and I do well. The little secret is you need to do a large amount of independent study,programming side projects, etc to become a decent programmer.
junko 11y ago
Full disclosure: I’m a female with engineering background who skipped to another semi-technical field because I got put off, blah blah blah … Just thought I’d add another ‘female’ voice here. Apologies for the lengthiness. For the longest time, I felt and agreed exactly what you said. I grew up being both artsy and techy, was labelled from geek to nerd, took things apart etc (though never at a too deep I-set-up-my-own-Linux-distro level) … in fact gender didn’t even occur to me. I couldn’t understand those who whine about gender issues either, of course I’ve had a few sexist incidents like boys not letting me play with their marble rollercoaster but hey, I didn’t feel particularly insulted as I couldn’t take dumb people seriously anyway. Maybe that sort of ego was what kept me strong, or rather provided the shield needed to keep me happy and giddy-go-lucky. Adolescence came and I got hit by a series of personal crises – but still I couldn’t understand what the gender issue was all about. It must be noted that I must have had low empathy level to start with, as I couldn’t understand other types of discrimination – despite being non-white, foreign, muslim, short, lispy, bad skin, bespectacled etc. Why would anyone care about your ‘shell’ anyway? When I went to university to study engineering, for the first time I was surrounded by more males than females. Friends, colleagues, teaching staff – but this is great, as I tend to get on better with guys than gals anyway! So initially it seemed fine, but then the gender issue crept in. Remember my low empathy level? Well that must have shot up, which was probably due to those humbling personal crises I mentioned (and which simultaneously ruined my confidence). So I guess I became more ‘feminine’, and my behaviour became more feminine too. For example, I became more conscious of the way I phrase things to make sure that it doesn’t sound so ‘abrupt’, like asking ‘dumb’ questions as conversation starters which surprise-surprise, was interpreted as reflection of my own dumb state of mind instead. More guys took me less seriously, even though we may have the same idea but I squeaked it out instead. Sometimes I get ignored completely! I admit, it’s my problem. It’s my fault for not being straightforward, for not being clear enough, but the point is, it couldn’t be helped (At least at that time, I’ve since worked on curbing it). But this difference in communication made me think, for the first time, that maybe there is a line between male and female after all. It’s a controversial point, I know, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I began to lose communication with guys and vice versa, that I began to socialise more with my female friends and that I began to relate more to my more timid, female colleagues. I admit that there’s a lot of factors here, especially my own low confidence, but now I think that the gender issue is real. And it only became real when I became more sensitive and more ‘feminine’. Maybe gender doesn’t really exist, but lack of confidence sure does. And lack of confidence can come from perceived things too, like gender. You might scoff at it, you might be entirely unsympathetic to it, but who are you to judge? Whether something is perceived ‘wrongly’ or not, it doesn’t matter, because that person still feels the reaction from it. And how that person feels can affect his/her own decision-making. Frankly I’m still traumatised enough to decide quite strongly to avoid engineering … I know it’s stupid but I can’t help shudder at the bad memories of scornful male colleagues and embarrassed-looking female colleagues. Toughen up, you say? Get lost. Let that women-for-tech blogger write. Maybe you think that she got the factors mixed up, just like I might have done in my little essay there, but you never did the full flip coin like I did to know that. P.S. "You" is basically anyone reading this P.S.2. By saying 'male' and 'female', 'sensitive' and 'insensitive', I don't mean to simplify everything in a black and white way - of course there are many exceptions but my language skills aren't good enough to efficiently disclaim
whatever_dude 11y ago
(Full disclosure: white male software developer) I certainly don't envy the role women and minorities have in tech today. Always being pressured to be a role, or lead, or to be an example, or to strengthen your group, or whatever. When I got into programming it was because I was curious. No one ever asked me to do it. No one asked me how I was doing. No one directed me, no one told me to do anything different, no one told me I was smart, and overall no one judged me. I was 10. I never even thought it was possible to have a career in it until I was about 15. The important thing: that allowed me to just enjoy programming with no distractions, no politics, no social aspect involved. I was purely directed by my interests only. I'm not sure if that's possible today, especially for under-represented demographics, and that makes me sad. The result is that we'll be pushing people to do things that they might not be comfortable with. We want under-represented groups to be vocal and open about what they do, so they can get other people interested? If I had to be vocal and open about what I was doing, I'm not sure I'd have got into programming in the first place! What attracted me was the fact that I could just be on my own, solving problems in my mind, by myself, with no distractions.
gus_massa 11y ago
Two blogs from female developers that appear here. They don't post too often, but the articles are usually very good. Oona Räisänen: http://www.windytan.com/ http://www.windytan.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=windytan.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=windytan.com Julia Evans: http://jvns.ca/ http://jvns.ca/ https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=jvns.ca https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=jvns.ca
scott_s 11y ago
Disclosure: I am a male computer science researcher and software developer. I have years of experience as a TA, and I have taught a CS intro course to college students. > I think it's great that this lady is going into this field, but I feel really weird about this characterization that CS is supposed to be so super scary and women need special hand-holding and encouragement to attempt it. I don't think that is what the author is trying to convey. Rather the opposite, actually. She's trying to get across the notion that computer science is a topic like any other. The problem is that many CS students (you included, it sounds like) come into CS intro classes with significant prior experience. To those without that experience, and not realizing that their peers have a significant head-start, they may feel dumb when they don't get concepts their peers instantly get. Many people will hesitate to ask for help in such a circumstance. I think members of a minority group are then even less likely to ask for help, because they already feel different and perhaps wondering if they belong. Not many people come into microbiology programs with years of experience in the topic. So while CS is a topic like any other, it tends to have students unlike any other. I do not think it is enough to just talk about how cool it is in programming. I think that the culture in our courses needs to change, and some of that is on the instructional staff.
- munchbunny 11y ago
  Combine this with people who have varying thresholds for "understanding the content" and you have a context where it's quite possible that somebody who is actually quite competent doesn't feel that way because their threshold for "I get it" involves asking lots of seemingly obvious but not actually obvious questions. When you put this kind of person in a climate where they feel like they are representing a group in front of others, then you have a recipe for somebody who has a lot of promise, but the environment suppresses learning. That's bad. On the matter of whether this person feels like they are representing a group, it's important to distinguish whether this person "should" or "actually does" feel that they are representing a group. Women should not feel that they are, but we know that some do as a direct result of someone else generalizing them to represent women as a group. We know it happens. Maybe not by the people reading this comment, but we know it happens. So this all combines into a situation where somebody saying "hey, asking questions is a good thing, stop worrying about making yourself look dumb" is necessary and helpful.
pmelendez 11y ago
I believe is perception, I follow several women careers in tech and honestly it is just because they rock in the technical department and not because they are women, funny enough they don't write about "women in tech" (or at least I haven't seen them doing that) so if you are not searching in their particular area of expertise then you might not notice them. Caitie McCaffrey and Hilary Mason comes to my mind but there are many more.
matt4077 10y ago
That could be a result of selection bias: If women write 5% of the programming articles on HN (because they make up 5% of the group writing such articles) but 100% of the women-in-tech articles (because men don't care about that) you might get that impression even though women write technical articles with the same quality & quantity as their male counterparts.

by krstck 11y ago

ma2rten 11y ago

I agree, but I feel this post is not really about that. It applies to guys equally. It's just that the author happens to be female. At least it was very relatable to me.

fossuser 11y ago
Yeah the core of the article is that it's good to admit ignorance and ask questions - that's how you learn quickly. Paradoxically people will actually think you're smarter for it anyway - it's often when you pretend you know something you don't that you appear dumb. The gender commentary is a distraction.
iherbig 11y ago
I think the problem that krstck is trying to address is not so much that the anecdote is invalid, but that prefacing it with "I'm a female programmer" colors the rest of the anecdote. Instead of it being a general anecdote which may be relatable to everyone in the field, it's specifically an anecdote about being a woman in computing. And krstck is saying there are certain problems that come along with that coloring of things.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

visarga 11y ago

> I think we're doing a huge disservice by promoting this idea that programming is some super elusive thing It's certainly not super elusive but it requires a specific kind of people that don't get anxious/frustrated when tackling complex systems, often badly documented. Some hate this kind of work, others love it. It involves having a certain type of personality as much as high IQ. Most men feel helpless when tacking such problems, too.

c3534l 11y ago
> a specific kind of people that don't get anxious/frustrated when tackling complex systems Eh, you learn to not let that get to you because you build up experience working through it over time. I think that's a learned skill, not an innate, immutable trait. Also: > Basic Cognitive Skills, as measured by standard cognitive ability tests, are not shown to be helpful in predicting programming proficiency from http://pro.sagepub.com/content/27/7/647.short http://pro.sagepub.com/content/27/7/647.short
- prawn 11y ago
  There'd be a huge percentage of people who if you started them down the CS path would bail very early through frustration, not feeling comfortable with the topics, etc. I imagine many of us learn to get better at aspects of it. Or we're more comfortable with what the job entails and so can make light of the frustrations and soldier on.
  - c3534l 11y ago
    That's definitely true. I suppose if I were teaching a CS course, I'd point out that it can be difficult at times and that being confused or challenged intellectually is a necessary part of growth, not something to be avoided.

bladecatcher 11y ago

Reminds me of this video, where Maddox explores similar theme on women in video games https://youtu.be/MpJGkG1g-Lk https://youtu.be/MpJGkG1g-Lk

VeejayRampay 11y ago
This is nice and all, but it's also a tad simplistic. It makes the huge assumption that women will be treated equally on their way to making video games. The video game industry is controlled by a huge majority of men, how do we know that any woman trying to enter the field will be treated fairly? The same goes for any field where there's a big unbalance in gender representation by the way.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > The video game industry is controlled by a huge majority of men, how do we know that any woman trying to enter the field will be treated fairly? The same goes for any field where there's a big unbalance in gender representation by the way. I don't think this is really related to gender in any non-superficial way. It's the nature of business that the establishment wants to keep their high status and limit access to newcomers. Gender, if targeted, is an excuse. If you're not of wrong gender, you're of wrong skin colour. If you're not of wrong colour, you're from wrong country. Etc. What do you think would happen if suddenly women were to become majority in game development? Yeah, we'd see what could be perceived a discrimination against men. The solution is to find a way to level the playing field for everyone, without going into specific characteristics - because those are transient and change depending on who's on the top of the hill.

akamaka 11y ago

My first boss was a woman who had started her career in the computer field in the mid-1970s, and nothing seemed unusual about it at the time. As years have gone by, I read an increasing amount of talk about women having a different experience with programming, but my experience of actually working with women programmers stays the same. They are just part of every team I've worked with and deal with the same day-to-day challenges as everyone else.

towlejunior 11y ago

>CS is supposed to be so super scary and women need special hand-holding and encouragement to attempt it. This. I think this is really damaging. A misogynist sees this characterization and thinks, "Lol. See, what did I tell you?" An employer thinks, "Hiring women requires hand holding." A young girl thinks, "My friends won't want to do this with me."

greyskull 11y ago
I want a world where we don't have to have this conversation at all. But, until we get there, don't we still need some role model type people for those women who are intimidated? I may be completely off base here: any time there's a big social shift, it takes a bunch of effort by a relatively small number of people. Right now, the industry is male-dominated, and many women are either too intimidated to start or this is not even on their radar. "Role model" type people do help, and maybe at some point a few years down the line, we've bolstered the female population enough where people enter and exit naturally like any other balanced profession.
- Dr_tldr 11y ago
  There's a difference between a role-model and a self-promoter. The role-model hacks away at lots of projects, has an active github, and develops lots of experience until they're at the top of their field. The self-promoter writes a lot of blog posts about "being" in tech instead of actually "doing" tech. The cottage industry devoted to writing blog posts about how hard it is to be a woman in tech and all the sexism and hardship all women face along the way seems to be doing their part to continue to intimidate and discourage women from learning to code. But for the self-promoter, this continued imbalance offers basically limitless opportunities for career progression through pointing out sexism rather than through technical ability. Easily 90% of the female engineers I encounter are from East or South Asia where these blogs aren't widely read. It's an interesting correlation, even if by itself it proves nothing.
  - qznc 11y ago
    I don't like it but active promotion feels necessary in a world, where attention is the secondary currency.

enraged_camel 11y ago

Exactly! About 3 years ago, a lady by the name of Jennifer Dewalt submitted her website on Hacker News, in which she had developed 180 websites in 180 days [1]. It was basically a documentation of her self-learning process, starting from scratch and every day's project a little more advanced than the previous day's, and it was impressive. I emailed it to my sister, who at the time was trying to decide what to do with her life. She was very inspired and started learning JavaScript. The funny thing is that none of the "you should go into tech because..." type articles I had sent her previously had made a dent. Yet apparently all she needed was a "doer" role model! I, too, feel that if more women focused on doing stuff instead of writing about the difficulties they experience, we would see more women in tech. Dewalt became a YC fellowship founder[2] and I'm sure her leadership by example has inspired many more women than just my sister. [1]https://jenniferdewalt.com/ https://jenniferdewalt.com/ [2]https://zube.io/blog/how-i-built-180-websites-in-180-days-and-became-a-yc-fellowship-founder/ https://zube.io/blog/how-i-built-180-websites-in-180-days-an...

viraptor 11y ago
Here's another blog if you want to ever follow up with more advanced "this can be done" examples: http://www.windytan.com/p/posts.html http://www.windytan.com/p/posts.html
- tonyarkles 11y ago
  jvns.ca as well
yxhuvud 11y ago
For what it is worth though, if we remove the gendered aspect from the article then what remains is the insight that asking questions and alerting other people to what you don't understand is a great way to actually get the information you need and to gain skills. The advise really works for everyone.
pbhjpbhj 11y ago
>Yet apparently all she needed was a "doer" role model! // Do you perhaps mean a "doer _female_ role model"? Maybe the problem here is that [younger] females are particularly sexist and so won't consider males as role models?

viraptor 11y ago

> I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect. I wonder how much of that is bias of what information is put up front. I mean, I see a meta-post on female programmers probably just as often as I see posts about Qubes. Both include female programmers, but it's not as apparent in the second case. I'm sure there are some more posts where it's just not "advertised"... or at least not until someone comments that it was written by (gasp) a woman, when it suddenly becomes super-relevant to the discussion. Or to put it another way, if this post was treated with s/girl/guy/, would anybody mention anything about "being a male programmer"? It would be likely received as just a post about learning. The community seems to be exposed to more "female programmer" posts now and they stand out. Even this post self describes as "female programmer" post to, but only the second paragraph mentions it directly.

LoSboccacc 11y ago
It seems a variation of the good old there are no girls on the internet.
tdkl 11y ago
> Or to put it another way, if this post was treated with s/girl/guy/, would anybody mention anything about "being a male programmer"? Bingo. There's a recent post on HN trending right now about mistreatment : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11429590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11429590 The difference is that the person is male and the comparison of comments here and there is - peculiar.

lsc 11y ago

>I think this is a great sentiment, but....and maybe I'm just not hanging out in the right parts of the internet or whatever...but I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect. My observation of women I know personally is that they're a lot less likely to write publicly about things they have a less than perfect grasp of than, say, I am. I do a lot of things that I am, quite frankly, unqualified to do, and most of them turn out crap. You can spend time with google and see megabytes and megabytes of text that came from my keyboard, and the vast majority of it is garbage. I have, however, produced a few things that I think turned out to be pretty decent. in '09, I finished a book about the virtualization technology I used in my business. (To be clear, I co-authored the book, it wasn't just me, not by a long shot.) - but my point is that throughout my life, I've always felt like only my successes counted. I've always felt like falling on my face wasn't a big deal. And part of that was unhealthy; I kind of saw falling on my face as the default situation, the ground state. But part of it was healthy, too, in that the world really has been pretty forgiving of my mistakes, especially my technical mistakes. (my business mistakes, on the other hand.) Where am I going with this? my impression is that many of the women I know personally who work in my field feel super uncomfortable with failure, especially with the kind of failure that comes from publicly being provably technically wrong, as you are, from time to time, if you publish technical documentation. My impression is that they fear falling on their faces more than I do. Part of that, I'm sure, is just that online, I think, people are just meaner to women. There seems to be this presumption that because I'm a white guy, I didn't get the job because of some quota... which seems really silly to me, for obvious reasons, but it's there. I also think that men are socialized to deal with rejection more than women are, from an early age, and I think that if you aren't used to dealing with rejection, you are going to be a lot less likely to put yourself in a position where you are going to be rejected. And, if you are like me in that your technical abilities are a huge part of your sense of self, being proven wrong after writing up a thing does feel like a rejection, especially if the criticism is framed in a "you are not competent to write technical documentation" sort of way. For me, that's a rejection of what it is to be me; probably the worst feeling another person can inspire in me using only text. This goes back to the mean thing. People are very rarely mean to me in this way... and if people were often mean to me in that way? I would probably stop writing. And it could be a lot more than gender; most of the women I'm thinking of went to good schools, both high school and college, while I barely made it through a terrible high school and have no college to speak of (though I'm working on changing that part) so I have a much different idea of how you learn. It's easy to see how going to a good school, or preparing to go to a good school could give you a different outlook on failure; Just failing one class can bring your grade average way down (I mean, way down by the standards that good colleges have) and a lot of kids feel like they only have one shot to get into the school of their choice. I've never experienced anything like that; If I do really horribly at a job, I can always just leave it off my resume.

klunger 11y ago

> I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect. I used to wonder about this myself. But, then I met some ladies that write technical blogs anonymously, or under male or gender neutral pseudonyms. This was because of the harassment they experienced themselves, or witnessed in others, when they originally set out to write as a woman in tech. So, I suspect that women writing about getting women into tech is one of the few ways that they feel comfortable publicly contributing to their field (even if not from angle they may have originally preferred).

gurkendoktor 11y ago
Why would women be harassed for blogging about programming, but not for meta-blogging about the experience of being a female programmer (as the OP)? Is one really less dangerous than the other?
- EliRivers 11y ago
  Why would women be harassed for blogging about programming There are a great many total dickheads on the internet. Really. It's hard to comprehend just how many utter dickheads are running around out here. The exact reasons why? I've never really understood all of it. Some of it is because it makes them feel like big men, showing off to their dickhead friends; I've seen them come back to crow about it and they seem to get some kind of approval from their peers.
  - tomp 11y ago
    You haven't really answered parent's question.
    - EliRivers 11y ago
      Perhaps I need to repeat it in fewer words; "because they gain peer approval by doing it". I also edited what I said to remove some of the additional discussion and data, to make it simpler to see where I said it was for peer approval.

nindalf 11y ago

I agree with your sentiment - I read most of the technical articles on HN and reddit and I rarely find that a woman has written them. I suspect that since only a tenth of developers are women, at best you're likely to see 1 in 10 articles written by women. Its worth discussing why the actual rate feels a lot lower than that. Having said that, here's a fantastic article I read recently - [1]. Unlike most articles about switching languages, she tried several approaches to fixing her problem in the existing language and shared why it was impossible to do it. [1] - https://medium.com/@theflapjack103/the-way-of-the-gopher-6693db15ae1f#.twtdbvbzo https://medium.com/@theflapjack103/the-way-of-the-gopher-669...

cauterized 11y ago
Actually, industry-wide, more like 20-25% of software developers are women. It's only in Silicon Valley and the startup milieu that 10% is the norm.

m4x 11y ago

> if we want more women in programming, then let's talk about how cool it is to build stuff I really agree with this. Girls just don't seem to be interested in programming when they are young. Then they go to university, and largely avoid CS because a) they haven't developed any prior interest in it and b) it is perceived as a difficult and male-dominated field. The ones who do enrol in a CS course often struggle because it's their first foray into programming and they aren't familiar with any of the concepts, unlike many of their male peers who have done it before and cruise through all the 100 level courses If we want to see more women in CS, get them interested at a younger age and suddenly CS will seem more appealing and they will find it just as easy as the other experienced students. We need to show girls that programming is a good outlet for their creativity and foster their interest at a younger age

humanrebar 11y ago
> it is perceived as a difficult It is difficult. Why would that impression be problematic?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- naasking 11y ago
  Expertise in computer science probably isn't intrinsically more difficult than any other field, like medicine which now has more women than men.
  - humanrebar 11y ago
    Sure. But would it make sense to get women interested in medicine by downplaying how difficult it is?
- m4x 11y ago
  I didn't word that very clearly but I meant difficult in the "I will have to fight to get ahead because women aren't necessarily well respected by the men in CS" sense It is also technically difficult, but if that is a turn off to a prospective student of any gender then they might not be suited for a career in software engineering

AlyssaRowan 11y ago

Absolutely. What troubles me - partly why I nearly always stay the hell out of discussions like this, the other part being that it seems to induce sealiony arguments I don't care much for - is that an underlying attitude, though well-meaning, often seems to come from a reaction to the field being male-dominated: "women can (program|science|engineer|etc) too". I don't feel that the unspoken "too" part is all that helpful. Of course human beings can do things. This isn't some kind of secret "boys' club" invasion. For me, curiosity was the key. I saw my elder brother and dad doing stuff, and I wanted to join in and learn. No-one ever told me I couldn't: or if they did I was too hungry for knowledge, and too headstrong and precocious to listen - I can't honestly say a lot's changed about me! <g> If there's a solution to whatever problem we may have, maybe it's just that, and it's not just for girls, it's universal. I rarely gave a moment's thought to my peers' gender because I was thinking about the important part, what I was actually doing: and for the most part, save for a couple of sexist teachers (who were - an even bigger crime - totally useless at the subject they were trying to teach) nor did they.

anon4 11y ago
Maybe if we make it a secret boys' club and let them "invade" it and act all shocked when they do, they'll get it out of their systems and we'll be able to go on?
StavrosK 11y ago
I think that's spot on, and this kind of mentality definitely sounds like a show pony. I'm wondering if some female developers mistake "not being very good at what they do" for gender bias, because I've noticed that the women who are great at what they do don't talk as much about sexism. I don't have enough data to draw any conclusions, and maybe I'm just bitter because a conference we're trying to get off the ground was accused of sexism when all 8 speakers were men. The kicker is that none of the 70 talk proposals the conference received was by a woman...
- atom-morgan 11y ago
  > I'm wondering if some female developers mistake "not being very good at what they do" for gender bias Or they mistake a rude person at work as being sexist or racist when they're really just rude.

groundCode 11y ago

> I think we're doing a huge disservice by promoting this idea that programming is some super elusive thing very true! The heart of the article is really just pointing out that like anything, learning computer science is about admitting what you don't know, asking questions and perseverance. I guess it's because I'm not female that the "female in tech" portion of the article didn't really stand out against the greater take away (for me anyway) of what it takes to actually learn. On the role model front though, I do think that they can play an important part in encouraging someone into learning a subject where they haven't had any encouragement/support from family or school.

mcv 11y ago

It's possible that when women who do write about the tech itself, and don't emphasize the fact that they're women, people tend to not realize they're women. That said, I've definitely seen interesting tech articles by women. But I'm also aware of cases like Kathy Sierra being chased off the internet by trolls like weev. As much as women would like to focus just on the tech, sometimes the "women in tech" issues are unavoidable. In any case, this particular article doesn't seem to be about "women in tech" so much as about "how to get into tech when it doesn't come naturally", and I think it's very insightful and inspiring, and relevant for men just as much as it is for women.

p4bl0 11y ago

Wouldn't it be possible that when the matter is technical you/we do not pay attention to the gender, or worse, assume the author is a male?

anouk_anca 11y ago

> Nobody told me it was supposed to be hard or supposed to be for boys or whatever. This is an ideal situation, but sadly not what many women experience, myself included. Role models are necessary because these negative gender stereotypes are real and need to be explicitly countered, ignoring them and simply focusing on gender-blind education is not enough IMO.

johnbm 11y ago
Education isn't gender blind, girls are doing vastly better than boys, have been for ages, and women earn 2/3rds of all college degrees in the west. It's still not enough. Because until a field is 50% women, it is seen as evidence of discrimination, no matter the choices women make, or the endless programs and job fairs aimed uniquely at women in STEM. Women: want to enjoy tech? Stop believing this claptrap that you are a victim. The day you define yourself as a techie, instead of a "woman in tech," is the day you actually gain "equality." Not to mention, the gender stereotypes mostly come from other women, especially the ones with gender studies degrees.

stkni 11y ago

Full disclosure: I'm not female but I have two daughters :) This is bang on the money to me. The important part is having the interest/curiosity & opportunity to take tech apart and see what makes it tick. We need more women in software development, but women should not necessarily take it up because we need more women in software development.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago

>but I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect. Ok, but as a male, I don't blog about everything technical I do. Most of the code I write or fix is just sort of quietly sent into internal code-review or pushed to an unpublicized github repo. I don't see what the problem is with a woman blogging about social/political stuff rather than technical stuff, since I figure it's plenty likely she's doing loads of technical stuff without yelling about it.

riotdash 11y ago

You are not in the wrong part of the internet. This is reality. There are many great female programmers and software engineers and they are usually the ones who don't make these self-pity filled blog posts which have all the traditional meaningless magic words: "empowerment", "misogynist" etc. and they don't join all these WOMEN ONLY coding clubs where people don't really give a fk about technical stuff, but instead just wanna be in the "coding scene" taking Instagram pictures of their cute macbooks, gluten-free salads, vitamin water bottles etc. Those girls who actually want to code and not "to code" discuss about technical aspects of software development with other people no matter what their race/gender/whatever is, instead of posting endless blog entries about "how are my emotions today as A FEMALE PROGRAMMER IN THIS HORRIBLE WORLD WHERE ALL MEN HATE WOMEN crycrycry ".

SolaceQuantum 11y ago
I'm really confused by this statement. I've gone to female-oriented conferences (that were also open to male attendance) and much of the discussion was about the technical aspects of whatever people were doing both in employment and in hobby. Anything from the details of SEO to hobbyist arduino projects. Only rarely does someone bring up being a woman, and usually it was something like "a coworker/other peer referred to me with a rude comment concerning my being female, how do I navigate this" which seemed perfectly reasonable to ask a group of women about. Do you have some kind of study or article I could read that verifies your view? I do apologize; I haven't gone to many female-oriented conferences or meetups other than the several I can drive to.
- junko 11y ago
  Sorry I don't have studies or articles, my views are formed by my own experience. Surely that's still valid? (Sorry I didn't mean that in a snarky way) As a female, I've been to a few female-oriented tech events myself. And I don't hear very intimate stories, except general ones such as the "how do I deal with a sexist remark" as you mentioned. But I do hear, and see, from my close female tech friends ... I think it's because it's generally too complicated to be expressed and more than that, there's an associated shame - for example, for a long time I didn't want to talk about it because I thought that people can't be that discriminatory and therefore it MUST be something that I've done. Cue in unhealthy self-analysis and reproach, and it was only after many years, I considered sexism (and other types of discrimination) though not without grudge. But on the other hand there are also women in tech who seem to be tougher - sometimes I think the scornful "you're-letting-our-race-down" looks on their faces hurt even more. I think that any activism for empowering women for tech needs to deal with the deeper issues, beyond the random colleague sexist remarks. Sticks and stones can't hurt, but a lack of self-worth, leading to imposter syndrome, can. Though I'll be honest with you, when I go to tech events I don't even think about my femaleness let alone gender issues. And that itself means something, that most people aren't generally discriminatory! So I'm still positive, but is there a need to build confidence for women in tech? Yes. I will also add that my own experience of getting discriminated may not just be due to one factor (i.e. gender) as I happen to tick a few other "minority" boxes.

ralfd 11y ago

> but I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect. One of my most favorite programmer figures quickly became Natasha Murashev... https://www.linkedin.com/in/natashatherobot https://www.linkedin.com/in/natashatherobot ...better known as NatashaTheRobot. Not because she is a woman, but because her Swift/iOS Newsletter is superuseful and interesting and she focuses on technical details instead of "did you know I am a girl?!". https://twitter.com/natashatherobot https://twitter.com/natashatherobot http://www.thomashanning.com/interview-natasha-the-robot/ http://www.thomashanning.com/interview-natasha-the-robot/ Similar to Erica Sadun who writes all this Apple/iOS dev Cookbooks.

akavel 11y ago

> "I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect" I disagree. That is, I kinda agree and I totally disagree. I mean... argh, this is so hard to phrase for me here: I kinda "agree" - that one sees "more of" the writing about the meta-topics by women. But I disagree with the underlying fact (that women actually do "write more about meta-topics than technical aspects"). The problem (but also kinda non-problem?) here is, that women do write, but a reader often may not notice when the technical-aspects writer is a woman!... I know this is true, because I totally was once corrected here on HN for answering "he something" when it was a she - and started looking more carefully since. And now I see there totally are woman technical-bloggers, and many of them highly notable ones! (off the top of my head: Julia Evans, Joanna Rutkowska, Limor Fried/ladyada, ... just to start with.) With that said, I believe the visibility paradox is a kinda self-fulfilling prophecy and/or hard to untie conundrum: either you have technical-aspects woman writers who don't emphasize being women (and thus can currently often get overlooked), or you have technical-aspects woman writers who do emphasize, and thus easily fall into category of "women writing about meta-topics more than technical aspect"... thus I believe we "see" more of the latter mostly because we typically don't recognize the former :/

sosuke 11y ago
I can agree with your feeling. When I read a technical article I don't think about gender but I would say 'he' unless I knew with certainty the author was a 'she'. Even when a picture of the author is present I might never notice it, read and enjoy the technical piece, and move on. Hell I might even consider that I would say he, instead of checking gender, because I project myself into the story. Anyhow, I believe you've gotten it right. We don't highlight gender unless that is the topic to be discussed. Otherwise we don't notice, I wonder what the real numbers are a little but I don't care. The person that looks for gender, to harass, is someone I can't identify with or empathize with. I don't understand them at all. So people of every shade of gender please keep writing technical posts and I'll keep enjoying them! Thanks!

spangry 11y ago

> if we want more women in programming, then let's talk about how cool it is to build stuff, instead of how we can be role models or whatever. “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

arien 11y ago
But in this particular case, doing cool stuff is the actual reward of computer science. In other words, it's the endless sea of things you can achieve through it, not the fact that you can be cool while doing it :)
- mseebach 11y ago
  YMMV. For me, I don't really care about the nuts and bolts of engineering (I know others do), it's just the vessel in which I take to the vast and endless sea. FWIW, I have a totally unscientific gut-feeling that feeling cool about the process and the tools (rather than the outcome) is a slightly male-heavy preference.
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - omginternets 11y ago
    Here's some scientific validation of your gut feeling: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James_Rounds/publication/38061313_Men_and_things_women_and_people_a_meta-analysis_of_sex_differences_in_interests/links/0fcfd50a5a3350c86a000000.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James_Rounds/publicatio...

dkrich 11y ago

Completely agree with this. Reading this I got the sense that the author has the impression that struggling to learn new, complex topics and feeling uncomfortable falling behind is a male vs. female thing. It isn't. I struggled greatly in my early days of CS and had many of the same pressures the author did as I felt I fell behind my classmates. Some people pick things up very quickly, while others take more time before it "clicks." It's embarrassing and frustrating no matter who you are. I have worked with many programmers and PM's over the course of my education and career and many of the sharpest people I've worked with were female. However there is one thing that has always bothered me which I do believe affects an outsized proportion of female programmers. Many times when I'm in a meeting or on a call discussing a project, I've noticed that somebody will ask a question and then immediately follow it up by apologizing and saying "I'm not technical, so bear with me." If you are female (or male- it just so happens that it seems that this person is almost always a female)- Don't. Ever. Do. That. First of all, what does that mean, "I"m not technical?" You don't have an understanding of what is being discussed? Then you should carve out time to meet with people to gain an understanding so that you know what's going on prior to the meeting. That isn't male or female or only applies to some group of people who were destined to be "technical", it applies to everyone. Second, when you say something that is self-deprecating, the intent is usually to gain favor with others at your own expense, but I think somewhere there's an assumption that the other people still respect you anyway because of the other things you do. But whenever I hear that, I immediately get annoyed because I then wonder why the person is asking questions and attempting to manage timelines for something they clearly don't have an understanding of. It causes me to lose respect for them. I can't help that, they just told me that they don't know what's going on, laughed, and made no attempt to gain an understanding. If you go around telling people you aren't "technical" and laughing, you're giving them license to question your abilities. Instead, it would be far more constructive to ask people to explain what they mean by X, even if you think X is something really simple. I personally haven't worked with many people who would have a problem taking a couple of minutes to provide a basic background, and if anybody does, then they aren't doing their job and that will reflect poorly on them, not you.

ksou32 11y ago

The "who had all the odds against her" part made me feel sick. I'm seeing nothing about sleeping in a car, or any hint of a struggle aside from academia. Maybe it's just because my childhood was so shitty, but I can't feel empathy here. You don't need a CS degree to become a well paid programmer, I couldn't even afford to finish college and I do well. The little secret is you need to do a large amount of independent study,programming side projects, etc to become a decent programmer.

junko 11y ago

Full disclosure: I’m a female with engineering background who skipped to another semi-technical field because I got put off, blah blah blah … Just thought I’d add another ‘female’ voice here. Apologies for the lengthiness. For the longest time, I felt and agreed exactly what you said. I grew up being both artsy and techy, was labelled from geek to nerd, took things apart etc (though never at a too deep I-set-up-my-own-Linux-distro level) … in fact gender didn’t even occur to me. I couldn’t understand those who whine about gender issues either, of course I’ve had a few sexist incidents like boys not letting me play with their marble rollercoaster but hey, I didn’t feel particularly insulted as I couldn’t take dumb people seriously anyway. Maybe that sort of ego was what kept me strong, or rather provided the shield needed to keep me happy and giddy-go-lucky. Adolescence came and I got hit by a series of personal crises – but still I couldn’t understand what the gender issue was all about. It must be noted that I must have had low empathy level to start with, as I couldn’t understand other types of discrimination – despite being non-white, foreign, muslim, short, lispy, bad skin, bespectacled etc. Why would anyone care about your ‘shell’ anyway? When I went to university to study engineering, for the first time I was surrounded by more males than females. Friends, colleagues, teaching staff – but this is great, as I tend to get on better with guys than gals anyway! So initially it seemed fine, but then the gender issue crept in. Remember my low empathy level? Well that must have shot up, which was probably due to those humbling personal crises I mentioned (and which simultaneously ruined my confidence). So I guess I became more ‘feminine’, and my behaviour became more feminine too. For example, I became more conscious of the way I phrase things to make sure that it doesn’t sound so ‘abrupt’, like asking ‘dumb’ questions as conversation starters which surprise-surprise, was interpreted as reflection of my own dumb state of mind instead. More guys took me less seriously, even though we may have the same idea but I squeaked it out instead. Sometimes I get ignored completely! I admit, it’s my problem. It’s my fault for not being straightforward, for not being clear enough, but the point is, it couldn’t be helped (At least at that time, I’ve since worked on curbing it). But this difference in communication made me think, for the first time, that maybe there is a line between male and female after all. It’s a controversial point, I know, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I began to lose communication with guys and vice versa, that I began to socialise more with my female friends and that I began to relate more to my more timid, female colleagues. I admit that there’s a lot of factors here, especially my own low confidence, but now I think that the gender issue is real. And it only became real when I became more sensitive and more ‘feminine’. Maybe gender doesn’t really exist, but lack of confidence sure does. And lack of confidence can come from perceived things too, like gender. You might scoff at it, you might be entirely unsympathetic to it, but who are you to judge? Whether something is perceived ‘wrongly’ or not, it doesn’t matter, because that person still feels the reaction from it. And how that person feels can affect his/her own decision-making. Frankly I’m still traumatised enough to decide quite strongly to avoid engineering … I know it’s stupid but I can’t help shudder at the bad memories of scornful male colleagues and embarrassed-looking female colleagues. Toughen up, you say? Get lost. Let that women-for-tech blogger write. Maybe you think that she got the factors mixed up, just like I might have done in my little essay there, but you never did the full flip coin like I did to know that. P.S. "You" is basically anyone reading this P.S.2. By saying 'male' and 'female', 'sensitive' and 'insensitive', I don't mean to simplify everything in a black and white way - of course there are many exceptions but my language skills aren't good enough to efficiently disclaim

whatever_dude 11y ago

(Full disclosure: white male software developer) I certainly don't envy the role women and minorities have in tech today. Always being pressured to be a role, or lead, or to be an example, or to strengthen your group, or whatever. When I got into programming it was because I was curious. No one ever asked me to do it. No one asked me how I was doing. No one directed me, no one told me to do anything different, no one told me I was smart, and overall no one judged me. I was 10. I never even thought it was possible to have a career in it until I was about 15. The important thing: that allowed me to just enjoy programming with no distractions, no politics, no social aspect involved. I was purely directed by my interests only. I'm not sure if that's possible today, especially for under-represented demographics, and that makes me sad. The result is that we'll be pushing people to do things that they might not be comfortable with. We want under-represented groups to be vocal and open about what they do, so they can get other people interested? If I had to be vocal and open about what I was doing, I'm not sure I'd have got into programming in the first place! What attracted me was the fact that I could just be on my own, solving problems in my mind, by myself, with no distractions.

gus_massa 11y ago

Two blogs from female developers that appear here. They don't post too often, but the articles are usually very good. Oona Räisänen: http://www.windytan.com/ http://www.windytan.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=windytan.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=windytan.com Julia Evans: http://jvns.ca/ http://jvns.ca/ https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=jvns.ca https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=jvns.ca

scott_s 11y ago

Disclosure: I am a male computer science researcher and software developer. I have years of experience as a TA, and I have taught a CS intro course to college students. > I think it's great that this lady is going into this field, but I feel really weird about this characterization that CS is supposed to be so super scary and women need special hand-holding and encouragement to attempt it. I don't think that is what the author is trying to convey. Rather the opposite, actually. She's trying to get across the notion that computer science is a topic like any other. The problem is that many CS students (you included, it sounds like) come into CS intro classes with significant prior experience. To those without that experience, and not realizing that their peers have a significant head-start, they may feel dumb when they don't get concepts their peers instantly get. Many people will hesitate to ask for help in such a circumstance. I think members of a minority group are then even less likely to ask for help, because they already feel different and perhaps wondering if they belong. Not many people come into microbiology programs with years of experience in the topic. So while CS is a topic like any other, it tends to have students unlike any other. I do not think it is enough to just talk about how cool it is in programming. I think that the culture in our courses needs to change, and some of that is on the instructional staff.

munchbunny 11y ago
Combine this with people who have varying thresholds for "understanding the content" and you have a context where it's quite possible that somebody who is actually quite competent doesn't feel that way because their threshold for "I get it" involves asking lots of seemingly obvious but not actually obvious questions. When you put this kind of person in a climate where they feel like they are representing a group in front of others, then you have a recipe for somebody who has a lot of promise, but the environment suppresses learning. That's bad. On the matter of whether this person feels like they are representing a group, it's important to distinguish whether this person "should" or "actually does" feel that they are representing a group. Women should not feel that they are, but we know that some do as a direct result of someone else generalizing them to represent women as a group. We know it happens. Maybe not by the people reading this comment, but we know it happens. So this all combines into a situation where somebody saying "hey, asking questions is a good thing, stop worrying about making yourself look dumb" is necessary and helpful.

pmelendez 11y ago

I believe is perception, I follow several women careers in tech and honestly it is just because they rock in the technical department and not because they are women, funny enough they don't write about "women in tech" (or at least I haven't seen them doing that) so if you are not searching in their particular area of expertise then you might not notice them. Caitie McCaffrey and Hilary Mason comes to my mind but there are many more.

matt4077 10y ago

That could be a result of selection bias: If women write 5% of the programming articles on HN (because they make up 5% of the group writing such articles) but 100% of the women-in-tech articles (because men don't care about that) you might get that impression even though women write technical articles with the same quality & quantity as their male counterparts.