11 ms·

Why are most programmers white males?

behnamoh 9y ago
Actually here on HN, I have seen some people from Nigeria and Cameron and they have done some pretty good job in their fields.
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  You're kidding, right? I sure hope so.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - graycat 9y ago
    I struggled with such questions. Eventually, as I was trying to figure this stuff out, one expert told me: "Of COURSE women are MUCH more emotional than men. That's the cause of all the problems [between men and women]." It does appear that from, say, SAT test scores, that the girls and boys have somewhat different aptitudes. But, girls can be plenty bright, really, at darned near anything. E.g., my wife was Valedictorian, Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, NSF Fellow, and Ph.D. in mathematical sociology. Her memory, verbal, and social talents were astounding: E.g., early in our marriage, we played Scrabble. She beat me like a rented mule. But I kept trying. I improved! She improved faster than I did; the situation for me was hopeless; and she refused to play me anymore. She did beautifully in analysis of variance and, really, all the material in statistical hypothesis testing and multi-variate statistics, material that is still in significant ways ahead of the usual in AI and ML. Still, the expert was correct: She was MUCH more emotional than I was. COULD she be rational? Yes, especially for something far from her core concerns. Otherwise, nope: On any of her core concerns, especially as a female, her emotionalism wildly overwhelmed her rationalism. Often it's not that the females can't be rational; instead, it's that they are also emotional, strongly emotional, and their emotionalism can just overwhelm their rationalism. The expert told me that this commonly happens very strongly near age 22. He'd been there, seen that, for years. Female emotionalism? A lot of it, especially the more visible cases, has a single cause -- anxiety disease, and there are other experts who claim that anxiety disease is four times more common in human females, including across cultures, than in human males. Consequences of anxiety disease can include hysteria (overreacting to things), paranoia (overestimating dangers and external intentional threats), obsessive/compulsive disorder (thinking/doing things without ability to stop), etc. These can lead to stress, especially as these symptoms cause practical problems in relationships and careers. The stress can lead to depression and more problems in relationships and careers, thus, more stress, clinical depression (a scary, ugly, desperate situation), and suicide. Yup. The stereotype of a dangerous situation with the female trembling, closing her eyes, ready to scream and the male, cool, calm, calculating, planning, plotting, quiet, hunting, and about ready to strike at the danger, the wild pig, the deer, the snake, the bear, the enemy, maybe these days a bug in a computer program, etc. is not fully wrong and in too many cases close to correct. Men who insist that human males and females are just interchangeable and equal in all respects except the most obvious anatomical differences can be in for some serious, life changing, reality checks. My strong advice: Without strong evidence to the contrary, treat each human female one by one as unique and quite different from a human male. Maybe slowly begin to see the main cases of human females accurately enough to speed up how you regard them, that is, not just one by one unique. Sure, some human females can be tough, mean, cold hearted, ruthless, calculating, combative, emasculating, etc. Yup, SOME can. Commonly, easily? No. Sometimes? Yes. So, have to be ready for all the major, more common cases. This is not nearly new stuff: As many parents discover and as some recent careful research has shown, right from the crib human males and females are very different. In particular, the males are paying attention to things and the females, to people. No joke. For a simple view, the boy is there in the crib plotting how to hack the latch, crawl to the floor, and install a Raspberry Pi in the toy firetruck on the floor so that he can drive it via his Android, maybe tease his sister, and the girl is smiling at her mother, father, older brother and sister, aunt and uncle, and grandparents, soon learns how with just a smile she can wrap her father around her little finger and get anything she wants by smiling and looking pretty and pretending to be cute, sweet, darling, adorable, precious, and to be cared for. Then if she wanted a computerized firetruck, which likely she wouldn't, with just a smile she'd be able to get her father, uncle, or grandfather to get one for her. In simple terms, the pattern is, if the boy wants something, then he works directly to get it. If the girl wants something, then she works indirectly, gets a human male to get it for her. You've noticed this by now, right? You thought that this difference was just happenstance, random, and likely visible just to you? Nope. What you were seeing is real, solid, and quite general. Applies in all cases? Nope. Maybe 90+% of the cases? Yup. Soon she learns that she gets a lot of what she wants by being pretty. Then she enters a circle: She begs for pretty clothes, gets them, looks pretty, and, looking pretty, gets more pretty clothes, a new iPhone, white bedroom furniture, whatever she wants in dresses, hats, coats, shoes, and gloves for Sunday in the winter, doesn't have to mow the grass (her brothers do), gets to watch her brothers fix the car, her pink bicycle, the printer of her computer, etc. When Mom's vacuum cleaner doesn't work, one of the brothers unplugs it from the wall, takes the switch apart, sees the A/C line cord broken from being used as a handle, with his pocket knife cuts off the broken wire, rewires the A/C cord connection, reassembles the thing, and Mom's vacuum cleaner works again. That's just what I did when I was 14 for the mother of the girl of 12 I was seeing at the time -- made a big hit with both mother and daughter. At about that age, in a class at school, the electric fan wasn't running. I saw that the plug was about to fall out of the wall socket so calmly plugged it back in. Within a millisecond, there was a scream that could be heard across half the school building -- the teacher, a woman, screamed "Don't TOUCH that. It's a WIRE!!!!!". Of COURSE it's a wire, you bimbo -- I didn't actually say that, but I continued, and the fan worked again. Poor woman -- afraid of wires. She probably still doesn't know the difference between gigawatts and millivolts if only because when I took high school physics she and the other girls took high school biology and giggled about boys. E. Fromm, The Art of Loving has "Men and women deserve equal respect as persons but are not the same." Can females learn to fix a vacuum cleaner? Of course. In WWII they learned to weld big ships, too. And they can learn to fly an F-22. But from the crib and for the rest of their lives, they will prefer pretty, pink dresses, people, and humanities subjects to things, Lego blocks, electronic breadboards, physics, calculus, and, right, writing computer software. This is just my opinion; I could be wrong; but the last time I believed that human males and females were just alike my wife died; no way will anyone ever convince me that human males and females are not radically different; we can try better to understand the differences, but to assume and/or insist that there are no differences is a short walk to Hell -- been there, done that, not doing it again, suggest that other boys/men don't either. I wish I'd been warned; now you've been warned. Right, with political correctness we are careful never to say anything that might offend anyone. So, the female feminist movement wants to insist that there are no important differences in interests, aptitudes, careers, etc. So, explaining that quite clearly there are differences is not politically correct. Sorry 'bout that. Wealthy Hollywood actresses have the financial power to ignore a lot of reality and embrace a lot of fantasy. Nearly all the rest of us need to be closer to reality or suffer some serious reality checks. So, for this post, don't tell anyone in Hollywood! They might be offended!
    - GradientsCents 9y ago
      Sometimes I also fall for "treating women like men" and then I realize they perceive & react differently to their surroundings Once a soccerball almost landed on the head of my daughter (could have broken her scull) and my wife was standing 100% unaware next to her (and not catching the ball): Luckily the ball just touched my daughter's cheek (when returning from the sky) and made her _only_ cry I was showing off how high I could kick a (real) soccerball to my family. Highly idiotic in hindsight. BUT: I was looking out for my son and my wife for my daughter...... We are constantly told (especially by girls/women) that there is no difference and it's convenient to believe it. Is part of being a women denying differences between man and women? Is that just another skill they want to have in us men, that we make them feel 'not different at all'? Are men looking/searching for different skills/things in women ;)? I am sorry for your loss (and currious what happend?)
    - 52-6F-62 9y ago
      I apologize only because what I am about to say may sound crass, but the length of your diatribe only adds to the fruitlessness of your central point. Even a complex idea can be explained far more briefly. The fact that you felt compelled to respond to my chastising in such a fashion speaks to your defensive position. Men and women are in no way the same, but to extend that to the capacity for rational or logical thought is ridiculous and unfounded -- at least in your response. You resolved to ply me and and everyone else with the opinion of a colleague you agree with and only that - that serves nothing. In short, I'll be more crass: you're full of shit.
      - graycat 9y ago
        You failed to make any rational case. So, you resulted to insults. > extend that to the capacity for rational or logical thought is ridiculous and unfounded I explained (A) the astounding ability for "rational thought" but also (B) how emotions can overwhelm that ability. So, your comment shows you have poor reading comprehension, and some junior college may be able to help you. On length, what I wrote was not long enough with enough details, examples, and explanations for you to understand it. So, at least for you, what I wrote was not long enough. For your obsession with excretory matters, neither HN nor I can help you.
- sctb 9y ago
  This comment is unsubstantive and violates the guidelines with incivility and by introducing a classic flamewar topic with nothing new to say about it. If you want to keep posting on Hacker News it can't be like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - behnamoh 9y ago
    I suggest you read your own link: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 9y ago
  We've banned this account for trolling. (The comment originally began with "How many women do you know who can actually think logically" and was edited after sctb replied.)
HarryHirsch 9y ago
On the other hand, why are so many crystallographers women? Dorothy Hodgkin, Olga Kennard, Eleanor Dodson, Kathleen Lonsdale, it's easy to come up with all these and many more, they are among the greats. You'd think it's due to J D Bernal. He was a pioneer of x-ray crystallography and was involved with many women, all of whom he treated with respect. That set the tone in the field.
- timthorn 9y ago
  I know that you said many more, but such a list surely isn't complete without Rosalind Franklin?
  - HarryHirsch 9y ago
    Definitively. And Jane Richardson. How we think about protein structure is due to her artwork.
- finid 9y ago
  Women also are majority in the biological sciences.
  - HarryHirsch 9y ago
    Yeah. I find that it's Computer Science in America that is the exception.
    - IslaDeEncanta 9y ago
      All engineering disciplines are the same way.
romanovcode 9y ago
Why are most coal miners males?
vowelless 9y ago
Is it even true that most programmers are "white males"? Is the scope the global population?
- Svenstaro 9y ago
  Well pretty much yes going by https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017
  - tyingq 9y ago
    It could be closer: https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/01/IDC-software-developers https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/01/IDC-software-developers China + India + the portion of US/Europe that aren't white must be close to half. Region oriented stats though, so I don't know how much of the AsiaPAC total is Australia, Russia, etc.
- dismantlethesun 9y ago
  I think they mean in the USA. In near homogenous countries, it's unsurprising that there aren't very many counter examples to the demographic (e.g. very few white programmers in Ghana).
- HarryHirsch 9y ago
  At a certain Java school in the South that is attended mostly by Indians, the gender ratio amongst the Indians is fairly even. The Americans, they are all white and male. What this means is open to interpretation.
  - klipt 9y ago
    I believe in Indian culture, engineering and programming are respected as solid, lucrative professions, while in general (white) American culture they're seen as second best to being say, a doctor or lawyer, which is where more high achieving women end up.
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  I have a background similar to the author of the post. I gather his scope is the US, or North America. Personally, I had my foot in more than one world. I grew up not wealthy, lower-middle-class in rural Ontario. I rowed because of my parents' history as athletes and their involvement helping establish a club in the small town we lived in. I also skateboarded and preferred old punk music to the Tragically Hip (which was the popular stuff where I grew up. How things change). I was also notoriously uncool and didn't hit parties, and spent a lot of time on the computer I urged and urged my parents to buy after coming in contact with GUI's (after years of messing with the 286 my mom had from her days working in the city.) From my perspective then, his outlook is accurate. On a global scale, totally off. It's far more complex than he makes it out to be. I would contend that in North America, a lot of the business leaders in tech are white because of the economic advantage typically afforded to them. But it's not universally the case. To start any business, you need resources. That's either money to run a server and access to a half-decent computer, or more. You also need time -- the most expensive and rare of resources in NA.
stri8ed 9y ago
Why are most prison inmates males?
throwaway26960 9y ago
Because women are smart. The women I've worked with claim ignorance to programming, have no desire to learn programming, and give me a mile high task list of things to do. Then they take all the credit for my work while I'm being worked to the bone. I burn out and quit while they hire the next fresh programmer ready to accept work. I've tried teaching employees to program, but when they realized how much painful/frustrating work they can now accept with this fresh new skill, they immediately stop learning how to program. Easier to give me all the work.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- analog31 9y ago
  Become a manager and play the same game. But seriously, it may be a function of your workplace culture. Where I work, the programmers have a typical 8 hour work day, and their managers are very protective of their time. In fact, if I need some programming work done, I have to do it myself, even though I'm supposedly not employed as a programmer. Another option is to find a role where you use your programming skill, but you're not developing software for someone. That's my case. My title is "scientist," and truth be told, I spend a considerable portion of my day programming, but I'm using code to solve problems, and my code will never be used by a customer.
grandalf 9y ago
I used to get teased for being so interested in computers and electronics during grade school, and for staying in at recess to program or read. Being able to ignore social pressures and just be yourself is definitely a benefit of privilege. So it's easy to see how many of the rarest skills and ingenious founder stories are examples of someone going against the grain to do something he or she cares about. When people decry privilege, they seem to think that it's a bad thing, that we should all feel the insecurity, the doubt, and the drive to conform that most people feel. I think the opposite is true, we should strive for all people to feel the empowerment of privilege and the freedom to pursue whatever moves them. As a corollary, it's not a coincidence that the top schools admit the most privileged applicants. Those are the people whose privilege has allowed them to think about what is important to them... not just simply trying to be popular, avoiding getting beaten up by the kids who hate nerds, or avoiding ticking off an abusive parent, etc. Privilege puts a person years ahead when it comes to moral clarity, purpose, curiosity, and self-actualization. Metaphorically, everyone else is in some sort of minimum security prison.
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  I think you've got a valid point. I would add that genetics plays a part. I grew up the same way, but my family didn't have much money. However my parents were former athletes and ensured my siblings and I took part in a regular physical activity (in one form or another) from a young age. I think that staves off some of the aggression -- if you don't look like they could just give you a knock around regardless of your demeanor. That and I was often told I looked angry or sad while I spent my spare periods or lunches reading. Woops. I think this at least applies to younger ages. edit: wanted to add, I'm sure this changed some time ago. I'm referring to the 90's and early 2000's in particular.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Arete3141 9y ago
  There are multiple factors, but basic discouragement, starting from childhood, is a big one. 100 years ago, when writing could make you a decent living, women were constantly discouraged from writing. Here's Virginia Woolf's character Lily in To The Lighthouse, dealing with nagging doubts: "Then why did she mind what he said? Women can’t write, women can’t paint—what did that matter coming from him, since clearly it was not true to him but for some reason helpful to him, and that was why he said it?" At roughly the same time, women were often employed as "computers" -- that is, people who did complex mathematical calculations. It was thought that women were good for this more tedious math, thus leaving men free for the higher math to which they were more eminently suited. So, to review: When writers could support a family, women were discouraged from being writers. When math skill was not connected with a good salary, women were accepted as being good at math. Nowadays, very few writers can make a living, while mathematically-minded coders can. So today's generally accepted wisdom is that girls are naturally good with words (which doesn't pay), while boys are good with math and computers (which does). The fact that women aren't in coding isn't a bug, but a feature. Remember the Eniac? Programming that was brutally hard, and it was all done by women, and there does not seem to have been a particular amount of money or glory in it. Now there's both, and that's why women are discouraged from joining in the lucrative boys' club. Once code starts being written by robots and the average developer can't find a job, then you'll see the field fill up with women.
matt_wulfeck 9y ago
> It was flat out unpopular and the only people I found that were really into it were nerdy white kids like me who somehow tricked their parents into buying a computer. Indeed the seeds were sown a very long time ago. My father bought a PC with some inheritance money he had, then he immediately regretted it because I spent all my time and summer on it rather than playing sports or hanging out with friends! Back then nobody realized how in demand our field would be. By the time I started college I had already been programming.
jhbadger 9y ago
The author makes a good point as to the high cost of computers in the US in previous decades, which meant kids who grew up using computers tended to be upper-middle class, but what about places like Britain where the Sinclair Spectrum and various Amstrad machines reigned in the 1980s-early 1990s? These were cheap machines. It would be interesting to see if this cheapness led to a more diverse set of programmers.
- timthorn 9y ago
  They were cheaper, but the social status of geeks was just the same in the UK.
ng12 9y ago
I think this hits the nail on the head, and explains why some people feel gilted by the recent push for diversity in tech -- like it or not it's only a popular issue because tech is now sexy where it absolutely wasn't before. Other fields have worse gender ratios by a fair margin (in both directions) but you don't see news articles about it -- maybe because there's no Zuckerberg of mechanical engineering.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
lemonsqueeze 9y ago
"It was flat out unpopular and the only people I found that were really into it were nerdy white kids like me who somehow tricked their parents into buying a computer." This. I tricked my parents 3 times to buy my brother I computers. I took well over a year each time of pestering and took them the whole year to save $2000. We are immigrants and didnt have much money then. It's obvious to me and the author... that's what this hysteria is ridiculous and funny. We got picked on and bullied for being nerds and into computers at the age of 13.
soneca 9y ago
I understand the logic. But data about the diversity among programmers around 20~25 years old must be significantly different from ~40 if he is right. We do not have to sit and wait 20 years hoping he is right. Is there any such data available? About the cost of the equipment to learn. Is there any raspberry pi based computer that one can use to learn to code? Like, something below USD100? That would also help more class diversity.
- evilDagmar 9y ago
  That's pretty much every RPi. Computers are cheap now, and the RPi in particular is incredibly inexpensive and has more than enough power for people to learn programming skills.
- douche 9y ago
  There's little benefit to screwing around with a RPi, unless that's your hobby and you want to mess around with the hardware, when you can go to Best Buy and get a real laptop for $300. By the time you've bought a keyboard, mouse, display, and storage for the Pi, you've spent just as much money.
chewyfruitloop 9y ago
Yeh $1500 computers.... you where looking at the wrong thing. Everyone else was looking at the not Microsoft market... commadore, Atari etc. I bought my first computer with Christmas money when I was about 10 for under £100 in the mid 80's. The whole girls weren't into computers is looking at the bubble from the inside and not looking at why there's a bubble. Parents in the 70's tended to point the boys at building and engineering toys and the girls at dolls etc. Those children followed on in the same fashion. That's left us in the gender bias we have now. As for ethnic groups... that's complicated and depends on local demographic, plus imigant families tend not to be overflow in spare cash....
- 300bps 9y ago
  I had the same reaction to the pricing in the article. I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas 1982. I think it was a few hundred dollars at most. I got it because I begged my parents to buy it for me. My two older sisters had zero interest. None whatsoever. I spent 12 hours a day on it especially after I got my first 300 bps modem in 1985.
  - abecedarius 9y ago
    It cost about $1500 in today's money. Not-rich families would buy one for their kids, but it was a nontrivial expense to them. My first computer was a TI-99/4A at about half that, and I was grateful.
  - Avernar 9y ago
    I got mine for Christmas and it was $300 just for the computer. The floppy drive was another $300. Got the monitor which was another $300 about six months later. Add in the dot matrix printer and 1200 baud modem and it was over $1000 for the complete system.
- CoolGuySteve 9y ago
  The video game crash of the early 80s put a stop to those cheap programmable computers. By the 90s, any cheap home computer, like the NES/SNES/Genesis/Gameboy was not programmable by the end user. When I was a kid, I learned BASIC on a 10 year old Tandy 80 to write games like I had on my NES (which was marketed solely to boys btw). Eventually my dad dropped $2000 on a 486 (and subsequent upgrades) and that's when I was able to start writing C with the DJGPP toolchain, installing Linux, rebuilding machines out of spare obsolete parts, etc. If my family wasn't well off, there's no way I'd have progressed past having known BASIC for a couple of summers. I think this is a common refrain for anyone born between about 1980 and maybe 1995. By 2010, there were cheap laptops, netbooks, and whatnot.
rm999 9y ago
This article makes some decent points around class and the expense of a computer in the 80s/90s. But it dodges more substantial questions, and a lot of the substance is either circular logic or confirmation bias. There are plenty of asian men in programming, so this isn't a race thing. It probably is socioeconomic for the reasons the article points out, so that's fine - I think we can leave it at "white and asian people dominate programming because they tend to come from wealthier families". I think the much harder question is why women aren't in programming. They make up 50% of the population and come from the same exact socioeconomic background as men. This question is important because the repercussions still haunt us today. The article starts this question with "girls weren’t interested in computers or video games at all", and then circles the logic with "people tend to do things that they see other people who are 'like them' doing". Well, I'd like to know why women weren't interested in programming. In my circumstantial experience it wasn't a conscious decision or peer pressure, it was coming top down from society. I saw many parents encouraging their sons to play with computers and completely ignoring that their daughters may want to also. The article completely avoids this topic, sadly. edit: downvoted within 30 seconds - if you're gonna downvote, please at least reply and start a discussion about it.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > There are plenty of asian men in programming, so this isn't a race thing. That whites aren't the only race disproportionately advantaged does not in any way support the conclusion that it isn't (in part or in whole) “a race thing”.
  - rm999 9y ago
    The article doesn't even argue that it's a race thing, it simply starts with the premise but explains it as socioeconomic. I agree with the article on that one. I am not white and I was never discouraged in any way from programming because of my skin color or ethnic background (I've been doing it in some form since I was 6 in the late 80s with full support from pretty much everyone, including a lot of monetary support from my upper middle class parents). edit: it actually does get into race, but around blacks/african americans. But it didn't get into Asians - my point really is this isn't a white thing per se.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gweinberg 9y ago
I think in the US it is not the case the programmers are significantly disproportionately white.
- IslaDeEncanta 9y ago
  https://datausa.io/profile/soc/151131/#demographics https://datausa.io/profile/soc/151131/#demographics
ZapataMondata 9y ago
There is an alternate theory. Before you label it a trope, read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Female_Brain_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Female_Brain_(book) The premise is that due to both physical differences and differences in hormonal episodes over a lifetime, the brains of men and women wind up with somewhat different architectures. One architecture is more suited to linear thinking, as in flow charts. The other is more suited to network thinking, as in connecting attributes. Computers were overwhelmingly designed by men and a computer's architecture and programming methods are reflective of the way men think. Hence, there is little natural draw for women.
briholt 9y ago
The reason men are more inclined to program is autism. Thinking systematically and enjoying some level of solitude are traits that make a good programmer. It's no coincidence that men are 4.5x more likely to be diagnosed with autism[1]. Look at any early interview with Zuck or Gates or Musk or Jack - it's like an educational video on how to spot mild Asperger Syndrome. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html
- altano 9y ago
  This is what programmers tell themselves but it sounds bizarre to me. 1) There is almost no profession where thinking is required for which "Thinking systematically and enjoying some level of solitude" isn't helpful. Programming isn't special in this regard. 2) Having empathy with your users seems even more important to me, and a lack of this is the cause of a lot of shitty software. Also, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't strike me as being Asbergery at all but maybe that's just because I work at Facebook.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - briholt 9y ago
    You seem like someone who is way outside of the autistic spectrum. Imagine the sound of other people talking sounding like nails on a chalkboard. Now imagine working a job in sales, biz dev, marketing, customer support, investing, legal, management, child care, or HR. How many hours can you go in a day without hearing that screeching sound? Maybe 1/2 hour if you tried hard? Now imagine working in a good programming environment where you can frequently spend 1-3 hours without talking to anyone, and when you reluctantly do it's for very short periods with people who understand you don't like talking. Or maybe you can just work at home and almost never deal with anyone. Are you the type of person who wants to spend weeks at home, alone, no travel, no dinners, with almost no human interaction outside of say 4 family/close friends? A very large number of programmers I've met are.
  - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
funzofactofive 9y ago
Yeah...20 years ago "girls didn't like video games" is a very weak narrative.
- ouid 9y ago
  well, 20 years ago, being a nerd was awful until college. Just the worst possible childhood available.
RaceIsSensitive 9y ago
Throwaway, because race is a sensitive topic, and below is a potentially unpopular way to look at things in regards to race (I am not addressing gender in this comment). 1. Whites actually do not make up a disproportionate number of the programmers in the US! Whites are 74% of the workforce and 72% of the programmers. 2. Asians do make up a disproportionately high number of the programmers in the US, they are 6% of workforce but 20% of programmers. 3. I'd suggest that programming is a job where intellectual ability (specifically math-type logic) is highly correlated with success. Everything else held equal - on average more intellectual ability will lead to a better programmer. 4. Black Americans have on average significantly lower math skills (measured by the SAT) than white Americans. The factors leading to this are widely debated, but the fact remains that the gap still exists in a big way.[2] Asians have, on average, much better math skills than whites and blacks. 5. This doesn't seem to me primarily a culture issue, it seems like an intellectual ability issue. Conclusion: I am not qualified to say what drives the intellectual ability gap (education, infant diet, genetics, culture, etc). But the fact remains the highest IQ people (and therefore highest IQ groups) will continue to perform the best in jobs where IQ is a big factor for success. [1]https://datausa.io/profile/soc/151131/ https://datausa.io/profile/soc/151131/ [2]I'm using SAT math scores to show this here, which of course have faults, but it's tough to argue they don't show an actual difference. IQ tests show similar results: https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-highlight-inequality-and-hinder-upward-mobility/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-h...
- baddox 9y ago
  Number 5 seems like a leap.
  - RaceIsSensitive 9y ago
    Do you agree that higher IQ (on average) makes a better programmer, and that as a group asians have higher IQs than blacks? If so, how do you expect blacks (as a group) to have the same number of quality programmers as asians? Again, I am NOT saying this needs to be inherently true in the future, that this is unsolvable, is genetic, etc. I am simply saying that today (on average) 18 year old asians have more intellectual ability than 18 year old blacks - and therefore, I would expect the asians (as a group) to do better in programming today. Maybe in 20 years the IQs of the various race groups will be equal. And if that becomes the case and there is still a gap, then my thesis is disproven. But that is not the case today.
notacoward 9y ago
The 'white' part is pretty straightforward. THe 'male' part is trickier. If it's a simple matter of role-model discouragement, why has it been getting worse? Depending on which data set you look at, the percentage of CS graduates (bachelor's) who were female has been declining since the early to mid 80s. This matches my own experience, with a steady decline in the percentage of my developer colleagues who were female from 1989 until this year. It's not all about the so-called pipeline. There are many forms of discrimination and discouragement that apply even to women who are already in the field. That includes everything from differences in conversational style to pay disparities to actual assault. To a large extent, most programmers are men because the people driving the culture - not just programmers themselves but execs, investors, etc. - have been men, and that culture has been more comfortable for other men than for women. (BTW I was going to use "male" and "female" but the objectifying way that "female" is used by the MRA/alt-right crowd made it sound creepy.) When those people stop injecting their old-boy-network ethos and habits into our workplaces, we might stand a chance of creating an ecosystem where someone who's not just like them can still feel like an equal.
- malandrew 9y ago
  According to National Science Foundation figures, the decline in female CS graduates stopped around 2008/2009. It bottomed out then and has been on the rise since.
  - notacoward 9y ago
    According to the US department of education, it remained level through 2014. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/what-should-we-be-teaching-the-next-generation-of-computer-scientists#survey-answer https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/what-should-we... According to AAUW (unsourced but with NSF as a sponsor) it remained level through 2013. http://www.aauw.org/research/solving-the-equation/ http://www.aauw.org/research/solving-the-equation/ There's no way this is positive or even neutral. Even the high of 35% was unimpressive. The long-term trend is still downwards, despite a mere couple of years at least 10% below that peak. Leveling off at 18-24% is still unacceptable, and we're still a few years short of being able to say even that is more than a statistical anomaly. When that number has reached its previous peak and is still trending upward, so that we're within a generation of full parity, then we might be able to say we're making sufficient progress.
brockvond 9y ago
That is so spot-on... the only reason people care about forcing diversity in tech is because its now a fashionable industry that gets you respect and makes you money. If coders were not lauded for being super-smart, rich, and working in "fun environments" nobody would care how big of a white sausage fest it'd be.
- prostoalex 9y ago
  I was wondering if other industries (construction, commercial fishing, oil drilling, nursing, coal mining, aircraft maintenance) were as focused on diversity as tech. And if not, what made tech an outlier.
thegayngler 9y ago
I'm black and my family wasn't upper middle class. My parents bought a computer when I was 11 years old and I lived on that thing. After I dropped out of HS and was living on my own at like 18, I would put dollars into the machine so I could build my music website as I didn't have a computer at the time. The point is people who are interested will do what they have to even if they don't have large amounts of money.
- rmah 9y ago
  I think your experience is highly admirable. But I think even you have to admit that most people, regardless of background, do not have the sort of will power and drive you exhibited. So yes, any particular person could overcome the obstacles in their path. But most will not. And it's the "most" that will lead to skewed statistics over time.
  - thegayngler 9y ago
    I certainly agree. It was just my interest and I felt like it was fun for me to put something out that the whole world could see if they wanted to.
AckSyn 9y ago
This kind of article is trashy at best. We all know the answer alread, and the solution is found in the answer! Encouragement from the time people are young. "Cultures" that can't respect what a kid wants to be curious about and lets them explore that shouldn't be allowed to persist. Reading, scientific exploration of subjects, using their minds. The society and culture that shuns learning and education need to die off. The rest is race and gender baiting garbage.
- douche 9y ago
  How much of the beneficial parts of the "hacker ethos" are rooted in having to circumvent the disapproval and blockers that attempted to prevent access to the machine? Nobody was encouraging me to dick around on the computer and learn what have turned out to be hugely beneficial skills. Instead it was "Get the fuck off that thing and go outside and stack the firewood!"
  - AckSyn 9y ago
    Well you had responsibilities as a child and presumably you have them now as an adult. That hasn't a thing to do with what I'm talking about.
FT_intern 9y ago
Is it even really a privilege to be into programming in your childhood/teen years? Most kids are not Feynmans. They aren't naturally curious geniuses who are only stopped by a judgmental society and "biases". There is a whole other, more dominant incentive structure in place. The way many kids/teens become interested in programming is through video games and trolling online forums/message boards. Now, why do some kids play videos games and troll the internet more? Because the opportunity cost is low for them. Meaning that if they did not play video games/troll the internet, the other potential activities are not as fun for them. A vital activity that other kids do is socializing and hanging out with family, friends, etc. in real life. Is it really a privilege to be exiled from real life to the internet? Would those kids spend time on the internet playing video games and reading about programming if they weren't as "privileged" as they are and had opportunities to socialize in real life?
- gradientdescent 9y ago
  When I was young (and a white male) what could I do? All the girls (16 to 20 years old) were hot and going to parties and having older boyfriends of course Yes, the attractivness of the topic "white, priviledged males" is THE TWIST: Actually we were ugly ducklings sitting at home not knowing what to do with our time Today we are compared to a few super-rich and lucky guys. And the job: Is it a job that other people are envious about, that I am doing it? "Hey, he is programming according to the requirements he is given by project managers"
antingate2 9y ago
The war on white male
20years 9y ago
This is a topic of high interest to me personally. Over the past couple of years I have been teaching middle school students how to code on and off. I am also a female who has been coding for close to 20 years now. In the classes I teach, the girls are usually far beyond the boys. They get this stuff so much quicker and at a much deeper level. They are so much more focused and really try to understand what everything means. The boys need instant gratification. They want to hack and mess around with the code but most don't want to really try and understand what it all means. They also need way more confirmation from the other boys in the class. They all create their games and show them off to the other boys and then they all try to one up each other. This is how they are motivated. They also completely exclude the girls from this. In my current class of 17, there are 5 girls. All 5 are far ahead of all of the boys and 3 of those girls are already doing the advanced stuff. 4 of those girls sit together and actually seem to be annoyed by the boys antics. This has been similar in all of the classes/workshops I have taught. It has been a very interesting observation which has convinced me that the boys club type behavior starts very early. What I am not convinced of is that we should necessarily try and change the boys behavior as long as they are not specifically offending the girls. I worry that this would suppress their instinctual way of being motivated and learning. I can also understand however why girls bail out, which is unfortunate in itself being that even at this early age, they are so good at it. I am not really sure what the answer is other than trying to encourage girls to stick with it and give them that support early on. "There is one other reason I think you see fewer women and minorities as software developers. People tend to do things that they see other people who are "like them" doing" It helps when other girls are doing it with you like the 5 in my current class.
- FT_intern 9y ago
  I hope your political beliefs aren't implicitly biasing your teaching against the males. The primary education system seems to be failing males (more female college graduates every year) and it wouldn't help if you added to that. I'm curious, would it be an issue to you if all the boys in the class were "beyond" the girls?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
dlwdlw 9y ago
The reason most programmers are white males is because traditionally only wealthy western countries had access to computers. As the cost went down, more people could afford to study and in silicon valley at least there are many Chinese and Indians, basically a reflection of world population than anything else. Plus, the majority if good jobs are still in the US where the majority of the population are white males. This is completely separate than white male privilege. Programming was never something to make you popular and there was never any attempt at creating barriers to entry. It was a nerdy unsexy job till recently. The biggest gate to diversity is probably getting a visa. I don't hear any white expat programmers complaining about why all the programmers in China are mostly chinese and being looked down on for lack of advanced math skills.
finid 9y ago
Interesting topic, but I think Why are most programmers in the USA white males? is a much more accurate title.
carsongross 9y ago
Asians are proportionally over-represented because programming broadly rewards IQ, and asians have the highest IQ. Men are over represented because they are naturally better, on average, at abstract mathematical reasoning. There are social reasons as well, but this is the core of the issue.
illuminati1911 9y ago
What kind of question is this? Do you think there are many white male programmers in China for example? It shouldn't surprise anyone that white people are majority in white coutries and that it reflects to working life too. And why male? Because men like programming and only few women do.
jrs235 9y ago
Because white males were more likely to have access to computers 15-30 years ago?
- GradientsCents 9y ago
  Yeah, it's just one reason Luckily this reason is politically correct and you stated it Super You are a hero!
Yetanfou 9y ago
Why are people asking more and more of these basically racist / 'genderist' / whateverist questions? Why is it that it is nearly impossible to open a newspage or magazine without being confronted with '...blah blah blah white males blah blah ...' or '... blah blah blah women wearing hijab blah blah ...' or '...blah blah LGBT people blah blah ...'? I live in Sweden, one of the most egalitarian countries in the world, but if you were to believe the media we're about as bad as it can get when it comes to 'discrimination' and 'privilege' and such. Strangely enough those claims are mostly made by people from the 'upper class', living in the most comfortable (and, need I say it, 'white'...) areas of the capital and other big cities. People who send their children to remarkably homogeneous schools while they promote diversity everywhere. This whole thing with identity politics better stop soon or we'll be back in the 18th century before you know it, with segregation everywhere. Because that is what this mostly leads to. The more people identify themselves with some special interest - be it based on skin colour, gender, religion, sexual preference, country of origin or any other factor - the more society will fall apart into disparate camps. Back to the question, why is the majority of people in IT of a specific gender and a specific skin colour? Well, I can ask the same question about, say, horse riding: why is the majority of people of a specific gender and skin colour, at least in this country? Or let's take another profession, veterinarians, why are they mostly of a specific gender? The answer to these questions is mostly that, for some reason, more males than females are interested in computer-related stuff. On the other hand, more females than males are interested in working with pets. Is this a problem? If so, what should be done about it? Should there be a mandatory stop on veterinary college for women to combat the female domination of the field? Should girls be forced to play football and boys be lifted in the saddle? If so, why? What would be achieved by this, other than increasing the level of injustice - men who want to work in IT can not due to quota, women who want to work as vets can not due to quota... If racism is bad, stop drawing attention to race. If gender is a social construction (...), why decry the lack of a specific gender (...) in a given field. Just... stop. No more identity politics, please.
- ellius 9y ago
  It's the current topic that wannabe intellectuals have latched onto because it's easy to understand and reason about without actually thinking too hard. It also has the benefit of lending a cheap moral authority. That doesn't mean it doesn't actually deserve examination -- there are some excellent writings on race, gender, etc. that are well worth reading, thinking about, and designing policy after. But by and large the reason you see it everywhere is because it's intellectually fashionable.
arghimonmobile2 9y ago
I encourage everyone in tech to read Unlocking the Clubhouse, by Margolis et al. It doesn't quite propose how to solve the problem, but it certainly teases out a number of contributing factors. I think in the case in point, the importance of being encouraged/discouraged depending on gender cannot be understated. Of course, to the individual involved it'll feel 'normal' since it has always been that way, but on a societal level it is blatantly obvious that children are moulded into gendered expectation patterns from literally the moment they're born. (As to that last assertion, there's a study floating around on how adults react to a baby crying then told the child is either male or female. Quite saddening.)
raulpopa 9y ago
it's the IQ folks.

Actually here on HN, I have seen some people from Nigeria and Cameron and they have done some pretty good job in their fields.

52-6F-62 9y ago
You're kidding, right? I sure hope so.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- graycat 9y ago
  I struggled with such questions. Eventually, as I was trying to figure this stuff out, one expert told me: "Of COURSE women are MUCH more emotional than men. That's the cause of all the problems [between men and women]." It does appear that from, say, SAT test scores, that the girls and boys have somewhat different aptitudes. But, girls can be plenty bright, really, at darned near anything. E.g., my wife was Valedictorian, Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, NSF Fellow, and Ph.D. in mathematical sociology. Her memory, verbal, and social talents were astounding: E.g., early in our marriage, we played Scrabble. She beat me like a rented mule. But I kept trying. I improved! She improved faster than I did; the situation for me was hopeless; and she refused to play me anymore. She did beautifully in analysis of variance and, really, all the material in statistical hypothesis testing and multi-variate statistics, material that is still in significant ways ahead of the usual in AI and ML. Still, the expert was correct: She was MUCH more emotional than I was. COULD she be rational? Yes, especially for something far from her core concerns. Otherwise, nope: On any of her core concerns, especially as a female, her emotionalism wildly overwhelmed her rationalism. Often it's not that the females can't be rational; instead, it's that they are also emotional, strongly emotional, and their emotionalism can just overwhelm their rationalism. The expert told me that this commonly happens very strongly near age 22. He'd been there, seen that, for years. Female emotionalism? A lot of it, especially the more visible cases, has a single cause -- anxiety disease, and there are other experts who claim that anxiety disease is four times more common in human females, including across cultures, than in human males. Consequences of anxiety disease can include hysteria (overreacting to things), paranoia (overestimating dangers and external intentional threats), obsessive/compulsive disorder (thinking/doing things without ability to stop), etc. These can lead to stress, especially as these symptoms cause practical problems in relationships and careers. The stress can lead to depression and more problems in relationships and careers, thus, more stress, clinical depression (a scary, ugly, desperate situation), and suicide. Yup. The stereotype of a dangerous situation with the female trembling, closing her eyes, ready to scream and the male, cool, calm, calculating, planning, plotting, quiet, hunting, and about ready to strike at the danger, the wild pig, the deer, the snake, the bear, the enemy, maybe these days a bug in a computer program, etc. is not fully wrong and in too many cases close to correct. Men who insist that human males and females are just interchangeable and equal in all respects except the most obvious anatomical differences can be in for some serious, life changing, reality checks. My strong advice: Without strong evidence to the contrary, treat each human female one by one as unique and quite different from a human male. Maybe slowly begin to see the main cases of human females accurately enough to speed up how you regard them, that is, not just one by one unique. Sure, some human females can be tough, mean, cold hearted, ruthless, calculating, combative, emasculating, etc. Yup, SOME can. Commonly, easily? No. Sometimes? Yes. So, have to be ready for all the major, more common cases. This is not nearly new stuff: As many parents discover and as some recent careful research has shown, right from the crib human males and females are very different. In particular, the males are paying attention to things and the females, to people. No joke. For a simple view, the boy is there in the crib plotting how to hack the latch, crawl to the floor, and install a Raspberry Pi in the toy firetruck on the floor so that he can drive it via his Android, maybe tease his sister, and the girl is smiling at her mother, father, older brother and sister, aunt and uncle, and grandparents, soon learns how with just a smile she can wrap her father around her little finger and get anything she wants by smiling and looking pretty and pretending to be cute, sweet, darling, adorable, precious, and to be cared for. Then if she wanted a computerized firetruck, which likely she wouldn't, with just a smile she'd be able to get her father, uncle, or grandfather to get one for her. In simple terms, the pattern is, if the boy wants something, then he works directly to get it. If the girl wants something, then she works indirectly, gets a human male to get it for her. You've noticed this by now, right? You thought that this difference was just happenstance, random, and likely visible just to you? Nope. What you were seeing is real, solid, and quite general. Applies in all cases? Nope. Maybe 90+% of the cases? Yup. Soon she learns that she gets a lot of what she wants by being pretty. Then she enters a circle: She begs for pretty clothes, gets them, looks pretty, and, looking pretty, gets more pretty clothes, a new iPhone, white bedroom furniture, whatever she wants in dresses, hats, coats, shoes, and gloves for Sunday in the winter, doesn't have to mow the grass (her brothers do), gets to watch her brothers fix the car, her pink bicycle, the printer of her computer, etc. When Mom's vacuum cleaner doesn't work, one of the brothers unplugs it from the wall, takes the switch apart, sees the A/C line cord broken from being used as a handle, with his pocket knife cuts off the broken wire, rewires the A/C cord connection, reassembles the thing, and Mom's vacuum cleaner works again. That's just what I did when I was 14 for the mother of the girl of 12 I was seeing at the time -- made a big hit with both mother and daughter. At about that age, in a class at school, the electric fan wasn't running. I saw that the plug was about to fall out of the wall socket so calmly plugged it back in. Within a millisecond, there was a scream that could be heard across half the school building -- the teacher, a woman, screamed "Don't TOUCH that. It's a WIRE!!!!!". Of COURSE it's a wire, you bimbo -- I didn't actually say that, but I continued, and the fan worked again. Poor woman -- afraid of wires. She probably still doesn't know the difference between gigawatts and millivolts if only because when I took high school physics she and the other girls took high school biology and giggled about boys. E. Fromm, The Art of Loving has "Men and women deserve equal respect as persons but are not the same." Can females learn to fix a vacuum cleaner? Of course. In WWII they learned to weld big ships, too. And they can learn to fly an F-22. But from the crib and for the rest of their lives, they will prefer pretty, pink dresses, people, and humanities subjects to things, Lego blocks, electronic breadboards, physics, calculus, and, right, writing computer software. This is just my opinion; I could be wrong; but the last time I believed that human males and females were just alike my wife died; no way will anyone ever convince me that human males and females are not radically different; we can try better to understand the differences, but to assume and/or insist that there are no differences is a short walk to Hell -- been there, done that, not doing it again, suggest that other boys/men don't either. I wish I'd been warned; now you've been warned. Right, with political correctness we are careful never to say anything that might offend anyone. So, the female feminist movement wants to insist that there are no important differences in interests, aptitudes, careers, etc. So, explaining that quite clearly there are differences is not politically correct. Sorry 'bout that. Wealthy Hollywood actresses have the financial power to ignore a lot of reality and embrace a lot of fantasy. Nearly all the rest of us need to be closer to reality or suffer some serious reality checks. So, for this post, don't tell anyone in Hollywood! They might be offended!
  - GradientsCents 9y ago
    Sometimes I also fall for "treating women like men" and then I realize they perceive & react differently to their surroundings Once a soccerball almost landed on the head of my daughter (could have broken her scull) and my wife was standing 100% unaware next to her (and not catching the ball): Luckily the ball just touched my daughter's cheek (when returning from the sky) and made her _only_ cry I was showing off how high I could kick a (real) soccerball to my family. Highly idiotic in hindsight. BUT: I was looking out for my son and my wife for my daughter...... We are constantly told (especially by girls/women) that there is no difference and it's convenient to believe it. Is part of being a women denying differences between man and women? Is that just another skill they want to have in us men, that we make them feel 'not different at all'? Are men looking/searching for different skills/things in women ;)? I am sorry for your loss (and currious what happend?)
  - 52-6F-62 9y ago
    I apologize only because what I am about to say may sound crass, but the length of your diatribe only adds to the fruitlessness of your central point. Even a complex idea can be explained far more briefly. The fact that you felt compelled to respond to my chastising in such a fashion speaks to your defensive position. Men and women are in no way the same, but to extend that to the capacity for rational or logical thought is ridiculous and unfounded -- at least in your response. You resolved to ply me and and everyone else with the opinion of a colleague you agree with and only that - that serves nothing. In short, I'll be more crass: you're full of shit.
    - graycat 9y ago
      You failed to make any rational case. So, you resulted to insults. > extend that to the capacity for rational or logical thought is ridiculous and unfounded I explained (A) the astounding ability for "rational thought" but also (B) how emotions can overwhelm that ability. So, your comment shows you have poor reading comprehension, and some junior college may be able to help you. On length, what I wrote was not long enough with enough details, examples, and explanations for you to understand it. So, at least for you, what I wrote was not long enough. For your obsession with excretory matters, neither HN nor I can help you.
sctb 9y ago
This comment is unsubstantive and violates the guidelines with incivility and by introducing a classic flamewar topic with nothing new to say about it. If you want to keep posting on Hacker News it can't be like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- behnamoh 9y ago
  I suggest you read your own link: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dang 9y ago
We've banned this account for trolling. (The comment originally began with "How many women do you know who can actually think logically" and was edited after sctb replied.)

HarryHirsch 9y ago

On the other hand, why are so many crystallographers women? Dorothy Hodgkin, Olga Kennard, Eleanor Dodson, Kathleen Lonsdale, it's easy to come up with all these and many more, they are among the greats. You'd think it's due to J D Bernal. He was a pioneer of x-ray crystallography and was involved with many women, all of whom he treated with respect. That set the tone in the field.

timthorn 9y ago
I know that you said many more, but such a list surely isn't complete without Rosalind Franklin?
- HarryHirsch 9y ago
  Definitively. And Jane Richardson. How we think about protein structure is due to her artwork.
finid 9y ago
Women also are majority in the biological sciences.
- HarryHirsch 9y ago
  Yeah. I find that it's Computer Science in America that is the exception.
  - IslaDeEncanta 9y ago
    All engineering disciplines are the same way.

romanovcode 9y ago

Why are most coal miners males?

vowelless 9y ago

Is it even true that most programmers are "white males"? Is the scope the global population?

Svenstaro 9y ago
Well pretty much yes going by https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017
- tyingq 9y ago
  It could be closer: https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/01/IDC-software-developers https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/01/IDC-software-developers China + India + the portion of US/Europe that aren't white must be close to half. Region oriented stats though, so I don't know how much of the AsiaPAC total is Australia, Russia, etc.
dismantlethesun 9y ago
I think they mean in the USA. In near homogenous countries, it's unsurprising that there aren't very many counter examples to the demographic (e.g. very few white programmers in Ghana).
HarryHirsch 9y ago
At a certain Java school in the South that is attended mostly by Indians, the gender ratio amongst the Indians is fairly even. The Americans, they are all white and male. What this means is open to interpretation.
- klipt 9y ago
  I believe in Indian culture, engineering and programming are respected as solid, lucrative professions, while in general (white) American culture they're seen as second best to being say, a doctor or lawyer, which is where more high achieving women end up.
52-6F-62 9y ago
I have a background similar to the author of the post. I gather his scope is the US, or North America. Personally, I had my foot in more than one world. I grew up not wealthy, lower-middle-class in rural Ontario. I rowed because of my parents' history as athletes and their involvement helping establish a club in the small town we lived in. I also skateboarded and preferred old punk music to the Tragically Hip (which was the popular stuff where I grew up. How things change). I was also notoriously uncool and didn't hit parties, and spent a lot of time on the computer I urged and urged my parents to buy after coming in contact with GUI's (after years of messing with the 286 my mom had from her days working in the city.) From my perspective then, his outlook is accurate. On a global scale, totally off. It's far more complex than he makes it out to be. I would contend that in North America, a lot of the business leaders in tech are white because of the economic advantage typically afforded to them. But it's not universally the case. To start any business, you need resources. That's either money to run a server and access to a half-decent computer, or more. You also need time -- the most expensive and rare of resources in NA.

stri8ed 9y ago

Why are most prison inmates males?

throwaway26960 9y ago

Because women are smart. The women I've worked with claim ignorance to programming, have no desire to learn programming, and give me a mile high task list of things to do. Then they take all the credit for my work while I'm being worked to the bone. I burn out and quit while they hire the next fresh programmer ready to accept work. I've tried teaching employees to program, but when they realized how much painful/frustrating work they can now accept with this fresh new skill, they immediately stop learning how to program. Easier to give me all the work.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
analog31 9y ago
Become a manager and play the same game. But seriously, it may be a function of your workplace culture. Where I work, the programmers have a typical 8 hour work day, and their managers are very protective of their time. In fact, if I need some programming work done, I have to do it myself, even though I'm supposedly not employed as a programmer. Another option is to find a role where you use your programming skill, but you're not developing software for someone. That's my case. My title is "scientist," and truth be told, I spend a considerable portion of my day programming, but I'm using code to solve problems, and my code will never be used by a customer.

grandalf 9y ago

I used to get teased for being so interested in computers and electronics during grade school, and for staying in at recess to program or read. Being able to ignore social pressures and just be yourself is definitely a benefit of privilege. So it's easy to see how many of the rarest skills and ingenious founder stories are examples of someone going against the grain to do something he or she cares about. When people decry privilege, they seem to think that it's a bad thing, that we should all feel the insecurity, the doubt, and the drive to conform that most people feel. I think the opposite is true, we should strive for all people to feel the empowerment of privilege and the freedom to pursue whatever moves them. As a corollary, it's not a coincidence that the top schools admit the most privileged applicants. Those are the people whose privilege has allowed them to think about what is important to them... not just simply trying to be popular, avoiding getting beaten up by the kids who hate nerds, or avoiding ticking off an abusive parent, etc. Privilege puts a person years ahead when it comes to moral clarity, purpose, curiosity, and self-actualization. Metaphorically, everyone else is in some sort of minimum security prison.

52-6F-62 9y ago
I think you've got a valid point. I would add that genetics plays a part. I grew up the same way, but my family didn't have much money. However my parents were former athletes and ensured my siblings and I took part in a regular physical activity (in one form or another) from a young age. I think that staves off some of the aggression -- if you don't look like they could just give you a knock around regardless of your demeanor. That and I was often told I looked angry or sad while I spent my spare periods or lunches reading. Woops. I think this at least applies to younger ages. edit: wanted to add, I'm sure this changed some time ago. I'm referring to the 90's and early 2000's in particular.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Arete3141 9y ago
There are multiple factors, but basic discouragement, starting from childhood, is a big one. 100 years ago, when writing could make you a decent living, women were constantly discouraged from writing. Here's Virginia Woolf's character Lily in To The Lighthouse, dealing with nagging doubts: "Then why did she mind what he said? Women can’t write, women can’t paint—what did that matter coming from him, since clearly it was not true to him but for some reason helpful to him, and that was why he said it?" At roughly the same time, women were often employed as "computers" -- that is, people who did complex mathematical calculations. It was thought that women were good for this more tedious math, thus leaving men free for the higher math to which they were more eminently suited. So, to review: When writers could support a family, women were discouraged from being writers. When math skill was not connected with a good salary, women were accepted as being good at math. Nowadays, very few writers can make a living, while mathematically-minded coders can. So today's generally accepted wisdom is that girls are naturally good with words (which doesn't pay), while boys are good with math and computers (which does). The fact that women aren't in coding isn't a bug, but a feature. Remember the Eniac? Programming that was brutally hard, and it was all done by women, and there does not seem to have been a particular amount of money or glory in it. Now there's both, and that's why women are discouraged from joining in the lucrative boys' club. Once code starts being written by robots and the average developer can't find a job, then you'll see the field fill up with women.

matt_wulfeck 9y ago

> It was flat out unpopular and the only people I found that were really into it were nerdy white kids like me who somehow tricked their parents into buying a computer. Indeed the seeds were sown a very long time ago. My father bought a PC with some inheritance money he had, then he immediately regretted it because I spent all my time and summer on it rather than playing sports or hanging out with friends! Back then nobody realized how in demand our field would be. By the time I started college I had already been programming.

jhbadger 9y ago

The author makes a good point as to the high cost of computers in the US in previous decades, which meant kids who grew up using computers tended to be upper-middle class, but what about places like Britain where the Sinclair Spectrum and various Amstrad machines reigned in the 1980s-early 1990s? These were cheap machines. It would be interesting to see if this cheapness led to a more diverse set of programmers.

timthorn 9y ago
They were cheaper, but the social status of geeks was just the same in the UK.

ng12 9y ago

I think this hits the nail on the head, and explains why some people feel gilted by the recent push for diversity in tech -- like it or not it's only a popular issue because tech is now sexy where it absolutely wasn't before. Other fields have worse gender ratios by a fair margin (in both directions) but you don't see news articles about it -- maybe because there's no Zuckerberg of mechanical engineering.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

lemonsqueeze 9y ago

"It was flat out unpopular and the only people I found that were really into it were nerdy white kids like me who somehow tricked their parents into buying a computer." This. I tricked my parents 3 times to buy my brother I computers. I took well over a year each time of pestering and took them the whole year to save $2000. We are immigrants and didnt have much money then. It's obvious to me and the author... that's what this hysteria is ridiculous and funny. We got picked on and bullied for being nerds and into computers at the age of 13.

soneca 9y ago

I understand the logic. But data about the diversity among programmers around 20~25 years old must be significantly different from ~40 if he is right. We do not have to sit and wait 20 years hoping he is right. Is there any such data available? About the cost of the equipment to learn. Is there any raspberry pi based computer that one can use to learn to code? Like, something below USD100? That would also help more class diversity.

evilDagmar 9y ago
That's pretty much every RPi. Computers are cheap now, and the RPi in particular is incredibly inexpensive and has more than enough power for people to learn programming skills.
douche 9y ago
There's little benefit to screwing around with a RPi, unless that's your hobby and you want to mess around with the hardware, when you can go to Best Buy and get a real laptop for $300. By the time you've bought a keyboard, mouse, display, and storage for the Pi, you've spent just as much money.

chewyfruitloop 9y ago

Yeh $1500 computers.... you where looking at the wrong thing. Everyone else was looking at the not Microsoft market... commadore, Atari etc. I bought my first computer with Christmas money when I was about 10 for under £100 in the mid 80's. The whole girls weren't into computers is looking at the bubble from the inside and not looking at why there's a bubble. Parents in the 70's tended to point the boys at building and engineering toys and the girls at dolls etc. Those children followed on in the same fashion. That's left us in the gender bias we have now. As for ethnic groups... that's complicated and depends on local demographic, plus imigant families tend not to be overflow in spare cash....

300bps 9y ago
I had the same reaction to the pricing in the article. I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas 1982. I think it was a few hundred dollars at most. I got it because I begged my parents to buy it for me. My two older sisters had zero interest. None whatsoever. I spent 12 hours a day on it especially after I got my first 300 bps modem in 1985.
- abecedarius 9y ago
  It cost about $1500 in today's money. Not-rich families would buy one for their kids, but it was a nontrivial expense to them. My first computer was a TI-99/4A at about half that, and I was grateful.
- Avernar 9y ago
  I got mine for Christmas and it was $300 just for the computer. The floppy drive was another $300. Got the monitor which was another $300 about six months later. Add in the dot matrix printer and 1200 baud modem and it was over $1000 for the complete system.
CoolGuySteve 9y ago
The video game crash of the early 80s put a stop to those cheap programmable computers. By the 90s, any cheap home computer, like the NES/SNES/Genesis/Gameboy was not programmable by the end user. When I was a kid, I learned BASIC on a 10 year old Tandy 80 to write games like I had on my NES (which was marketed solely to boys btw). Eventually my dad dropped $2000 on a 486 (and subsequent upgrades) and that's when I was able to start writing C with the DJGPP toolchain, installing Linux, rebuilding machines out of spare obsolete parts, etc. If my family wasn't well off, there's no way I'd have progressed past having known BASIC for a couple of summers. I think this is a common refrain for anyone born between about 1980 and maybe 1995. By 2010, there were cheap laptops, netbooks, and whatnot.

rm999 9y ago

This article makes some decent points around class and the expense of a computer in the 80s/90s. But it dodges more substantial questions, and a lot of the substance is either circular logic or confirmation bias. There are plenty of asian men in programming, so this isn't a race thing. It probably is socioeconomic for the reasons the article points out, so that's fine - I think we can leave it at "white and asian people dominate programming because they tend to come from wealthier families". I think the much harder question is why women aren't in programming. They make up 50% of the population and come from the same exact socioeconomic background as men. This question is important because the repercussions still haunt us today. The article starts this question with "girls weren’t interested in computers or video games at all", and then circles the logic with "people tend to do things that they see other people who are 'like them' doing". Well, I'd like to know why women weren't interested in programming. In my circumstantial experience it wasn't a conscious decision or peer pressure, it was coming top down from society. I saw many parents encouraging their sons to play with computers and completely ignoring that their daughters may want to also. The article completely avoids this topic, sadly. edit: downvoted within 30 seconds - if you're gonna downvote, please at least reply and start a discussion about it.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> There are plenty of asian men in programming, so this isn't a race thing. That whites aren't the only race disproportionately advantaged does not in any way support the conclusion that it isn't (in part or in whole) “a race thing”.
- rm999 9y ago
  The article doesn't even argue that it's a race thing, it simply starts with the premise but explains it as socioeconomic. I agree with the article on that one. I am not white and I was never discouraged in any way from programming because of my skin color or ethnic background (I've been doing it in some form since I was 6 in the late 80s with full support from pretty much everyone, including a lot of monetary support from my upper middle class parents). edit: it actually does get into race, but around blacks/african americans. But it didn't get into Asians - my point really is this isn't a white thing per se.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

gweinberg 9y ago

I think in the US it is not the case the programmers are significantly disproportionately white.

IslaDeEncanta 9y ago
https://datausa.io/profile/soc/151131/#demographics https://datausa.io/profile/soc/151131/#demographics

ZapataMondata 9y ago

There is an alternate theory. Before you label it a trope, read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Female_Brain_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Female_Brain_(book) The premise is that due to both physical differences and differences in hormonal episodes over a lifetime, the brains of men and women wind up with somewhat different architectures. One architecture is more suited to linear thinking, as in flow charts. The other is more suited to network thinking, as in connecting attributes. Computers were overwhelmingly designed by men and a computer's architecture and programming methods are reflective of the way men think. Hence, there is little natural draw for women.

briholt 9y ago

The reason men are more inclined to program is autism. Thinking systematically and enjoying some level of solitude are traits that make a good programmer. It's no coincidence that men are 4.5x more likely to be diagnosed with autism[1]. Look at any early interview with Zuck or Gates or Musk or Jack - it's like an educational video on how to spot mild Asperger Syndrome. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html

altano 9y ago
This is what programmers tell themselves but it sounds bizarre to me. 1) There is almost no profession where thinking is required for which "Thinking systematically and enjoying some level of solitude" isn't helpful. Programming isn't special in this regard. 2) Having empathy with your users seems even more important to me, and a lack of this is the cause of a lot of shitty software. Also, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't strike me as being Asbergery at all but maybe that's just because I work at Facebook.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- briholt 9y ago
  You seem like someone who is way outside of the autistic spectrum. Imagine the sound of other people talking sounding like nails on a chalkboard. Now imagine working a job in sales, biz dev, marketing, customer support, investing, legal, management, child care, or HR. How many hours can you go in a day without hearing that screeching sound? Maybe 1/2 hour if you tried hard? Now imagine working in a good programming environment where you can frequently spend 1-3 hours without talking to anyone, and when you reluctantly do it's for very short periods with people who understand you don't like talking. Or maybe you can just work at home and almost never deal with anyone. Are you the type of person who wants to spend weeks at home, alone, no travel, no dinners, with almost no human interaction outside of say 4 family/close friends? A very large number of programmers I've met are.
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago

funzofactofive 9y ago

Yeah...20 years ago "girls didn't like video games" is a very weak narrative.

ouid 9y ago
well, 20 years ago, being a nerd was awful until college. Just the worst possible childhood available.

RaceIsSensitive 9y ago

Throwaway, because race is a sensitive topic, and below is a potentially unpopular way to look at things in regards to race (I am not addressing gender in this comment). 1. Whites actually do not make up a disproportionate number of the programmers in the US! Whites are 74% of the workforce and 72% of the programmers. 2. Asians do make up a disproportionately high number of the programmers in the US, they are 6% of workforce but 20% of programmers. 3. I'd suggest that programming is a job where intellectual ability (specifically math-type logic) is highly correlated with success. Everything else held equal - on average more intellectual ability will lead to a better programmer. 4. Black Americans have on average significantly lower math skills (measured by the SAT) than white Americans. The factors leading to this are widely debated, but the fact remains that the gap still exists in a big way.[2] Asians have, on average, much better math skills than whites and blacks. 5. This doesn't seem to me primarily a culture issue, it seems like an intellectual ability issue. Conclusion: I am not qualified to say what drives the intellectual ability gap (education, infant diet, genetics, culture, etc). But the fact remains the highest IQ people (and therefore highest IQ groups) will continue to perform the best in jobs where IQ is a big factor for success. [1]https://datausa.io/profile/soc/151131/ https://datausa.io/profile/soc/151131/ [2]I'm using SAT math scores to show this here, which of course have faults, but it's tough to argue they don't show an actual difference. IQ tests show similar results: https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-highlight-inequality-and-hinder-upward-mobility/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-h...

baddox 9y ago
Number 5 seems like a leap.
- RaceIsSensitive 9y ago
  Do you agree that higher IQ (on average) makes a better programmer, and that as a group asians have higher IQs than blacks? If so, how do you expect blacks (as a group) to have the same number of quality programmers as asians? Again, I am NOT saying this needs to be inherently true in the future, that this is unsolvable, is genetic, etc. I am simply saying that today (on average) 18 year old asians have more intellectual ability than 18 year old blacks - and therefore, I would expect the asians (as a group) to do better in programming today. Maybe in 20 years the IQs of the various race groups will be equal. And if that becomes the case and there is still a gap, then my thesis is disproven. But that is not the case today.

notacoward 9y ago

The 'white' part is pretty straightforward. THe 'male' part is trickier. If it's a simple matter of role-model discouragement, why has it been getting worse? Depending on which data set you look at, the percentage of CS graduates (bachelor's) who were female has been declining since the early to mid 80s. This matches my own experience, with a steady decline in the percentage of my developer colleagues who were female from 1989 until this year. It's not all about the so-called pipeline. There are many forms of discrimination and discouragement that apply even to women who are already in the field. That includes everything from differences in conversational style to pay disparities to actual assault. To a large extent, most programmers are men because the people driving the culture - not just programmers themselves but execs, investors, etc. - have been men, and that culture has been more comfortable for other men than for women. (BTW I was going to use "male" and "female" but the objectifying way that "female" is used by the MRA/alt-right crowd made it sound creepy.) When those people stop injecting their old-boy-network ethos and habits into our workplaces, we might stand a chance of creating an ecosystem where someone who's not just like them can still feel like an equal.

malandrew 9y ago
According to National Science Foundation figures, the decline in female CS graduates stopped around 2008/2009. It bottomed out then and has been on the rise since.
- notacoward 9y ago
  According to the US department of education, it remained level through 2014. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/what-should-we-be-teaching-the-next-generation-of-computer-scientists#survey-answer https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/what-should-we... According to AAUW (unsourced but with NSF as a sponsor) it remained level through 2013. http://www.aauw.org/research/solving-the-equation/ http://www.aauw.org/research/solving-the-equation/ There's no way this is positive or even neutral. Even the high of 35% was unimpressive. The long-term trend is still downwards, despite a mere couple of years at least 10% below that peak. Leveling off at 18-24% is still unacceptable, and we're still a few years short of being able to say even that is more than a statistical anomaly. When that number has reached its previous peak and is still trending upward, so that we're within a generation of full parity, then we might be able to say we're making sufficient progress.

brockvond 9y ago

That is so spot-on... the only reason people care about forcing diversity in tech is because its now a fashionable industry that gets you respect and makes you money. If coders were not lauded for being super-smart, rich, and working in "fun environments" nobody would care how big of a white sausage fest it'd be.

prostoalex 9y ago
I was wondering if other industries (construction, commercial fishing, oil drilling, nursing, coal mining, aircraft maintenance) were as focused on diversity as tech. And if not, what made tech an outlier.

thegayngler 9y ago

I'm black and my family wasn't upper middle class. My parents bought a computer when I was 11 years old and I lived on that thing. After I dropped out of HS and was living on my own at like 18, I would put dollars into the machine so I could build my music website as I didn't have a computer at the time. The point is people who are interested will do what they have to even if they don't have large amounts of money.

rmah 9y ago
I think your experience is highly admirable. But I think even you have to admit that most people, regardless of background, do not have the sort of will power and drive you exhibited. So yes, any particular person could overcome the obstacles in their path. But most will not. And it's the "most" that will lead to skewed statistics over time.
- thegayngler 9y ago
  I certainly agree. It was just my interest and I felt like it was fun for me to put something out that the whole world could see if they wanted to.

AckSyn 9y ago

This kind of article is trashy at best. We all know the answer alread, and the solution is found in the answer! Encouragement from the time people are young. "Cultures" that can't respect what a kid wants to be curious about and lets them explore that shouldn't be allowed to persist. Reading, scientific exploration of subjects, using their minds. The society and culture that shuns learning and education need to die off. The rest is race and gender baiting garbage.

douche 9y ago
How much of the beneficial parts of the "hacker ethos" are rooted in having to circumvent the disapproval and blockers that attempted to prevent access to the machine? Nobody was encouraging me to dick around on the computer and learn what have turned out to be hugely beneficial skills. Instead it was "Get the fuck off that thing and go outside and stack the firewood!"
- AckSyn 9y ago
  Well you had responsibilities as a child and presumably you have them now as an adult. That hasn't a thing to do with what I'm talking about.

FT_intern 9y ago

Is it even really a privilege to be into programming in your childhood/teen years? Most kids are not Feynmans. They aren't naturally curious geniuses who are only stopped by a judgmental society and "biases". There is a whole other, more dominant incentive structure in place. The way many kids/teens become interested in programming is through video games and trolling online forums/message boards. Now, why do some kids play videos games and troll the internet more? Because the opportunity cost is low for them. Meaning that if they did not play video games/troll the internet, the other potential activities are not as fun for them. A vital activity that other kids do is socializing and hanging out with family, friends, etc. in real life. Is it really a privilege to be exiled from real life to the internet? Would those kids spend time on the internet playing video games and reading about programming if they weren't as "privileged" as they are and had opportunities to socialize in real life?

gradientdescent 9y ago
When I was young (and a white male) what could I do? All the girls (16 to 20 years old) were hot and going to parties and having older boyfriends of course Yes, the attractivness of the topic "white, priviledged males" is THE TWIST: Actually we were ugly ducklings sitting at home not knowing what to do with our time Today we are compared to a few super-rich and lucky guys. And the job: Is it a job that other people are envious about, that I am doing it? "Hey, he is programming according to the requirements he is given by project managers"

antingate2 9y ago

The war on white male

20years 9y ago

This is a topic of high interest to me personally. Over the past couple of years I have been teaching middle school students how to code on and off. I am also a female who has been coding for close to 20 years now. In the classes I teach, the girls are usually far beyond the boys. They get this stuff so much quicker and at a much deeper level. They are so much more focused and really try to understand what everything means. The boys need instant gratification. They want to hack and mess around with the code but most don't want to really try and understand what it all means. They also need way more confirmation from the other boys in the class. They all create their games and show them off to the other boys and then they all try to one up each other. This is how they are motivated. They also completely exclude the girls from this. In my current class of 17, there are 5 girls. All 5 are far ahead of all of the boys and 3 of those girls are already doing the advanced stuff. 4 of those girls sit together and actually seem to be annoyed by the boys antics. This has been similar in all of the classes/workshops I have taught. It has been a very interesting observation which has convinced me that the boys club type behavior starts very early. What I am not convinced of is that we should necessarily try and change the boys behavior as long as they are not specifically offending the girls. I worry that this would suppress their instinctual way of being motivated and learning. I can also understand however why girls bail out, which is unfortunate in itself being that even at this early age, they are so good at it. I am not really sure what the answer is other than trying to encourage girls to stick with it and give them that support early on. "There is one other reason I think you see fewer women and minorities as software developers. People tend to do things that they see other people who are "like them" doing" It helps when other girls are doing it with you like the 5 in my current class.

FT_intern 9y ago
I hope your political beliefs aren't implicitly biasing your teaching against the males. The primary education system seems to be failing males (more female college graduates every year) and it wouldn't help if you added to that. I'm curious, would it be an issue to you if all the boys in the class were "beyond" the girls?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

dlwdlw 9y ago

The reason most programmers are white males is because traditionally only wealthy western countries had access to computers. As the cost went down, more people could afford to study and in silicon valley at least there are many Chinese and Indians, basically a reflection of world population than anything else. Plus, the majority if good jobs are still in the US where the majority of the population are white males. This is completely separate than white male privilege. Programming was never something to make you popular and there was never any attempt at creating barriers to entry. It was a nerdy unsexy job till recently. The biggest gate to diversity is probably getting a visa. I don't hear any white expat programmers complaining about why all the programmers in China are mostly chinese and being looked down on for lack of advanced math skills.

finid 9y ago

Interesting topic, but I think Why are most programmers in the USA white males? is a much more accurate title.

carsongross 9y ago

Asians are proportionally over-represented because programming broadly rewards IQ, and asians have the highest IQ. Men are over represented because they are naturally better, on average, at abstract mathematical reasoning. There are social reasons as well, but this is the core of the issue.

illuminati1911 9y ago

What kind of question is this? Do you think there are many white male programmers in China for example? It shouldn't surprise anyone that white people are majority in white coutries and that it reflects to working life too. And why male? Because men like programming and only few women do.

jrs235 9y ago

Because white males were more likely to have access to computers 15-30 years ago?

GradientsCents 9y ago
Yeah, it's just one reason Luckily this reason is politically correct and you stated it Super You are a hero!

Yetanfou 9y ago

Why are people asking more and more of these basically racist / 'genderist' / whateverist questions? Why is it that it is nearly impossible to open a newspage or magazine without being confronted with '...blah blah blah white males blah blah ...' or '... blah blah blah women wearing hijab blah blah ...' or '...blah blah LGBT people blah blah ...'? I live in Sweden, one of the most egalitarian countries in the world, but if you were to believe the media we're about as bad as it can get when it comes to 'discrimination' and 'privilege' and such. Strangely enough those claims are mostly made by people from the 'upper class', living in the most comfortable (and, need I say it, 'white'...) areas of the capital and other big cities. People who send their children to remarkably homogeneous schools while they promote diversity everywhere. This whole thing with identity politics better stop soon or we'll be back in the 18th century before you know it, with segregation everywhere. Because that is what this mostly leads to. The more people identify themselves with some special interest - be it based on skin colour, gender, religion, sexual preference, country of origin or any other factor - the more society will fall apart into disparate camps. Back to the question, why is the majority of people in IT of a specific gender and a specific skin colour? Well, I can ask the same question about, say, horse riding: why is the majority of people of a specific gender and skin colour, at least in this country? Or let's take another profession, veterinarians, why are they mostly of a specific gender? The answer to these questions is mostly that, for some reason, more males than females are interested in computer-related stuff. On the other hand, more females than males are interested in working with pets. Is this a problem? If so, what should be done about it? Should there be a mandatory stop on veterinary college for women to combat the female domination of the field? Should girls be forced to play football and boys be lifted in the saddle? If so, why? What would be achieved by this, other than increasing the level of injustice - men who want to work in IT can not due to quota, women who want to work as vets can not due to quota... If racism is bad, stop drawing attention to race. If gender is a social construction (...), why decry the lack of a specific gender (...) in a given field. Just... stop. No more identity politics, please.

ellius 9y ago
It's the current topic that wannabe intellectuals have latched onto because it's easy to understand and reason about without actually thinking too hard. It also has the benefit of lending a cheap moral authority. That doesn't mean it doesn't actually deserve examination -- there are some excellent writings on race, gender, etc. that are well worth reading, thinking about, and designing policy after. But by and large the reason you see it everywhere is because it's intellectually fashionable.

arghimonmobile2 9y ago

I encourage everyone in tech to read Unlocking the Clubhouse, by Margolis et al. It doesn't quite propose how to solve the problem, but it certainly teases out a number of contributing factors. I think in the case in point, the importance of being encouraged/discouraged depending on gender cannot be understated. Of course, to the individual involved it'll feel 'normal' since it has always been that way, but on a societal level it is blatantly obvious that children are moulded into gendered expectation patterns from literally the moment they're born. (As to that last assertion, there's a study floating around on how adults react to a baby crying then told the child is either male or female. Quite saddening.)

raulpopa 9y ago

it's the IQ folks.