6 ms·

We can teach women to code, but that just creates another problem

15 points by ctoth 9y ago

horsecaptin 9y ago
After vilifying men for about fifty years, perhaps it is time to begin surveying the effect on American society the gender wars have had.
retox 9y ago
Couldn't it just be explained by saying that as more women enter a field typically dominated by men, the pool of potential employees expands and so the expected income from one of those positions decreases. I'd say it's also true that as time goes on there are an increasing numbers of businesses 'going digital', which more often than not means getting a wordpress site and an e-commerce package set up. These are relatively simple, and don't require as much experience as a back-end position, and thus don't demand a high salary. You might have 50 businesses 'go digital', which employs 50 different web design shops, but they could all be hosted on the hardware from less than 5 hosts. Just off-the-top-of-my-head thoughts, feel free to flame.
- UncleMeat 9y ago
  Except that we didn't see this in fields that transitioned from female dominated to male dominated. There is more going on than just the number of workers. Our society still has a serious problem with undervaluing women.
- orionblastar 9y ago
  In the 1950s and 1960s most programmers were women. Somehow during the civil rights era they stopped taking STEM courses and took the arts etc. It is claimed that boys who got 8 bit computers had replaced them, but I am a bit skeptical. Females and other genders should be able to learn how to program like makes, as gender does not matter for one to become a programmer.
bfrydl 9y ago
I think this article really misses the mark by trying to claim that the divide between front-end and back-end development is based on gender, that it only exists now where it did not before because of women entering the field. By my observation, there simply was no such thing as a “front-end developer” until recently, as more and more logic as pushed to the front-end over time. Many people in the industry do view front-end development as less prestigious than back-end development, but that's because it exists on a spectrum between design and engineering with the majority of the work closer to the former side. While many front-end development jobs are on the same level of engineering as back-end development jobs, these are not the jobs being done by “self-taught coders and designers” as the author describes them, and require a lot more than learning HTML and CSS. While it is most likely true that women face gender discrimination when looking for back-end work, the author doesn't really seem to be talking about those women. Instead, the focus is on women who apparently only have web design skills, which aren't enough to earn either gender prestigious engineering positions.
- fumplethumb 9y ago
  I agree that the author seems to be conflating front-end development with web design, two different fields requiring two different skillsets.
  - curtis 9y ago
    I think many of the people coming into the software engineering field by unconventional paths often start out as web designers and then move on to web development. One reason these people may be making less money than software engineers working on the back end is that they have far less experience. I started programming at 13, spent 5 years getting a computer science degree, and now I've spent my entire career doing software development. If you consider my level of experience at say 28 vs someone who first learned to program only in their mid-to-late-20s, there's a big difference. Also many people who move from web design to web development may stay there, not because they're stuck, but because it already pays pretty well and they like it.
- paulddraper 9y ago
paulddraper 9y ago
tl;dr More women in technology causes stratification to happen, namely women being typecast for perspectibly mushy front end jobs. This effect devalues these jobs because women are chronically undervalued in any field. I'm skeptical to say the least, but that's the gist of the article.
fumplethumb 9y ago
This article was a little painful for me to read because it confirms all the inaccuracies I suspect many people have about the software industry. The author is inaccurate on a number of points: > Women are typecast as front-end developers, while men work on the back end – where they generally earn significantly more money than their front-end counterparts. The link provided here for back end developers links to the glass door page for devops engineers [1]. Sources may vary, but both in my experience and by the numbers provided by Paysa, front-end and back-end salaries are almost at parity [2][3]. This makes sense in a world that's increasingly dominated by the JavaScript (NodeJS, Electron, SPA frameworks). > Back-end developers often attribute front-end expertise not to mastery but to alchemy, wizardry or magic. Its adepts don’t succeed through technical skill so much as a kind of web whispering: feeling, rather than thinking, their way through a tangle of competing styles – in other words, those soft fuzzy things that women are supposed to excel at. I understand what the author is getting at here, but she was unable to articulate it properly. The front-end is where the UI lives, so it's more interactive, more visual. The back end is where the database lives, and where more computationally intensive tasks take place. > That’s not true, of course; nothing on a computer is any more or less logical than anything else. This sentence is almost offensive. Of course, like every other task, tasks "on a computer" live on a spectrum that ranges from the logical to the creative. For example Fizz buzz is a logical exercise, while designing a landing page is a creative pursuit. Not really looking weigh in on the main topic of discussion, that is women in tech. This is a complicated issue, and the author makes some valid points. [1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/devops-engineer-salary-SRCH_KO0,15.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/devops-engineer-salary-SR... [2] https://www.paysa.com/salaries/front-end-developer--t https://www.paysa.com/salaries/front-end-developer--t [3] https://www.paysa.com/salaries/back-end-web-developer--t https://www.paysa.com/salaries/back-end-web-developer--t
xt00 9y ago
Women getting into an area doesn’t bring down value as the title implies.. but one thing in the article I think is true that areas that are more accessible to get into with fewer years of training such as from code camp graduates, then the people in that field will try to differentiate themselves by saying they are back end engineers. It truly does take way more time, effort and a level of persistence to be able to glue together the Linux kernel, various internet services, cloud, etc compared to building UIs for the web. The main issue I think is the quantity of people available to do the backend.. so commands a higher price. I think if there were no women in the front end side the wage would still be lower for those people since it would have more people available to do it in the job market. I also think many men assume they will not be good at UI development and just don’t even try to do front end stuff. So that lowers the quantity of men going that direction.
zwaps 9y ago
Not to pile on, but publishing low quality pieces such as this really doesn't do "the cause" any favors. The obvious question the article avoids is "why then are there so few women back-end devs?". That is really the crux of the whole matter. The article seems to suggest that women, for whatever unrelated reason, uniformly decided to go into front-end development, saw a wage and prestige drop and therefore decided to stop there since "men". As has been pointed out, less scarcity of skilled labour in any field will reduce wages eventually, so this wouldn't even be surprising in a gender-blind world. The problem I have with articles like this is the obvious omission of facts that explain the situation. Front-end dev is often a natural path from, or, even part of traditional design work. Traditional design work (among other things working with html), is not at all men dominated. It doesn't matter at all why this is the case, rather, it explains what happens in front vs. back-end development. It is not that women somehow do not react to monetary incentives or are driven out by men. Front-end development is just simply the natural extension and career path for many women somehow involved in the technology sector. The same can not be said for back-end development. The fact of the matter is however, and this is unrelated to the above, that front-end development requires (generally) far less specialized skills and has a far tougher labor market than back-end development. Hence, front-end devs earn less. The real question, and crux of the discussion, is therefore if women can be successful as skilled back-end engineers and earn their fair share there. Up until that situation, there isn't even any reason to debate some sort of male fault and this is so obvious that shoehorning a gender debate into this matter is simply bad journalism. I think the equal pay movement can really "thank" journalists for producing such garbage articles because it truly calls into question the validity of the whole deal.
- zwaps 9y ago
  The whole article is also interesting in that it is what happens when someone thinks only in "sociological" concepts such as role, class and distinction. For most, economic factors (so, scarcity) would be a very obvious explanation, but it does not even occur for the author. This is of course since such factors do not and can not occur in pure models of sociological structures. This delightful dialectic confusion, if you will, shows well how badly, or misleading, the proponents of general "facts" argue in the gender debate.
ikeyany 9y ago
"Hard" engineering is lucrative. As word gets out, more people enter the field, and the field becomes less lucrative. Women just happen to finally be entering the field, so it appears that feminity is the reason why hard engineering's lucrativity is decreasing. What we need to do is encourage "non-traditional" students to enter fields not because they are lucrative, and not because they will gain you a status bump in our society, but because those subjects are interesting in and of themselves.
mesozoic 9y ago
More progressive garbage vilifying innocent people in order to self promote a magazine... no thanks.
rayascott 9y ago
Terrible article. A lot of sweeping generalizations with absolutely no facts to back them up.

15 points by ctoth 9y ago

After vilifying men for about fifty years, perhaps it is time to begin surveying the effect on American society the gender wars have had.

retox 9y ago

Couldn't it just be explained by saying that as more women enter a field typically dominated by men, the pool of potential employees expands and so the expected income from one of those positions decreases. I'd say it's also true that as time goes on there are an increasing numbers of businesses 'going digital', which more often than not means getting a wordpress site and an e-commerce package set up. These are relatively simple, and don't require as much experience as a back-end position, and thus don't demand a high salary. You might have 50 businesses 'go digital', which employs 50 different web design shops, but they could all be hosted on the hardware from less than 5 hosts. Just off-the-top-of-my-head thoughts, feel free to flame.

UncleMeat 9y ago
Except that we didn't see this in fields that transitioned from female dominated to male dominated. There is more going on than just the number of workers. Our society still has a serious problem with undervaluing women.
orionblastar 9y ago
In the 1950s and 1960s most programmers were women. Somehow during the civil rights era they stopped taking STEM courses and took the arts etc. It is claimed that boys who got 8 bit computers had replaced them, but I am a bit skeptical. Females and other genders should be able to learn how to program like makes, as gender does not matter for one to become a programmer.

bfrydl 9y ago

I think this article really misses the mark by trying to claim that the divide between front-end and back-end development is based on gender, that it only exists now where it did not before because of women entering the field. By my observation, there simply was no such thing as a “front-end developer” until recently, as more and more logic as pushed to the front-end over time. Many people in the industry do view front-end development as less prestigious than back-end development, but that's because it exists on a spectrum between design and engineering with the majority of the work closer to the former side. While many front-end development jobs are on the same level of engineering as back-end development jobs, these are not the jobs being done by “self-taught coders and designers” as the author describes them, and require a lot more than learning HTML and CSS. While it is most likely true that women face gender discrimination when looking for back-end work, the author doesn't really seem to be talking about those women. Instead, the focus is on women who apparently only have web design skills, which aren't enough to earn either gender prestigious engineering positions.

fumplethumb 9y ago
I agree that the author seems to be conflating front-end development with web design, two different fields requiring two different skillsets.
- curtis 9y ago
  I think many of the people coming into the software engineering field by unconventional paths often start out as web designers and then move on to web development. One reason these people may be making less money than software engineers working on the back end is that they have far less experience. I started programming at 13, spent 5 years getting a computer science degree, and now I've spent my entire career doing software development. If you consider my level of experience at say 28 vs someone who first learned to program only in their mid-to-late-20s, there's a big difference. Also many people who move from web design to web development may stay there, not because they're stuck, but because it already pays pretty well and they like it.
paulddraper 9y ago

paulddraper 9y ago

tl;dr More women in technology causes stratification to happen, namely women being typecast for perspectibly mushy front end jobs. This effect devalues these jobs because women are chronically undervalued in any field. I'm skeptical to say the least, but that's the gist of the article.

fumplethumb 9y ago

This article was a little painful for me to read because it confirms all the inaccuracies I suspect many people have about the software industry. The author is inaccurate on a number of points: > Women are typecast as front-end developers, while men work on the back end – where they generally earn significantly more money than their front-end counterparts. The link provided here for back end developers links to the glass door page for devops engineers [1]. Sources may vary, but both in my experience and by the numbers provided by Paysa, front-end and back-end salaries are almost at parity [2][3]. This makes sense in a world that's increasingly dominated by the JavaScript (NodeJS, Electron, SPA frameworks). > Back-end developers often attribute front-end expertise not to mastery but to alchemy, wizardry or magic. Its adepts don’t succeed through technical skill so much as a kind of web whispering: feeling, rather than thinking, their way through a tangle of competing styles – in other words, those soft fuzzy things that women are supposed to excel at. I understand what the author is getting at here, but she was unable to articulate it properly. The front-end is where the UI lives, so it's more interactive, more visual. The back end is where the database lives, and where more computationally intensive tasks take place. > That’s not true, of course; nothing on a computer is any more or less logical than anything else. This sentence is almost offensive. Of course, like every other task, tasks "on a computer" live on a spectrum that ranges from the logical to the creative. For example Fizz buzz is a logical exercise, while designing a landing page is a creative pursuit. Not really looking weigh in on the main topic of discussion, that is women in tech. This is a complicated issue, and the author makes some valid points. [1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/devops-engineer-salary-SRCH_KO0,15.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/devops-engineer-salary-SR... [2] https://www.paysa.com/salaries/front-end-developer--t https://www.paysa.com/salaries/front-end-developer--t [3] https://www.paysa.com/salaries/back-end-web-developer--t https://www.paysa.com/salaries/back-end-web-developer--t

xt00 9y ago

Women getting into an area doesn’t bring down value as the title implies.. but one thing in the article I think is true that areas that are more accessible to get into with fewer years of training such as from code camp graduates, then the people in that field will try to differentiate themselves by saying they are back end engineers. It truly does take way more time, effort and a level of persistence to be able to glue together the Linux kernel, various internet services, cloud, etc compared to building UIs for the web. The main issue I think is the quantity of people available to do the backend.. so commands a higher price. I think if there were no women in the front end side the wage would still be lower for those people since it would have more people available to do it in the job market. I also think many men assume they will not be good at UI development and just don’t even try to do front end stuff. So that lowers the quantity of men going that direction.

zwaps 9y ago

Not to pile on, but publishing low quality pieces such as this really doesn't do "the cause" any favors. The obvious question the article avoids is "why then are there so few women back-end devs?". That is really the crux of the whole matter. The article seems to suggest that women, for whatever unrelated reason, uniformly decided to go into front-end development, saw a wage and prestige drop and therefore decided to stop there since "men". As has been pointed out, less scarcity of skilled labour in any field will reduce wages eventually, so this wouldn't even be surprising in a gender-blind world. The problem I have with articles like this is the obvious omission of facts that explain the situation. Front-end dev is often a natural path from, or, even part of traditional design work. Traditional design work (among other things working with html), is not at all men dominated. It doesn't matter at all why this is the case, rather, it explains what happens in front vs. back-end development. It is not that women somehow do not react to monetary incentives or are driven out by men. Front-end development is just simply the natural extension and career path for many women somehow involved in the technology sector. The same can not be said for back-end development. The fact of the matter is however, and this is unrelated to the above, that front-end development requires (generally) far less specialized skills and has a far tougher labor market than back-end development. Hence, front-end devs earn less. The real question, and crux of the discussion, is therefore if women can be successful as skilled back-end engineers and earn their fair share there. Up until that situation, there isn't even any reason to debate some sort of male fault and this is so obvious that shoehorning a gender debate into this matter is simply bad journalism. I think the equal pay movement can really "thank" journalists for producing such garbage articles because it truly calls into question the validity of the whole deal.

zwaps 9y ago
The whole article is also interesting in that it is what happens when someone thinks only in "sociological" concepts such as role, class and distinction. For most, economic factors (so, scarcity) would be a very obvious explanation, but it does not even occur for the author. This is of course since such factors do not and can not occur in pure models of sociological structures. This delightful dialectic confusion, if you will, shows well how badly, or misleading, the proponents of general "facts" argue in the gender debate.

ikeyany 9y ago

"Hard" engineering is lucrative. As word gets out, more people enter the field, and the field becomes less lucrative. Women just happen to finally be entering the field, so it appears that feminity is the reason why hard engineering's lucrativity is decreasing. What we need to do is encourage "non-traditional" students to enter fields not because they are lucrative, and not because they will gain you a status bump in our society, but because those subjects are interesting in and of themselves.

mesozoic 9y ago

More progressive garbage vilifying innocent people in order to self promote a magazine... no thanks.

rayascott 9y ago

Terrible article. A lot of sweeping generalizations with absolutely no facts to back them up.