7 ms·

It's taking a little longer than it should, but people are finally starting to realize that the actual reason there aren't as many women in software is because

It's taking a little longer than it should, but people are finally starting to realize that the actual reason there aren't as many women in software is because they've chosen not to be. They're wired differently and therefore have different interests.

beat 8y ago
But there are fewer women in software now than there were 30 years ago. Are women today "wired differently" from their mothers? Single-generation changes in behavior aren't genetic. They're social.
- zimablue 8y ago
  But you're not comparing the same thing generation to generation. The job of developer has changed massively, the number of developers, the expectations, the salary. Sociaety has also changed, and not just in culture but in income distribution, etc etc. If tomorrow we say that you have to do 30 chinups to be a waitress, and the job will involve regular fistfights then we count the number of waitresses by gender and say "it must be cultural", we're kind of missing the point. Or if we say "OK now waitresses make 200k and are respected" and watch the numbers shift.
  - beat 8y ago
    "The job of the developer has changed massively". What, pray tell, has changed that made the job more attractive to men, and less attractive to women? You need to be able to answer that question if you're going to make a causal assertion.
    - zimablue 8y ago
      I wasn't around two generations ago to make the comparison but I imagine that with the higher income has come much higher expectations that you'll be in the office for 12 hours a day and weekends. You also have much higher wealth in western nations which correlates with higher ability to seek jobs that fit your preferences. Back in the day most people didn't go to uni and had a much smaller choice of positions. There are hundreds of ways the world and job are very different, and you're flipping the argument to say that I have to assert the one specific causal link. If you're proposing an argument "it's misogynist culture, as evidence compare two generations ago". Then it's more the case that you need to demonstrate that the conditions and job are the same, for your link to be valid. Or that all the ways they're different are irrelevant, which they're just obviously not.
      - beat 8y ago
        Nonsense. I don't know where you work, but where I work, 12 hour days and weekends are clearly not the norm. We put in 40 hour weeks like any other profession. I first learned to program 35 years ago. It wasn't fundamentally different then. Hell, we still use programming languages that were in wide use 35 years ago, like C and the unix shell. The kind of thinking required hasn't changed. So, based on my 35 years of experience, the conditions and the job are basically the same. So again, I challenge you - how is the job different now?
        zimablue 8y ago
        The parent conceded we're talking 50 years not 35 years, and my point wasn't only that the job is different but that society is different. how is the job different? The pay is much higher and so are the entry requirements, that's the biggest difference. You don't get assigned to program punch cards as part of your secretarial role, you have to actively get educated and good to choose it as a career. I think there's far more places now expecting crazy hours but that's anecdotal I don't have numbers on it. But the languages are different (mostly), the tooling is different, the deployment is different, the scale is different.
      - gspetr 8y ago
        > Back in the day most people didn't go to uni and had a much smaller choice of positions. Not the parent and I wasn't around either, but I think accessibility of education counters your point, not supports it. More egalitarianism should in theory be more favorable to women. Back then I imagine it was much harder to program without access to university computers and education materials. More women get higher education than men compared to 35 years ago. More incentives (monetary and otherwise), combined with lower barriers to entry should also be favoring the supposedly disadvantaged. And yet the drop in F-M ratio since late 1980s has not been overcome last time I checked.
        zimablue 8y ago
        More egalitarianism should be favorable to women /if/ you assume a priori that they are mostly disadvantaged through lack of access to education/resources, and the real expected outcome distribution is 50-50. If you assume that there are underlying differences in interests and aptitude, more egalitarianism allows these differences to be expressed more since women are more free to eg. choose a career working with people, like medicine or law. http://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-girls-3848156-Feb2018/ http://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-girl... It also raises the bar for inherent aptitude to get into/(the top of) a career, since you're competing against a much wider pool of talent. The point I was making to the parent was that his point "cross-generation drop in ratio proves it's cultural" doesn't hold up, because there have been many changes across those generations, you're comparing apples to oranges.
- naasking 8y ago
  > But there are fewer women in software now than there were 30 years ago. That's not true. Firstly, it's more like 40-50 years ago. Secondly, there are far more women doing software development, but the gender ratio is dramatically different. Thirdly, that's because male interest exploded with the advent of personal computing the 80s. Lastly, "programming" as a profession used to be regarded as an offshot of secretarial work, which was dominated by women. The facts around women in STEM are polluted with a lot of bizarre narratives.
  - beat 8y ago
    Okay, so TWO generations. Big deal. It still dismisses the "born that way" nonsense argument. "'programming' as a profession used to be regarded as an offshoot of secretarial work, which was dominated by women". Which begs the question of why women dominated secretarial work (and still do), while as programming became a more respected and better paying profession, it became male-dominated.
    - naasking 8y ago
      > Okay, so TWO generations. Big deal. It still dismisses the "born that way" nonsense argument. It really doesn't. Unless you seriously think punch card programming is the same as modern programming, or that the fact that only women were secretaries that did programming somehow provides data on the relative strengths and inclinations of women and men for programming work at that time. Look, it's clear that you have no idea of the breadth and depth of data available on this subject, and a trite "sexism/oppression" narrative explains hardly any of it. For instance, the fact that as a nation becomes more egalitarian, the gender disparities in STEM increase, ie. Nordic countries have worse gender disparities than here, despite having less sexism, and oppressive countries like Iran actually have gender parity in STEM fields. If you want to actually learn about this subject, I suggest reading: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00189/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018... The fact is, there's good evidence that women are naturally less interested in STEM-like fields due to a well known psychological attitude on things vs. people. That attitude explains facts like why medicine and law have achieved approximate gender parity overall, but surgery is still dominated by men, pediatrics and family law is dominated by women.
- jhfhhhf 8y ago
  Programming is very different from 40 years ago.
- manfredo 8y ago
  One big change is that many traditionally male high paying jobs like doctors, lawyers, etc. have become much more open to women. Some, like publishing, have become majority women to the same degree as Tech. One very likely explanation is that many women who wanted to be independently financially successful had few choices other than tech back decades ago. Now they have many other choices.
- notSoRandom27 8y ago
  > But there are fewer women in software now than there were 30 years ago. Are women today "wired differently" from their mothers? But are they really ?, do you have any data/reference to back it up, I was under the assumption that there are more people, both men and women, working as programmers, than 30 years ago.
arandr0x 8y ago
I see this argument a lot but your exposition is less inflammatory than most. Please note this: when you tell a mixed-gender group of people that all women are "wired" to not like programming, you are telling the women who do like programming (which, let's be real, is most of them on Hacker News) that they're in effect not real women (or defective women, in an engineering sense). Or that they don't count. Since you're presumably not a woman, and they are, they object to your seeming to be taking it upon yourself to tell them what a woman is. It's not unlikely that most women don't want to be in software. Most men don't want to be in software! But hundreds of thousands of women are, in fact, working as programmers. Whenever tech news talks about hiring women, presumably, they're talking about hiring these women. Why pretend they don't exist?
- zimablue 8y ago
  "Since you're presumably not a woman, and they are, they object to your seeming to be taking it upon yourself to tell them what a woman is." That idea is complete poison. In a debate where you're both completely uninformed, the anecdotal evidence of experience is relevant. In any discussion where reason, numbers, research are involved, the gender/race of the person making the argument is irrelevant to the argument. This current idea that only women can talk about female issues, only X about X is pre-enlightenment tribalism. It presupposes conflict between the tribes too. If in my philosophy I believe that through reason and evidence I can understand your point of view and experiences,there's the possibility of agreement. If you really believe that I can never talk about issues affecting your tribe, or arrive at reason to an underlying truth, there's no point in talking. We might as well just fight to see whose tribe can impose power on whose.
  - arandr0x 8y ago
    I'm sorry, I don't follow how your argument (which is valid) is a response to mine. I said people tend to object to being imposed an identity by people who do not share it ("all women hate programming", "all Yankees eat too much"). (And to a lesser extent they also object to the same thing by ingroup members, but are less comfortable expressing it. If my parent was in fact a woman, her viewpoint would most likely still be pretty unpopular.) Arguments being inflammatory does not make them invalid. It is fine to have conversations that include inflammatory arguments, if they are made politely, which parent did. But ignoring that the argument is inflammatory, and/or that the group the argument refers to are in fact intelligent people involved in the discussion that may have themselves an opinion, is lacking in empathy. Rhetoric is founded in empathy; that is why it is an art, and not merely a technique.
androidgirl 8y ago
I don't think that's quite true, I think this is more of a nurture vs nature thing. My father got me into programming, and my colleagues who are women also have a backstory with someone supporting their interest in development.
- cowpewter 8y ago
  For me it was my grandfather, but yes, I also got into programming at least partially due to nurture, not nature. Just teach kids to code, boy or girl. Not all of them will like it, not all of them will be good at it. But I think a lot more girls would be into it and good at it if they were introduced to it before college. Tailor it to the kid's interests. My first programs were more socially oriented. When I was 5-6 years old, all my programs were made-up conversations with the computer, where your answers were stored and parroted back by the computer to show that it was "listening". Maybe a boy would have been less into that and more into something mathier, like LOGO instead of BASIC, but it was what was interesting to me at that age. The computer was a form of imaginary friend for an introverted kid like me.
- cimmanom 8y ago
  Yup. Someone telling us that programming was something for us - not just being exposed to media and advertising and social pressures that continually suggest (and did even more so in the 80's and 90's) that computing was for socially inept males.

beat 8y ago

But there are fewer women in software now than there were 30 years ago. Are women today "wired differently" from their mothers? Single-generation changes in behavior aren't genetic. They're social.

zimablue 8y ago
But you're not comparing the same thing generation to generation. The job of developer has changed massively, the number of developers, the expectations, the salary. Sociaety has also changed, and not just in culture but in income distribution, etc etc. If tomorrow we say that you have to do 30 chinups to be a waitress, and the job will involve regular fistfights then we count the number of waitresses by gender and say "it must be cultural", we're kind of missing the point. Or if we say "OK now waitresses make 200k and are respected" and watch the numbers shift.
- beat 8y ago
  "The job of the developer has changed massively". What, pray tell, has changed that made the job more attractive to men, and less attractive to women? You need to be able to answer that question if you're going to make a causal assertion.
  - zimablue 8y ago
    I wasn't around two generations ago to make the comparison but I imagine that with the higher income has come much higher expectations that you'll be in the office for 12 hours a day and weekends. You also have much higher wealth in western nations which correlates with higher ability to seek jobs that fit your preferences. Back in the day most people didn't go to uni and had a much smaller choice of positions. There are hundreds of ways the world and job are very different, and you're flipping the argument to say that I have to assert the one specific causal link. If you're proposing an argument "it's misogynist culture, as evidence compare two generations ago". Then it's more the case that you need to demonstrate that the conditions and job are the same, for your link to be valid. Or that all the ways they're different are irrelevant, which they're just obviously not.
    - beat 8y ago
      Nonsense. I don't know where you work, but where I work, 12 hour days and weekends are clearly not the norm. We put in 40 hour weeks like any other profession. I first learned to program 35 years ago. It wasn't fundamentally different then. Hell, we still use programming languages that were in wide use 35 years ago, like C and the unix shell. The kind of thinking required hasn't changed. So, based on my 35 years of experience, the conditions and the job are basically the same. So again, I challenge you - how is the job different now?
      - zimablue 8y ago
        The parent conceded we're talking 50 years not 35 years, and my point wasn't only that the job is different but that society is different. how is the job different? The pay is much higher and so are the entry requirements, that's the biggest difference. You don't get assigned to program punch cards as part of your secretarial role, you have to actively get educated and good to choose it as a career. I think there's far more places now expecting crazy hours but that's anecdotal I don't have numbers on it. But the languages are different (mostly), the tooling is different, the deployment is different, the scale is different.
    - gspetr 8y ago
      > Back in the day most people didn't go to uni and had a much smaller choice of positions. Not the parent and I wasn't around either, but I think accessibility of education counters your point, not supports it. More egalitarianism should in theory be more favorable to women. Back then I imagine it was much harder to program without access to university computers and education materials. More women get higher education than men compared to 35 years ago. More incentives (monetary and otherwise), combined with lower barriers to entry should also be favoring the supposedly disadvantaged. And yet the drop in F-M ratio since late 1980s has not been overcome last time I checked.
      - zimablue 8y ago
        More egalitarianism should be favorable to women /if/ you assume a priori that they are mostly disadvantaged through lack of access to education/resources, and the real expected outcome distribution is 50-50. If you assume that there are underlying differences in interests and aptitude, more egalitarianism allows these differences to be expressed more since women are more free to eg. choose a career working with people, like medicine or law. http://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-girls-3848156-Feb2018/ http://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-girl... It also raises the bar for inherent aptitude to get into/(the top of) a career, since you're competing against a much wider pool of talent. The point I was making to the parent was that his point "cross-generation drop in ratio proves it's cultural" doesn't hold up, because there have been many changes across those generations, you're comparing apples to oranges.
naasking 8y ago
> But there are fewer women in software now than there were 30 years ago. That's not true. Firstly, it's more like 40-50 years ago. Secondly, there are far more women doing software development, but the gender ratio is dramatically different. Thirdly, that's because male interest exploded with the advent of personal computing the 80s. Lastly, "programming" as a profession used to be regarded as an offshot of secretarial work, which was dominated by women. The facts around women in STEM are polluted with a lot of bizarre narratives.
- beat 8y ago
  Okay, so TWO generations. Big deal. It still dismisses the "born that way" nonsense argument. "'programming' as a profession used to be regarded as an offshoot of secretarial work, which was dominated by women". Which begs the question of why women dominated secretarial work (and still do), while as programming became a more respected and better paying profession, it became male-dominated.
  - naasking 8y ago
    > Okay, so TWO generations. Big deal. It still dismisses the "born that way" nonsense argument. It really doesn't. Unless you seriously think punch card programming is the same as modern programming, or that the fact that only women were secretaries that did programming somehow provides data on the relative strengths and inclinations of women and men for programming work at that time. Look, it's clear that you have no idea of the breadth and depth of data available on this subject, and a trite "sexism/oppression" narrative explains hardly any of it. For instance, the fact that as a nation becomes more egalitarian, the gender disparities in STEM increase, ie. Nordic countries have worse gender disparities than here, despite having less sexism, and oppressive countries like Iran actually have gender parity in STEM fields. If you want to actually learn about this subject, I suggest reading: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00189/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018... The fact is, there's good evidence that women are naturally less interested in STEM-like fields due to a well known psychological attitude on things vs. people. That attitude explains facts like why medicine and law have achieved approximate gender parity overall, but surgery is still dominated by men, pediatrics and family law is dominated by women.
jhfhhhf 8y ago
Programming is very different from 40 years ago.
manfredo 8y ago
One big change is that many traditionally male high paying jobs like doctors, lawyers, etc. have become much more open to women. Some, like publishing, have become majority women to the same degree as Tech. One very likely explanation is that many women who wanted to be independently financially successful had few choices other than tech back decades ago. Now they have many other choices.
notSoRandom27 8y ago
> But there are fewer women in software now than there were 30 years ago. Are women today "wired differently" from their mothers? But are they really ?, do you have any data/reference to back it up, I was under the assumption that there are more people, both men and women, working as programmers, than 30 years ago.

arandr0x 8y ago

I see this argument a lot but your exposition is less inflammatory than most. Please note this: when you tell a mixed-gender group of people that all women are "wired" to not like programming, you are telling the women who do like programming (which, let's be real, is most of them on Hacker News) that they're in effect not real women (or defective women, in an engineering sense). Or that they don't count. Since you're presumably not a woman, and they are, they object to your seeming to be taking it upon yourself to tell them what a woman is. It's not unlikely that most women don't want to be in software. Most men don't want to be in software! But hundreds of thousands of women are, in fact, working as programmers. Whenever tech news talks about hiring women, presumably, they're talking about hiring these women. Why pretend they don't exist?

zimablue 8y ago
"Since you're presumably not a woman, and they are, they object to your seeming to be taking it upon yourself to tell them what a woman is." That idea is complete poison. In a debate where you're both completely uninformed, the anecdotal evidence of experience is relevant. In any discussion where reason, numbers, research are involved, the gender/race of the person making the argument is irrelevant to the argument. This current idea that only women can talk about female issues, only X about X is pre-enlightenment tribalism. It presupposes conflict between the tribes too. If in my philosophy I believe that through reason and evidence I can understand your point of view and experiences,there's the possibility of agreement. If you really believe that I can never talk about issues affecting your tribe, or arrive at reason to an underlying truth, there's no point in talking. We might as well just fight to see whose tribe can impose power on whose.
- arandr0x 8y ago
  I'm sorry, I don't follow how your argument (which is valid) is a response to mine. I said people tend to object to being imposed an identity by people who do not share it ("all women hate programming", "all Yankees eat too much"). (And to a lesser extent they also object to the same thing by ingroup members, but are less comfortable expressing it. If my parent was in fact a woman, her viewpoint would most likely still be pretty unpopular.) Arguments being inflammatory does not make them invalid. It is fine to have conversations that include inflammatory arguments, if they are made politely, which parent did. But ignoring that the argument is inflammatory, and/or that the group the argument refers to are in fact intelligent people involved in the discussion that may have themselves an opinion, is lacking in empathy. Rhetoric is founded in empathy; that is why it is an art, and not merely a technique.

androidgirl 8y ago

I don't think that's quite true, I think this is more of a nurture vs nature thing. My father got me into programming, and my colleagues who are women also have a backstory with someone supporting their interest in development.

cowpewter 8y ago
For me it was my grandfather, but yes, I also got into programming at least partially due to nurture, not nature. Just teach kids to code, boy or girl. Not all of them will like it, not all of them will be good at it. But I think a lot more girls would be into it and good at it if they were introduced to it before college. Tailor it to the kid's interests. My first programs were more socially oriented. When I was 5-6 years old, all my programs were made-up conversations with the computer, where your answers were stored and parroted back by the computer to show that it was "listening". Maybe a boy would have been less into that and more into something mathier, like LOGO instead of BASIC, but it was what was interesting to me at that age. The computer was a form of imaginary friend for an introverted kid like me.
cimmanom 8y ago
Yup. Someone telling us that programming was something for us - not just being exposed to media and advertising and social pressures that continually suggest (and did even more so in the 80's and 90's) that computing was for socially inept males.