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My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer

244 points by jeanhsu 16y ago

gvb 16y ago
The key quote: "It is also very intimidating to take classes where it seems like most people know all the material already and have been programming since middle school or earlier..." The key to getting more females in CS is to expose them to programming in middle school or earlier. Jean put her finger on why recruiting females for CS at the college level is so difficult: if they are starting programming in college (or even high school) when most of the class has been programming for years, they are way behind on the learning curve and have a daunting task to catch up.
- cyen 16y ago
  I'm a fan of: http://blog.jolieodell.com/2010/09/07/women-in-tech/ http://blog.jolieodell.com/2010/09/07/women-in-tech/
- timr 16y ago
  You've missed the most important two words of that quote: "seems like". She goes on: "Something that frustrates me about the field of computer science is that there are a lot of jerks who think that just because they've "mastered" some programming language or know some obscure unix commands, they are gods and you are nothing." And frankly, that's the level at which a typical CS freshman is operating. Lots of knowledge about "coding"...very little knowledge about anything else. The playing field is much more level than it initially seems, but because the CS 101 classes are mostly about writing toy code it's easy for prior coding knowledge to be intimidating. In my own undergrad CS program, the CS101 hotshots fared no better, on average, than the kids who came in with no experience at all. In fact, a few of the loudest initial braggarts were the most spectacular flameouts, and about an equal number of the no-prior-experience kids ended up the honors graduates. Universities could do a lot to combat this problem -- it might be a good idea to let the high-school coding jocks place out of the first CS classes. Alternatively, making first-year classes more about math and less about code would probably put 99% of all incoming students on an even playing field.
  - T-R 16y ago
    I liked what my university's Chinese classes did - they had a special "advanced 101" class. This way, hot shots who still really needed to go through the 101 coursework weren't intimidating those just starting; those who really knew what they were doing could just test into a higher level. Korean classes, which didn't have the "advanced 101", ended up catering to the hottest of the hot shots, and saw a good number of both the hot shots and the non-native speakers dropping out before the 200 level.
    - antihero 16y ago
      I do think that the split would be an interesting idea. At my university, our first year programming class was divided between people who found it too hard, and people who found it way too easy.
      - T-R 16y ago
        We had that, too, but it wasn't really clear cut. We also had a bunch in the middle, who, while they really did need to go through most of the 101 material, they also did their share of intimidating the fresh starters - probably more so than those who really knew the material, who mostly just skipped class. Since my university had large Korean and Chinese populations, it kind of struck me as parallel to the problems the Asian Studies department had weeding out native speakers looking for an easy A - it was hard to tell them from the kids who could speak but not write. Putting them in a separate section kept them from driving the class, and things went much smoother.
  - bm98 16y ago
    One of the beauties of programs that teach Scheme and ML (or OCaml or F#) in introductory CS is that they level the playing field. The typical high school computer hot shot has never seen anything like functional programming before, and is no better off than anyone else in the class. Follow that with the theoretical foundations of CS and you have plenty of hot shots at the bottom of the class. A professor of mine once said, "Some kids just can't hack the math."
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  Can I respectfully disagree? I think that it is important to make software engineering a codified, professional field. It is not an advantage to have programming be a field where the bragging rights go to those who put together a D&D weather generator in a true Mini-computer in Middle School. Rather, it is much better to have software engineering be something you can enter in college if you a good mastery of abstract thinking. I would further mention that it helps programming as a professional if a good programmer is a generalist who knows how to get any required details. The process of becoming a generalist is entirely possible if you enter the software engineering field in college. Essentially, the point is for a person learn good process and let the rest take of itself. Oppositely, if programmers are merely hackers, geeks or idiot-savants, who accumulate massive amounts of details concerning systems, languages and libraries in a near-autistic fashion, then not only will programming remain a ghetto but it will be a poorly paid, miserably ghetto.
  - deleted 16y ago
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  - Locke1689 16y ago
    It is not an advantage to have programming be a field where the bragging rights go to those who put together a D&D weather generator in a true Mini-computer in Middle School. Careful, this could be similar to saying that it's not advantageous to have mathematics be a field where people who prove non-trivial theorems in high school do better in university courses. Some people have prior background or a special talent and that's not a bad thing. It's just important that this is also not required to succeed in the given field.
  - juhygtfghjk 16y ago
    > software engineering a codified, professional field. So after getting your degree you can only be a CEng by working for an existing CEng in a company that certifies CEngs. Sounds like a perfect way of weeding out all those women who do pick a CS degree. Unless all traditional big-iron firms are looking to hire more women, and all 60-something male senior engineers are really clamoring for more women to certify ?
- biot 16y ago
  I don't believe the age argument. At what age was Grace Hopper first introduced to programming? Based on the wikipedia article, Grace Hopper appears to have started programming 14 years after getting her PhD and didn't seem to have been hampered by not having started programming before high school. [Insert COBOL joke here.] What about others who have a few more gray hairs than I? When did Seymour Cray, Vint Cerf, Peter Norvig, Tim Berners-Lee, and other early pioneers start programming? I think it's pretty safe to say they didn't have mainframes in their parent's basement growing up that they were programming on since before high school. They had a natural interest and the aptitude to do well in it.
  - gwern 16y ago
    Maybe you ought to look up your examples. > Cray was born in 1925 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin to Seymour R. and Lillian Cray. His father was a civil engineer who fostered Cray's interest in science and engineering. As early as the age of ten he was able to build a device out of Erector Set components that converted punched paper tape into Morse code signals. The basement of the family home was given over to the young Cray as a "lab". That's not a mainframe, no. But he was still learning a lot about programming.
  - gvb 16y ago
    Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper started programming when Howard H. Aiken[1] designed and IBM built a computer[2] for her to program. Seymour Cray was also born before the first usable computers were created. I don't have concrete date, but I strongly suspect the other early pioneers also started programming when they first got access to a computer. I'm a few years younger than the youngest of the quoted pioneers (Tim Berners-Lee, born 1955). My first access to a computer was in my junior year in high school: a DecWriter[3] connected via a 300 baud dial-up modem to a timeshare system, programmed in Basic. (Obsessively. Still. :-O) The limiting factor for pioneers was access to computer. For kids today, access isn't a problem. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_H._Aiken http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_H._Aiken [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I [3] http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/la36.html http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/la36.html
- erikpukinskis 16y ago
  The key to getting more females in CS All sentences that start with these words are misguided. It is a complex issue with contributing factors at EVERY stage of a programmer's development. Yes, let's help middle school girls get a chance to program. But let's also change CS curricula to draw on more skills besides programming. And let's make intro programming classes more welcoming to nonprogrammers. And let's find new venues for promoting startup job openings. And let's give grants for women making open source contributions, and, and, and.... The same is true of promoting literacy and bike friendly cities and fighting racism and most every other kind of activism. This is not a world of root causes.
- antihero 16y ago
  Thing is, this is a perplexing problem - my SO teaches at a school that has a "computer club" where they do such things, and it has a lot of female members, but there's a distinctly bizarre issue of girls interested in computers at Secondary/6th form level not then going on to do degrees in the subject. I think a more in depth study interviewing the "potentials" needs to be done in order to understand whether there's a problem with endemic sexism or whether it's something else.
- gaius 16y ago
  But that is a ridiculous thing to say. Should people be banned from programming until college so everyone can be "equal"? It's like whining that you can't compete with an athlete who has been training since they were a kid.
- younata 16y ago
  I don't go to a school known for their CS program (we have a good one, just not a renowned one). Of roughly 30 or so freshman in the CS program, I know of about 20 or so who said they did not know how to program before they went to college. So, your premise of "most of the class has been programming for years" is false in at least my case.
- shortlived 16y ago
  I started programming in college and turned out fine.
ernestipark 16y ago
Really well written article. I'm not a female, but I resonate with a lot of her points, especially: They can say something so simple as "Oh don't you know that command?" but in an inadvertently condescending voice that makes you feel like you're the only person who doesn't know it. As someone just testing out the CS waters, that type of experience in every class can be very daunting. In general, computer science tends to be a major where people go into college with a lot of prior-knowledge and I have seen this discourage many people from majoring in it.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  It's hardly the only such major. Art and music schools require you to have a lot of prior knowledge - your portfolio is part of your application.
  - ernestipark 16y ago
    True, but you're not required or even expected to have prior knowledge of computer science before undergrad.
  - marquis 16y ago
    Many schools allow you to apply based on other factors. New enrollments at music schools (not the top ones, but still some very good ones) allow you to take a starter course the summer before school starts so you can learn to read music. Music has changed so much in the 20th century that a prerequisite in music theory isn't going to hinder you if you show the ability to apply your analytical skills. Having been through music classes myself I noted I was initially wary of those who hadn't been trained musicians since the age of 7, but quickly realised that it really didn't matter and some of my peers really excelled at music having picked it up even as an adult. Doesn't apply to performance/dance schools though, obviously - you can't get a degree in piano performance if you're just starting at 18, unless you're a rare genius.
- mbubb 16y ago
  I agree on the "really well written part" - she is a good writer.
luu 16y ago
[The professor] once told me that even though the females are fairly quiet, and the boys in the class showed off a lot, when it came down to projects and exams, the female average was often higher At his confirmation hearing, when Greenspan was asked why Townsend-Greenspan employed so many women (> 50%, compared to about 5% in finance at the time), he replied that since he valued women as much as men, but other firms didn't, he could get better work for the same money by hiring women. Are there any software companies doing the same thing today, and if not, why not?
- natrius 16y ago
  I don't think the opportunity to do that even exists. I haven't heard female engineers complaining that they can't get jobs. The problem is there there are so few looking for the jobs in the first place.
- necubi 16y ago
  I don't think the main problem is companies not valuing women, because it starts much earlier. University CS departments are tilted very heavily towards men (~10:1 at my school) so there are far, far fewer women graduating with CS degrees and entering the marketplace. If many companies have a similar ratio, it may reflect the availability of female programmers rather than any bias on their part.
- Stormbringer 16y ago
  Interestingly Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett's mentor had a similar problem, he was Jewish and none of the firms on Wall Street would hire a Jew, so he had to start his own firm.
  - mynameishere 16y ago
    Right. No Jews allowed in finance. http://www.buffettsecrets.com/benjamin-graham-biography.htm http://www.buffettsecrets.com/benjamin-graham-biography.htm Somehow I suspect if you said something like, "Enrico Caruso was Italian, and so couldn't find a job since none of the opera houses would hire an Italian..." ...the bullshit detectors would have tripped more readily.
brainfsck 16y ago
"It's no secret that females in Computer Science, both in academia and industry, are scarce... currently sitting at about 12% to 20%." I wonder how much of the gender discrepancy in CS can be objectively attributed to personality differences. Populations who participate in certain logical activities have rare personality traits (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=946249 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=946249, http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=112400 http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=112...) which are far more common in men than women. If this is the case, is it possible that direct attempts to "increase the number of women in CS" are misguided?
- sp332 16y ago
  This fits a hypothesis I've been formulating for a while: CS doesn't need to attract more women, it needs to attract more people. It's not a mystery that CS isn't appealing to women. Honestly, the atmosphere and culture of most CS departments just aren't appealing at all. Can anyone answer, for their alma mater: unless you're already coding "10 hours straight, forgetting to eat and losing track of time into the wee hours of the night", what is the incentive to study CS? edited for clarity
  - Stormbringer 16y ago
    Even if we accept all of your assumptions, there is an alternative conclusion: that the problem is the CS culture, and the culture needs to change.
    - sp332 16y ago
      Sorry, it's a bit late here so I might not be thinking real clearly but, isn't that what I said?
      - peteforde 16y ago
        No! Your comment only implies that bringing more people will solve the problem. Sadly, that will just reinforce the current social proofs that loud assholes dominate CS.
toephu 16y ago
i care not.
patrickgzill 16y ago
Any sufficiently driven, or competitive woman, will do far better financially and "psychically" to go into management or marketing sides of a tech-related field. CS / software engineering is an underpaid ghetto, and as outsourcing continues, will remain so. Perhaps I should have pointed out Philip Greenspun's take: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/acm-women-in-computing http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/acm-women-in-computing
- Stormbringer 16y ago
  You could say the same thing about blokes too. When people ask me for career advice, I tell them to do car sales for a couple of years (until they're good at it) and then go work for a large corporate. Their 10% commission on a 100 million dollar sale will blow away anything the average programmer will get in their entire lifetime. If they insist on IT, I point at helpdesk. The turn-over is so big that within 8 months you can be team leader (by virtue of seniority) and you're on a fast track to management. === On the other hand, if we deny the premise that CS / Software Engineering is a ghetto for men too, then what is wrong with the picture? Do men get opportunities that women don't get? E.g. ground floor of a start-up? I think the premise needs to be not that "something is wrong with women", but rather "something is wrong with the system if it treats men and women differently".
  - Locke1689 16y ago
    Sorry but do you have any statistics on those sorts of things? Seems like there are more open CS positions so the average expected income would be higher..
    - Stormbringer 16y ago
      I'm not sure which of my outrageous claims you are disputing. :D Everything you do in life involves sales skills. Getting better sales skills is going to make you more money. Even if you worked in some high-fallutin' ivory tower institution you still need to go cap in hand begging for funding. Every job interview is a sales situation, every annual review etc. Are you disputing the claim about help desk having a high turn-over? Have you even worked in IT? Seriously. As for programmers making such big salaries, outside of anomalies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook, good luck with that one. Try comparing against electricians, plumbers and carpenters. Or even the bloke who owns his own lawn mowing business. Yes, I know apprentice jobs are shitty and they make peanuts, but after their apprenticeship is over, they can make big bucks. For big $ as a wage slave, try medical. Oh, you're such a delicate precious genius as a programmer, but couldn't cut it (sic) as a Doctor, Dentist or GP? Guess maybe you're not as special or smart as you think you are. A lot of programmers who think they are God's gift to the information age need to pull their head out and go outside. Even a garbo can make good $ (and it's great for your immune system!)
nostrademons 16y ago
"One of the challenges for me while I was at Google was to speak up when I didn't understand something" That is a problem for perhaps 90%+ of Googlers, regardless of their gender.
- whakojacko 16y ago
  I'd venture this is a problem for most engineers, regardless of their employer.
- solipsist 16y ago
  This makes me never want to consider applying there. Can someone elaborate on why Google has this intimidating atmosphere?
  - antihero 16y ago
    I'd hazard a guess at the fact that because Google is so prestigious, and because engineers there are reputed to be intellectually brilliant, people don't want to seem "dumb" in such an environment. Which is mad, because knowledge != intelligence.
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    I don't really want to give the impression that it's this totally intimidating atmosphere all the time, because it does fade with time, and most engineers learn to ask questions abundantly, and most engineers are also really great at answering questions. One of the most commonly cited perks of being at Google is the ability to ask anything of anyone. Have a question about HTML 5? Shoot hixie an e-mail. Digging into the internals of Python? Guido works there, as do a number of other core Pythonistas. Building a Go app? Rob Pike can answer. That said, it is intimidating starting as a Noogler, largely because of the huge volume of proprietary material you need to learn. There's one true way to store structured data, and while it's open-sourced (Protobufs), you've probably never used it. There's a unified JavaScript library (Closure), but it wasn't open-sourced until recently. There're logging, and log-processing, and monitoring, and RPC, and cluster management systems to learn. There're a bunch of storage options, some of which you may've read about in public but never used (BigTable), some of which will be completely new to you. The scale of problems that Google tackles is also bigger than most people are accustomed to. In a lot of the industry, a few-dozen node cluster is fairly large. At Google, thousands of machines are routine. Big-O notation can be ignored at a lot of shops, but at Google-scale, anything that runs in greater than O(N log N) will usually take centuries. Most frontend web devs never worry about latency; at Google, we care very much. A/B testing has recently made a lot of headlines and had some neat libraries developed for it, but its centrally ingrained in Google's feature development processes. When you first start out - particularly if you're used to always having the answers, as many Google engineers were - that can be intimidating. There's suddenly so much you don't know, and yet you know (through Google's public reputation) that software obviously gets written there. Once in a while, it's even good software. For your first few weeks, you probably won't even know what questions to ask, because there's such a volume of knowledge out there. Oftentimes, somebody's already solved your problem, but you don't know about it because it might never occur to you that someone's already solved it. There're also things that Google pays attention to that many other shops don't - in many other employers, you'll never have to deal with internationalization, or handling Chinese characters, or right-to-left languages, or XSS, or managing HTTP resources when you have a large fleet of potentially-out-of-sync webservers. When I started doing code reviews for the websearch webserver, the tech lead said, "We don't expect you to know everything, but we expect that by now you've learned enough to know when you need to ask someone."
Stormbringer 16y ago
I knew several blokes who had the same problem, they were getting straight A's but they didn't believe they were 'worthy' to work in the industry if there was even one person in the class that was better or smarter than them. Funnily none of the guys getting B's or C's had that psychological problem.
peteforde 16y ago
I've found that in the last few years as the "we must encourage more women into tech" train has gained speed, people have lost sight of the importance of removing barriers in favour of recruiting girls simply because they are girls. In addition to being totally messed up politically, it's really harmful to your self-esteem if you think that you are being given special treatment to satisfy someone else's political correctness quota. Not to mention that eager men (with the best of intentions, no doubt) over-compensating can lead to "othering", that feeling that everyone is going overboard making you so welcomed that you kind of want to barf. My current speculation is that for most girls, it's actually their parents that instill a nagging sense of doubt regarding what they are "supposed" to consider good career options. Therefore, I think the key is to reach young minds. Girl coders: go speak at public schools or high schools today!
- marquis 16y ago
  On your comment about parents guiding their girls into certain careers, I don't see that as being so prevalent today. Part of the issue is that coding isn't viewed as a social experience, so it isolates - especially - girls, as teenagers feel peer pressure to be doing social activities. I strongly remember being 15 and wanting to be in the computer lab, but it was deemed unseemly by my peers and at that age it's more important to keep your relationships intact. So I started coding in my early twenties when my peers were busy studying or working so the social aspect was less of an issue.
  - mattdeboard 16y ago
    Perhaps in some subcultures, but I know in at least a one immigrant community girls seem to be actively dissuaded from pursuing any engineering degrees whatsoever and steered instead toward the medical field in some capacity, or business degrees. When my significant other told her family she was changing majors to an engineering field away from a business field, they were pretty upset. In addition I noticed in the Bay Area when I lived there for a few years many of the immigrant Asians really didn't give a damn one way or the other what their daughters did. This is actually worse, in my opinion. Ah well, here is to the hope more of the sublimely proficient women I know seek engineering careers instead of pigeonholing themselves into "touchy feely" crap fields like marketing & PR.
dennisgorelik 16y ago
-- They can say something so simple as "Oh don't you know that command?" but in an inadvertently condescending voice -- "Condescending voice" is a matter of perception. It's quite possible that these engineers were totally ok that she did not know some stuff. Still it's possible that females are more sensitive to [imaginary] condescending tone, so they shy away from the field.
- marquis 16y ago
  >females are more sensitive to [imaginary] condescending tone I have male friends who are also very sensitive to criticism, and female colleagues who can be very insensitive. Please be careful of applying a general personality issue to a gender - I understand how this could make sense at first glance but it's too vague and comes across as reductionist.
  - dennisgorelik 16y ago
    1) From my observation females on average are more sensitive to [perceived] criticism than males. "Sensitive" in the sense that females usually avoid such experience. Males might be sensitive too, but they might try harder to overcome it. 2) "Try harder" attitude is not necessarily better than "Avoid potential confrontation" attitude. But the difference might explain why there are so few females in software development. 3) There are other reasons behind gender ratio in software field. For example, software development requires more abstract thinking which on average is easier for males. Females focus more on more practical things and care a little bit less about abstract stuff. 4) All of the reasoning above is about comparing averages. Individual female might outperform average male in abstract thinking and "try it harder" attitude.
    - keeronmarc 16y ago
      Female entrepreneur and coder situation is interesting. I will say that you do bring up the common points cited for females not choosing tech areas. One point to also consider, which I consider fundamental to any entrepreneur, be it tech or otherwise is the concept of "challenge". I think regardless of sex, if you really are challenged in an area, and feel like you can beat someone, or a company at their game, you will succeed. More specifically, guys are challenged at a younger age, be it in athletics, video games, neighborhood ball, or your friends telling you, you're a wimp if you don't do this. As simple as this sounds, guys thrive on challenges, we play video games for the challenge, and girls alot of times don't get that same oppportunity to be encouraged or challenged at a young age. Because this shapes the competitive drive and spirit of entrepreneurship. Sp, what I would say to the women entrepreneur question. Challenge, challenge, challenge. Doesn't matter when you start, embrace a good challenge.
fleitz 16y ago
Why does it matter how many women are in tech? If we're all equal then it doesn't. Not all the people I socialize with are into computers. Most aren't. You can't make all your friends in your own industry. I don't care if a person is a man or a woman, unless there are seriously extenuating circumstance I won't work or socialize with them if their assholes. The problem is that in geek circles there is a heavy social penalty of advocating that someone be ostracized for behaving like an asshole, everyone has to be included no matter how much no one else wants to hang out with them. There are a lot of anti-social retards in tech regardless of gender. I'm quite happy with it as there are lots of people willing to hire devs who are willing to not be condescending and have some semblance of adherence to social norms. As the OP pointed out quite accurately in their post 'I realized he was just an asshole who probably wouldn't get too far in life anyways.' Many people are hardwired to respect the opinion of anyone who forcefully and confidently expresses it. It's a two way street though, want people to think you know software engineering or any other topic? Just say something reasonably intelligent in a forceful and confident way, also if someone else has said it that they respect mention that person as having saying it. Most of the debates in software engineering are subjective in nature as much as everyone involved in the decision likes to claim otherwise. If you know your rhetoric you'll have no problem intellectually disarming most people in CS. CS geeks think they only pay attention to logos but realistically there are a lot of CS decisions made based on ethos and pathos. I'll probably be down modded for saying this but the appeal of open source is based largely in ethos and pathos, and not logos. I'd settle for more people in tech who can write working code with out being an asshole regardless of gender.
- tjogin 16y ago
  We are equal, but we are also different. These things are often conflated, but they are not the same.
  - bethling 16y ago
    Exactly. And teams do better when there are different perspectives, different ways of thought. Women have a different set of life experiences, and if we're dissuaded from technology, then the rest of the technology world misses out of those different perspectives. There's nothing better or superior about them, they're just different. It's not that women should be encouraged because we're women. It's that 1/2 the population often feels (at least to some extent) like outsiders to the field. If there are other groups that feel the same way, then that needs to be dealt with as well. It's just that lack of women tends to be noticeable - in 15 years of software development I've only had 3 other women developers on my team.
scottjad 16y ago
I think that the % of women graduating from CS programs is a horrible indicator of the % of women programming in industry. The author hints at this in the last paragraph. At Clojure Conj I think there were 0 women (other than guardians of minors) out of 200 people. On programming mailing lists I almost never see female names. I think CS graduation rates might be much higher for a number of reasons. I think females have higher college graduation rates overall in the US, they may be more likely to switch fields and pursue a graduate degree, to switch out of programming after graduating, and in a field like programming where many are self-taught they may be less likely to learn programming out of the classroom.
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leon_ 16y ago
> As I grow as a developer, I realize that hey, I am really good at what I do and I've gotten to where I am because of that. 3 years out of school and already a big ego :)
- wccrawford 16y ago
  Or a healthy one. It's not hubris to recognize your own strengths and accomplishments.
  - kolektiv 16y ago
    It's hubris to recognize it outside of your own head! Although that's rather a culturally biased observation I admit.
- kolektiv 16y ago
  I had to laugh, the same thing struck me as I read it. I'm sure she is very good, but in my own experience impostor syndrome merely increases with time. I came out of university thinking I was good. Now, I feel worse every year. In objective terms I'm clearly better, and make a huge effort on continual learning and improvement. But now I know enough to know how much I don't know.
HilbertSpace 16y ago
For why so few girls major in computer science in college, below is my answer. Sorry to say this, but I have to conclude that my points below are the main ones to explain the data and so far have received too little attention on this thread. From a standard point about good parenting, nearly all the girls with good parenting had mommies who were happy being mommies. For more, I draw from E. Fromm, 'The Art of Loving'. and Deborah Tannen, 'You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation'. So, I continue: Way before age 5, the little girls realize that they are small versions of Mommy and NOT Daddy. They know in absolute terms that they are a GIRL and NOT a BOY. Since their mommy was happy being a mommy, the little girls want to be like Mommy and on the 'mommy track'. By about age 18 months, little girls are already masters at eliciting positive emotions from adults, MUCH better than boys. The girls are also MUCH better at reading emotions than boys. Facial expressions and eye contact are part of how the girls read and elicit emotions; other ways are to 'act' (they are MUCH better at acting than the boys) cute, meek, and sweet and to be pretty. Since being pretty lets them do better eliciting positive emotions, they love pretty dresses with ruffles and ribbons. So, they are in a 'virtuous circle': They act sweet, elicit positive emotions in an adult, e.g., father, grandfather, uncle, get a gift of a pretty dress, wear the dress, elicit even more positive emotions, get even more pretty dresses, white bedroom furniture, patent leather shoes, cute stuffed animals, etc. Having to act like a boy or be treated like a boy, instead of like a girl, would be terrifying to them. So, in their first years, such little girls, to be on the 'mommy track' want to play with dolls and not Erector sets, want to work at being pretty and not how to hot rod a car, want to learn how to bake a cake and not how to plug together a SATA RAID array. Give such a girl a toy truck and she will know instantly that the toy is 'for boys' and will avoid it as a big threat. Generally, from a little after birth and for nearly all their lives, human females are MUCH more emotional than human males. So, they pay a LOT of attention to emotions, both theirs and others'. One of a human female's strongest emotions is to get security from membership in, and praise, acceptance, and approval from, groups, especially groups of females about their own age. That is, they are 'herd animals'. Gossip? It's how they make connections with others in the herd. Why do they like cell phones so much? For more gossip. Why pay so much attention to fashion? To 'fit in' with the herd. In such a herd, in most respects the females try hard to be like the 'average' of the herd and not to stand out or look different. [An exception is when a female wants to lead her herd, e.g., go to Clicker, follow the biographies, get the one for the Astors, and look at Ms. Astor and her herd of 400.] Well, as long as human females with good parenting are on the 'mommy track', and the human race will be nearly dead otherwise, the 'average' of the herd will emphasize the 'mommy track', dolls, looking pretty, cakes, and clothes and not Erector sets, hot rodding cars, or building RAID arrays. When it comes to a college major, any human female 18 months or older will recognize in a milli, micro, nano second that her herd believes that mathematics, physical science, engineering, and computer science are subjects for boys and NOT girls. Instead the girl subjects are English literature, French, music, acting, 'communications', sociology, psychology, nursing, maybe accounting, and K-12 education. By college the girls have been working 24 x 7 for about 16 years to fit in with the herd of girls, and their chances of leaving the herd in college to major in computer science are slim to none. Don't expect this situation to change easily or soon: Mother Nature was there LONG before computer science, and, as we know, "It's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature.". Or, to get girls to major in computer science, "You are dealing with forces you cannot possibly understand.". Having women pursuing computer careers give girls in middle school lectures on computer careers will stick like water on a duck's back -- not a chance. Nearly all the girls will just conclude that at most such careers are for girls who are not doing well fitting into the herd of girls, are not very good socially, don't get invited to the more desirable parties, don't get the good dates, are not very pretty, and are not in line to be good as wives and mommies. By middle school, the girls have already received oceans of influences about 'female roles', and changing the directions these girls have selected and pursued so strongly for so long is hopeless. Besides, 'middle school' is an especially hopeless time: The girls have just recently entered puberty, just got reminded in overwhelmingly strong and unambiguous terms that they are now young women, have received a lot of plain talk from their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and older sisters about the birds and the bees, in their gossip with their herd members have been discussing the birds and bees with great intensity, already have a good woman's figure or nearly so, really, are well on their way to, in another year or so, being the most attractive physically they will ever be and know it, notice men of their age up to age 80 or so looking at them as women, and are in no mood to consider being 'more like boys'. Middle school is about the worst possible time to try to get the girls to fight Mother Nature. Suggestions of such lectures are 'clueless' in grand terms. So, a typical scenario is a boy in middle school who is really excited because he just understood how an automobile differential (TCP part of TCP/IP, binary search, virtual memory, etc.) works and with great excitement tries to explain it to a girl his age at, say, lunch, and we have a strict dichotomy: The boy is totally clueless that the girl couldn't be less interested. The girl sees right away that she couldn't be less interested, not to offend the boy unduly pretends to be a little interested, and sees in clear terms that the boy is totally clueless at perceiving her lack of interest. She concludes that he is so clueless he is really easy to manipulate (a fact she suspects could be useful and saves for later). The boy doesn't understand the girl, and the girl regards the boy, and soon, all boys less then 2-6 years older than she, as at least 'socially' immature and, really, just immature. She wants nothing to do with such 'children' (she already understands that a woman needs a strong man) and will concentrate on boys 2-6, maybe 8 or 10, years older than she is. She has a point: She was likely more mature socially at age six than he will be at age 16. Look, it's WAY too easy to fail to understand: So, we can just assume a simplistic 'rational' model. In this model, sure, we can teach 2 + 3 = 5 and (2 / 3) / ( 5 / 4 ) = 8 / 15, and both the boys and the girls can learn, although typically the girls will do better on tests in such things than the boys. So, we entertain that the boys and girls can exercise all their 'rational' abilities and, thus, can learn and do well with anything their rational abilities permit. Nonsense. Naive, clueless nonsense. Instead, Mother Nature says that in addition to rational abilities are emotions and commonly has the emotions overwhelm the rational abilities. Net, such a simplistic rational model is clueless, even dangerous, nonsense. Give a girl of 4 a toy truck and take away her dolls in pretty dresses, and she will cry, and the crying will be heartrending to any adults around who will quickly swap back the truck and the dolls. It's no different at age 13 in middle school or 18 in college. Actually, there can be a reason for a girl in college to take some courses in computer science: Look for a husband! It may be that in college girls of Asian descent are more willing to pursue math, physical science, etc. than are girls of Western European descent.
aming 16y ago
Interesting article. Did not expect a negative experience for the author in a post-secondary institution. On her point about being at a disadvantage compared to the other students since she had low experience with computer science (having only taken classes in high school). In my point of view, I think she had sufficient exposure to compsci. I didn't get into computer science, or even know of its existence, until my 2nd year in university. I definitely do think personality has an effect on the experience. The author of the article, I think, took comments and retorts too seriously or negatively. In addition, I think she uses her gender as a weakness but rather it has no effect on her ability at all. Though at least she recognized the asshole soon after his outburst. In my experience, I don't see a decline of females in computer science, rather it is a increase. I have passed by the portraits of graduated students in my hallways and definitely there are way more females than in the previous years. Matter of fact, it was almost a 1:5 ratio of females:males (may not be super accurate).
binbasti 16y ago
Last year I attended a panel about women in tech on the fairly new CCC congress "SIGINT" in Cologne, which focusses more on society and politics. The panel itself was rather boring and not really insightful, but during the Q&A a young woman from Eastern Europe pointed out something interesting: she stated that in her country there's a 1:1 male/female ratio in all science fields at the universities, including computer science. I haven't checked the facts, but even if that is not entirely true, the difference to Western countries is astounding. She went on to say that the problem is entirely with culture, and all aspects of it, and that the numbers were just reflecting that. The women on the panel, who were all Westerners, couldn't even comment on that. They were just plain speechless, and rightly so, because most of their arguments involving bullying boys, mother nature, and other standard points were pretty much refuted by the simple fact that there already exist places in the world where this topic is not even an issue. And it's not the ones you would usually relate to human progress.
- binbasti 16y ago
  I found some numbers, albeit a little old: Exemplar: Bulgaria The participation rate for women in these fields is slightly higher than for men: 7.8 percent of the female college-age cohort obtained an NS&E degree in Bulgaria in 1992; 7.2 percent of males in this age group obtained such a degree in that same year. In 1992, women obtained 57 percent of all university degrees. In addition, they obtained half of the engineering degrees, 70 percent of the natural science degrees, and 73 percent of the mathematics and computer science degrees. These percentages have not changed since 1975 (Stretenova, 1994). http://anitaborg.org/files/womenhightechworld.pdf http://anitaborg.org/files/womenhightechworld.pdf
  - deleted 16y ago
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- capstone 16y ago
  Growing up in Russia, I remember the stereotype that girls are better suited for sciences because they are more studious (the exact Russian word is hard to translate but basically means that one is physically able as well as personally inclined to sit down and study for a long period of time). Boys on the other hand were considered too boisterous to pay attention for very long. Of course, this stereotype was perceived as The Truth. Mother Nature, backed up by statistically demonstrable demographic evidence. Can't argue with that, right? And so it goes...
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16s 16y ago
I used to work with graduate EE students in a research lab. We had male and female students. They joked around a lot. Nothing ever too serious. If you pulled your weight, you had everyone's respect. One day, a top male student came into the lab. A female student was writing some code. Guy: "What are you working on." Girl: "Code for the new project." Guy: "What are you writing it in." Girl: "Perl." Guy: "Perl!? (long pause) now that's a man's language." Girl: "Rolls her eyes... shut-up dumb ass." That's an example of the banter. The girls wrote just as much code and did all the things the guys did. The only major difference was numbers. There were 6 guys for every 1 girl. Edit: spelling
skeltoac 16y ago
The word "sexism" is too often used without any discussion of its definition. Here are a few definitions for "sexism" from Google: I. discriminatory or abusive behavior towards members of the opposite sex II. prejudice or discrimination based on sex; especially: discrimination against women III. attitudes or behavior based on traditional stereotypes of sexual roles IV. Attitudes, conditions, or behaviors that promote stereotyping of social roles based on gender. The sexist remark in II is quite common. In some dictionaries the word "sexism" is itself defined in sexist terms: "sexist - a man with a chauvinistic belief in the inferiority of women". It may be warranted by the attitude's prevalence; it is sexist nonetheless because it promotes stereotyping. Definition IV is probably the most enlightening of the bunch. One valid yet unpopular answer to the question "why so few female software engineers" is that most parents provide a sexist (IV) upbringing. Given the standard attitudes (gender identification), conditions (girl's toy collection), and behaviors (mom's occupation), the odds are stacked against a female becoming a software engineer even before she enters the first grade. These things change but it takes generations. Inspecting my own behavior as a male software engineer, I would find myself guilty of several of the attitudes and behaviors mentioned in the article. My first hope is that I do not discriminate by gender (I'm a jerk to men and women equally) and my second hope is that I can be less of a jerk to everyone.
hank53 16y ago
so many dudes just commented because they think they can get laid by commenting.lol disgusting. as a woman im disgusted.
Tycho 16y ago
A lot of tech people do seem intent on 'sandbagging' engineers of feebler talent/knowledge. Some of the conversations remind me of this: http://www.kontraband.com/videos/5173/Family-Guy-Skywalker-Sandbagging/ http://www.kontraband.com/videos/5173/Family-Guy-Skywalker-S... The thing is the uber-geeks do this to each other too, the difference is to them it's water off a duck's back.

244 points by jeanhsu 16y ago

gvb 16y ago

The key quote: "It is also very intimidating to take classes where it seems like most people know all the material already and have been programming since middle school or earlier..." The key to getting more females in CS is to expose them to programming in middle school or earlier. Jean put her finger on why recruiting females for CS at the college level is so difficult: if they are starting programming in college (or even high school) when most of the class has been programming for years, they are way behind on the learning curve and have a daunting task to catch up.

cyen 16y ago
I'm a fan of: http://blog.jolieodell.com/2010/09/07/women-in-tech/ http://blog.jolieodell.com/2010/09/07/women-in-tech/
timr 16y ago
You've missed the most important two words of that quote: "seems like". She goes on: "Something that frustrates me about the field of computer science is that there are a lot of jerks who think that just because they've "mastered" some programming language or know some obscure unix commands, they are gods and you are nothing." And frankly, that's the level at which a typical CS freshman is operating. Lots of knowledge about "coding"...very little knowledge about anything else. The playing field is much more level than it initially seems, but because the CS 101 classes are mostly about writing toy code it's easy for prior coding knowledge to be intimidating. In my own undergrad CS program, the CS101 hotshots fared no better, on average, than the kids who came in with no experience at all. In fact, a few of the loudest initial braggarts were the most spectacular flameouts, and about an equal number of the no-prior-experience kids ended up the honors graduates. Universities could do a lot to combat this problem -- it might be a good idea to let the high-school coding jocks place out of the first CS classes. Alternatively, making first-year classes more about math and less about code would probably put 99% of all incoming students on an even playing field.
- T-R 16y ago
  I liked what my university's Chinese classes did - they had a special "advanced 101" class. This way, hot shots who still really needed to go through the 101 coursework weren't intimidating those just starting; those who really knew what they were doing could just test into a higher level. Korean classes, which didn't have the "advanced 101", ended up catering to the hottest of the hot shots, and saw a good number of both the hot shots and the non-native speakers dropping out before the 200 level.
  - antihero 16y ago
    I do think that the split would be an interesting idea. At my university, our first year programming class was divided between people who found it too hard, and people who found it way too easy.
    - T-R 16y ago
      We had that, too, but it wasn't really clear cut. We also had a bunch in the middle, who, while they really did need to go through most of the 101 material, they also did their share of intimidating the fresh starters - probably more so than those who really knew the material, who mostly just skipped class. Since my university had large Korean and Chinese populations, it kind of struck me as parallel to the problems the Asian Studies department had weeding out native speakers looking for an easy A - it was hard to tell them from the kids who could speak but not write. Putting them in a separate section kept them from driving the class, and things went much smoother.
- bm98 16y ago
  One of the beauties of programs that teach Scheme and ML (or OCaml or F#) in introductory CS is that they level the playing field. The typical high school computer hot shot has never seen anything like functional programming before, and is no better off than anyone else in the class. Follow that with the theoretical foundations of CS and you have plenty of hot shots at the bottom of the class. A professor of mine once said, "Some kids just can't hack the math."
joe_the_user 16y ago
Can I respectfully disagree? I think that it is important to make software engineering a codified, professional field. It is not an advantage to have programming be a field where the bragging rights go to those who put together a D&D weather generator in a true Mini-computer in Middle School. Rather, it is much better to have software engineering be something you can enter in college if you a good mastery of abstract thinking. I would further mention that it helps programming as a professional if a good programmer is a generalist who knows how to get any required details. The process of becoming a generalist is entirely possible if you enter the software engineering field in college. Essentially, the point is for a person learn good process and let the rest take of itself. Oppositely, if programmers are merely hackers, geeks or idiot-savants, who accumulate massive amounts of details concerning systems, languages and libraries in a near-autistic fashion, then not only will programming remain a ghetto but it will be a poorly paid, miserably ghetto.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- Locke1689 16y ago
  It is not an advantage to have programming be a field where the bragging rights go to those who put together a D&D weather generator in a true Mini-computer in Middle School. Careful, this could be similar to saying that it's not advantageous to have mathematics be a field where people who prove non-trivial theorems in high school do better in university courses. Some people have prior background or a special talent and that's not a bad thing. It's just important that this is also not required to succeed in the given field.
- juhygtfghjk 16y ago
  > software engineering a codified, professional field. So after getting your degree you can only be a CEng by working for an existing CEng in a company that certifies CEngs. Sounds like a perfect way of weeding out all those women who do pick a CS degree. Unless all traditional big-iron firms are looking to hire more women, and all 60-something male senior engineers are really clamoring for more women to certify ?
biot 16y ago
I don't believe the age argument. At what age was Grace Hopper first introduced to programming? Based on the wikipedia article, Grace Hopper appears to have started programming 14 years after getting her PhD and didn't seem to have been hampered by not having started programming before high school. [Insert COBOL joke here.] What about others who have a few more gray hairs than I? When did Seymour Cray, Vint Cerf, Peter Norvig, Tim Berners-Lee, and other early pioneers start programming? I think it's pretty safe to say they didn't have mainframes in their parent's basement growing up that they were programming on since before high school. They had a natural interest and the aptitude to do well in it.
- gwern 16y ago
  Maybe you ought to look up your examples. > Cray was born in 1925 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin to Seymour R. and Lillian Cray. His father was a civil engineer who fostered Cray's interest in science and engineering. As early as the age of ten he was able to build a device out of Erector Set components that converted punched paper tape into Morse code signals. The basement of the family home was given over to the young Cray as a "lab". That's not a mainframe, no. But he was still learning a lot about programming.
- gvb 16y ago
  Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper started programming when Howard H. Aiken[1] designed and IBM built a computer[2] for her to program. Seymour Cray was also born before the first usable computers were created. I don't have concrete date, but I strongly suspect the other early pioneers also started programming when they first got access to a computer. I'm a few years younger than the youngest of the quoted pioneers (Tim Berners-Lee, born 1955). My first access to a computer was in my junior year in high school: a DecWriter[3] connected via a 300 baud dial-up modem to a timeshare system, programmed in Basic. (Obsessively. Still. :-O) The limiting factor for pioneers was access to computer. For kids today, access isn't a problem. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_H._Aiken http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_H._Aiken [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I [3] http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/la36.html http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/la36.html
erikpukinskis 16y ago
The key to getting more females in CS All sentences that start with these words are misguided. It is a complex issue with contributing factors at EVERY stage of a programmer's development. Yes, let's help middle school girls get a chance to program. But let's also change CS curricula to draw on more skills besides programming. And let's make intro programming classes more welcoming to nonprogrammers. And let's find new venues for promoting startup job openings. And let's give grants for women making open source contributions, and, and, and.... The same is true of promoting literacy and bike friendly cities and fighting racism and most every other kind of activism. This is not a world of root causes.
antihero 16y ago
Thing is, this is a perplexing problem - my SO teaches at a school that has a "computer club" where they do such things, and it has a lot of female members, but there's a distinctly bizarre issue of girls interested in computers at Secondary/6th form level not then going on to do degrees in the subject. I think a more in depth study interviewing the "potentials" needs to be done in order to understand whether there's a problem with endemic sexism or whether it's something else.
gaius 16y ago
But that is a ridiculous thing to say. Should people be banned from programming until college so everyone can be "equal"? It's like whining that you can't compete with an athlete who has been training since they were a kid.
younata 16y ago
I don't go to a school known for their CS program (we have a good one, just not a renowned one). Of roughly 30 or so freshman in the CS program, I know of about 20 or so who said they did not know how to program before they went to college. So, your premise of "most of the class has been programming for years" is false in at least my case.
shortlived 16y ago
I started programming in college and turned out fine.

ernestipark 16y ago

Really well written article. I'm not a female, but I resonate with a lot of her points, especially: They can say something so simple as "Oh don't you know that command?" but in an inadvertently condescending voice that makes you feel like you're the only person who doesn't know it. As someone just testing out the CS waters, that type of experience in every class can be very daunting. In general, computer science tends to be a major where people go into college with a lot of prior-knowledge and I have seen this discourage many people from majoring in it.

yummyfajitas 16y ago
It's hardly the only such major. Art and music schools require you to have a lot of prior knowledge - your portfolio is part of your application.
- ernestipark 16y ago
  True, but you're not required or even expected to have prior knowledge of computer science before undergrad.
- marquis 16y ago
  Many schools allow you to apply based on other factors. New enrollments at music schools (not the top ones, but still some very good ones) allow you to take a starter course the summer before school starts so you can learn to read music. Music has changed so much in the 20th century that a prerequisite in music theory isn't going to hinder you if you show the ability to apply your analytical skills. Having been through music classes myself I noted I was initially wary of those who hadn't been trained musicians since the age of 7, but quickly realised that it really didn't matter and some of my peers really excelled at music having picked it up even as an adult. Doesn't apply to performance/dance schools though, obviously - you can't get a degree in piano performance if you're just starting at 18, unless you're a rare genius.
mbubb 16y ago
I agree on the "really well written part" - she is a good writer.

luu 16y ago

[The professor] once told me that even though the females are fairly quiet, and the boys in the class showed off a lot, when it came down to projects and exams, the female average was often higher At his confirmation hearing, when Greenspan was asked why Townsend-Greenspan employed so many women (> 50%, compared to about 5% in finance at the time), he replied that since he valued women as much as men, but other firms didn't, he could get better work for the same money by hiring women. Are there any software companies doing the same thing today, and if not, why not?

natrius 16y ago
I don't think the opportunity to do that even exists. I haven't heard female engineers complaining that they can't get jobs. The problem is there there are so few looking for the jobs in the first place.
necubi 16y ago
I don't think the main problem is companies not valuing women, because it starts much earlier. University CS departments are tilted very heavily towards men (~10:1 at my school) so there are far, far fewer women graduating with CS degrees and entering the marketplace. If many companies have a similar ratio, it may reflect the availability of female programmers rather than any bias on their part.
Stormbringer 16y ago
Interestingly Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett's mentor had a similar problem, he was Jewish and none of the firms on Wall Street would hire a Jew, so he had to start his own firm.
- mynameishere 16y ago
  Right. No Jews allowed in finance. http://www.buffettsecrets.com/benjamin-graham-biography.htm http://www.buffettsecrets.com/benjamin-graham-biography.htm Somehow I suspect if you said something like, "Enrico Caruso was Italian, and so couldn't find a job since none of the opera houses would hire an Italian..." ...the bullshit detectors would have tripped more readily.

brainfsck 16y ago

"It's no secret that females in Computer Science, both in academia and industry, are scarce... currently sitting at about 12% to 20%." I wonder how much of the gender discrepancy in CS can be objectively attributed to personality differences. Populations who participate in certain logical activities have rare personality traits (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=946249 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=946249, http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=112400 http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=112...) which are far more common in men than women. If this is the case, is it possible that direct attempts to "increase the number of women in CS" are misguided?

sp332 16y ago
This fits a hypothesis I've been formulating for a while: CS doesn't need to attract more women, it needs to attract more people. It's not a mystery that CS isn't appealing to women. Honestly, the atmosphere and culture of most CS departments just aren't appealing at all. Can anyone answer, for their alma mater: unless you're already coding "10 hours straight, forgetting to eat and losing track of time into the wee hours of the night", what is the incentive to study CS? edited for clarity
- Stormbringer 16y ago
  Even if we accept all of your assumptions, there is an alternative conclusion: that the problem is the CS culture, and the culture needs to change.
  - sp332 16y ago
    Sorry, it's a bit late here so I might not be thinking real clearly but, isn't that what I said?
    - peteforde 16y ago
      No! Your comment only implies that bringing more people will solve the problem. Sadly, that will just reinforce the current social proofs that loud assholes dominate CS.

toephu 16y ago

i care not.

patrickgzill 16y ago

Any sufficiently driven, or competitive woman, will do far better financially and "psychically" to go into management or marketing sides of a tech-related field. CS / software engineering is an underpaid ghetto, and as outsourcing continues, will remain so. Perhaps I should have pointed out Philip Greenspun's take: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/acm-women-in-computing http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/acm-women-in-computing

Stormbringer 16y ago
You could say the same thing about blokes too. When people ask me for career advice, I tell them to do car sales for a couple of years (until they're good at it) and then go work for a large corporate. Their 10% commission on a 100 million dollar sale will blow away anything the average programmer will get in their entire lifetime. If they insist on IT, I point at helpdesk. The turn-over is so big that within 8 months you can be team leader (by virtue of seniority) and you're on a fast track to management. === On the other hand, if we deny the premise that CS / Software Engineering is a ghetto for men too, then what is wrong with the picture? Do men get opportunities that women don't get? E.g. ground floor of a start-up? I think the premise needs to be not that "something is wrong with women", but rather "something is wrong with the system if it treats men and women differently".
- Locke1689 16y ago
  Sorry but do you have any statistics on those sorts of things? Seems like there are more open CS positions so the average expected income would be higher..
  - Stormbringer 16y ago
    I'm not sure which of my outrageous claims you are disputing. :D Everything you do in life involves sales skills. Getting better sales skills is going to make you more money. Even if you worked in some high-fallutin' ivory tower institution you still need to go cap in hand begging for funding. Every job interview is a sales situation, every annual review etc. Are you disputing the claim about help desk having a high turn-over? Have you even worked in IT? Seriously. As for programmers making such big salaries, outside of anomalies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook, good luck with that one. Try comparing against electricians, plumbers and carpenters. Or even the bloke who owns his own lawn mowing business. Yes, I know apprentice jobs are shitty and they make peanuts, but after their apprenticeship is over, they can make big bucks. For big $ as a wage slave, try medical. Oh, you're such a delicate precious genius as a programmer, but couldn't cut it (sic) as a Doctor, Dentist or GP? Guess maybe you're not as special or smart as you think you are. A lot of programmers who think they are God's gift to the information age need to pull their head out and go outside. Even a garbo can make good $ (and it's great for your immune system!)

nostrademons 16y ago

"One of the challenges for me while I was at Google was to speak up when I didn't understand something" That is a problem for perhaps 90%+ of Googlers, regardless of their gender.

whakojacko 16y ago
I'd venture this is a problem for most engineers, regardless of their employer.
solipsist 16y ago
This makes me never want to consider applying there. Can someone elaborate on why Google has this intimidating atmosphere?
- antihero 16y ago
  I'd hazard a guess at the fact that because Google is so prestigious, and because engineers there are reputed to be intellectually brilliant, people don't want to seem "dumb" in such an environment. Which is mad, because knowledge != intelligence.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  I don't really want to give the impression that it's this totally intimidating atmosphere all the time, because it does fade with time, and most engineers learn to ask questions abundantly, and most engineers are also really great at answering questions. One of the most commonly cited perks of being at Google is the ability to ask anything of anyone. Have a question about HTML 5? Shoot hixie an e-mail. Digging into the internals of Python? Guido works there, as do a number of other core Pythonistas. Building a Go app? Rob Pike can answer. That said, it is intimidating starting as a Noogler, largely because of the huge volume of proprietary material you need to learn. There's one true way to store structured data, and while it's open-sourced (Protobufs), you've probably never used it. There's a unified JavaScript library (Closure), but it wasn't open-sourced until recently. There're logging, and log-processing, and monitoring, and RPC, and cluster management systems to learn. There're a bunch of storage options, some of which you may've read about in public but never used (BigTable), some of which will be completely new to you. The scale of problems that Google tackles is also bigger than most people are accustomed to. In a lot of the industry, a few-dozen node cluster is fairly large. At Google, thousands of machines are routine. Big-O notation can be ignored at a lot of shops, but at Google-scale, anything that runs in greater than O(N log N) will usually take centuries. Most frontend web devs never worry about latency; at Google, we care very much. A/B testing has recently made a lot of headlines and had some neat libraries developed for it, but its centrally ingrained in Google's feature development processes. When you first start out - particularly if you're used to always having the answers, as many Google engineers were - that can be intimidating. There's suddenly so much you don't know, and yet you know (through Google's public reputation) that software obviously gets written there. Once in a while, it's even good software. For your first few weeks, you probably won't even know what questions to ask, because there's such a volume of knowledge out there. Oftentimes, somebody's already solved your problem, but you don't know about it because it might never occur to you that someone's already solved it. There're also things that Google pays attention to that many other shops don't - in many other employers, you'll never have to deal with internationalization, or handling Chinese characters, or right-to-left languages, or XSS, or managing HTTP resources when you have a large fleet of potentially-out-of-sync webservers. When I started doing code reviews for the websearch webserver, the tech lead said, "We don't expect you to know everything, but we expect that by now you've learned enough to know when you need to ask someone."

Stormbringer 16y ago

I knew several blokes who had the same problem, they were getting straight A's but they didn't believe they were 'worthy' to work in the industry if there was even one person in the class that was better or smarter than them. Funnily none of the guys getting B's or C's had that psychological problem.

peteforde 16y ago

I've found that in the last few years as the "we must encourage more women into tech" train has gained speed, people have lost sight of the importance of removing barriers in favour of recruiting girls simply because they are girls. In addition to being totally messed up politically, it's really harmful to your self-esteem if you think that you are being given special treatment to satisfy someone else's political correctness quota. Not to mention that eager men (with the best of intentions, no doubt) over-compensating can lead to "othering", that feeling that everyone is going overboard making you so welcomed that you kind of want to barf. My current speculation is that for most girls, it's actually their parents that instill a nagging sense of doubt regarding what they are "supposed" to consider good career options. Therefore, I think the key is to reach young minds. Girl coders: go speak at public schools or high schools today!

marquis 16y ago
On your comment about parents guiding their girls into certain careers, I don't see that as being so prevalent today. Part of the issue is that coding isn't viewed as a social experience, so it isolates - especially - girls, as teenagers feel peer pressure to be doing social activities. I strongly remember being 15 and wanting to be in the computer lab, but it was deemed unseemly by my peers and at that age it's more important to keep your relationships intact. So I started coding in my early twenties when my peers were busy studying or working so the social aspect was less of an issue.
- mattdeboard 16y ago
  Perhaps in some subcultures, but I know in at least a one immigrant community girls seem to be actively dissuaded from pursuing any engineering degrees whatsoever and steered instead toward the medical field in some capacity, or business degrees. When my significant other told her family she was changing majors to an engineering field away from a business field, they were pretty upset. In addition I noticed in the Bay Area when I lived there for a few years many of the immigrant Asians really didn't give a damn one way or the other what their daughters did. This is actually worse, in my opinion. Ah well, here is to the hope more of the sublimely proficient women I know seek engineering careers instead of pigeonholing themselves into "touchy feely" crap fields like marketing & PR.

dennisgorelik 16y ago

-- They can say something so simple as "Oh don't you know that command?" but in an inadvertently condescending voice -- "Condescending voice" is a matter of perception. It's quite possible that these engineers were totally ok that she did not know some stuff. Still it's possible that females are more sensitive to [imaginary] condescending tone, so they shy away from the field.

marquis 16y ago
>females are more sensitive to [imaginary] condescending tone I have male friends who are also very sensitive to criticism, and female colleagues who can be very insensitive. Please be careful of applying a general personality issue to a gender - I understand how this could make sense at first glance but it's too vague and comes across as reductionist.
- dennisgorelik 16y ago
  1) From my observation females on average are more sensitive to [perceived] criticism than males. "Sensitive" in the sense that females usually avoid such experience. Males might be sensitive too, but they might try harder to overcome it. 2) "Try harder" attitude is not necessarily better than "Avoid potential confrontation" attitude. But the difference might explain why there are so few females in software development. 3) There are other reasons behind gender ratio in software field. For example, software development requires more abstract thinking which on average is easier for males. Females focus more on more practical things and care a little bit less about abstract stuff. 4) All of the reasoning above is about comparing averages. Individual female might outperform average male in abstract thinking and "try it harder" attitude.
  - keeronmarc 16y ago
    Female entrepreneur and coder situation is interesting. I will say that you do bring up the common points cited for females not choosing tech areas. One point to also consider, which I consider fundamental to any entrepreneur, be it tech or otherwise is the concept of "challenge". I think regardless of sex, if you really are challenged in an area, and feel like you can beat someone, or a company at their game, you will succeed. More specifically, guys are challenged at a younger age, be it in athletics, video games, neighborhood ball, or your friends telling you, you're a wimp if you don't do this. As simple as this sounds, guys thrive on challenges, we play video games for the challenge, and girls alot of times don't get that same oppportunity to be encouraged or challenged at a young age. Because this shapes the competitive drive and spirit of entrepreneurship. Sp, what I would say to the women entrepreneur question. Challenge, challenge, challenge. Doesn't matter when you start, embrace a good challenge.

fleitz 16y ago

Why does it matter how many women are in tech? If we're all equal then it doesn't. Not all the people I socialize with are into computers. Most aren't. You can't make all your friends in your own industry. I don't care if a person is a man or a woman, unless there are seriously extenuating circumstance I won't work or socialize with them if their assholes. The problem is that in geek circles there is a heavy social penalty of advocating that someone be ostracized for behaving like an asshole, everyone has to be included no matter how much no one else wants to hang out with them. There are a lot of anti-social retards in tech regardless of gender. I'm quite happy with it as there are lots of people willing to hire devs who are willing to not be condescending and have some semblance of adherence to social norms. As the OP pointed out quite accurately in their post 'I realized he was just an asshole who probably wouldn't get too far in life anyways.' Many people are hardwired to respect the opinion of anyone who forcefully and confidently expresses it. It's a two way street though, want people to think you know software engineering or any other topic? Just say something reasonably intelligent in a forceful and confident way, also if someone else has said it that they respect mention that person as having saying it. Most of the debates in software engineering are subjective in nature as much as everyone involved in the decision likes to claim otherwise. If you know your rhetoric you'll have no problem intellectually disarming most people in CS. CS geeks think they only pay attention to logos but realistically there are a lot of CS decisions made based on ethos and pathos. I'll probably be down modded for saying this but the appeal of open source is based largely in ethos and pathos, and not logos. I'd settle for more people in tech who can write working code with out being an asshole regardless of gender.

tjogin 16y ago
We are equal, but we are also different. These things are often conflated, but they are not the same.
- bethling 16y ago
  Exactly. And teams do better when there are different perspectives, different ways of thought. Women have a different set of life experiences, and if we're dissuaded from technology, then the rest of the technology world misses out of those different perspectives. There's nothing better or superior about them, they're just different. It's not that women should be encouraged because we're women. It's that 1/2 the population often feels (at least to some extent) like outsiders to the field. If there are other groups that feel the same way, then that needs to be dealt with as well. It's just that lack of women tends to be noticeable - in 15 years of software development I've only had 3 other women developers on my team.

scottjad 16y ago

I think that the % of women graduating from CS programs is a horrible indicator of the % of women programming in industry. The author hints at this in the last paragraph. At Clojure Conj I think there were 0 women (other than guardians of minors) out of 200 people. On programming mailing lists I almost never see female names. I think CS graduation rates might be much higher for a number of reasons. I think females have higher college graduation rates overall in the US, they may be more likely to switch fields and pursue a graduate degree, to switch out of programming after graduating, and in a field like programming where many are self-taught they may be less likely to learn programming out of the classroom.

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leon_ 16y ago

> As I grow as a developer, I realize that hey, I am really good at what I do and I've gotten to where I am because of that. 3 years out of school and already a big ego :)

wccrawford 16y ago
Or a healthy one. It's not hubris to recognize your own strengths and accomplishments.
- kolektiv 16y ago
  It's hubris to recognize it outside of your own head! Although that's rather a culturally biased observation I admit.
kolektiv 16y ago
I had to laugh, the same thing struck me as I read it. I'm sure she is very good, but in my own experience impostor syndrome merely increases with time. I came out of university thinking I was good. Now, I feel worse every year. In objective terms I'm clearly better, and make a huge effort on continual learning and improvement. But now I know enough to know how much I don't know.

HilbertSpace 16y ago

For why so few girls major in computer science in college, below is my answer. Sorry to say this, but I have to conclude that my points below are the main ones to explain the data and so far have received too little attention on this thread. From a standard point about good parenting, nearly all the girls with good parenting had mommies who were happy being mommies. For more, I draw from E. Fromm, 'The Art of Loving'. and Deborah Tannen, 'You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation'. So, I continue: Way before age 5, the little girls realize that they are small versions of Mommy and NOT Daddy. They know in absolute terms that they are a GIRL and NOT a BOY. Since their mommy was happy being a mommy, the little girls want to be like Mommy and on the 'mommy track'. By about age 18 months, little girls are already masters at eliciting positive emotions from adults, MUCH better than boys. The girls are also MUCH better at reading emotions than boys. Facial expressions and eye contact are part of how the girls read and elicit emotions; other ways are to 'act' (they are MUCH better at acting than the boys) cute, meek, and sweet and to be pretty. Since being pretty lets them do better eliciting positive emotions, they love pretty dresses with ruffles and ribbons. So, they are in a 'virtuous circle': They act sweet, elicit positive emotions in an adult, e.g., father, grandfather, uncle, get a gift of a pretty dress, wear the dress, elicit even more positive emotions, get even more pretty dresses, white bedroom furniture, patent leather shoes, cute stuffed animals, etc. Having to act like a boy or be treated like a boy, instead of like a girl, would be terrifying to them. So, in their first years, such little girls, to be on the 'mommy track' want to play with dolls and not Erector sets, want to work at being pretty and not how to hot rod a car, want to learn how to bake a cake and not how to plug together a SATA RAID array. Give such a girl a toy truck and she will know instantly that the toy is 'for boys' and will avoid it as a big threat. Generally, from a little after birth and for nearly all their lives, human females are MUCH more emotional than human males. So, they pay a LOT of attention to emotions, both theirs and others'. One of a human female's strongest emotions is to get security from membership in, and praise, acceptance, and approval from, groups, especially groups of females about their own age. That is, they are 'herd animals'. Gossip? It's how they make connections with others in the herd. Why do they like cell phones so much? For more gossip. Why pay so much attention to fashion? To 'fit in' with the herd. In such a herd, in most respects the females try hard to be like the 'average' of the herd and not to stand out or look different. [An exception is when a female wants to lead her herd, e.g., go to Clicker, follow the biographies, get the one for the Astors, and look at Ms. Astor and her herd of 400.] Well, as long as human females with good parenting are on the 'mommy track', and the human race will be nearly dead otherwise, the 'average' of the herd will emphasize the 'mommy track', dolls, looking pretty, cakes, and clothes and not Erector sets, hot rodding cars, or building RAID arrays. When it comes to a college major, any human female 18 months or older will recognize in a milli, micro, nano second that her herd believes that mathematics, physical science, engineering, and computer science are subjects for boys and NOT girls. Instead the girl subjects are English literature, French, music, acting, 'communications', sociology, psychology, nursing, maybe accounting, and K-12 education. By college the girls have been working 24 x 7 for about 16 years to fit in with the herd of girls, and their chances of leaving the herd in college to major in computer science are slim to none. Don't expect this situation to change easily or soon: Mother Nature was there LONG before computer science, and, as we know, "It's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature.". Or, to get girls to major in computer science, "You are dealing with forces you cannot possibly understand.". Having women pursuing computer careers give girls in middle school lectures on computer careers will stick like water on a duck's back -- not a chance. Nearly all the girls will just conclude that at most such careers are for girls who are not doing well fitting into the herd of girls, are not very good socially, don't get invited to the more desirable parties, don't get the good dates, are not very pretty, and are not in line to be good as wives and mommies. By middle school, the girls have already received oceans of influences about 'female roles', and changing the directions these girls have selected and pursued so strongly for so long is hopeless. Besides, 'middle school' is an especially hopeless time: The girls have just recently entered puberty, just got reminded in overwhelmingly strong and unambiguous terms that they are now young women, have received a lot of plain talk from their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and older sisters about the birds and the bees, in their gossip with their herd members have been discussing the birds and bees with great intensity, already have a good woman's figure or nearly so, really, are well on their way to, in another year or so, being the most attractive physically they will ever be and know it, notice men of their age up to age 80 or so looking at them as women, and are in no mood to consider being 'more like boys'. Middle school is about the worst possible time to try to get the girls to fight Mother Nature. Suggestions of such lectures are 'clueless' in grand terms. So, a typical scenario is a boy in middle school who is really excited because he just understood how an automobile differential (TCP part of TCP/IP, binary search, virtual memory, etc.) works and with great excitement tries to explain it to a girl his age at, say, lunch, and we have a strict dichotomy: The boy is totally clueless that the girl couldn't be less interested. The girl sees right away that she couldn't be less interested, not to offend the boy unduly pretends to be a little interested, and sees in clear terms that the boy is totally clueless at perceiving her lack of interest. She concludes that he is so clueless he is really easy to manipulate (a fact she suspects could be useful and saves for later). The boy doesn't understand the girl, and the girl regards the boy, and soon, all boys less then 2-6 years older than she, as at least 'socially' immature and, really, just immature. She wants nothing to do with such 'children' (she already understands that a woman needs a strong man) and will concentrate on boys 2-6, maybe 8 or 10, years older than she is. She has a point: She was likely more mature socially at age six than he will be at age 16. Look, it's WAY too easy to fail to understand: So, we can just assume a simplistic 'rational' model. In this model, sure, we can teach 2 + 3 = 5 and (2 / 3) / ( 5 / 4 ) = 8 / 15, and both the boys and the girls can learn, although typically the girls will do better on tests in such things than the boys. So, we entertain that the boys and girls can exercise all their 'rational' abilities and, thus, can learn and do well with anything their rational abilities permit. Nonsense. Naive, clueless nonsense. Instead, Mother Nature says that in addition to rational abilities are emotions and commonly has the emotions overwhelm the rational abilities. Net, such a simplistic rational model is clueless, even dangerous, nonsense. Give a girl of 4 a toy truck and take away her dolls in pretty dresses, and she will cry, and the crying will be heartrending to any adults around who will quickly swap back the truck and the dolls. It's no different at age 13 in middle school or 18 in college. Actually, there can be a reason for a girl in college to take some courses in computer science: Look for a husband! It may be that in college girls of Asian descent are more willing to pursue math, physical science, etc. than are girls of Western European descent.

aming 16y ago

Interesting article. Did not expect a negative experience for the author in a post-secondary institution. On her point about being at a disadvantage compared to the other students since she had low experience with computer science (having only taken classes in high school). In my point of view, I think she had sufficient exposure to compsci. I didn't get into computer science, or even know of its existence, until my 2nd year in university. I definitely do think personality has an effect on the experience. The author of the article, I think, took comments and retorts too seriously or negatively. In addition, I think she uses her gender as a weakness but rather it has no effect on her ability at all. Though at least she recognized the asshole soon after his outburst. In my experience, I don't see a decline of females in computer science, rather it is a increase. I have passed by the portraits of graduated students in my hallways and definitely there are way more females than in the previous years. Matter of fact, it was almost a 1:5 ratio of females:males (may not be super accurate).

binbasti 16y ago

Last year I attended a panel about women in tech on the fairly new CCC congress "SIGINT" in Cologne, which focusses more on society and politics. The panel itself was rather boring and not really insightful, but during the Q&A a young woman from Eastern Europe pointed out something interesting: she stated that in her country there's a 1:1 male/female ratio in all science fields at the universities, including computer science. I haven't checked the facts, but even if that is not entirely true, the difference to Western countries is astounding. She went on to say that the problem is entirely with culture, and all aspects of it, and that the numbers were just reflecting that. The women on the panel, who were all Westerners, couldn't even comment on that. They were just plain speechless, and rightly so, because most of their arguments involving bullying boys, mother nature, and other standard points were pretty much refuted by the simple fact that there already exist places in the world where this topic is not even an issue. And it's not the ones you would usually relate to human progress.

binbasti 16y ago
I found some numbers, albeit a little old: Exemplar: Bulgaria The participation rate for women in these fields is slightly higher than for men: 7.8 percent of the female college-age cohort obtained an NS&E degree in Bulgaria in 1992; 7.2 percent of males in this age group obtained such a degree in that same year. In 1992, women obtained 57 percent of all university degrees. In addition, they obtained half of the engineering degrees, 70 percent of the natural science degrees, and 73 percent of the mathematics and computer science degrees. These percentages have not changed since 1975 (Stretenova, 1994). http://anitaborg.org/files/womenhightechworld.pdf http://anitaborg.org/files/womenhightechworld.pdf
- deleted 16y ago
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capstone 16y ago
Growing up in Russia, I remember the stereotype that girls are better suited for sciences because they are more studious (the exact Russian word is hard to translate but basically means that one is physically able as well as personally inclined to sit down and study for a long period of time). Boys on the other hand were considered too boisterous to pay attention for very long. Of course, this stereotype was perceived as The Truth. Mother Nature, backed up by statistically demonstrable demographic evidence. Can't argue with that, right? And so it goes...

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16s 16y ago

I used to work with graduate EE students in a research lab. We had male and female students. They joked around a lot. Nothing ever too serious. If you pulled your weight, you had everyone's respect. One day, a top male student came into the lab. A female student was writing some code. Guy: "What are you working on." Girl: "Code for the new project." Guy: "What are you writing it in." Girl: "Perl." Guy: "Perl!? (long pause) now that's a man's language." Girl: "Rolls her eyes... shut-up dumb ass." That's an example of the banter. The girls wrote just as much code and did all the things the guys did. The only major difference was numbers. There were 6 guys for every 1 girl. Edit: spelling

skeltoac 16y ago

The word "sexism" is too often used without any discussion of its definition. Here are a few definitions for "sexism" from Google: I. discriminatory or abusive behavior towards members of the opposite sex II. prejudice or discrimination based on sex; especially: discrimination against women III. attitudes or behavior based on traditional stereotypes of sexual roles IV. Attitudes, conditions, or behaviors that promote stereotyping of social roles based on gender. The sexist remark in II is quite common. In some dictionaries the word "sexism" is itself defined in sexist terms: "sexist - a man with a chauvinistic belief in the inferiority of women". It may be warranted by the attitude's prevalence; it is sexist nonetheless because it promotes stereotyping. Definition IV is probably the most enlightening of the bunch. One valid yet unpopular answer to the question "why so few female software engineers" is that most parents provide a sexist (IV) upbringing. Given the standard attitudes (gender identification), conditions (girl's toy collection), and behaviors (mom's occupation), the odds are stacked against a female becoming a software engineer even before she enters the first grade. These things change but it takes generations. Inspecting my own behavior as a male software engineer, I would find myself guilty of several of the attitudes and behaviors mentioned in the article. My first hope is that I do not discriminate by gender (I'm a jerk to men and women equally) and my second hope is that I can be less of a jerk to everyone.

hank53 16y ago

so many dudes just commented because they think they can get laid by commenting.lol disgusting. as a woman im disgusted.

Tycho 16y ago

A lot of tech people do seem intent on 'sandbagging' engineers of feebler talent/knowledge. Some of the conversations remind me of this: http://www.kontraband.com/videos/5173/Family-Guy-Skywalker-Sandbagging/ http://www.kontraband.com/videos/5173/Family-Guy-Skywalker-S... The thing is the uber-geeks do this to each other too, the difference is to them it's water off a duck's back.