9 ms·

This was an interesting read. I found it well written and kind of sad, if optimistic and hopeful. Personally, I would love to see a lot more female developers.

This was an interesting read. I found it well written and kind of sad, if optimistic and hopeful. Personally, I would love to see a lot more female developers. I am betting there is no significant difference in inherent potential talent between the two genders, so why are almost all coders I've worked with male?

tialaramex 6y ago
One thing that bugs me: Women I know who wrote software kept finding new roles where they'd be in management instead and then they moan that they liked writing code and miss it. Maybe that tells us that sexism in software development is prevalent and they wanted out, which is no fault of theirs, and maybe they just wanted more money - but it definitely sucks overall. I find blind technical interviewing easy because I don't usually remember new people after a few moments. My reports say "The applicant" not out of a deliberate effort to screen the potential hire's name, race, gender - anything like that but because if they left an hour ago I already couldn't tell you anything whatsoever about them besides that they've got this very idiosyncratic approach to loop structures or they seemed not to understand what thread safety means or whatever. The only interviewee I remember at all now was a Russian woman for whom it was her first interview in the country, and her first interview in English, and my core goal for the entire time was to keep her calm enough that I could discern whether she knew how to do the job. It isn't humanly possible to stay terrified for say months, eventually she will relax if we hire her (and she did, she was fine within a week) - but she might manage to stay terrified for long enough that I can't tell if she actually understands what a compound primary key is and how these iterators I'm talking about work and if I'm not sure then hiring her would be a big risk.
- eyerony 6y ago
  > Women I know who wrote software kept finding new roles where they'd be in management instead and then they moan that they liked writing code and miss it. Maybe that tells us that sexism in software development is prevalent and they wanted out, which is no fault of theirs, and maybe they just wanted more money - but it definitely sucks overall. I secretly (well not in this moment but ordinarily secret) consider women in software development smarter than men, on average, due precisely to this observed tendency to spot where the social and monetary rewards are (management, other social roles "above" developers) almost immediately and start aiming for that ASAP. [EDIT] this is in general bigcos and "startupy" places, anyway—I dunno if that trend holds in e.g. FAANG or finance or the other places where devs actually do make really, really good money rather than just good-for-not-a-manager like everywhere else.
  - bt4u2 6y ago
    Then you secretly are stupid and sexist. The average IQ is one of the few places where men and women are actually equal, the data is very clear on this
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    Possible for a bunch of reasons that women in the field tend to be more assertive and have better communications skills. Those are primary management skills.
    - eyerony 6y ago
      Yeah, I dunno why it is, but that could well be. I suspect it has something to do with whatever's resulting in women attending and completing college at a higher rate than men, but that's just a hunch. [EDIT] jesus it's so hard to write anything about this without walking on eggshells—to be clear I'm not complaining about any of this, including the college thing.
      - Gibbon1 6y ago
        I agree on the eggshell thing. I rewrote what I said three times to try and block off any interpretation other than the one I meant. I have some friends that are female engineers and you a get drink in them and listen to all the bullshit they've had to deal with, you have to imagine how thick their skin is.
    - dpoochieni 6y ago
      Yeah agreed, IME women, in average, have better communication and social skills than men, in average, and as you say those are what middle management is mostly made of.
  - freshhawk 6y ago
    Seems more likely that you have two groups here: one that needed to be very politically aware to get there, and one that didn't. So yeah, the one that had to fight political fights to even end up in the industry are going to be better, on average, than the ones who got welcomed in. If there was a concerted effort to keep men out of software you would notice that the men still in software were very aware of the political/power dynamics around them real quick. Because the rest would be somewhere else.
- ddevault 6y ago
  >Women I know who wrote software kept finding new roles where they'd be in management instead and then they moan that they liked writing code and miss it. I hear this a lot from men, too. We have a general problem in the industry of being bad at making senior engineering a rewarding career track.
  - mrkurt 6y ago
    Right. We glamorize "management" in every way, even going so far as to label devs "individual contributors". As if they only contribute 1x while managers contribute multiples. I have this gut wrenching feeling that tech companies just can't be fixed. There's way too much that has to change and the powerful people don't have much incentive to do the work.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      I mean, this is an issue in every company on the planet, not sure why you single out tech. If anything large tech companies have the best IC paths out there.
      - kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
        This is true. Many other industries are absolute cesspools of corruption, nepotism, outright harassment and just all in all hellholes to work in, but the media loves to shit almost exclusively on tech.
        nitrogen 6y ago
        Indeed, from people I know, working in a kitchen or as an auto parts delivery person is far, far worse for women than tech (not that tech should stop striving).
        rutthenut 6y ago
        >> but the media loves to shit almost exclusively on tech I don't think so. Hollywood has certainly had a lot of issues in the press... Perhaps it's that you read more tech-focused media? Or the founders/CEOs of big tech companies have massively high profiles and that can work against them when there is bad news to report about them or their companies.
- orpheansodality 6y ago
  Just based on what I've seen and the women I've talked to - a lot of women in tech are encouraged to move into management because (for a variety of societal reasons) they've just upskilled more in EQ than many of their male peers. See also: the pressure to be glue [1] 1: https://noidea.dog/glue https://noidea.dog/glue
  - cvlasdkv 6y ago
    There is also overwhelming pressure on minorities to not only succeed and be perfect but to gain positions of power to make it easier for those that follow. It's incredibly difficult to do that as an IC (for either gender).
- ifokiedoke 6y ago
  My own personal experience as a female software developer is that there is pressure from all sides to go into management, and this pressure can come from both ill and good intent. Others have mentioned that it might be because of perceived superior communication skills (good?), or perceived lack of "good-enough" technical skills (bad?)... both of these add to the problem, but I've also experienced that diversity-aware companies tend to explicitly want females in management/leadership positions because it sends a stronger message re: caring about diversity than e.g. having a female senior software engineer (As unfortunate as it is, I think most perceive "manager/team lead" as higher up the ladder than "senior software engineer"). A specific example: I worked at a startup where D/I was a huge topic and where we spoke about it during Town Hall all the time. Complaints (mostly from females from within the company, not necessarily from the Engineering department) were always about not having females as team leads, as managers, as directors, on out executive board, etc. So every quarter, each and every competent female engineer would be encouraged to try taking a team lead or management role if there was one open. Of course, a bunch of us (myself included) had 0 interest but the prodding was there. EDIT: Also, just in case someone is going to take this as proof that "women have it easy" at "woke" companies because the bar is lowered for going into management or something... I feel the need to explicitly state that the bar wasn't lowered. When I say "competent" I actually mean the dictionary definition of "having requisite or adequate ability or qualities". I worked with some badass female engineers, who were certainly skilled enough technically and socially to lead a team.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jmchuster 6y ago
    I would have thought that this was an attempt to balance out males being more likely to ask for such promotions (and thus be granted them).
  - Swizec 6y ago
    > there is pressure from all sides to go into management, and this pressure can come from both ill and good intent As a guy, I keep fighting this pressure a lot too. I think it comes from organizations who don’t have enough technical challenges and they’re afraid top talent will leave out of boredom. There’s always managerial challenges.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  As a male I've also noticed a pressure to move upwards from a 'regular' dev to e.g. tech lead or architect, but that said, I've been fortunate to have spent a lot of time working for a company where that was mainly people's own ambitions; they got rid of or raised the wage ceiling for 'regular' developers at some point.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
globular-toast 6y ago
> Personally, I would love to see a lot more female developers. See there you betray a rather sinister idea. If you had said that you want to see any unfair barriers to entry removed, or that you want to ensure equal exposure and opportunity across all people and all fields then I could support it. But instead you made your desires quite clear: you just want female developers. That means the gender, physical appearance, and perhaps even sexual preferences, of developers actually matters to you. Do you have any idea why this is?
- Scarblac 6y ago
  Aren't workplaces with a more or less even mix just more pleasant places to work? People seem to act more normal than when it's (almost) only men or (almost) only women.
- andrewg 6y ago
  Oh brother. People aren't work-producing robots, developers included. Different types of people bring different types of experiences, opinions, and viewpoints. So you'll make better products if you have a more diverse group of people making them. On a personal level, wouldn't you like to work with a more diverse group of people as well?
  - globular-toast 6y ago
    > So you'll make better products if you have a more diverse group of people making them. Do you have any evidence of this? Any world-leading product that assembled its team specifically for "diversity" rather than talent will do. > On a personal level, wouldn't you like to work with a more diverse group of people as well? It doesn't matter what I would like. I will not discriminate based on sex, colour, or religion out of principle and I will fight people who do.
  - antepodius 6y ago
    >Wouldn't you like to work with a more diverse group of people as well? I don't think anyone would really like to work with a truly diverse group of people. A truly diverse group would -all speak different languages -all be different genders (their origin culture, from which they immigrated last week, has some alternate view of gender) -all have different views on what's normal and what's tabboo -all have vastly different religious/quasi-religious views The hip, trendy open-plan office would be an open war zone between the eunuch sun-god worshipper and the revivalist post-truth anti-christianite on the first day.
theandrewbailey 6y ago
I've noticed no talent differences. I've worked with men and women who were great devs, and I've worked with men and women who weren't.
vmception 6y ago
I see a lot of different personalities and demographics including women coming out of coding academies. But everyone in the bay area flirts with "getting into tech".
golemiprague 6y ago
Partly because they are not interested and partly because there is so much propaganda about how bad it is for women in this industry that it cause the ones that are interested to be afraid of it even more. I had a chance to work in more "patriarchal" societies and in western countries and it seems like in those patriarchal places there are more women developers and much less hassle and friction.
jariel 6y ago
" I am betting there is no significant difference in inherent potential talent " I don't think it's talent, more so motivation, interest, cultural dissonance, choice - and of course all the 'bad stuff' like environments that are directly or indirectly not very conducive. Most fields have some kind of gender asymmetry. Have a look here [1]. If one were to take some time to experience a handful of those fields, I bet the answers to why 'software' has asymmetry would be similar. I guess I'm saying the issue may have specific roots in tech, but probably more or less rooted in more broad, cultural issues. [1] https://careersmart.org.uk/occupations/equality/which-jobs-do-men-and-women-do-occupational-breakdown-gender https://careersmart.org.uk/occupations/equality/which-jobs-d...
galoisgirl 6y ago
This has been discussed once or twice... What did your search engine tell you?
- nchelluri 6y ago
  I was following the time honored HN tradition of posting one line about the article and then taking up a tangent. That might be a practice to do away with. But to be literal, I asked because I wanted to talk about it and not just read about. However that may have been a mistake on my part; this article, found through my search engine, was pretty good: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/08/why-are-there-so-few-women-in-tech-the-truth-behind-the-google-memo https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/08/why-are... Points raised in the article: 1. Inherent differences between genders, if they exist, are tiny, and vary considerably from region to region 2. Starting in the 80s computers were marketed towards males 3. Computers were often in the male sibling's bedroom and not their own, according to interviews with some female CMU students in the 90s 4. Self-bias "For instance, girls tend to score worse on a test if they are told their maths skills are being assessed than when they are told they are taking part in a study investigating how people solve problems." 5. Hostile work environments: articles about why women should not be in the workplace, sexual harassment and illegal discrimination 6. May not be a worse gender gap than other industries such as finance or media 7. Cultural: women can (physically) start a family by having children; men cannot; there is an cost to staying in a work environment with regard to starting a family, and there is a "risk-taking" in the tech industry (to be honest, I've always found it very a secure line of work, but that is what the article says) 8. Tech may be well placed to bring more females into the workplace 9. Startups where someone is encouraged to spend a lot of time at the workplace are not doable for primary caregivers (which is often mothers) 10. Algorithmic biases being implicitly developed by a mostly male workforce (e.g. voice recognition trained and tested solely by men) Final line from the article, and why I posted my root post to begin with: “Computing is too important to be left to men.” So there is a whole host of reasons.
  - scott_s 6y ago
    > I was following the time honored HN tradition of posting one line about the article and then taking up a tangent. Please don't.
AdrianB1 6y ago
It is a documented (aka scientifically proven) fact that women generally prefer to work with people and men prefer to work with things. There are exceptions, of course. In my 20+ years working in IT I met a single woman that was a developer and chose to stay a developer; a few moved from development to project management or operations, but most never wrote a line of code after graduating college, jumping directly in PM, ops or any role that allowed moving away from coding. I do not have any good explanation for this, my first sentence doesn't fully explain this.

tialaramex 6y ago

One thing that bugs me: Women I know who wrote software kept finding new roles where they'd be in management instead and then they moan that they liked writing code and miss it. Maybe that tells us that sexism in software development is prevalent and they wanted out, which is no fault of theirs, and maybe they just wanted more money - but it definitely sucks overall. I find blind technical interviewing easy because I don't usually remember new people after a few moments. My reports say "The applicant" not out of a deliberate effort to screen the potential hire's name, race, gender - anything like that but because if they left an hour ago I already couldn't tell you anything whatsoever about them besides that they've got this very idiosyncratic approach to loop structures or they seemed not to understand what thread safety means or whatever. The only interviewee I remember at all now was a Russian woman for whom it was her first interview in the country, and her first interview in English, and my core goal for the entire time was to keep her calm enough that I could discern whether she knew how to do the job. It isn't humanly possible to stay terrified for say months, eventually she will relax if we hire her (and she did, she was fine within a week) - but she might manage to stay terrified for long enough that I can't tell if she actually understands what a compound primary key is and how these iterators I'm talking about work and if I'm not sure then hiring her would be a big risk.

eyerony 6y ago
> Women I know who wrote software kept finding new roles where they'd be in management instead and then they moan that they liked writing code and miss it. Maybe that tells us that sexism in software development is prevalent and they wanted out, which is no fault of theirs, and maybe they just wanted more money - but it definitely sucks overall. I secretly (well not in this moment but ordinarily secret) consider women in software development smarter than men, on average, due precisely to this observed tendency to spot where the social and monetary rewards are (management, other social roles "above" developers) almost immediately and start aiming for that ASAP. [EDIT] this is in general bigcos and "startupy" places, anyway—I dunno if that trend holds in e.g. FAANG or finance or the other places where devs actually do make really, really good money rather than just good-for-not-a-manager like everywhere else.
- bt4u2 6y ago
  Then you secretly are stupid and sexist. The average IQ is one of the few places where men and women are actually equal, the data is very clear on this
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  Possible for a bunch of reasons that women in the field tend to be more assertive and have better communications skills. Those are primary management skills.
  - eyerony 6y ago
    Yeah, I dunno why it is, but that could well be. I suspect it has something to do with whatever's resulting in women attending and completing college at a higher rate than men, but that's just a hunch. [EDIT] jesus it's so hard to write anything about this without walking on eggshells—to be clear I'm not complaining about any of this, including the college thing.
    - Gibbon1 6y ago
      I agree on the eggshell thing. I rewrote what I said three times to try and block off any interpretation other than the one I meant. I have some friends that are female engineers and you a get drink in them and listen to all the bullshit they've had to deal with, you have to imagine how thick their skin is.
  - dpoochieni 6y ago
    Yeah agreed, IME women, in average, have better communication and social skills than men, in average, and as you say those are what middle management is mostly made of.
- freshhawk 6y ago
  Seems more likely that you have two groups here: one that needed to be very politically aware to get there, and one that didn't. So yeah, the one that had to fight political fights to even end up in the industry are going to be better, on average, than the ones who got welcomed in. If there was a concerted effort to keep men out of software you would notice that the men still in software were very aware of the political/power dynamics around them real quick. Because the rest would be somewhere else.
ddevault 6y ago
>Women I know who wrote software kept finding new roles where they'd be in management instead and then they moan that they liked writing code and miss it. I hear this a lot from men, too. We have a general problem in the industry of being bad at making senior engineering a rewarding career track.
- mrkurt 6y ago
  Right. We glamorize "management" in every way, even going so far as to label devs "individual contributors". As if they only contribute 1x while managers contribute multiples. I have this gut wrenching feeling that tech companies just can't be fixed. There's way too much that has to change and the powerful people don't have much incentive to do the work.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    I mean, this is an issue in every company on the planet, not sure why you single out tech. If anything large tech companies have the best IC paths out there.
    - kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
      This is true. Many other industries are absolute cesspools of corruption, nepotism, outright harassment and just all in all hellholes to work in, but the media loves to shit almost exclusively on tech.
      - nitrogen 6y ago
        Indeed, from people I know, working in a kitchen or as an auto parts delivery person is far, far worse for women than tech (not that tech should stop striving).
      - rutthenut 6y ago
        >> but the media loves to shit almost exclusively on tech I don't think so. Hollywood has certainly had a lot of issues in the press... Perhaps it's that you read more tech-focused media? Or the founders/CEOs of big tech companies have massively high profiles and that can work against them when there is bad news to report about them or their companies.
orpheansodality 6y ago
Just based on what I've seen and the women I've talked to - a lot of women in tech are encouraged to move into management because (for a variety of societal reasons) they've just upskilled more in EQ than many of their male peers. See also: the pressure to be glue [1] 1: https://noidea.dog/glue https://noidea.dog/glue
- cvlasdkv 6y ago
  There is also overwhelming pressure on minorities to not only succeed and be perfect but to gain positions of power to make it easier for those that follow. It's incredibly difficult to do that as an IC (for either gender).
ifokiedoke 6y ago
My own personal experience as a female software developer is that there is pressure from all sides to go into management, and this pressure can come from both ill and good intent. Others have mentioned that it might be because of perceived superior communication skills (good?), or perceived lack of "good-enough" technical skills (bad?)... both of these add to the problem, but I've also experienced that diversity-aware companies tend to explicitly want females in management/leadership positions because it sends a stronger message re: caring about diversity than e.g. having a female senior software engineer (As unfortunate as it is, I think most perceive "manager/team lead" as higher up the ladder than "senior software engineer"). A specific example: I worked at a startup where D/I was a huge topic and where we spoke about it during Town Hall all the time. Complaints (mostly from females from within the company, not necessarily from the Engineering department) were always about not having females as team leads, as managers, as directors, on out executive board, etc. So every quarter, each and every competent female engineer would be encouraged to try taking a team lead or management role if there was one open. Of course, a bunch of us (myself included) had 0 interest but the prodding was there. EDIT: Also, just in case someone is going to take this as proof that "women have it easy" at "woke" companies because the bar is lowered for going into management or something... I feel the need to explicitly state that the bar wasn't lowered. When I say "competent" I actually mean the dictionary definition of "having requisite or adequate ability or qualities". I worked with some badass female engineers, who were certainly skilled enough technically and socially to lead a team.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jmchuster 6y ago
  I would have thought that this was an attempt to balance out males being more likely to ask for such promotions (and thus be granted them).
- Swizec 6y ago
  > there is pressure from all sides to go into management, and this pressure can come from both ill and good intent As a guy, I keep fighting this pressure a lot too. I think it comes from organizations who don’t have enough technical challenges and they’re afraid top talent will leave out of boredom. There’s always managerial challenges.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
As a male I've also noticed a pressure to move upwards from a 'regular' dev to e.g. tech lead or architect, but that said, I've been fortunate to have spent a lot of time working for a company where that was mainly people's own ambitions; they got rid of or raised the wage ceiling for 'regular' developers at some point.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

globular-toast 6y ago

> Personally, I would love to see a lot more female developers. See there you betray a rather sinister idea. If you had said that you want to see any unfair barriers to entry removed, or that you want to ensure equal exposure and opportunity across all people and all fields then I could support it. But instead you made your desires quite clear: you just want female developers. That means the gender, physical appearance, and perhaps even sexual preferences, of developers actually matters to you. Do you have any idea why this is?

Scarblac 6y ago
Aren't workplaces with a more or less even mix just more pleasant places to work? People seem to act more normal than when it's (almost) only men or (almost) only women.
andrewg 6y ago
Oh brother. People aren't work-producing robots, developers included. Different types of people bring different types of experiences, opinions, and viewpoints. So you'll make better products if you have a more diverse group of people making them. On a personal level, wouldn't you like to work with a more diverse group of people as well?
- globular-toast 6y ago
  > So you'll make better products if you have a more diverse group of people making them. Do you have any evidence of this? Any world-leading product that assembled its team specifically for "diversity" rather than talent will do. > On a personal level, wouldn't you like to work with a more diverse group of people as well? It doesn't matter what I would like. I will not discriminate based on sex, colour, or religion out of principle and I will fight people who do.
- antepodius 6y ago
  >Wouldn't you like to work with a more diverse group of people as well? I don't think anyone would really like to work with a truly diverse group of people. A truly diverse group would -all speak different languages -all be different genders (their origin culture, from which they immigrated last week, has some alternate view of gender) -all have different views on what's normal and what's tabboo -all have vastly different religious/quasi-religious views The hip, trendy open-plan office would be an open war zone between the eunuch sun-god worshipper and the revivalist post-truth anti-christianite on the first day.

theandrewbailey 6y ago

I've noticed no talent differences. I've worked with men and women who were great devs, and I've worked with men and women who weren't.

vmception 6y ago

I see a lot of different personalities and demographics including women coming out of coding academies. But everyone in the bay area flirts with "getting into tech".

golemiprague 6y ago

Partly because they are not interested and partly because there is so much propaganda about how bad it is for women in this industry that it cause the ones that are interested to be afraid of it even more. I had a chance to work in more "patriarchal" societies and in western countries and it seems like in those patriarchal places there are more women developers and much less hassle and friction.

jariel 6y ago

" I am betting there is no significant difference in inherent potential talent " I don't think it's talent, more so motivation, interest, cultural dissonance, choice - and of course all the 'bad stuff' like environments that are directly or indirectly not very conducive. Most fields have some kind of gender asymmetry. Have a look here [1]. If one were to take some time to experience a handful of those fields, I bet the answers to why 'software' has asymmetry would be similar. I guess I'm saying the issue may have specific roots in tech, but probably more or less rooted in more broad, cultural issues. [1] https://careersmart.org.uk/occupations/equality/which-jobs-do-men-and-women-do-occupational-breakdown-gender https://careersmart.org.uk/occupations/equality/which-jobs-d...

galoisgirl 6y ago

This has been discussed once or twice... What did your search engine tell you?

nchelluri 6y ago
I was following the time honored HN tradition of posting one line about the article and then taking up a tangent. That might be a practice to do away with. But to be literal, I asked because I wanted to talk about it and not just read about. However that may have been a mistake on my part; this article, found through my search engine, was pretty good: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/08/why-are-there-so-few-women-in-tech-the-truth-behind-the-google-memo https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/08/why-are... Points raised in the article: 1. Inherent differences between genders, if they exist, are tiny, and vary considerably from region to region 2. Starting in the 80s computers were marketed towards males 3. Computers were often in the male sibling's bedroom and not their own, according to interviews with some female CMU students in the 90s 4. Self-bias "For instance, girls tend to score worse on a test if they are told their maths skills are being assessed than when they are told they are taking part in a study investigating how people solve problems." 5. Hostile work environments: articles about why women should not be in the workplace, sexual harassment and illegal discrimination 6. May not be a worse gender gap than other industries such as finance or media 7. Cultural: women can (physically) start a family by having children; men cannot; there is an cost to staying in a work environment with regard to starting a family, and there is a "risk-taking" in the tech industry (to be honest, I've always found it very a secure line of work, but that is what the article says) 8. Tech may be well placed to bring more females into the workplace 9. Startups where someone is encouraged to spend a lot of time at the workplace are not doable for primary caregivers (which is often mothers) 10. Algorithmic biases being implicitly developed by a mostly male workforce (e.g. voice recognition trained and tested solely by men) Final line from the article, and why I posted my root post to begin with: “Computing is too important to be left to men.” So there is a whole host of reasons.
- scott_s 6y ago
  > I was following the time honored HN tradition of posting one line about the article and then taking up a tangent. Please don't.

AdrianB1 6y ago

It is a documented (aka scientifically proven) fact that women generally prefer to work with people and men prefer to work with things. There are exceptions, of course. In my 20+ years working in IT I met a single woman that was a developer and chose to stay a developer; a few moved from development to project management or operations, but most never wrote a line of code after graduating college, jumping directly in PM, ops or any role that allowed moving away from coding. I do not have any good explanation for this, my first sentence doesn't fully explain this.