16 ms·

What happened to all the female developers?

279 points by buzzcut 15y ago

fossuser 15y ago
"In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the systems analysts in America were women. ... the percentages of women who earned Computer Science degrees rose steadily, peaking at 37% in 1984." While that's definitely higher, still seems like the field was male dominated (the majority were male).
- Cushman 15y ago
  That 37% dropped to 20% by 2006— nearly halved. It might not seem like a large percentage difference, but consider that that's the difference between the field being under 2:1 male and 4:1 male. That's the observation of interest here.
  - fossuser 15y ago
    Definitely true, I was actually surprised the field wasn't originally the majority female since I remember reading that the original programmers were nearly all women.
- iuytghyjuyh 15y ago
  Also in 1987 the only count of "software developers" were people working at IBM/ICL/Burroughs etc. Most of these women devs were in pretty menial jobs - the equivalent of the Indian outsourcing outfits today. Those companies had women devs because they were cheap - not out of equality. Also CD degree programs in the early 80s were pretty rare - so 37% of 100 grads nationwide is easier to imagine than 37% of the 100,000 now
- aninteger 15y ago
  The title "Systems Analyst" sometimes has absolutely nothing to do with software development. I know a couple of female Systems Analysts that know nothing about software development. I'm not even exaggerating.. they use a computer, sure, but they do not write or develop any software.
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- almost 15y ago
  The sample size is small enough that I don't think there's any reason to believe that it means anything.
  - gecko 15y ago
    That's our hunch, at least for now. I doubt that the code screen is somehow gender-biased, but I'm certainly not going to reach that conclusion with a sample size of 21.
  - yummyfajitas 15y ago
    My bad, glossed over the table giving frequency counts just above it. Comment deleted.
    - almost 15y ago
      It's a question that others will probably ask themselves as they read the article. Some maybe don't understand significance and others, like you, will just miss the frequency counts. So I think your comment still had value, maybe with an EDIT added if you want to make it clear that you see the error now. It's your call of course, but I tend to think that comment deletion is something that should be avoided when possible.
  - Goladus 15y ago
    I don't think it means much in the big picture but it does seem to be a reasonable example of a company where the hiring process is fair, gender-wise, from start to finish. The only problem is that a mere fraction of the applicants are women. And it makes it easier to believe that, at companies unable to attract and screen that many candidates, they may get no qualified female applicants, period. It lends plausibility, even if it's not actually proving anything.
gaius 15y ago
This question makes no sense unless it is also asked in conjuction with "what happened to all the male primary school teachers"?
- kscaldef 15y ago
  I don't see any reason they need to be asked in the same article actually. Was there ever a time when 40% of primary school teachers were male? It's not clear to me that there's any strong parallel between the two professions at all.
  - BDFL_Xenu 15y ago
    It is a good question to ask though, as there are societal pressures against men going into any profession related to children (e.g. the pedophile scare). But asking it _here_ is just cheap whataboutery to silence the discussion.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  I think the rise of males in CS was due to the rise of the personal computer. As someone noted earlier, as computers become more common in the home and males started using them, they picked up a stigma associated with the type of males that used them. Why does that have anything to do with primary school teachers? I'm fairly certain very little.
  - gaius 15y ago
    Because it's only a "problem" when an industry is male-dominated it seems. Question is do we want equality, or not?
    - kenjackson 15y ago
      Actually, it's only a problem because males dominate high paying industries. There's a lot of talk about gender transitions on jobs. One common argument is if men leave jobs as they begin to pay less or is it that as more women take to a job, we value the job less. Outside of a few niche industries (modeling, porn, etc...), men generally are in higher paying industries. And gender transitions within industries tend to favor men (for whatever reason). I don't expect men and women to participate equally in every field of employment. But it would be interesting to understand why women aren't represented as highly in some of the higher paying fields, especially since the opposite is almost never the case (women are over-represented in a high paying field).
true_religion 15y ago
It's my understanding that in the early days working with computers was considered manually labor, something akin to data-entry of today. The "real" scientists and business people would instruct their CS conterparts to do a task, and how that task was accomplished was neither interesting nor remarked upon. As computation became cheaper, CS still retained many qualities of data entry especially in the business sector. As such, the whole profession was looked down upon. Men didn't want to enter it since after all they could simply be scientists and businessmen instead. So those who took it up were first women, then social outcasts (I'm exaggerating a bit here). --- Around the 90s, everything started changing. CS was still looked down on, but computing was so cheap and easy that you didn't need to trust it to someone with a specific degree to do so. As such, the scientists and business people I remarked upon earlier began using their own computers. And where they didn't, they didn't hire someone with a CS degree to do it. Also, the programming aspects of CS were better separated from data entry. Programmers which once were reviled, now could command healthy incomes and thus it became an attractive job for men. Women on the other hand could get any job they preferred, and did prefer to get jobs in their own interest instead of CS which they might have only taken before because it was one of the few 'low class' labors that still made use of the mind and education.
- FeministHacker 15y ago
  Somewhere buried at home I have an old Cobol programming book, talking about how, as a programmer, typing was beneith you. Instead you were instructed to write neatly on cards and supply these to the typist for her to type in.
  - JoshTriplett 15y ago
    Ouch, that hurts to read quite apart from the offensive stereotype. Barring the pervasive use of shorthand, I don't think someone writing by hand has any hope of keeping up with even a moderately skilled typist, even when writing English rather than code.
  - MostAwesomeDude 15y ago
    I'd like to think we've grown a lot as a culture since then. I mean, seriously, do we really want to return to a time when the ALTER verb existed? :3
Locke1689 15y ago
And she said that one of the things that happens is that women don’t even think they’re qualified for something because it’s advertised in competitive language. The language of competition not only doesn’t appeal to many women, it actually puts them off. This doesn't make sense to me because easily the most competitive path I've ever seen is premed. Almost all of the premeds I know are competing for the best grades, the best resumes, and the best internships. Organic chem is like a giant free-for-all where everyone tries to beat the curve. And yet, at least 50% of biology and medical students are women. Why are women turned off by competitiveness in CS (which I think is less common in my engineering classes where people often try to help other people and don't compete for the best grade), but not in medicine? Aren't we just applying cultural influences to both genders in either case?
- rdouble 15y ago
  Why are women turned off by competitiveness in CS ... but not in medicine? Maybe they are just more practical. The worst physician's salary averages about $50K more than the best programmer's salary. Nurses get paid as much as programmers. If you do pre-med but can't get into med school, you can still get into public health, physical therapy, dentistry, optometry, pharmacy, etc... If you do CS but can't get a job at Google, you can get into TPS reports or be unemployed. That last part is grossly simplifying, but compare getting a programming job someplace like Wyoming or North Dakota vs. getting a medical job in the same place.
  - true_religion 15y ago
    Or perhaps there's more prestige in a medical degree than a CS degree. Or perhaps there is a perception that doctors are really helping people, as opposed to CS professionals. Didn't we just have a spate of articles that complained that startups weren't doing enough to "help the world".
    - rdouble 15y ago
      There may or may not be more prestige. There are countless "I hate my jerk doctor" stories. There is definitely more money.
wisty 15y ago
It could also be about riskiness. Computing moved from stable and secure to very risky and with nightmare hours, though I'm not sure when.
diolpah 15y ago
A cursory look at the graph indicates that the only place women suffered was on their own code. Resume, phone skills, interpersonal skills, all great.
- diolpah 15y ago
  The downvotes are appreciated. Where am I wrong?
  - cjzhang 15y ago
    Why didn't you just say "women can't code?" Also, the sample size is crap and the deviation is crap relative to the sample size, so you can't make very many truly meaningful observations from it.
    - gsmaverick 15y ago
      That's what you wanted him to say so you could attack him. He was merely stating an observation of the given data in an unbiased manner.
      - sliverstorm 15y ago
        diolpah, my grandparent here is why you were downvoted. Nowadays, the atmosphere around anything related to gender is super-charged, and people are hyper-super-extra-sensitive to anything that could even slightly be construed as debasing towards women, so even something as simple as observing measured data sounds to them like overt sexism.
  - known 15y ago
    "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." --Oscar Wilde
  - groby_b 15y ago
    You're not wrong, but it's a touchy subject. Gender issues are always tinged with "discrimination" overtones. And, just to be clear, there is _plenty_ of discrimination and bias against women. But that shouldn't detract from the fact that you're pointing out a major outlier in their data. Unfortunately, without knowing the test, it's hard to even guess what happened there. Is it focusing on syntactic vs. semantical correctness? Does it require deep specialist knowledge, or broad generalist knowledge? How is it graded? Or is it simply a function of the tiny sample size? Without pointing out what you conclude from that data, people will infer what you concluded. And since it's a loaded subject, they will often arrive at "what a misogynist jerk" without ever knowing what you were trying to say. Corollary: When pointing out data on a loaded subject, it might be beneficial to point out what you conclude, and why. At least that way, only one of the two factions can flame you ;) (Disclaimer: I am a woman, so I obviously disagree with the "women can't code theory". I'd still love to find out _why_ women are filtered out by that test so disproportionately, simply because it might hold clues as to why women are not interested in CS)
dpritchett 15y ago
This post is presumably part of the patio11 campaign to boost Fog Creek's SEO and conversion rates by publishing "content you can't get anywhere else". Looking good! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588431 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588431
- rmc 15y ago
  That's what I thought, but FogCreek and Joel Spolsky probably has billions of in bound links from Joel's writing. Surely they wouldn't need to attract in links?
  - dpritchett 15y ago
    You should really read the thread and post I linked above, Patrick goes over exactly what they're getting out of the new arrangement. Also, Joel's stopped blogging for the most part so Joel on Software links might not maintain their current worth forever. I'm not sure it's possible to have "enough" inbound links, assuming you are able to make a profit on each new customer. Given a certain level of profitable business and submaximal SEO, effort aimed at improving SEO and conversions will be the highest bang for your buck.
  - joshuacc 15y ago
    1. The fact that Joel's blog is on a separate domain means that Fog Creek doesn't reap all the SEO benefits that it could have from links to his writing. 2. Having people visiting the same website where the software is actually sold gets them one step closer to purchasing. 3. There's the "top of mind" marketing effect of constantly having Fog Creek's blog posts on the front page of HN and other tech news aggregators.
    - rick888 15y ago
      If it's on a separate domain, it's probably because they want to do some SEO testing without losing any rankings for the origianl fogcreek site.
      - 15y ago
curtis 15y ago
I wonder what the percentage of high school graduates who can program is, broken down by gender. My guess is there's close to an order of magnitude more 18 year-old males who can program than there are 18 year-old females, at least in the U.S., anyway. Furthermore, I'd guess that many if not most 18 year-olds who can program (male or female) are largely self-taught. My thesis here is that teenage boys are much more likely to learn to program on their own than teenage girls are, regardless of raw aptitude. This might be true of technical skills in general, but programming (I would contend) is unusual in how easy it is to learn on your own. This is just a hypothesis on my part, and I don't have hard numbers to back it up. It's a question I'd like to see asked, though.
- curtis 15y ago
  To extend the argument, incoming freshmen who have an aptitude for chemical engineering are likely to start on a level playing field, regardless of gender. If you consider the CS track, though, the same is not true. Regardless of base aptitude, many more male freshmen will know how to program than will female freshmen. Females (on average) start out behind, and never catch up.
  - klaut 15y ago
    that;s just so wrong. speaking from my experience, I was one of the 10 girls in a freshmen class at uni (100 of us) and yes, i was the only one that knew how to program (taught myself) but then, maybe only 10 out of all the other boys knew how to program.
    - thedufer 15y ago
      Which is simultaneously anecdotal and proving the point. A statistic like 1/10 can so easily be an outlier - those aren't numbers you can use to prove a point. And 1/10 is somewhat (although not statistically significantly, given your sample size) smaller than 10/90.
- benmccann 15y ago
  Except you don't have to be able to program to be accepted to a CS program, so that shouldn't have a dramatic effect on why there are so few female students interested in CS.
pflats 15y ago
"In the past year, the number of women majoring in Computer Science has nearly doubled at Harvard, rising from 13% to 25% (still nowhere near the 37% of 1984). [...] In the past three years, the number of female Computer Science majors at MIT has risen by 28%. And, at Carnegie Mellon, the portion of Computer Science majors who are women has moved from 1 in 5 in 2007 to 1 in 4 last year." Focusing on the elite computer science schools obscures the overall statistic (which I don't see mentioned in the article). These schools specifically recruit and admit as many qualified females as they can into their program. At CS4HS, a CMU/Google conference for high school CS teachers, we were told as much, and tasked to do our own part to diversify our CS classes.
sp332 15y ago
Here you go: It seems like sometimes the family computer is bought mainly for the boy to use and then he’s kind of forced to share it with his sister. That pretty much explains it, doesn't it? Girls are discouraged from using computers because they learn from a young age that computers are the "domain" (property / territory) of boys.
- mctavjb9 15y ago
  Happily not the case in my family. The Apple II Plus was my Christmas present in 1980. My younger brother (now an MBA) was content playing video games when I wasn't hunched over the keyboard writing BASIC programs with alarming numbers of GOTO statements. Do you really think that girls are discouraged from using computers in this day and age? I'm always excited to meet women who can code or who show even the slightest interest in learning how to actually program a computer because there don't seem to be very many of us (even in a place like Boston). That being said, most women that I know who are approximately my age or younger are at least reasonably adept at using software that other people wrote.
  - sp332 15y ago
    No, I just meant that if the present is given to the brother, then girls learn that computers are for boys. Especially if he defends it from her :)
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- cjzhang 15y ago
  I personally feel that women get turned off to CS and in general tech courses because they're male-dominated and usually somewhat misogynistic, which makes being in CS classes and interacting with CS majors sometimes unpleasant and encourages them to do something else. In general, women are perfectly intelligent and capable of studying (see: women in premed, women in law, etc, etc). CS isn't some mystical major that's harder than every other major ever (me, I'm scared of business majors; those guys are cutthroat), and I don't think "women can't commit themselves and women can't study the same way and women don't do research" is really a good explanation for why there are fewer women in CS than there are in premed.
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FargoNorth 15y ago
Every company I have worked for has treated developers like sh!t, so I can imagine women would not put up with that. Like expecting you to code over the weekend for 16 hours, and not being understanding if you want to take Monday off. Or forcing them to program like crazy for non-important projects, just because you can. It's a thankless job, I don't recommend programming/software development to anyone. It's a joke of a field really...
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- frossie 15y ago
  Irrespective of context, I second the recommendation for Red Queen. As to the question, since my college years are in the "drought" years described in the OP: there is no way I would have done a CompSci degree in those days. The CompSci programme was in the mathematics department, and was primarily a pen-and-paper discipline (very algorithmic). In the meanwhile, the physics department had Vaxes! And Internet (well, DECnet at least). Nobody in their right mind who loved computers would have chosen CompSci over Physics. Obviously things have changed now.
flomincucci 15y ago
I'm a female developer. I'm not going for CS, but a Systems Engineering degree. I share classes with lots of women (well, in the best of situations, we're 1/3 of the total population of a classroom). Even knowing lots of women going for a SE degree, I can count with one hand the female developers I know. Most of them aren't interested in developing, but in functional analysis and leading teams.
- Udo 15y ago
  > Most of them aren't interested in developing, but in functional analysis and leading teams. But why is that so? Is it because we as a culture have decided that "men are focussed on building things" and "women are focussed on social interaction"? I'm interested in the thought process that actually motivates people to decide what they prefer to be working on. When I look back on how I got started with programming, the overwhelming aspect for me was the incredible coolness of being able to make anything I could dream of. It's this feeling of creative empowerment that really drives me to this day. And somehow I never thought of this as being a gender-specific motivation, but I would like to hear more opinions on whether I'm mistaken or not...
  - pnathan 15y ago
    Is it because we as a culture have decided that "men are focussed on building things" and "women are focussed on social interaction"? I think that that is the root of the problem, that collective decision, that outsourcing of our moral responsibility to our bodies.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    Is it because we as a culture have decided that "men are focussed on building things" and "women are focussed on social interaction"? "Decided" or "observed"?
    - Udo 15y ago
      That's the same thing. When a culture "decides" something like that it becomes a behavioral reality. The human mind is incredibly plastic. Cultural expectations and preconceptions shape us tremendously, they play a big role in all issues where identity or life goals are concerned.
elehack 15y ago
The pictures in the article show an old IBM-style computing facility, the domain of the sages in white robes who tend the machine. This raises two questions in my mind: 1. Have hackers and the hacker culture risen in importance and influence in the broader tech ecosystem since, say, 1985? 2. Has this resulted in a change of computing culture contributing to the decreasing numbers of women entering the field? One of the things present in Levy's Hackers was that the vast majority of the movers-and-shakers in the hacker community were men. Roberta Williams was, I believe, the only woman mentioned in the book with any direct involvement in computing. Has that culture risen in influence, and is it (partly) to blame? The IBM terminal & mainframe rooms with their hospital-clean appearance don't make press much any more.
ig1 15y ago
"What happened to all the talented female teachers?" In the 1960s teaching was one of the few professional occupations considered "suitable" for women, and as a result many of the best and brightest women went into education. As other occupations opened up to women this resulted in a huge brain drain, with the average ability of teacher to drop dramatically. I imagine the same happened in programming as well, as women has more choices open up to them they naturally moved on to other fields.
lutorm 15y ago
If you plot women's share of doctorates in different fields, it's pretty telling that CS is the only field in which the fraction of women dropped significantly between 1920 - 1960. In 1920, 20% of mathematics and CS PhD degrees went to women, by 1960 it was down to 5%. It took until around the turn of the century for it to get back up to 20%. (See http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf06319/ http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf06319/)
devski 15y ago
who wants to be a low paying developer when being an high-class escort earns about $200,000/year. highest paying job for the least amount of effort.
peterwwillis 15y ago
Why did I (a boy) get into computers? I was a nerd and I had one friend and no social skills. I played no sports and did nothing but play with action figures and watch TV - until I found the computer. I never gave it up until I grew up, and now it's a job and sometimes a hobby (when i'm home long enough to play with it). Would you say it's more likely or less likely that an equal percentage of girls to boys would have similar experiences? Or would you say that girls might just have an easier time socializing and might be less prompted to lose themselves on the computer? Why do we even care about which sex works more in that field? If we had the answer to this question, and somebody decided to increase the population of women in the field... Is it going to produce better code or something? What's the point other than just playing with social structures for fun, or exercising some strange need to reach some kind of artificial equilibrium anywhere we see what we perceive as an imbalance? tl;dr there's not as many friendless geek women and who cares who's coding anyway
blahedo 15y ago
I'm so glad to see this message out there; a frustratingly small number of people are aware of the 1984(ish) peak in females in the field. My mom taught computer programming (Fortran) in a Chicago high school from 1967 until 1984, and was actually kind of surprised when I first asked her about gender balance issues in the field—they just weren't an issue then, and her classes were always more or less balanced. But what they also were was everyone's very first exposure to a computer. Without exception, her students had never written any sort of program before, and they were recruited from good students in the math and physics classes, coming to programming with an open mind and no preconceptions. (A lot of them, girls and boys both, went into technical computer-related fields.) The change, as has been noted elsewhere on this page, surely has to do with the introduction of computers, but my hypothesis is that it wasn't just home PCs (not in the 80s) but classroom PCs that were the problem: in a lot of places, computers in the classroom were a fad and showed up with no training of the teachers, so they sat in the back or the side, mostly unused... unless one or two of the students pestered the teacher to play with the computer, and then used the manual and/or trial and error to figure it out. Guess which students were doing that more? But that, I think, wouldn't be enough. The knowledge should equalise after one or maybe two terms of college CS, right? But I'm pretty sure the real problem was that professors inadvertently reinforced and magnified the difference between students who'd had previous computer experience (primarily boys) and students who hadn't (of both genders). It turns out that as a teacher, it's very, very easy to look around the classroom, see that X% of the students seem to be getting something, and decide to move on. (You can't wait for 100%, usually, so it's always a judgement call.) That's fine if it's something you've taught well and only the weak students are struggling, but what if it's something you absentmindedly glossed over? Half the class understands it, so you must have covered it, right? This is very insidious, and even being aware of it is not always enough to combat it; and if the divide of "has experience" vs "no experience" partially reflects a gender divide, that divide will only get reinforced.
- maco 15y ago
  Have you seen this article? http://geekfeminism.org/2010/08/10/restore-meritocracy-in-cs-with-an-obscure-functional-programming-language/ http://geekfeminism.org/2010/08/10/restore-meritocracy-in-cs... One way teachers can even the CS 101 playing field is by doing something totally different than what the kids taught themselves or learned in high school (which is probably object oriented programming, these days).
joe_the_user 15y ago
I worked many years ago as a substitute teacher in Oakland, CA. During that time, there was interesting pattern. The vast majority of the older teachers were black and the vast majority of younger teacher were white. At a glance, this would seem strange given that discrimination was being actively attacked. But what was happening was more socially prestiges opportunities were opening for black college graduates and so few of them wanted to go into teaching, a field with less prestige than, say, law or business. I suspect something different but with related qualities is going on with women and programming. * Women now have more and more opportunities in a number of fields (I recall a statistic claiming the average income of a young woman college graduate in New York was higher than that of the average male college graduate). * Programming has become a less desirable, less socially prestiges occupation. * Programming became a more hobby-based occupation - the expectation is more that a programmer have been tinkering with computers forever and thus (as per the article). * Programming became a more male-identified occupation through the media and through the hobby aspect. * Age discrimination pushes the previous women programmers out of the field (and contributes to the field losing social prestige).
- sunir 15y ago
  I believe this is the major force. The reason why medicine equalized first was that it is the highest status profession. Law, business and accounting are similarly equalizing faster. Low status professions are losing women. Usually low status non-labour professions like teachers, librarians and nurses were done by women primarily but computer science started off early equal so now it is skewed male. It sucks to be in a low status profession but that's the way it is.
afims 15y ago
Based on the handful of women I know who can program, there seems to be a few reasons why not many go into CS: 1) It seems they aren't exposed to it as much. They're less likely to read about it on the internet. Or learn about it from relatives. Or take classes in it. 2) The handful that I know who took programming in high school never (or barely) turned it into a hobby, even if they later declared CS as their major. Meanwhile, I know tons of guys who got into programming by themselves, or because their parents did it. Also, all of the CS guys I know who took programming classes in high school did some outside of class for fun. So, when some women become CS majors, they get intimidated. They see "everyone" outperforming them, since everyone is mostly guys with a pre-built set of skills. Even guys who are so-so at something quite frequently talk like they know stuff; that's just the way guys behave. This worsens the above impression. There's an actual culture difference. Can't stress the importance of this enough. As a result, instead of thinking "These guys have years on me and I need to catch up and put lots of work in," many women think "I suck at this," and quit. Then next set has the same problem. EDIT: removed a bit of unintentional italicizing
SanjayUttam 15y ago
Totally off topic, but, is that Font intended?
ohyes 15y ago
"But that means that I can’t really talk to my friends about the stuff I do for my classes, which is frustrating. Sometimes, there’s a really cool idea presented in class, but it’s only cool if you already know the background information to understand it – to grasp how and why it’s cool. Trying to present enough background to explain why this concept is awesome during the course of a conversation really just doesn’t work, as they don’t get a deep enough understanding of the background to see why it’s cool and spending several minutes attempting to explain frustrates me and bores them." As a male software developer, this frustrates me too. You just get eye-rolls and snarky replies of 'flux capacitor?'
- elliottkember 15y ago
  I hear you on this one. I think it's fashionable to not have to know anything. Look at our role models, for example - celebrities. Not so many scientists or mathematicians, mostly glitterati or athletes. It's a bit worrying.
andreiursan 15y ago
my experience: Where I work, on my floor we are either a proportion of 50% - 50% or 40%-60% (in favor for the Girls). Hey, but this is Romania, we don't have feminist movements and so on. Different society. Even in college we are something like 40%-60% (males win here) but we don't take it as a big deal... Btw found CS girls in college that were smarter than me on some fields of this domain :), and I know where to ask if I have a question about those fields. other answer: Depends on the "society" although while I was in the USA everybody was blaming it... and believe me is not because of it, is because of those who like to blame it ;). Last but not least... my girlfriend is a developer.
- deleted 15y ago
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jwwest 15y ago
I can barely put up with all of the jerks in our industry as a man, I don't want to think about what it would be like as a woman.
flocial 15y ago
Forgot where I read it but like true_religion said, some female programmers came into the field by way of secretary. As they kept typing instructions, they eventually figured out how computers work. This photo set from Bell Labs taken in the 1960s is pretty interesting: http://www.luckham.org/LHL.Bell%20Labs%20Days.html http://www.luckham.org/LHL.Bell%20Labs%20Days.html One thing to note is that despite computers being a novelty back then is that primary education was in a much better state and students had a stronger foundation in science and math regardless of sex. Many long-time teachers would say (with some nostalgia premium) that high school graduates of the 1960s are equivalent to college graduates of today. Another thing that isn't touched on is that computer programming as it stands right now is not a very female friendly profession. Women will usually factor in the possibility that their careers may get derailed at some point by having a child. Careers where time away from the field doesn't obsolete your skills is a big plus for women. Medicine and law are excellent fields in that regard. "Partly because it is so tricky to juggle kids and a career, many highly able women opt for jobs with predictable hours, such as human resources or accounting. They also gravitate towards fields where their skills are less likely to become obsolete if they take a career break, which is perhaps one reason why nearly two-thirds of new American law graduates are female but only 18% of engineers. A study by the Centre for Work-Life Policy, a think-tank based in New York, found that, in 2009, 31% of American women had taken a career break (for an average of 2.7 years) and 66% had switched to working part-time or flexible-time in order to balance work and family. Having left the fast track, many women find it hard to get back on. " http://www.economist.com/node/18988694 http://www.economist.com/node/18988694
maeon3 15y ago
Of all of the female computer programmers I've gotten to know well and worked with (maybe 4 or 5), none of them were half as good as the average male programmer I've gotten to know. Programming is, and always will be a male profession. The only thing that will change this is if we force women to learn programming, but even then you can't make them like it. I think the solution here is to realize that there is a physical pre-programmed revulsion to everything that Higher math, Physics and Programming have to offer.
- zerohp 15y ago
  I've had the opportunity to work with several women programmers. I don't think they were worse than average but none of them live to write software and use technology as a lifestyle. I have never met a female programmer that was self-taught. I think the answer to the original question (in the title here, not the Fog Creek post) is that the rise of personal computers, and parental influence on girls at the time drove them away from it. Prior to the personal computer, most programmers were being introduced to the field in college. At the dawn of personal computing, parents viewed it as a male activity, like radio or electronics. Once this generation reached college, the males had many years of experience exploring their curiosity at home that the females did not have. College course work had to adapt to this with increased expectations of incoming freshman into Computer Science programs, which left those without computer experience intimidated and struggling.
  - Jem 15y ago
    > I have never met a female programmer that was self-taught. Hi, how you doin' :)
- britta 15y ago
  "there is a physical pre-programmed revulsion to everything that Higher math, Physics and Programming have to offer." This is not consistent with my understanding of myself or all the other women I've known, and it does not seem to make sense based on the women that you've known either - maybe the female programmers you've met weren't awesome at what they did, but why would they have chosen this profession if they felt a deep revulsion every day when they were learning how to program? I am sorry that you imagine that all the many women who enjoy making contributions to these fields are fighting against some inherent evolved dislike for them, instead of reaching deep into their personal enthusiasm for these fields and fighting against the sexist attitudes and cultures they often run into.
WalterSear 15y ago
For better or worse, the thing that jumps out at me from that graph is that the numbers all look similar until you get to the code review, where half as many women made the cut as men. If this is a statistically significant difference, it speaks volumes.
kamaal 15y ago
While we analyze why there isn't much gender diversity as it is before. We must also understand how much the industry has changed over years. The volume of work that existed back in the pre - 80's era and now isn't even comparable. And with volume the culture of our profession has changed drastically. If its your usual 9-5 job, where you have to apply routine steps everyday then it would have been OK. But being progressive in programming requires you not just to work hard(And in most cases working under difficult deadlines and overnight) you also have continuously keep learning and update yourself with things that come along everyday. This is pretty demanding if you have a family, kids and especially when you are pregnant etc. There are physical limitations in those issues. If I look at the way my career has been, I sort of had to stay and overnights and work on difficult deadlines many times over long periods. It becomes very difficult for a mother with kids to accommodate work and family in that kind of schedule. So she has to often opt to be one side. A general counter point presented to this argument is to ask the Project manager to be more come with a more accommodating plan.This is often not possible due to economic reasons, given the time, money and resource something needs to be delivered. This has nothing to do with male domination in the society, these are just unavoidable situations. This is typical of many other professions. Why don't we find as many female cab drivers as male ones? Why don't we have as many frontline female soldiers/nurses? Let alone all that, if the current biological situation was reversed. And men could stay at home(Do the house choses, kids, food etc) and women had to take all responsibilities of house, family, money and security for their whole life. How many women in mass(not individual cases) would be happy with such a tiring and demanding life? Well I guess everything in the nature and the way things go have a purpose.
ladyphp 15y ago
Asking why there aren't more female developers is like asking why there aren't more guys who go into nursing or more guys who wanna be fashion designers or a chef. Perhaps its personal interest, societal view that industries like games and computers are more masculine... Honestly, who cares if the developer is a chick or a guy as long as the application or site being built is useful
fauigerzigerk 15y ago
But the most common explanation is that the rise of personal computers led computing culture to be associated with the stereotype of the eccentric, antisocial, male “hacker.” I think that's right, but the question is why girls did not use the opportunity that presented itself and put their own cultural stamp on it.
6ren 15y ago
Do the influxes of women correlate with industry stability? Women tend to not like to waste their time, but men will take high risks for high returns (according to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2767867 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2767867). So, men will explore, discover, invent. Some get rich; most get nothing. Women prefer reliable reward for effort e.g. law and medicine. But the computer industry has been characterized by periodic disruptions of new hardware (mainframe, minicomputer, desktop), and while those revolutions were opportunities to make a fortune, they were not stable. Currently, the early land-grab of the web seems to have subsided and its future looks secure (e.g. smartphones aren't dethroning it). If we have entered a period of stability, it may be more attractive to women.

279 points by buzzcut 15y ago

"In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the systems analysts in America were women. ... the percentages of women who earned Computer Science degrees rose steadily, peaking at 37% in 1984." While that's definitely higher, still seems like the field was male dominated (the majority were male).

Cushman 15y ago
That 37% dropped to 20% by 2006— nearly halved. It might not seem like a large percentage difference, but consider that that's the difference between the field being under 2:1 male and 4:1 male. That's the observation of interest here.
- fossuser 15y ago
  Definitely true, I was actually surprised the field wasn't originally the majority female since I remember reading that the original programmers were nearly all women.
iuytghyjuyh 15y ago
Also in 1987 the only count of "software developers" were people working at IBM/ICL/Burroughs etc. Most of these women devs were in pretty menial jobs - the equivalent of the Indian outsourcing outfits today. Those companies had women devs because they were cheap - not out of equality. Also CD degree programs in the early 80s were pretty rare - so 37% of 100 grads nationwide is easier to imagine than 37% of the 100,000 now
aninteger 15y ago
The title "Systems Analyst" sometimes has absolutely nothing to do with software development. I know a couple of female Systems Analysts that know nothing about software development. I'm not even exaggerating.. they use a computer, sure, but they do not write or develop any software.

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almost 15y ago
The sample size is small enough that I don't think there's any reason to believe that it means anything.
- gecko 15y ago
  That's our hunch, at least for now. I doubt that the code screen is somehow gender-biased, but I'm certainly not going to reach that conclusion with a sample size of 21.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  My bad, glossed over the table giving frequency counts just above it. Comment deleted.
  - almost 15y ago
    It's a question that others will probably ask themselves as they read the article. Some maybe don't understand significance and others, like you, will just miss the frequency counts. So I think your comment still had value, maybe with an EDIT added if you want to make it clear that you see the error now. It's your call of course, but I tend to think that comment deletion is something that should be avoided when possible.
- Goladus 15y ago
  I don't think it means much in the big picture but it does seem to be a reasonable example of a company where the hiring process is fair, gender-wise, from start to finish. The only problem is that a mere fraction of the applicants are women. And it makes it easier to believe that, at companies unable to attract and screen that many candidates, they may get no qualified female applicants, period. It lends plausibility, even if it's not actually proving anything.

gaius 15y ago

This question makes no sense unless it is also asked in conjuction with "what happened to all the male primary school teachers"?

kscaldef 15y ago
I don't see any reason they need to be asked in the same article actually. Was there ever a time when 40% of primary school teachers were male? It's not clear to me that there's any strong parallel between the two professions at all.
- BDFL_Xenu 15y ago
  It is a good question to ask though, as there are societal pressures against men going into any profession related to children (e.g. the pedophile scare). But asking it _here_ is just cheap whataboutery to silence the discussion.
kenjackson 15y ago
I think the rise of males in CS was due to the rise of the personal computer. As someone noted earlier, as computers become more common in the home and males started using them, they picked up a stigma associated with the type of males that used them. Why does that have anything to do with primary school teachers? I'm fairly certain very little.
- gaius 15y ago
  Because it's only a "problem" when an industry is male-dominated it seems. Question is do we want equality, or not?
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    Actually, it's only a problem because males dominate high paying industries. There's a lot of talk about gender transitions on jobs. One common argument is if men leave jobs as they begin to pay less or is it that as more women take to a job, we value the job less. Outside of a few niche industries (modeling, porn, etc...), men generally are in higher paying industries. And gender transitions within industries tend to favor men (for whatever reason). I don't expect men and women to participate equally in every field of employment. But it would be interesting to understand why women aren't represented as highly in some of the higher paying fields, especially since the opposite is almost never the case (women are over-represented in a high paying field).

true_religion 15y ago

It's my understanding that in the early days working with computers was considered manually labor, something akin to data-entry of today. The "real" scientists and business people would instruct their CS conterparts to do a task, and how that task was accomplished was neither interesting nor remarked upon. As computation became cheaper, CS still retained many qualities of data entry especially in the business sector. As such, the whole profession was looked down upon. Men didn't want to enter it since after all they could simply be scientists and businessmen instead. So those who took it up were first women, then social outcasts (I'm exaggerating a bit here). --- Around the 90s, everything started changing. CS was still looked down on, but computing was so cheap and easy that you didn't need to trust it to someone with a specific degree to do so. As such, the scientists and business people I remarked upon earlier began using their own computers. And where they didn't, they didn't hire someone with a CS degree to do it. Also, the programming aspects of CS were better separated from data entry. Programmers which once were reviled, now could command healthy incomes and thus it became an attractive job for men. Women on the other hand could get any job they preferred, and did prefer to get jobs in their own interest instead of CS which they might have only taken before because it was one of the few 'low class' labors that still made use of the mind and education.

FeministHacker 15y ago
Somewhere buried at home I have an old Cobol programming book, talking about how, as a programmer, typing was beneith you. Instead you were instructed to write neatly on cards and supply these to the typist for her to type in.
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  Ouch, that hurts to read quite apart from the offensive stereotype. Barring the pervasive use of shorthand, I don't think someone writing by hand has any hope of keeping up with even a moderately skilled typist, even when writing English rather than code.
- MostAwesomeDude 15y ago
  I'd like to think we've grown a lot as a culture since then. I mean, seriously, do we really want to return to a time when the ALTER verb existed? :3

Locke1689 15y ago

And she said that one of the things that happens is that women don’t even think they’re qualified for something because it’s advertised in competitive language. The language of competition not only doesn’t appeal to many women, it actually puts them off. This doesn't make sense to me because easily the most competitive path I've ever seen is premed. Almost all of the premeds I know are competing for the best grades, the best resumes, and the best internships. Organic chem is like a giant free-for-all where everyone tries to beat the curve. And yet, at least 50% of biology and medical students are women. Why are women turned off by competitiveness in CS (which I think is less common in my engineering classes where people often try to help other people and don't compete for the best grade), but not in medicine? Aren't we just applying cultural influences to both genders in either case?

rdouble 15y ago
Why are women turned off by competitiveness in CS ... but not in medicine? Maybe they are just more practical. The worst physician's salary averages about $50K more than the best programmer's salary. Nurses get paid as much as programmers. If you do pre-med but can't get into med school, you can still get into public health, physical therapy, dentistry, optometry, pharmacy, etc... If you do CS but can't get a job at Google, you can get into TPS reports or be unemployed. That last part is grossly simplifying, but compare getting a programming job someplace like Wyoming or North Dakota vs. getting a medical job in the same place.
- true_religion 15y ago
  Or perhaps there's more prestige in a medical degree than a CS degree. Or perhaps there is a perception that doctors are really helping people, as opposed to CS professionals. Didn't we just have a spate of articles that complained that startups weren't doing enough to "help the world".
  - rdouble 15y ago
    There may or may not be more prestige. There are countless "I hate my jerk doctor" stories. There is definitely more money.

wisty 15y ago

It could also be about riskiness. Computing moved from stable and secure to very risky and with nightmare hours, though I'm not sure when.

diolpah 15y ago

A cursory look at the graph indicates that the only place women suffered was on their own code. Resume, phone skills, interpersonal skills, all great.

diolpah 15y ago
The downvotes are appreciated. Where am I wrong?
- cjzhang 15y ago
  Why didn't you just say "women can't code?" Also, the sample size is crap and the deviation is crap relative to the sample size, so you can't make very many truly meaningful observations from it.
  - gsmaverick 15y ago
    That's what you wanted him to say so you could attack him. He was merely stating an observation of the given data in an unbiased manner.
    - sliverstorm 15y ago
      diolpah, my grandparent here is why you were downvoted. Nowadays, the atmosphere around anything related to gender is super-charged, and people are hyper-super-extra-sensitive to anything that could even slightly be construed as debasing towards women, so even something as simple as observing measured data sounds to them like overt sexism.
- known 15y ago
  "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." --Oscar Wilde
- groby_b 15y ago
  You're not wrong, but it's a touchy subject. Gender issues are always tinged with "discrimination" overtones. And, just to be clear, there is _plenty_ of discrimination and bias against women. But that shouldn't detract from the fact that you're pointing out a major outlier in their data. Unfortunately, without knowing the test, it's hard to even guess what happened there. Is it focusing on syntactic vs. semantical correctness? Does it require deep specialist knowledge, or broad generalist knowledge? How is it graded? Or is it simply a function of the tiny sample size? Without pointing out what you conclude from that data, people will infer what you concluded. And since it's a loaded subject, they will often arrive at "what a misogynist jerk" without ever knowing what you were trying to say. Corollary: When pointing out data on a loaded subject, it might be beneficial to point out what you conclude, and why. At least that way, only one of the two factions can flame you ;) (Disclaimer: I am a woman, so I obviously disagree with the "women can't code theory". I'd still love to find out _why_ women are filtered out by that test so disproportionately, simply because it might hold clues as to why women are not interested in CS)

dpritchett 15y ago

This post is presumably part of the patio11 campaign to boost Fog Creek's SEO and conversion rates by publishing "content you can't get anywhere else". Looking good! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588431 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588431

rmc 15y ago
That's what I thought, but FogCreek and Joel Spolsky probably has billions of in bound links from Joel's writing. Surely they wouldn't need to attract in links?
- dpritchett 15y ago
  You should really read the thread and post I linked above, Patrick goes over exactly what they're getting out of the new arrangement. Also, Joel's stopped blogging for the most part so Joel on Software links might not maintain their current worth forever. I'm not sure it's possible to have "enough" inbound links, assuming you are able to make a profit on each new customer. Given a certain level of profitable business and submaximal SEO, effort aimed at improving SEO and conversions will be the highest bang for your buck.
- joshuacc 15y ago
  1. The fact that Joel's blog is on a separate domain means that Fog Creek doesn't reap all the SEO benefits that it could have from links to his writing. 2. Having people visiting the same website where the software is actually sold gets them one step closer to purchasing. 3. There's the "top of mind" marketing effect of constantly having Fog Creek's blog posts on the front page of HN and other tech news aggregators.
  - rick888 15y ago
    If it's on a separate domain, it's probably because they want to do some SEO testing without losing any rankings for the origianl fogcreek site.
    - 15y ago

curtis 15y ago

I wonder what the percentage of high school graduates who can program is, broken down by gender. My guess is there's close to an order of magnitude more 18 year-old males who can program than there are 18 year-old females, at least in the U.S., anyway. Furthermore, I'd guess that many if not most 18 year-olds who can program (male or female) are largely self-taught. My thesis here is that teenage boys are much more likely to learn to program on their own than teenage girls are, regardless of raw aptitude. This might be true of technical skills in general, but programming (I would contend) is unusual in how easy it is to learn on your own. This is just a hypothesis on my part, and I don't have hard numbers to back it up. It's a question I'd like to see asked, though.

curtis 15y ago
To extend the argument, incoming freshmen who have an aptitude for chemical engineering are likely to start on a level playing field, regardless of gender. If you consider the CS track, though, the same is not true. Regardless of base aptitude, many more male freshmen will know how to program than will female freshmen. Females (on average) start out behind, and never catch up.
- klaut 15y ago
  that;s just so wrong. speaking from my experience, I was one of the 10 girls in a freshmen class at uni (100 of us) and yes, i was the only one that knew how to program (taught myself) but then, maybe only 10 out of all the other boys knew how to program.
  - thedufer 15y ago
    Which is simultaneously anecdotal and proving the point. A statistic like 1/10 can so easily be an outlier - those aren't numbers you can use to prove a point. And 1/10 is somewhat (although not statistically significantly, given your sample size) smaller than 10/90.
benmccann 15y ago
Except you don't have to be able to program to be accepted to a CS program, so that shouldn't have a dramatic effect on why there are so few female students interested in CS.

pflats 15y ago

"In the past year, the number of women majoring in Computer Science has nearly doubled at Harvard, rising from 13% to 25% (still nowhere near the 37% of 1984). [...] In the past three years, the number of female Computer Science majors at MIT has risen by 28%. And, at Carnegie Mellon, the portion of Computer Science majors who are women has moved from 1 in 5 in 2007 to 1 in 4 last year." Focusing on the elite computer science schools obscures the overall statistic (which I don't see mentioned in the article). These schools specifically recruit and admit as many qualified females as they can into their program. At CS4HS, a CMU/Google conference for high school CS teachers, we were told as much, and tasked to do our own part to diversify our CS classes.

sp332 15y ago

Here you go: It seems like sometimes the family computer is bought mainly for the boy to use and then he’s kind of forced to share it with his sister. That pretty much explains it, doesn't it? Girls are discouraged from using computers because they learn from a young age that computers are the "domain" (property / territory) of boys.

mctavjb9 15y ago
Happily not the case in my family. The Apple II Plus was my Christmas present in 1980. My younger brother (now an MBA) was content playing video games when I wasn't hunched over the keyboard writing BASIC programs with alarming numbers of GOTO statements. Do you really think that girls are discouraged from using computers in this day and age? I'm always excited to meet women who can code or who show even the slightest interest in learning how to actually program a computer because there don't seem to be very many of us (even in a place like Boston). That being said, most women that I know who are approximately my age or younger are at least reasonably adept at using software that other people wrote.
- sp332 15y ago
  No, I just meant that if the present is given to the brother, then girls learn that computers are for boys. Especially if he defends it from her :)

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cjzhang 15y ago
I personally feel that women get turned off to CS and in general tech courses because they're male-dominated and usually somewhat misogynistic, which makes being in CS classes and interacting with CS majors sometimes unpleasant and encourages them to do something else. In general, women are perfectly intelligent and capable of studying (see: women in premed, women in law, etc, etc). CS isn't some mystical major that's harder than every other major ever (me, I'm scared of business majors; those guys are cutthroat), and I don't think "women can't commit themselves and women can't study the same way and women don't do research" is really a good explanation for why there are fewer women in CS than there are in premed.

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FargoNorth 15y ago

Every company I have worked for has treated developers like sh!t, so I can imagine women would not put up with that. Like expecting you to code over the weekend for 16 hours, and not being understanding if you want to take Monday off. Or forcing them to program like crazy for non-important projects, just because you can. It's a thankless job, I don't recommend programming/software development to anyone. It's a joke of a field really...

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frossie 15y ago
Irrespective of context, I second the recommendation for Red Queen. As to the question, since my college years are in the "drought" years described in the OP: there is no way I would have done a CompSci degree in those days. The CompSci programme was in the mathematics department, and was primarily a pen-and-paper discipline (very algorithmic). In the meanwhile, the physics department had Vaxes! And Internet (well, DECnet at least). Nobody in their right mind who loved computers would have chosen CompSci over Physics. Obviously things have changed now.

flomincucci 15y ago

I'm a female developer. I'm not going for CS, but a Systems Engineering degree. I share classes with lots of women (well, in the best of situations, we're 1/3 of the total population of a classroom). Even knowing lots of women going for a SE degree, I can count with one hand the female developers I know. Most of them aren't interested in developing, but in functional analysis and leading teams.

Udo 15y ago
> Most of them aren't interested in developing, but in functional analysis and leading teams. But why is that so? Is it because we as a culture have decided that "men are focussed on building things" and "women are focussed on social interaction"? I'm interested in the thought process that actually motivates people to decide what they prefer to be working on. When I look back on how I got started with programming, the overwhelming aspect for me was the incredible coolness of being able to make anything I could dream of. It's this feeling of creative empowerment that really drives me to this day. And somehow I never thought of this as being a gender-specific motivation, but I would like to hear more opinions on whether I'm mistaken or not...
- pnathan 15y ago
  Is it because we as a culture have decided that "men are focussed on building things" and "women are focussed on social interaction"? I think that that is the root of the problem, that collective decision, that outsourcing of our moral responsibility to our bodies.
- philwelch 15y ago
  Is it because we as a culture have decided that "men are focussed on building things" and "women are focussed on social interaction"? "Decided" or "observed"?
  - Udo 15y ago
    That's the same thing. When a culture "decides" something like that it becomes a behavioral reality. The human mind is incredibly plastic. Cultural expectations and preconceptions shape us tremendously, they play a big role in all issues where identity or life goals are concerned.

elehack 15y ago

The pictures in the article show an old IBM-style computing facility, the domain of the sages in white robes who tend the machine. This raises two questions in my mind: 1. Have hackers and the hacker culture risen in importance and influence in the broader tech ecosystem since, say, 1985? 2. Has this resulted in a change of computing culture contributing to the decreasing numbers of women entering the field? One of the things present in Levy's Hackers was that the vast majority of the movers-and-shakers in the hacker community were men. Roberta Williams was, I believe, the only woman mentioned in the book with any direct involvement in computing. Has that culture risen in influence, and is it (partly) to blame? The IBM terminal & mainframe rooms with their hospital-clean appearance don't make press much any more.

ig1 15y ago

"What happened to all the talented female teachers?" In the 1960s teaching was one of the few professional occupations considered "suitable" for women, and as a result many of the best and brightest women went into education. As other occupations opened up to women this resulted in a huge brain drain, with the average ability of teacher to drop dramatically. I imagine the same happened in programming as well, as women has more choices open up to them they naturally moved on to other fields.

lutorm 15y ago

If you plot women's share of doctorates in different fields, it's pretty telling that CS is the only field in which the fraction of women dropped significantly between 1920 - 1960. In 1920, 20% of mathematics and CS PhD degrees went to women, by 1960 it was down to 5%. It took until around the turn of the century for it to get back up to 20%. (See http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf06319/ http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf06319/)

devski 15y ago

who wants to be a low paying developer when being an high-class escort earns about $200,000/year. highest paying job for the least amount of effort.

peterwwillis 15y ago

Why did I (a boy) get into computers? I was a nerd and I had one friend and no social skills. I played no sports and did nothing but play with action figures and watch TV - until I found the computer. I never gave it up until I grew up, and now it's a job and sometimes a hobby (when i'm home long enough to play with it). Would you say it's more likely or less likely that an equal percentage of girls to boys would have similar experiences? Or would you say that girls might just have an easier time socializing and might be less prompted to lose themselves on the computer? Why do we even care about which sex works more in that field? If we had the answer to this question, and somebody decided to increase the population of women in the field... Is it going to produce better code or something? What's the point other than just playing with social structures for fun, or exercising some strange need to reach some kind of artificial equilibrium anywhere we see what we perceive as an imbalance? tl;dr there's not as many friendless geek women and who cares who's coding anyway

blahedo 15y ago

I'm so glad to see this message out there; a frustratingly small number of people are aware of the 1984(ish) peak in females in the field. My mom taught computer programming (Fortran) in a Chicago high school from 1967 until 1984, and was actually kind of surprised when I first asked her about gender balance issues in the field—they just weren't an issue then, and her classes were always more or less balanced. But what they also were was everyone's very first exposure to a computer. Without exception, her students had never written any sort of program before, and they were recruited from good students in the math and physics classes, coming to programming with an open mind and no preconceptions. (A lot of them, girls and boys both, went into technical computer-related fields.) The change, as has been noted elsewhere on this page, surely has to do with the introduction of computers, but my hypothesis is that it wasn't just home PCs (not in the 80s) but classroom PCs that were the problem: in a lot of places, computers in the classroom were a fad and showed up with no training of the teachers, so they sat in the back or the side, mostly unused... unless one or two of the students pestered the teacher to play with the computer, and then used the manual and/or trial and error to figure it out. Guess which students were doing that more? But that, I think, wouldn't be enough. The knowledge should equalise after one or maybe two terms of college CS, right? But I'm pretty sure the real problem was that professors inadvertently reinforced and magnified the difference between students who'd had previous computer experience (primarily boys) and students who hadn't (of both genders). It turns out that as a teacher, it's very, very easy to look around the classroom, see that X% of the students seem to be getting something, and decide to move on. (You can't wait for 100%, usually, so it's always a judgement call.) That's fine if it's something you've taught well and only the weak students are struggling, but what if it's something you absentmindedly glossed over? Half the class understands it, so you must have covered it, right? This is very insidious, and even being aware of it is not always enough to combat it; and if the divide of "has experience" vs "no experience" partially reflects a gender divide, that divide will only get reinforced.

maco 15y ago
Have you seen this article? http://geekfeminism.org/2010/08/10/restore-meritocracy-in-cs-with-an-obscure-functional-programming-language/ http://geekfeminism.org/2010/08/10/restore-meritocracy-in-cs... One way teachers can even the CS 101 playing field is by doing something totally different than what the kids taught themselves or learned in high school (which is probably object oriented programming, these days).

joe_the_user 15y ago

I worked many years ago as a substitute teacher in Oakland, CA. During that time, there was interesting pattern. The vast majority of the older teachers were black and the vast majority of younger teacher were white. At a glance, this would seem strange given that discrimination was being actively attacked. But what was happening was more socially prestiges opportunities were opening for black college graduates and so few of them wanted to go into teaching, a field with less prestige than, say, law or business. I suspect something different but with related qualities is going on with women and programming. * Women now have more and more opportunities in a number of fields (I recall a statistic claiming the average income of a young woman college graduate in New York was higher than that of the average male college graduate). * Programming has become a less desirable, less socially prestiges occupation. * Programming became a more hobby-based occupation - the expectation is more that a programmer have been tinkering with computers forever and thus (as per the article). * Programming became a more male-identified occupation through the media and through the hobby aspect. * Age discrimination pushes the previous women programmers out of the field (and contributes to the field losing social prestige).

sunir 15y ago
I believe this is the major force. The reason why medicine equalized first was that it is the highest status profession. Law, business and accounting are similarly equalizing faster. Low status professions are losing women. Usually low status non-labour professions like teachers, librarians and nurses were done by women primarily but computer science started off early equal so now it is skewed male. It sucks to be in a low status profession but that's the way it is.

afims 15y ago

Based on the handful of women I know who can program, there seems to be a few reasons why not many go into CS: 1) It seems they aren't exposed to it as much. They're less likely to read about it on the internet. Or learn about it from relatives. Or take classes in it. 2) The handful that I know who took programming in high school never (or barely) turned it into a hobby, even if they later declared CS as their major. Meanwhile, I know tons of guys who got into programming by themselves, or because their parents did it. Also, all of the CS guys I know who took programming classes in high school did some outside of class for fun. So, when some women become CS majors, they get intimidated. They see "everyone" outperforming them, since everyone is mostly guys with a pre-built set of skills. Even guys who are so-so at something quite frequently talk like they know stuff; that's just the way guys behave. This worsens the above impression. There's an actual culture difference. Can't stress the importance of this enough. As a result, instead of thinking "These guys have years on me and I need to catch up and put lots of work in," many women think "I suck at this," and quit. Then next set has the same problem. EDIT: removed a bit of unintentional italicizing

SanjayUttam 15y ago

Totally off topic, but, is that Font intended?

ohyes 15y ago

"But that means that I can’t really talk to my friends about the stuff I do for my classes, which is frustrating. Sometimes, there’s a really cool idea presented in class, but it’s only cool if you already know the background information to understand it – to grasp how and why it’s cool. Trying to present enough background to explain why this concept is awesome during the course of a conversation really just doesn’t work, as they don’t get a deep enough understanding of the background to see why it’s cool and spending several minutes attempting to explain frustrates me and bores them." As a male software developer, this frustrates me too. You just get eye-rolls and snarky replies of 'flux capacitor?'

elliottkember 15y ago
I hear you on this one. I think it's fashionable to not have to know anything. Look at our role models, for example - celebrities. Not so many scientists or mathematicians, mostly glitterati or athletes. It's a bit worrying.

andreiursan 15y ago

my experience: Where I work, on my floor we are either a proportion of 50% - 50% or 40%-60% (in favor for the Girls). Hey, but this is Romania, we don't have feminist movements and so on. Different society. Even in college we are something like 40%-60% (males win here) but we don't take it as a big deal... Btw found CS girls in college that were smarter than me on some fields of this domain :), and I know where to ask if I have a question about those fields. other answer: Depends on the "society" although while I was in the USA everybody was blaming it... and believe me is not because of it, is because of those who like to blame it ;). Last but not least... my girlfriend is a developer.

deleted 15y ago
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jwwest 15y ago

I can barely put up with all of the jerks in our industry as a man, I don't want to think about what it would be like as a woman.

flocial 15y ago

Forgot where I read it but like true_religion said, some female programmers came into the field by way of secretary. As they kept typing instructions, they eventually figured out how computers work. This photo set from Bell Labs taken in the 1960s is pretty interesting: http://www.luckham.org/LHL.Bell%20Labs%20Days.html http://www.luckham.org/LHL.Bell%20Labs%20Days.html One thing to note is that despite computers being a novelty back then is that primary education was in a much better state and students had a stronger foundation in science and math regardless of sex. Many long-time teachers would say (with some nostalgia premium) that high school graduates of the 1960s are equivalent to college graduates of today. Another thing that isn't touched on is that computer programming as it stands right now is not a very female friendly profession. Women will usually factor in the possibility that their careers may get derailed at some point by having a child. Careers where time away from the field doesn't obsolete your skills is a big plus for women. Medicine and law are excellent fields in that regard. "Partly because it is so tricky to juggle kids and a career, many highly able women opt for jobs with predictable hours, such as human resources or accounting. They also gravitate towards fields where their skills are less likely to become obsolete if they take a career break, which is perhaps one reason why nearly two-thirds of new American law graduates are female but only 18% of engineers. A study by the Centre for Work-Life Policy, a think-tank based in New York, found that, in 2009, 31% of American women had taken a career break (for an average of 2.7 years) and 66% had switched to working part-time or flexible-time in order to balance work and family. Having left the fast track, many women find it hard to get back on. " http://www.economist.com/node/18988694 http://www.economist.com/node/18988694

maeon3 15y ago

Of all of the female computer programmers I've gotten to know well and worked with (maybe 4 or 5), none of them were half as good as the average male programmer I've gotten to know. Programming is, and always will be a male profession. The only thing that will change this is if we force women to learn programming, but even then you can't make them like it. I think the solution here is to realize that there is a physical pre-programmed revulsion to everything that Higher math, Physics and Programming have to offer.

zerohp 15y ago
I've had the opportunity to work with several women programmers. I don't think they were worse than average but none of them live to write software and use technology as a lifestyle. I have never met a female programmer that was self-taught. I think the answer to the original question (in the title here, not the Fog Creek post) is that the rise of personal computers, and parental influence on girls at the time drove them away from it. Prior to the personal computer, most programmers were being introduced to the field in college. At the dawn of personal computing, parents viewed it as a male activity, like radio or electronics. Once this generation reached college, the males had many years of experience exploring their curiosity at home that the females did not have. College course work had to adapt to this with increased expectations of incoming freshman into Computer Science programs, which left those without computer experience intimidated and struggling.
- Jem 15y ago
  > I have never met a female programmer that was self-taught. Hi, how you doin' :)
britta 15y ago
"there is a physical pre-programmed revulsion to everything that Higher math, Physics and Programming have to offer." This is not consistent with my understanding of myself or all the other women I've known, and it does not seem to make sense based on the women that you've known either - maybe the female programmers you've met weren't awesome at what they did, but why would they have chosen this profession if they felt a deep revulsion every day when they were learning how to program? I am sorry that you imagine that all the many women who enjoy making contributions to these fields are fighting against some inherent evolved dislike for them, instead of reaching deep into their personal enthusiasm for these fields and fighting against the sexist attitudes and cultures they often run into.

WalterSear 15y ago

For better or worse, the thing that jumps out at me from that graph is that the numbers all look similar until you get to the code review, where half as many women made the cut as men. If this is a statistically significant difference, it speaks volumes.

kamaal 15y ago

While we analyze why there isn't much gender diversity as it is before. We must also understand how much the industry has changed over years. The volume of work that existed back in the pre - 80's era and now isn't even comparable. And with volume the culture of our profession has changed drastically. If its your usual 9-5 job, where you have to apply routine steps everyday then it would have been OK. But being progressive in programming requires you not just to work hard(And in most cases working under difficult deadlines and overnight) you also have continuously keep learning and update yourself with things that come along everyday. This is pretty demanding if you have a family, kids and especially when you are pregnant etc. There are physical limitations in those issues. If I look at the way my career has been, I sort of had to stay and overnights and work on difficult deadlines many times over long periods. It becomes very difficult for a mother with kids to accommodate work and family in that kind of schedule. So she has to often opt to be one side. A general counter point presented to this argument is to ask the Project manager to be more come with a more accommodating plan.This is often not possible due to economic reasons, given the time, money and resource something needs to be delivered. This has nothing to do with male domination in the society, these are just unavoidable situations. This is typical of many other professions. Why don't we find as many female cab drivers as male ones? Why don't we have as many frontline female soldiers/nurses? Let alone all that, if the current biological situation was reversed. And men could stay at home(Do the house choses, kids, food etc) and women had to take all responsibilities of house, family, money and security for their whole life. How many women in mass(not individual cases) would be happy with such a tiring and demanding life? Well I guess everything in the nature and the way things go have a purpose.

ladyphp 15y ago

Asking why there aren't more female developers is like asking why there aren't more guys who go into nursing or more guys who wanna be fashion designers or a chef. Perhaps its personal interest, societal view that industries like games and computers are more masculine... Honestly, who cares if the developer is a chick or a guy as long as the application or site being built is useful

fauigerzigerk 15y ago

But the most common explanation is that the rise of personal computers led computing culture to be associated with the stereotype of the eccentric, antisocial, male “hacker.” I think that's right, but the question is why girls did not use the opportunity that presented itself and put their own cultural stamp on it.

6ren 15y ago

Do the influxes of women correlate with industry stability? Women tend to not like to waste their time, but men will take high risks for high returns (according to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2767867 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2767867). So, men will explore, discover, invent. Some get rich; most get nothing. Women prefer reliable reward for effort e.g. law and medicine. But the computer industry has been characterized by periodic disruptions of new hardware (mainframe, minicomputer, desktop), and while those revolutions were opportunities to make a fortune, they were not stable. Currently, the early land-grab of the web seems to have subsided and its future looks secure (e.g. smartphones aren't dethroning it). If we have entered a period of stability, it may be more attractive to women.