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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.

• 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.
    • curtis 15y ago
      I don't think it's just perception. Doctors really do deal with other people -- both patients and coworkers -- more than software engineers do.
      • ma2rten 15y ago
        Yes, but that does not mean that software engineers are not helping people (indirectly).
        • politician 15y ago
          Indeed! Warehouse automation software prevents scores of back injuries in the first place, ergo women are shallow. That's tongue-in-cheek, but I'll bet there is a study out there to support the idea that humans do not value indirect effects as much as direct effects.
        • pak 15y ago
          In my experience, maybe 2% of software engineers are incentivized more strongly by positive social change than by money or fame. These are the idealists, like Richard Stallman and former members of OLPC, who are often ridiculed by the rest of the community. Until the academic and governmental infrastructure is able to put anywhere near as much money into CS research as private industry, the majority of technologists will (have to) be driven by the desire to make money. For all the talk of how doctors make a lot of money, the reason they do is that so few are both qualified and willing to take the long, grinding road through 8 years of medical school and residency, $200k in debt, and 80 hour work weeks, with fierce competition at every step of the way. According to the med students I know, if you aren't inspired by some higher calling it's almost not worth it because you won't make it through.
          • mahyarm 15y ago
            And medical education doesn't have to be structured that way at all. Medicine could be like engineering, where you start on day one of your undergrad and take 5-6 years in an average university setting, and 80 hour residency programs are just counter productive.
    • igorgue 15y ago
      If you go by that logic, nobody would study finance (or any financial business career). But they're hugely popular.
  • gaius 15y ago
    That is actually the only plausible explanation at this point in history. The average woman looks at the long hours and job insecurity in high tech and thinks "this is just not worth it". Men, historically, have always done these kinds of jobs and still do. We don't see feminists agitating for more woman refuse collectors do we?
    • jff 15y ago
      As opposed to the low-stress 9-5 world of medicine?
      • dpritchett 15y ago
        Doesn't an M.D. imply more job security and a higher starting wage than any C.S. credential?
        • gaius 15y ago
          Quite. Can't outsource a surgeon, can you? Not to mention the social prestige.
          • joeyo 15y ago
            At the risk of getting quite off-topic, in my opinion most physicians will eventually be replaced by a combination of Bayesian diagnostic software and surgical robotics. There will be an intermediate period where physicians will control and oversee the software and robots, but this too will pass. Those tasks which cannot be easily roboticized (for example, all the soft skills) will be shifted over to nurses.
            • neutronicus 15y ago
              It's sor tof happening (not the tech part). I dated a nurse practitioner for a while, and the medical industry is putting more and more responsibility into their hands to save money.
            • 15y ago
  • saturn 15y ago
    > The worst physician's salary averages about $50K more than the best programmer's salary. Nurses get paid as much as programmers I was all primed with a fiery response about how good programmers in hot markets should be pulling more than 200k, lousy markets at least 100k, and anyone who wasn't is either a lousy negotiator or not good, but then I remembered where I was. The crème de la crème. Yeah, "staff programmers" (as I call them) might well earn less, on average, than nurses. And it's a guaranteed, standardised wage, none of this grasping meritocracy competitive nonsense. The thing about programming is that it gives you a chance to shine. I mean really shine. God bless the nurses, etc, but realistically speaking any one nurse is not going to change the world just by being a bloody good nurse. I think the attraction to the high-stakes sink-or-swim pure meritocracy game is a very male thing.
    • rdouble 15y ago
      Even if you shine you don't make as much as a general physician, and you'll never make as much as a dermatologist. If you want to get rich as a programmer you have to attach yourself to a liquidity event or run your own business.
      • saturn 15y ago
        Isn't it the case that if you want to get rich as a GP or specialist you have to start your own business, too? Also known as a practise? It is known that you'll never get rich working for someone else, but that applies to all trades and I don't see any reason why starting one as a programmer is dramatically different from starting one as a GP, or a plumber, or any other kind of highly skilled and valuable trade.
        • rdouble 15y ago
          It depends on what you mean by rich. If you want beaucoup dollars (millions) it does help to own the cardiology clinic. However, my dad hires physicians for a rural health care system. A cardiologist in this area can get paid a salary of $350,000 per year, guaranteed three year contract. This is in the middle of nowhere, where a nice house can cost $100K and a king's mansion costs about $400K. That is "rich" by most of the world's standards. The option to throw a dart at a map, move there, and make a $300K+ a year without running a business is simply not available to programmers (or any other profession.)
  • krakensden 15y ago
    > The worst physician's salary averages about $50K more than the best programmer's salary And they have to spend ten extra years in school, none of which is guaranteed to do anything but leave them poorer.
    • drgath 15y ago
      Very true. While unlikely, it is certainly possible to rise to the top of the industry in CS without even graduating high school. Medical field? No way.
  • Duff 15y ago
    More than that, medicine is more portable. At a typical large company, the ingress point into the company is at an entry-level position. Many women want to interrupt employment when they have children, which isn't practical for a IT person or programmer at a bank or government agency. My mother, to use a fairly typical example, is a nurse. She took 5-6 years off at various times when my siblings were born or when daycare costs became prohibitive. Impact on her career? Not too bad -- hospitals need nurses, especially nurses with the specialist certifications she had.
    • SoftwareMaven 15y ago
      Why should it be a big deal if you interrupt your career for a few years (whether to have a family or to travel the world...somehow I bet the second would be seen as ok in tech circles)? A good programmer can pick up a new technology in a couple of months. If you are hiring based on candidates winning resume buzzword bingo, you are going to get crappy candidates anyway. Hire for intelligence and capability and five years off to have a couple of kids is meaningless.
      • Duff 15y ago
        I agree. I think paid sabbaticals have positive ROI too. Number crunchers don't think in those terms though.
        • bugsy 15y ago
          Good comment. Great point about sabbaticals. It's a pity that when I read your good comments and the one above it, both had been downvoted into the grey. Many newcomers here at HN don't seem to understand that downvoting here is not meant to indicate that one doesn't like an opinion, it's supposed to be for comments that are abusive, obviously trolling, or that contribute nothing. I propose an improvement to the downvoting API: One can downvote all they want, but each downvote will cost 1 karma/reputation point. That way, people with much good reputation can as needed mark abusive posts. But the newcomers will think more carefully about marking down posts they simply don't agree with since it can plunge them into negative.
  • seanalltogether 15y ago
    Perhaps it's because medicine is way more academic then programming. I think programming has more in relation with a skilled trade then with an academic based career, and the skilleds trades are notoriously male dominated.
• Cushman 15y ago
  Yeah, it's not a necessarily female response. I'm sure lots of male devs would be more attracted by constructive rather than competitive language. But actually, I love that. They asked her for advice on marketing their program to women, and she gave them advice on marketing their program in general. Good show.
  • jamii 15y ago
    > I'm sure lots of male devs would be more attracted by constructive rather than competitive language. I usually look for some measure of professionalism. There is nothing wrong with being passionate about your work but talk of ninjas and rockstars stinks of arrogance and is always offputting. Things like this are much more attractive, personally: Rethinkdb: "While everyone at RethinkDB has the determination to move heaven and earth to succeed, we prefer to get stuff done quickly and go home to our families, instead of living our lives in the office." Jane St: "We put aside ego, politics, and appearance to focus on truth. We try to admit when we are wrong, talk about our mistakes, and challenge our previous conclusions." Basho: "If you are smarter than everyone else, the absolute smartest person you know -- as in you win every argument because you are so smart and no problem cannot be solved by a quick application of your smarts -- please do not apply. We are human and will disappoint you."
• yardie 15y ago
  This doesn't make any sense to me (not you, the statement). Some of the most competitive people I know are women. And if you've been on a university campus it's stacked top to bottom with women competing for highly selective majors. CS and Sft.Eng. seems to be an outlier in this, but chem, bio, business, and econ are populated with really smart graduate women. Even when I was in highschool 10 years ago the top 10 students, 6 of them were girls. The salutatorian was a girl and she let everyone know how displeased she was for not getting valedictorian (beaten by 1/100 of a point). Women are turned off of CS and I can assure it's not the competitive language.
  • imajes 15y ago
    so what is it, then?
    • lurker19 15y ago
      The computers.
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• mrkurt 15y ago
  Premed and organic chem aren't advertised in "competitive language", though. How often do you see schools write course descriptions like "we're seeking the world's best chemistry ninjas to help us take our chemistry educating to the next level?"
  • yummyfajitas 15y ago
    Just as often as course descriptions say "we're seeking the world's best javascript ninjas".
    • mrkurt 15y ago
      We were comparing things like the Google Summer of Code description (referenced in the article) to premed (referenced in the parent of my comment). I'm sure programming courses don't have the competitive language, but I suspect premed courses correlate more strongly to the types of people who'd want to be doctors than programming courses correlate to the types of people who'd want to work at Fog Creek.
• mapgrep 15y ago
  She didn't say she was put off by competition, she said she was put off by competitive language in the job listing. She recommended more focus on the collaborative side of the internship - mentorship, line by line code review, and being part of decisionmaking. "Things that have to do with collaboration and learning appeal a lot more to female candidates." Couching something in mainly competitive terms does not just advertise that it's competitive, it also hints that there's a sort of pissing contest atmosphere at work. In the case of Fog Creek, it was an inadvertent, false signal, but what this woman is saying is that it's a negative indicator many women watch out for. You can be at once highly qualified for a competitive field and drawn to that field for reasons having nothing to do with competition. Those female premeds are almost certainly more interested in working with patients than in beating their chest and bragging about how they got into a good med school. (And I'd venture the same holds true for the males.)
  • Locke1689 15y ago
    A very good point, I'd agree with this.
  • palish 15y ago
    Perhaps someone would like to paste some job listings from other fields, like realestate or nursing, so everyone can see how they compare with CS?
    • lurker19 15y ago
      http://redfin.com/jobs http://redfin.com/jobs has programming, real estate, and real estate programming.
  • imajes 15y ago
    hate to do this, but... "this". CS is one of the very few industries i've ever been been around which engages in the "i'm better than you" pissing contest, EVERY SINGLE DAY, and yet asks itself why everyone looks the same. I really do hope that at some point, we lose our sneer and arrogance and stop thinking that we're better than everyone just because we have some kind of exclusive skill that's alien to most.
• lmkg 15y ago
  You misunderstand the quote. It's not saying that CS positions are too competitive. It's saying they're described as being about competition. Medical degrees are competitive, but they're not about the competition, they're about helping people. Meanwhile, CS is promoted by hosting coding challenges and competitions, and the top-tier jobs advertise how their teams are so much smarter and more accomplished than everyone, and so forth. This creates the perception that not only is the field competitive, but that the competition is practically an end in itself, where in medicine it's an obstacle to the actual goal of helping people (or getting a gigantic salary).
• rweba 15y ago
  " Honestly, when you hear the phrase 'the world’s best developers,' you see a guy. " Thats the key right there - women are comfortable competing, they just have a hard time picturing themselves as the alpha geek hacker that this competitive language brings to mind for many people. At least thats how I interpreted it. Also there are studies that women tend to underestimate their skills while men tend to overestimate them which might also be relevant, see Sheryl Sandberg's commencement address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdvXCKFNqTY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdvXCKFNqTY
  • jamesteow 15y ago
    "Also there are studies that women tend to underestimate their skills while men tend to overestimate them which might also be relevant." In general, men have far more pressure to be confident than women do.
    • kamaal 15y ago
      This is actually a very important point, I work so hard currently because I know I will have to secure my family's financial future after I get married. On the other hand, If I were to be a girl I would be a lot more relaxed in may approach because I know my earnings are not the primary source of income to my family. And husband is going to take care of it anyways.
      • lsc 15y ago
        Meh, I think most of the 'pressure to act confident' has little to do with wages and a lot to do with social mores. I have worked with many people over the years with much less confidence than I have who managed to out-earn me. I've met more women who would prefer a relationship with a confident man who earned less than they do than I've met women who would prefer a relationship with a less-confident man who did earn more. I mean, that's all anecdotal, but I've been both (comparatively) wealthy and unconfident, poor and confident, and wealthy and confident, and as far as I can tell, the comparative level of wealth involved has little to do with dating outcomes. On the subject of being out-earned, with traditionally male jobs falling out of favor and traditionally female jobs rising in importance and pay, it seems that us men may not end up being the primary provider for our families[1] this is consistent with my observation both of the lower class and the upper middle class people I know. [1]http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.html http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00....
• gdilla 15y ago
  Aren't we missing something here? Med schools try to have 50/50 gender split in their incoming classes. Heck, patients certainly 50/50. Med schools don't even want gender diversity, they want gender parity. CS departments can't fathom such a thing. And while employers like diversity, they don't need parity. Startups need skills, not stats, so it's not a priority for them either. I'm not saying females are not on par with their male counterparts in s/w and medicine by any means. But at least their are role models and courtship in medicine.
  • _delirium 15y ago
    I think a lot of CS departments would be happy to aim at 50/50 gender parity, if their application pipeline were anywhere near close enough to support it. When applicant ratios are in the range of 90% male, it's very hard to get more than 20-30% women in the incoming class, even if you really go out of your way to aim at gender balance. It took med schools a few decades too, over which they first removed overt barriers (like "medicine isn't for women" attitudes among faculty), then successfully convinced more women to apply, and then finally accepted many of those applying women. CS's troubles are complex, but I think one of the stickiest ones is that interest/disinterest in studying CS seems to develop around high-school (same as studying math), so the imbalance somehow has to be addressed at the pre-university level. Med-school doesn't seem to have the same differentiate-by-age-15 aspect.
  • vacri 15y ago
    Gender parity is more significant for medicine as there are a great many patients who have trouble working with a doctor of a particular gender. It's not always same-gender pref either - I know of two women who prefer male gynaecologists because they're less rough when examining. Given the importance of medicine to leading a happy life, it's important to get as much information out of patients as possible - so it's in the interest of the industry to make sure that the client-facing staff have plenty of both genders. It's much less important in programming as users and programmers rarely interact. Was Firefox written mostly by men or by women? It doesn't matter to me as I don't interact with them in order to use the service Firefox offers.
• bluekeybox 15y ago
  > Why are women turned off by competitiveness in CS, but not in medicine? From my experience, the primary thing driving those who aspire to work in the medical field is not so much salary as employment security. They compete early on (in college and in medical school) so they wouldn't have to compete later when they enter the workspace. I think that the promise of job security (guaranteed employment) has a particular appeal to women. I suspect that their thinking is that once they graduate, they can relax at the high-paying secure job and invest their time and resources into growing children. On the other hand, to me, as a young man looking to enter the startup field, ventures with ongoing high risk and high payoff appeal more than employment guarantees. I dropped out of premed and started programming and studying art sometime in college partly because I was turned off by people whose primary career motivation was job security and who did not have any serious creative pursuits besides their career goals.
• bugsy 15y ago
  That is a very interesting point you make about assumptions being applied to "both" genders. In particular, that advertising competition is considered to be a way to attract manly men to a tech startup. Is this really the best approach? Sure, the high school football player is interested in bashing in the head of his competition and causing them pain. Advertising for those competitive traits are undoubtedly an excellent approach to attracting the most sociopathic used car salesmen and wall street traders for who the customer is an enemy to be bilked. But is that criteria what best motivates inventors and designers as well? Myself, I design things because I like to make cool stuff for people to use and I am really good at it. I spend a lot of time thinking about and experimenting with usability. I have found that an interest in making cool useful things is something that brilliant talented designers share with me. I have yet to meet any brilliant designers who are motivated primarily by wanting to destroy their rivals.
• marquis 15y ago
  There's a core issue here I point out to my male colleagues, which I find to be true of myself as a female developer: as a stereotypical trait (I am generalising here, beware!) girls don't find sitting in front of a computer alone all that interesting. I personally value my personal time alone and am fairly unique in this respect (my boyfriend would love it if I wanted to hang out and work with him! But I focus best alone). So I would simply posit that changing the language to focus on the collaboration aspects appeals to more females. I'd love to work on a team of mixed genders (that includes all known genders) - I have yet to have the pleasure. I find working in a team of hetero males can be exclusionary and exhausting, and prefer to work remotely much of the time rather than be in a room of constant male posturing (which many of you do unawares and outside of the work office I'm quite happy to enjoy watching the escapades).
  • alexgartrell 15y ago
    Can you explain what you mean by male posturing?
    • marquis 15y ago
      I don't mean it in anyway as insulting: when a group of guys are together there are in-jokes, playful physical competitiveness (especially when they all know each other well) and talk of girls. All fine things, but spending a year with a bunch of guys in the same room during the workday can get a little draining. If I'm having a bad day it gets difficult when there isn't another female around for support. To clarify: I love working in any environment where I get on with everyone, regardless of gender/choice of music/language. But it's harder if it's a guy I don't get on with, or there is tension of any kind. Having another girl around to offset that makes a huge difference. Wouldn't it be the same if you're a guy and your workplace is all women?
      • blots 15y ago
        I have had a similar experience. I don't mind at all if they talk about the best way to catch a girl at the next party or how cool it would be to hide the word penis in the final version of their thesis. But I can't participate in that talk, though I started to appreciate sexy women now. I just can't help being aware that I'm the only girl an an all male group and feel out of place. I feel more comfortable if I imagine that I'm a guy too, I've even thought if it wouldn't be nice to have a gender change to better fit in.
• temphn 15y ago
  This whole endless search for the reason why "women aren't in computing" is just a modern day version of epicycle theory. In ancient times, they couldn't admit that the earth went around the sun, so they came up with the increasingly baroque epicycle theory, where planets were postulated to do loop-de-loops just so that no one would have to concede heliocentrism. Today we face a similar taboo, held for similar quasi-religious reasons. Our latest epicycle is competitive job postings. This at least is laudably specific; most of these kinds of explanations aren't testable at all. The obvious but taboo answer is that women will generally gravitate to fields which are more social/people focused and less technical/mathematical. That spectrum runs from teaching through medicine in the middle through CS. These trends are due in nontrivial part to genetics. Women are just more social and men more systematizing, on average. As programming went from rote punch card/data entry to something more like physics or math, the percentage of women dropped. All this breast beating is about a refusal to accept that basic biological differences could possibly affect behavior. Indeed, not even the tenured President of Harvard can broach the topic, even if he only moots the possibility of differences in variance rather than mean! It's not much of a debate when those who voice the "partially genetic" position are at risk of losing their jobs.
  • scilro 15y ago
    Your argument falls apart when you posit "worse at math" as an essentialist trait caused by genetics, without so much as a link to a single study showing this. Saying "Women are just more social on average" does not prove that it is genetic. You can probably name at least one woman amazing at math, or one woman amazing at programming. The fact that you can name even one counterexample refutes the proposition that all women are predisposed against mathematical thinking genetically.
    • bugsy 15y ago
      Interesting. I wonder what percentage of Fields medals have been earned by women mathematicians?
      • chalst 15y ago
• ladyphp 15y ago
  Med school appeals to the motherly side of chicks..in fact all of healthcare appeals to our motherly side