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Ok, I can see the lopsided lawyers marrying lawyers, but how is it that software developers are so lopsidedly marrying other software developers when something
by StillBored 5y ago
Ok, I can see the lopsided lawyers marrying lawyers, but how is it that software developers are so lopsidedly marrying other software developers when something like 90% of them are male?
I guess pretty much every female software developer marries a male software developer which works out to the 12% number?
Makes me sorta want to see a breakdown by sex. aka "male software developer has a 6% chance of marrying a software developer vs female software developer which has a 95% chance of marrying another software developer."
OTOH, its not as pronounced with nurses which have a similar problem in reverse.
- pjmlp 5y agoPlenty of female devs on most places I have worked since the .COM wave. If I am not mistaken, as per last results, most Informatics/Software Engineering degrees in Portugal have about 50% distribution between genders.
- spurgu 5y ago50% sounds crazy (and unsustainable). The women I've met in tech tend to, on average, have the same ambitions as their male counterparts - they chose this as a job/career, as opposed to having an actual passion for IT. A far cry from "my group of people" who grew up with BBS's, modems, demoscene, internet in the 90's. And I still try to hire only people who have a generic interest in computing and throw graduate resumes in the bin. Even if you discard the "passionate" ones from the equation you should end up with a ton more men, simply because of generic interest in STEM fields. Perhaps it's due to government incentives or something?
- pjmlp 5y agoThe best coders I had the pleasure to work with, were all females, so there is that. A mixed coding environment is always one of the points I assess when I get job offers.
- spurgu 5y agoSure, I appreciate a healthy mix as well. Just saying it's unrealistic to expect a 50/50 distribution of anything, in any field, expecially so in software development. Curious as you mentioned degrees, do you know if the same ratio transfers over to actual work life?
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> Makes me sorta want to see a breakdown by sex. aka "male software developer has a 6% chance of marrying a software developer But this data is specifically "among married couples". The male software developer's chances of marrying a software developer are much, much higher if we just assume he's married in the first place.
- danilor 5y agoI don't get it. Wouldn't anyone's chances of marrying any group be higher if we assume they are married at all? Because "being married" is a super set of "being married to a person from X group"?
- thaumasiotes 5y agoBecause "being married" is a smaller superset of "being married to a software developer" than "being alive" is. It's the same reason there's a higher rate of being married to software developers among people who are married to software developers than there is among the general population.
- JZumun 5y agoI think an extreme example might help: if there are 100 software developers but 98 are single, and 2 are married to each other, then 100% of software developers(that are married couples) have married software developers, even if only 2% of all software developers are married at all.
- kilburn 5y agoIt may also be because only software developers call themselves that. If you look up computer programmers or analysts suddenly it's not that lopsided (they are not even the first group).
- bullen 5y agoWhat is the distinction between Computer programmers and Software developers?
- rPlayer6554 5y agoBut then the weird thing is that web developers have software developers as 4th most likely to marry. Behind nurses, teachers, and managers.
- ra 5y agoIf you don't conflate gender with marriage, there's more opportunity for software developer couples.
- VWWHFSfQ 5y agodefinitely true. But same-sex marriages will not change that number pretty much at all
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pugworthy 5y agoYes as long as SS couples keep it secret. Anonymous surveys are a great way to say that you have a "committed partner" without going into details.
- nayaketo 5y agoEven with people keeping their relationships secret, I doubt SS numbers are that high in the software industry.
- Gigachad 5y agoI would suggest that in a field that is mostly male, including same sex couples changes the results disproportionately compared to more mixed industries.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y agoJudging from my social group, the gay male software engineers are more likely to be married than the straight ones (and I don’t think I could say that about any other profession), and also more likely to be married to another engineer. If I’m right about that, and the effect is strong enough, it could affect the numbers.
- mostertoaster 5y ago
- julianlam 5y agoIf you think lawyers marry lawyers, you should look up physicians!
- pc86 5y agoIt's not all that surprising if you think about it. Let's say you go right to college after HS, and take a year off between college and med school (due to the competitiveness this is becoming very common, maybe even more common than direct admits). You'll enter medical school around age 23 and will be there until around age 27. You'll be a resident until at least 30, but maybe as late as 33 or 34 depending on the specialty - family med is only 3 years but some of the more intense surgical residencies can be 5-6 years. Fellowship is optionally another 1-4 years on top of that. With a few notable exceptions, the most lucrative specialties have you not drawing more than a token paycheck until your late 30's, best case. Combine that 23ish-30ish age range with the fact that many (probably most) residents will work above the ACGME-mandated 80 hours a week for at least the first half of their residency, and I'm honestly shocked it's only ~21% of physicians that marry other physicians. Not to mention the fact that the income bump is substantial. My fiancé is a physician and we met when she was a resident, and I'd say about 40% of all the residents I met during her residency who were in relationships were in a relationship with another physician.
- new_stranger 5y agoSo basically, if you happen to wonder outside long enough you could (theoretically) meet and marry someone that is not a physician - but you'll still never really get to see them? I guess the choice is clear.
- ls612 5y agoIt's insane how much worse med school is now. When my dad went in the 70s he got in straight out of undergrad, spent one year in an internship and 3 years in Ophthalmology residency before getting his first real paychecks around 30. Everything I hear about med school today makes me think he would have never made it nowadays.
- stevekemp 5y ago
- cpwright 5y agoThis is presumably US data given it is from the "American Community Survey". The 90% male ratio is true globally, however in the US, 25% of software developers are female.
- fleddr 5y agoI think that's a good point. Another US bias may be that it seems fairly common to date or marry co-workers, which is not the case everywhere. In some (maybe most) countries in Europe, most people do not move far away from their initial place of birth. Could be for cultural reasons or just because distances are smaller. As such, by the time they are of a dating age, they already have a rich and extended social life. They don't necessarily require the work place as an important source of meeting a partner. In a way, this affords the luxury of keeping work and social separate.
- Causality1 5y agoIt would suggest a lot of software developers are unmarried.
- adrr 5y agoOr they are married and their partner doesn’t work. Or things are getting combined like product managers into software developers.
- bobthepanda 5y agoCS programs at most schools in the US keep getting larger and larger, so that doesn't really surprise me if you assume the age distribution of software engineers resembles a pyramid. The program I went to tripled in size over the course of my time there.
- dumbfoundded 5y agoYeah, I think a relative difference would be more helpful than the absolute number. There are lots of admin people so lots of jobs are likely to end up marrying one.
- dewert 5y agoThere's a link on the page to a different chart that does this. A bit less visually clear, but pretty cool to explore as well.
- comeonseriously 5y agoMy SO and I are both software engineers, so blame me for taking one of the lady devs off the market.
- ozarker 5y agoMy wife and I are too. Though we had our first child last week. She said earlier in the pregnancy that she would like to keep in the workforce. But as each day passes with the baby it feels more likely she'll decide to be a full-time mom. Either decision is fine in my book :)
- comeonseriously 5y agoCongratulations on your first child! That's so cool.
- m0llusk 5y agoKids need programming too.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- CameronNemo 5y agoBoop the snoot in Morse code!
- goldenkey 5y agoAnd Morse code is quite efficient! https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2017/02/08/how-efficient-is-morse-code/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2017/02/08/how-efficient-is-m...
- kmonsen 5y agoCongrats on your child! I can see both sides, but one thing to think about is that coming back to software engineering after 5-10 years away would be brutal. It’s also a place it’s famously easy to coast and take it easy for a while. But if I went through a pregnancy I would need a big rest and enjoy the rewards afterwards :-)
- jrsj 5y agoI would assume it’s partly because software devs tend to work longer hours and do less stuff socially outside of work than average. As an adult I’ve only dated people long term I either met through work or online games.
- vostok 5y agoDo software developers work longer hours? They seem to have the least work hours out of anyone in my upper middle class American peer group.
- mym1990 5y agoI feel like both could seem true depending on the lens of the observer. I've had projects where I feel like I'm cruising to the point of boredom and other projects where it does feel like long work hours. I don't know if I agree with the less social part either, a lot of devs I know are quite social in distinct ways(board games, video games, technical groups, etc...)!
- jrsj 5y agoDepends on the job and the industry I guess. I’ve normally had to do 50-60 hours on a salary unless I’ve ran out of upward mobility at a company & just want to coast for a few months until I find something else
- 999900000999 5y agoMy longest relationship so far was with a software developer. She was great. I think it's just a cool thing to relate too
- monksy 5y agoI can only speak from experience, but I've been on dates with women who openly admit that they've had bad experiences with IT people.
- ungamedplayer 5y agoI can only speak from experience, but I've been on dates with women who openly admit they have had bad experiences with scientists.
- dotancohen 5y agoI can only speak from experience, but I'm very likely to have been that IT guy that your dates have had bad experiences with.
- taneq 5y agoI’d imagine around 50% of married software engineers are women, so I guess the takeaway here is that male devs are doomed unless they can find a nice dev to marry?
- gilgoomesh 5y agoIf 10% of developers are female, there's a potential for 20% of all developers to be in male-female marriages. The data shown here had just 12% which could represent 60% of female software developers marrying male software developers (staggeringly high but not mathematically impossible). I think there's two problems with that premise: (1) a large slice of that marriage number could be male-male or other marriages. (2) the figure "10% of developers are female" is true only if you're looking at global numbers. It's higher in the U.S. where these marriage figures originate.
- kmonsen 5y agoAlso not everyone is married at all.
- klipt 5y ago> Makes me sorta want to see a breakdown by sex. Feast your eyes on this! https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries-whom/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries-whom/ For example it says that while lesbian software developers often marry each other, gay male software developers often marry "recreation and fitness workers". Straight male software engineers often marry within the profession, but also marry nurses, teachers and accountants.
- KptMarchewa 5y agoI did not expect that for female Software Developers, after male Software Developers, second biggest group would be female Software Developers.
- throw1234651234 5y agoNice, but the data here is also lost in the "teachers" and "nurses" top choices for EVERYONE. Would be nice to be able to exclude them.
- brabel 5y agoGiven women almost always marry up (i.e. they marry men who earn more than themselves), if you break this up by sex I am pretty sure the numbers will look very different.
- medstrom 5y agoIn Sweden highly educated women are marrying down. Just goes to show there's no reason not to break this sort of data analysis up per country and sex, it's not hard to do and will give much more relevant numbers to whomsoever it concerns.
- dagw 5y agoDo you have a source for this?
- medstrom 5y agoSorry, just anecdata from people I know. Perhaps I should not have posted.
- siva7 5y agoI got one: https://theblog.okcupid.com/how-important-college-is-to-millennial-daters-760c2c72e6f9 https://theblog.okcupid.com/how-important-college-is-to-mill... It's the same in germany. It also comes down that people here don't care that much about degrees but value other things more if they have to choose.
- dagw 5y agoDating and marrying are two hugely different things. Stereotypically, dating unemployed musicians and artists few years before marrying a white collar worker from your own social background is almost a rite of passage.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- idk1 5y agoI'm a male software engineer and I'm marrying a male software engineer, that may account for some the data too.
- sofixa 5y agoCongrats! That's what i thought as well, from anecdata it seems to me the overwhelming majority of females and gay males in software development or IT live with males or females from the same industry. I wonder if one day the industry is more evenly distributed if we'd see a similar percentage as for lawyers.
- lopis 5y agoMaybe most straight male software engineers never get married?
- kharak 5y agoA bit off-topic, but I'm wondering if the homosexual dating pool among software developers is bigger than the heterosexual dating pool. edit just to clarify, for men. Dating pool for homosexual/heterosexual men.
- dotancohen 5y agoNot everybody develops in Javascript on a Mac.
- xutopia 5y agoWhere I work we have about 30% women on my team of devs.
- topkai22 5y agoUS software developers are 19.4% female. Also, a same profession couple counts twice, so only roughly 1/3 off the female population is required to marry 6% of the female population and get to an aggregate of 12%. Same sex couples complicate this math, but I think the overall proportions would hold true. If you want a REALLY crazy number, look at physicians marrying physicians, it’s like 45%