6 ms·

Enough women in Coders at Work?

49 points by mqt 17y ago

boggles 17y ago
The trend is not a reflection on Coders at Work but on the industry as a whole. No need for apologies.
- mtrichardson 17y ago
  Saying "That's the way it is, no need to worry about it" is a great way to maintain the status quo and not promote any change.
  - discojesus 17y ago
    and saying "there aren't enough [insert gender/race/other meaningless criterion] in here, so let's add some" is a great way to be full of shit.
    - starchy 17y ago
      What you've done here is to create a straw man by asserting that gender and race are always meaningless criteria. Adding more developers who don't happen to be white and male to the workforce and to books like these helps to create more developers who don't happen to be white and male to the workforce, which aside from being good for those particular people can only lead to a wider variety of ideas in the memepool, which can only be good for those of us who care about ideas. That would be those of us reading this site, unless I've missed something.
      - hughprime 17y ago
        which aside from being good for those particular people I'm not sure that being a software developer is really that great a prize, unless you happen to be one of those small minority of people who just happens to have a brain which really enjoys software development. can only lead to a wider variety of ideas in the memepool Any evidence for the idea that inter-group differences between male and female programmers in terms of the kind of ideas they produce is significant? more developers who don't happen to be white and male I can understand the gender-imbalance thing, but do you really think there's a significant dearth of non-white developers? I could have sworn I saw a bunch of Asians and Indians around here somewhere...
        starchy 17y ago
        "I'm not sure that being a software developer is really that great a prize..." How many software developers give it all up to become housekeepers? Not everyone is best suited for any one job, of course, but that hardly suggests that any one arbitrary class alone is not well suited for it. Considering the average salary, benefits, and job conditions when stacked against many - although certainly not all - careers, being a software developer can be a pretty sweet prize indeed. Finding a non-niche comparable career that is not male dominated to a similar degree is left as an exercise to the reader. "Any evidence for the idea that inter-group differences between male and female programmers in terms of the kind of ideas they produce is significant?" I haven't so far turned up any studies specifically answering the question of significance. However, my assertion that including a greater demographic spread "can only lead to a wider variety of ideas in the memepool" seems self-evident; it could hardly lead to less variety or the same amount, even if the difference would wind up being less than we might hope for. "I can understand the gender-imbalance thing, but do you really think there's a significant dearth of non-white developers? I could have sworn I saw a bunch of Asians and Indians around here somewhere..." Asian and Indian, yes. Black and Latino, not nearly so much in my experience.
        prodigal_erik 17y ago
        > including a greater demographic spread "can only lead to a wider variety of ideas in the memepool" seems self-evident Men are interchangeable? Women are capable of thoughts men aren't? Every rationale for such a statement I've come up with is appalling.
        starchy 17y ago
        The set of all men plus all women is greater than the set of all men. If you find that concept appalling, more power to you.
        prodigal_erik 17y ago
        A larger set to recruit from is merely an easier way to find more developers total, unless there's some reason more women would be valuable but more men would be useless.
      - gloob 17y ago
        can only lead to a wider variety of ideas in the memepool That's rather a weakish argument, I would think. I suspect that people coming from different cultures would be far more likely to think differently about things than someone who comes from the same culture but happens to have a different set of genitalia. Mind you, I'm just pulling this out of my ass myself, so it's entirely possible I'm wrong. Haven't run across any studies about this sort of thing in my casual perusals of the net, though.
        jamesbritt 17y ago
        "Mind you, I'm just pulling this out of my ass myself, so it's entirely possible I'm wrong. Haven't run across any studies about this sort of thing in my casual perusals of the net, though." Still, this is common enough reasoning put forth to have "diversity" in programmer squads and gatherings. I recall looking at a picture of the Clinton White House staff (I think, or cabinet maybe), where the intent was to show the range of sexes and skin colors. Look, diversity! Yet, as a read the names, I was thinking "lawyer, lawyer, lawyer, not sure, lawyer, lawyer, ..." and wondered where, exactly, was the diversity? What is the argument that a geek with black skin will have different geek ideas to offer than a geek with white or yellow skin? Or that genitalia confers a unique technical point of view? I prefer to be among a technical group where there's a diversity of informed opinion, but I'm skeptical that such diversity has a correlation with sex and race. I'd prefer to hang with a mixed crowd of Lispers, Smalltalkers, PHPers, and embedded system developers, than a Rainbow Collation of nothing-but-Java developers.
        ilyak 17y ago
        Modded up, but please no PHP.
      - michaelcampbell 17y ago
        > What you've done here is to create a straw man by asserting that gender and race are always meaningless criteria. As opposed to the much more popular one of asserting that gender and race never aren't meaningless.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - dandelany 17y ago
      If you think that was the extent of the article's point, you didn't read it.
  - camccann 17y ago
    Yes, but hand-wringing over symptoms is a great way to not actually accomplish much change. The solution to "books about programmers don't have enough women in them" is probably not "write about more women in such books". Seibel's discussion of the matter seemed pretty fair and sensible to me, on the whole.
  - roundsquare 17y ago
    How exactly did you get that from the above statement? It wasn't saying "nothing is wrong" it was saying "if something is wrong, the problem is here, no there."
frossie 17y ago
My experience is that people, starting from when we are kids, do notice gender and that the path of least resistance is to do what other people of your gender are doing. So if you’re a girl interested in programming and you see very few other girls and women programming, that’s going to be a obstacle for you to overcome. For what it's worth, I think it is important for children of either gender to see role models of either gender - i.e. I think it is good for girls and boys to have female geek role models, male primary school teachers and so on. I think it promotes a certain amount of gender blindness, which is a good thing. That said, the author beating themselves up about this is unnecessary - I don't think tweens/early teens (when such exposure seems to count the most) are the main audience of his book. If you ask me, one real problem is the fact that many female geeks chose gender-neutral or male pseudonyms online. I understand why they do it, but this reduces the already-small visibility of the gender further.
- mdemare 17y ago
  There are hardly any pseudonyms in this thread that aren't gender-neutral. frossie? boggles? roundsquare? dandelany?
  - frossie 17y ago
    Well that's my point - since most people here are male, failing any other clue, a person could assume everybody is male and not be proven wrong. For what it's worth, of the examples you listed: I am not posting under a pseudonym, it's my real name (trivially googlable) and not at all gender-neutral in my culture - and personally I don't think Dan Delany is that gender neutral :-)
    - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
      No one knows if your name represents you though - I could be "redbloodedmale17" and still be a 40 year old woman. I thought dandelany was from "dandelion", possibly feminine, even if it is Dan Delaney then Dan could be for Danielle (f), Daniel (m), Danika (f), Dante (m), ... on the internetz know one knows your a dog. Woof!
jerf 17y ago
You can't ask "Do I have enough of X?" without first defining "enough". So... what's "enough" women in programming? Anyone want to cross that minefield? If you're not, then you should be aware that you've started something you can't finish, asked a question you've written into the preconditions that you can't answer. That's not necessarily useless, but it's less useful that asking questions you at least might be able to answer I don't have an answer. But I wanted to ask the right question. As with all definition questions, there are multiple valid definitions of "enough". I am seriously interested if you think you have one. I think this is actually a very important question to ask, despite the third-rail nature of it. If we have a "goal" of "more" women, how will we know when we've succeeded? If we can't succeed, it isn't much of a goal, and if we can't tell if we succeeded, then how can we measure progress (objectively or subjectively)?
- silencio 17y ago
  Is the question really about how many women programmers there are compared to men? I was hoping it was more of a "what can we do to make people in general feel like programming is less intimidating/closed off to them, and not just a niche subject?". Not just to women or to young girls, but to everyone. I suspect the number of women interested in programming would rise if we address that, and that would also attract the men that felt like programming was interesting but just not possible for them for whatever reason. Hell, it'd address the gender imbalance and issues with (or the complete lack of) good CS education starting from kids at a young age to college and beyond at the same time. A lot of times I feel like a statistical fluke being a female coder, but I go to a gym with lots of classes for kids, and I have their parents and the kids themselves (a fairly even mix of girls and boys) ask me how to get started programming and learning more about computers. They don't have the resources to learn this in their schools. Their parents don't know anything. They don't know where to find anyone that can be a mentor besides me. It doesn't always have to do with gender. That imbalance might just be a side effect of a bigger problem.
  - jerf 17y ago
    "Is the question really about how many women programmers there are compared to men?" I don't know. Is it? My post just riffed on "enough", and briefly mentioned "more". There's no hint of a measure. That was by design. If it isn't, what is the goal here? (I'm not trying to be a jerk, or really addressing you specifically. I'm trying to Socrates the conversation up a bit, except unlike Socrates I don't really know where I'm going. This conversation just goes in circles with too many people saying "What we have is bad!", but that's not, well, to borrow a word from another culture, actionable.)
ChillyWater 17y ago
My kid has been in day-care for four years now and has been cared for by at least 25 different teachers. Not one of them was male. How can we correct this egregious disparity?
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  Perhaps by avoiding treating every man as a child rapist in waiting. At some point paranoia transforms into prejudice.
- misuba 17y ago
  That disparity is pretty egregious. Modeling for children that men can also give care is actually pretty important.
  - hughprime 17y ago
    I agree, the lack of male teachers is a far more serious problem than the lack of female coders. Too many boys nowadays grow up without fathers. If they don't have any male teachers either, they'll hit puberty before they meet anyone whose behaviour is worth emulating.
    - maryrosecook 17y ago
      How about if they just emulate the female role models in their life?
- mcantelon 17y ago
  What's the pay like for day-care as opposed to programming?
  - jimfl 17y ago
    You can probably make more taking care of pets than children.
    - 17y ago
blacktastic 17y ago
I don't think the idea is to bring more women into the field. The idea is to make the field less known as an all-male bastion. Do we really want our field to be known as bigoted and closed? Or do we want the best and the brightest to consider it a golden opportunity for those who have the chops for it? I don't mind the field being mostly male. I do mind it being known as a ghetto of chauvinists.
icey 17y ago
I have an honest question, I hope this doesn't get taken the wrong way. Is it possible that women just aren't as interested in writing software as men are? I don't think that there's some kind of artificial barrier preventing them from getting in to it; I think if anything, most male programmers would love having some women around. I mean, there are women doctors, lawyers, politicians, executives, accountants, etc etc etc; don't you think it's possible that there aren't many women in this industry just because they're not all that interested in it? I personally think it's a little intellectually dishonest to insist that both genders have the exact same preferences, wants and needs. We understand the differences in gender in every species in the animal kingdom (including the times when there aren't differences), but we refuse to apply a modicum of critical thought to ourselves.
- wglb 17y ago
  I recommend this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5ObAgkqicQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5ObAgkqicQ to everyone here. Note she was interested in programming from a young age, but nobody encouraged her to be an engineer.
  - icey 17y ago
    Thank you for that; it definitely provided a perspective that I hadn't thought of previously. However, I don't know that I agree that if people were encouraged the same that it would somehow make the balance 50/50 or even remotely close to that. Of course, my perspective is limited to personal experience. I have a lot of geeky girls in my family and I know a lot of women who are geeks, and they've all been interested in other geeky pursuits - medicine, psychology, civil engineering, EE, chemistry; none of them have had a remote interest in software specifically. Why? Because it was too boring for them. Maybe we should bring it on ourselves to make the work seem more interesting if we really want to try to bring some balance to the gender mix.
    - mdemare 17y ago
      It may seem boring to them, but we know that it isn't - at all. To me, chemistry seems boring. It's a problem of perception. I can easily imagine a society where 90%+ of the programmers are women, where programming is thought of as a typically female profession, requiring skills such as accuracy and conscientiousness.
jimfl 17y ago
I have been fortunate enough to work in an environment where fully half of the developers were women. It was in state government, which is to say, outside industry. My strong suspicion is that sex bias has little to do with the work, but much more to do with the attitudes of corporate software development, which are (inanely) time-to-market driven.
known 17y ago
Women have different and distinct priorities in life.

49 points by mqt 17y ago

boggles 17y ago

The trend is not a reflection on Coders at Work but on the industry as a whole. No need for apologies.

mtrichardson 17y ago
Saying "That's the way it is, no need to worry about it" is a great way to maintain the status quo and not promote any change.
- discojesus 17y ago
  and saying "there aren't enough [insert gender/race/other meaningless criterion] in here, so let's add some" is a great way to be full of shit.
  - starchy 17y ago
    What you've done here is to create a straw man by asserting that gender and race are always meaningless criteria. Adding more developers who don't happen to be white and male to the workforce and to books like these helps to create more developers who don't happen to be white and male to the workforce, which aside from being good for those particular people can only lead to a wider variety of ideas in the memepool, which can only be good for those of us who care about ideas. That would be those of us reading this site, unless I've missed something.
    - hughprime 17y ago
      which aside from being good for those particular people I'm not sure that being a software developer is really that great a prize, unless you happen to be one of those small minority of people who just happens to have a brain which really enjoys software development. can only lead to a wider variety of ideas in the memepool Any evidence for the idea that inter-group differences between male and female programmers in terms of the kind of ideas they produce is significant? more developers who don't happen to be white and male I can understand the gender-imbalance thing, but do you really think there's a significant dearth of non-white developers? I could have sworn I saw a bunch of Asians and Indians around here somewhere...
      - starchy 17y ago
        "I'm not sure that being a software developer is really that great a prize..." How many software developers give it all up to become housekeepers? Not everyone is best suited for any one job, of course, but that hardly suggests that any one arbitrary class alone is not well suited for it. Considering the average salary, benefits, and job conditions when stacked against many - although certainly not all - careers, being a software developer can be a pretty sweet prize indeed. Finding a non-niche comparable career that is not male dominated to a similar degree is left as an exercise to the reader. "Any evidence for the idea that inter-group differences between male and female programmers in terms of the kind of ideas they produce is significant?" I haven't so far turned up any studies specifically answering the question of significance. However, my assertion that including a greater demographic spread "can only lead to a wider variety of ideas in the memepool" seems self-evident; it could hardly lead to less variety or the same amount, even if the difference would wind up being less than we might hope for. "I can understand the gender-imbalance thing, but do you really think there's a significant dearth of non-white developers? I could have sworn I saw a bunch of Asians and Indians around here somewhere..." Asian and Indian, yes. Black and Latino, not nearly so much in my experience.
        prodigal_erik 17y ago
        > including a greater demographic spread "can only lead to a wider variety of ideas in the memepool" seems self-evident Men are interchangeable? Women are capable of thoughts men aren't? Every rationale for such a statement I've come up with is appalling.
        starchy 17y ago
        The set of all men plus all women is greater than the set of all men. If you find that concept appalling, more power to you.
        prodigal_erik 17y ago
        A larger set to recruit from is merely an easier way to find more developers total, unless there's some reason more women would be valuable but more men would be useless.
    - gloob 17y ago
      can only lead to a wider variety of ideas in the memepool That's rather a weakish argument, I would think. I suspect that people coming from different cultures would be far more likely to think differently about things than someone who comes from the same culture but happens to have a different set of genitalia. Mind you, I'm just pulling this out of my ass myself, so it's entirely possible I'm wrong. Haven't run across any studies about this sort of thing in my casual perusals of the net, though.
      - jamesbritt 17y ago
        "Mind you, I'm just pulling this out of my ass myself, so it's entirely possible I'm wrong. Haven't run across any studies about this sort of thing in my casual perusals of the net, though." Still, this is common enough reasoning put forth to have "diversity" in programmer squads and gatherings. I recall looking at a picture of the Clinton White House staff (I think, or cabinet maybe), where the intent was to show the range of sexes and skin colors. Look, diversity! Yet, as a read the names, I was thinking "lawyer, lawyer, lawyer, not sure, lawyer, lawyer, ..." and wondered where, exactly, was the diversity? What is the argument that a geek with black skin will have different geek ideas to offer than a geek with white or yellow skin? Or that genitalia confers a unique technical point of view? I prefer to be among a technical group where there's a diversity of informed opinion, but I'm skeptical that such diversity has a correlation with sex and race. I'd prefer to hang with a mixed crowd of Lispers, Smalltalkers, PHPers, and embedded system developers, than a Rainbow Collation of nothing-but-Java developers.
        ilyak 17y ago
        Modded up, but please no PHP.
    - michaelcampbell 17y ago
      > What you've done here is to create a straw man by asserting that gender and race are always meaningless criteria. As opposed to the much more popular one of asserting that gender and race never aren't meaningless.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - dandelany 17y ago
    If you think that was the extent of the article's point, you didn't read it.
- camccann 17y ago
  Yes, but hand-wringing over symptoms is a great way to not actually accomplish much change. The solution to "books about programmers don't have enough women in them" is probably not "write about more women in such books". Seibel's discussion of the matter seemed pretty fair and sensible to me, on the whole.
- roundsquare 17y ago
  How exactly did you get that from the above statement? It wasn't saying "nothing is wrong" it was saying "if something is wrong, the problem is here, no there."

frossie 17y ago

My experience is that people, starting from when we are kids, do notice gender and that the path of least resistance is to do what other people of your gender are doing. So if you’re a girl interested in programming and you see very few other girls and women programming, that’s going to be a obstacle for you to overcome. For what it's worth, I think it is important for children of either gender to see role models of either gender - i.e. I think it is good for girls and boys to have female geek role models, male primary school teachers and so on. I think it promotes a certain amount of gender blindness, which is a good thing. That said, the author beating themselves up about this is unnecessary - I don't think tweens/early teens (when such exposure seems to count the most) are the main audience of his book. If you ask me, one real problem is the fact that many female geeks chose gender-neutral or male pseudonyms online. I understand why they do it, but this reduces the already-small visibility of the gender further.

mdemare 17y ago
There are hardly any pseudonyms in this thread that aren't gender-neutral. frossie? boggles? roundsquare? dandelany?
- frossie 17y ago
  Well that's my point - since most people here are male, failing any other clue, a person could assume everybody is male and not be proven wrong. For what it's worth, of the examples you listed: I am not posting under a pseudonym, it's my real name (trivially googlable) and not at all gender-neutral in my culture - and personally I don't think Dan Delany is that gender neutral :-)
  - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
    No one knows if your name represents you though - I could be "redbloodedmale17" and still be a 40 year old woman. I thought dandelany was from "dandelion", possibly feminine, even if it is Dan Delaney then Dan could be for Danielle (f), Daniel (m), Danika (f), Dante (m), ... on the internetz know one knows your a dog. Woof!

jerf 17y ago

You can't ask "Do I have enough of X?" without first defining "enough". So... what's "enough" women in programming? Anyone want to cross that minefield? If you're not, then you should be aware that you've started something you can't finish, asked a question you've written into the preconditions that you can't answer. That's not necessarily useless, but it's less useful that asking questions you at least might be able to answer I don't have an answer. But I wanted to ask the right question. As with all definition questions, there are multiple valid definitions of "enough". I am seriously interested if you think you have one. I think this is actually a very important question to ask, despite the third-rail nature of it. If we have a "goal" of "more" women, how will we know when we've succeeded? If we can't succeed, it isn't much of a goal, and if we can't tell if we succeeded, then how can we measure progress (objectively or subjectively)?

silencio 17y ago
Is the question really about how many women programmers there are compared to men? I was hoping it was more of a "what can we do to make people in general feel like programming is less intimidating/closed off to them, and not just a niche subject?". Not just to women or to young girls, but to everyone. I suspect the number of women interested in programming would rise if we address that, and that would also attract the men that felt like programming was interesting but just not possible for them for whatever reason. Hell, it'd address the gender imbalance and issues with (or the complete lack of) good CS education starting from kids at a young age to college and beyond at the same time. A lot of times I feel like a statistical fluke being a female coder, but I go to a gym with lots of classes for kids, and I have their parents and the kids themselves (a fairly even mix of girls and boys) ask me how to get started programming and learning more about computers. They don't have the resources to learn this in their schools. Their parents don't know anything. They don't know where to find anyone that can be a mentor besides me. It doesn't always have to do with gender. That imbalance might just be a side effect of a bigger problem.
- jerf 17y ago
  "Is the question really about how many women programmers there are compared to men?" I don't know. Is it? My post just riffed on "enough", and briefly mentioned "more". There's no hint of a measure. That was by design. If it isn't, what is the goal here? (I'm not trying to be a jerk, or really addressing you specifically. I'm trying to Socrates the conversation up a bit, except unlike Socrates I don't really know where I'm going. This conversation just goes in circles with too many people saying "What we have is bad!", but that's not, well, to borrow a word from another culture, actionable.)

ChillyWater 17y ago

My kid has been in day-care for four years now and has been cared for by at least 25 different teachers. Not one of them was male. How can we correct this egregious disparity?

InclinedPlane 17y ago
Perhaps by avoiding treating every man as a child rapist in waiting. At some point paranoia transforms into prejudice.
misuba 17y ago
That disparity is pretty egregious. Modeling for children that men can also give care is actually pretty important.
- hughprime 17y ago
  I agree, the lack of male teachers is a far more serious problem than the lack of female coders. Too many boys nowadays grow up without fathers. If they don't have any male teachers either, they'll hit puberty before they meet anyone whose behaviour is worth emulating.
  - maryrosecook 17y ago
    How about if they just emulate the female role models in their life?
mcantelon 17y ago
What's the pay like for day-care as opposed to programming?
- jimfl 17y ago
  You can probably make more taking care of pets than children.
  - 17y ago

blacktastic 17y ago

I don't think the idea is to bring more women into the field. The idea is to make the field less known as an all-male bastion. Do we really want our field to be known as bigoted and closed? Or do we want the best and the brightest to consider it a golden opportunity for those who have the chops for it? I don't mind the field being mostly male. I do mind it being known as a ghetto of chauvinists.

icey 17y ago

I have an honest question, I hope this doesn't get taken the wrong way. Is it possible that women just aren't as interested in writing software as men are? I don't think that there's some kind of artificial barrier preventing them from getting in to it; I think if anything, most male programmers would love having some women around. I mean, there are women doctors, lawyers, politicians, executives, accountants, etc etc etc; don't you think it's possible that there aren't many women in this industry just because they're not all that interested in it? I personally think it's a little intellectually dishonest to insist that both genders have the exact same preferences, wants and needs. We understand the differences in gender in every species in the animal kingdom (including the times when there aren't differences), but we refuse to apply a modicum of critical thought to ourselves.

wglb 17y ago
I recommend this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5ObAgkqicQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5ObAgkqicQ to everyone here. Note she was interested in programming from a young age, but nobody encouraged her to be an engineer.
- icey 17y ago
  Thank you for that; it definitely provided a perspective that I hadn't thought of previously. However, I don't know that I agree that if people were encouraged the same that it would somehow make the balance 50/50 or even remotely close to that. Of course, my perspective is limited to personal experience. I have a lot of geeky girls in my family and I know a lot of women who are geeks, and they've all been interested in other geeky pursuits - medicine, psychology, civil engineering, EE, chemistry; none of them have had a remote interest in software specifically. Why? Because it was too boring for them. Maybe we should bring it on ourselves to make the work seem more interesting if we really want to try to bring some balance to the gender mix.
  - mdemare 17y ago
    It may seem boring to them, but we know that it isn't - at all. To me, chemistry seems boring. It's a problem of perception. I can easily imagine a society where 90%+ of the programmers are women, where programming is thought of as a typically female profession, requiring skills such as accuracy and conscientiousness.

jimfl 17y ago

I have been fortunate enough to work in an environment where fully half of the developers were women. It was in state government, which is to say, outside industry. My strong suspicion is that sex bias has little to do with the work, but much more to do with the attitudes of corporate software development, which are (inanely) time-to-market driven.

known 17y ago

Women have different and distinct priorities in life.