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>One is that women simply aren't as good at programming as men are. The other is that there is a persistent and difficult cultural bias against women in this in

• neilk 11y ago
  I know you probably think you're being a skeptical and intelligent speaker of uncomfortable truths. But you're a lot more like a climate change denier. You're going with your gut and not the facts. This graph says it all, I think. Is it really conceivable that women were more interested in computing when it was all about hand-coding assembly for a modest amount of money, and less interested now that you can make >$100K/year doing Rails from home? http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom... There's tons of evidence that women are excluded from our industry, at every level -- high school, university, and even the ones that graduate and go on to work in the industry drop out at a very high rate. Other scientific or mathematical fields do not have the same problem. You will probably now try to bury me with various quibbles, because you can argue against any statistic. but maybe you could try ASKING A WOMAN. Anecdotally, I know many women who have since found coding later in life. I've heard several times that they wandered into some science or computer club early on and had horrible experiences and left. They're coming into it now, mostly due to the high demand for engineers such that the industry is (reluctantly) hiring people who don't have the ideal background, and actually training them. So these women are finding out, for the first time, that they aren't bad at technical things. It was just that the field was so gendered, and they came from environments that were strongly biased.
  • cgh 11y ago
    Agh, you beat me to it with that link. Also, nice analogy with climate change.
  • borgia 11y ago
    >I know you probably think you're being a skeptical and intelligent speaker of uncomfortable truths. But you're a lot more like a climate change denier. You're going with your gut and not the facts. >You will probably now try to bury me with various quibbles, because you can argue against any statistic. but maybe you could try ASKING A WOMAN. That's a heck of a lot of assumptions you're making about me, Neil. I can't understand how you came to the belief that this kind of gruff contributes to the conversation let alone to your point. >Is it really conceivable that women were more interested in computing when it was all about hand-coding assembly for a modest amount of money, and less interested now that you can make >$100K/year doing Rails from home? Is it really conceivable that women are abandoning well paid careers in business and other areas to become yoga instructors? Or life coaches? Or re-training in psychology? Or starting their own home businesses on etsy or similar? There's seemingly more ways to make money than ever before. Just because sitting at home grinding out a rails app is an appealing way to make money to you, doesn't necessarily mean it is to others. >There's tons of evidence that women are excluded from our industry, at every level -- high school, university, and even the ones that graduate and go on to work in the industry drop out at a very high rate. Other scientific or mathematical fields do not have the same problem. How many of their male counterparts drop out of the tech industry? Or move into non-tech roles within it? On a second point, how much more socially acceptable is it for a woman to change careers or to become stay-at-home mothers than it is for men? I've read studies about self-actualization that have concluded that more than twice as many women achieve self-actualization than their male counterparts, so maybe it's a case of more women realising how lacking in substance tech work really is and getting out of it, than their male counterparts who simply struggle on with it? And by the way, Neil, I have talked to women about this. My own partner is a very successful female in a competitive, scientific area. I've worked with many female engineers over the years also. I've also seen first hand, and have actively supported, many female engineers leaving the industry to do something they find more fulfilling. This is a complex topic and we're not going to agree on everything. Building me up, even internally, as some demonic misogynist who has no contact with women isn't going to do or contribute much though.
• RodericDay 11y ago
  > Women dominate many professions. Men dominate many professions. As a society we don't need to have an equal number of penises and vaginas present in all professions. If you did just a bit of critical thinking about which genders dominate which professions and why, including historical trends, you'd arrive to either two conclusions. 1) One gender is naturally predisposed to being nurturing and subjugated and taken care of and caring, or 2) there have been cultural protectionist barriers set up to protect the most bountiful activities. What did people say before women reached parity or near-parity in Law and Medicine? Were they biologically disinclined then too?
  • Kalium 11y ago
    Or 3) the previous binary is overly simplistic. Bear in mind that there are studies in apes demonstrating preferences in toys that mirror what is widely assumed to be purely cultural influences in humans.
    • nine_k 11y ago
      (Offtopic:) Why do you think apes lack some kind of culture? I wonder how was the studies controlled for that.
      • Kalium 11y ago
        I don't think apes culture-free. I suspect ape culture is highly unlikely to have gendering of wheeled toys. Mostly because that requires the discovery/invention of wheels and so on, which ape cultures outside our own have largely not managed.
      • nerfhammer 11y ago
        It's reliable across different populations and has been demonstrated in monkeys (non-apes), for which the existence of culture may be more more doubtful. It's pretty easy to replicate, here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm9xXyw2f7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm9xXyw2f7g
  • drzaiusapelord 11y ago
• beat 11y ago
  "Less interest" along gender lines sounds like a good explanation... until you toss in racial lines as well. Black and Latino representation in IT is even worse than female representation. This strongly suggests that the problem is a matter of culture, not gender.
  • tomjen3 11y ago
    Blacks are also horribly overrepresented in prison - likely because they grow up in poverty. This also makes it more difficult to study and that is the prize of admission to the coding group (you can learn to program for no more than the cost of a computer, an internet connection and electricity).
    • amyjess 11y ago
      Yes: it's not just about money, but also about being able to take the time to study and practice. This affects the really poor: for example, if you're working three retail jobs just to stay afloat, you're not going to have any time to hone your skills or hobbies.
      • err4nt 11y ago
        But people in prison have all day to learn new skills!
        • jongraehl 11y ago
          And internet and computers whenever they want! (I'm being sarcastic here; not sure 'bout parent err4nt)
    • pekk 11y ago
      > you can learn to program for no more than the cost of a computer, an internet connection and electricity which by no means will ever get you a job in the tech industry. Nice hobby, though.
      • 11y ago
• cgh 11y ago
  By the early '80s, around 35% of all comp sci degrees went to women[1] and roughly the same percentage worked as programmers. The old "they're just different!" argument doesn't cut it when viewed historically. [1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...
  • rjsw 11y ago
    I would see the mid 80s as the point where wider society became aware that computer programming existed as a job, your link does suggest this but also puts some blame on parents. Before this point there was no negative pressure on women to avoid it as a career, they just drifted into it same as the men.
    • cgh 11y ago
      I work with a lot of Indian and Chinese programmers and plenty of them are women. I've asked them about the whole "why are there so few women in programming?" thing and they look at me like I have three heads. To them, it's like saying "have you notice that accountants often have red hair?" It's just a normal job that you get, no real stigma attached.
      • walshemj 11y ago
        That's because of "extreme" societal pressures to get a "good" job though engineering is often seen as third best behind Medical and Lawyers.
  • TylerE 11y ago
    I heard an intresting argument once, I think it was on Planet Money or Freakanomics, that argued that early personal computer advertising had a major role. Early on it was a career or maybe a video game. In the early 80s when home systems like the C64 and TRS-80 were hitting the market they were marketed, essentially, as toys for boys. So people bought them for their kids. Their male kids. Fast forward 10 years and the comp sci demographics shift.
• zevyoura 11y ago
  This doesn't explain the significant changes in gender ratios since the 1980s.
  • daemonfire300 11y ago
    Neither does the argument of the "patriarchy" which if you go after the graph would have suddenly appeared in 1980 and only in CS domain. This whole discussion is so black and white. One person claims it's 100% natural, the other claims it's 100% not natural. Why can't it be 50% natural and 50% biased? Why is there no fine grained discussion, still...
• spaga 11y ago
  Relevant excerpt, courtesy of Scott Alexander and his essay, "Untitled" (via Slate Star Codex); this particular excerpt is about blaming "nerds" and for a supposed anti-women culture in tech, but addresses some gender issues relevant to the parent/grandparent and the discussion generated: -- By late high school, the gap between men and women in math and programming is already as large as it will ever be. Yes, it’s true that only 20 – 23% of tech workers are women. But less than twenty percent of high school students who choose to the AP Computer Science test are women. Nothing that happens between twelfth grade and death decreases the percent of women interested in computer science one whit. I have no hard numbers on anything before high school, but from anecdotal evidence I know very very many young men who were programming BASIC on their dad’s old computer in elementary school, and only a tiny handful of young women who were doing the same. I don’t want to get into a drawn out inborn-ability versus acculutration fight here. I want to say that I want to say that whether we attribute this to inborn ability or to acculturation, the entire gender gap has been determined in high school if not before. If anything, women actually gain a few percentage points as they enter Silicon Valley. What the heck do high schoolers know about whether Silicon Valley culture is sexist or not? Even if you admit that all the online articles talking about this are being read by fourteen year olds in between Harry Potter and Twilight, these articles are a very new phenomenon and my stats are older than they are. Are you saying the is because of a high level of penetration of rumors about “toxic brogrammers” into the world of the average 11th grader? The entire case for Silicon Valley misogyny driving women out of tech is a giant post hoc ergo propter hoc. What’s worse, I have never heard any feminist give this case in anything like a principled way. The explanation is usually just something like of course men would use their privilege to guard a well-paying and socially prestigious field like programming from women, men have always guarded their privileges, they’ve never given anything up to women without a fight, etc. My own field is medicine. More than half of medical students are female. In two years, more than half of doctors in the UK will be female, and the US is close behind. Medicine is better-paying and more prestigious than programming. It’s also terrible. Medicine is full of extremely abrasive personalities. Medicine has long work hours. Medicine will laugh at you hysterically if you say you want to balance work and family life. But women can’t get into medicine fast enough. Every so often medical journals and the popular news run scare stories about how there are so many women in medicine now that if they take off time to raise kids at their accustomed rates we’re suddenly going to find ourselves pretty much doctorless. So any explanation of the low number of women in Silicon Valley has to equally well explain their comparatively high numbers in medicine. Given all this, it’s really easy for me to see why it’s tempting to blame nerds. Look at these low-status people. It’s their fault. We already dislike them, now we have an even better reason to dislike them that nicely wraps up an otherwise embarassing mystery. They’re clearly repelling women with their rapey creepishness. It doesn’t hurt that occasional high profile stories of sexual harassment come out of Silicon Valley aren’t hard to find and bring viral. (no one ever asks whether there are an equally high number of stories of sexual harassment in medicine – or law, or any other field – that no one had a reason to publicize. When I was in medical school, there was an extremely creepy incident of sexual harassment/borderline attempted rape involving a female medical student and male doctor at an outlying hospital where I worked. Nobody put it on the front page of Gawker, because the doctor involved wasn’t a nerd and no one feels any particular need to tar all doctors as sexist.) But again, you really can’t blame this one on Silicon Valley nerds, unless they are breaking into high schools and harassing the women there. And possibly breaking into grade schools, demanding the young boys start tinkering with BASIC. Time for a better theory. A look at percent female physicians by subspecialty is instructive. The specialty with the most women is pediatrics, followed by child psychiatry, followed by obstetrics, followed by – you get the picture. The specialties with the least women are the various surgeries – the ones where your patient is immobilized, anaesthetized, opened up, and turned into a not-quite-color-coded collection of tubes and wires to poke and prod at – the ones that bear more than a passing resemblance to engineering. (surgeons are the jockiest jocks ever to jock, so you can’t blame us for this one) It seems really obvious to me that women – in high schools and everywhere else – have a statistical predilection to like working with people (especially children) and to dislike working with abstract technical poking and prodding. This is a bias clearly inculcated well before SATs and AP exams, one that affects medics and programmers alike. It’s a bias that probably has both cultural and biological origins. The cultural origins are far too varied to enumerate. Many people very justly bring up the issue of how our society genders toys, with parents getting very angry when girls play with stereotypically male toys and vice versa. The classic example is of course the talking Barbie who would famously say “Math is hard! Let’s go shopping!” On the other hand, I also think people who neglect biological causes are doing the issue a disservice. Did you know that young monkeys express pretty much exactly the same gendered toy preferences as human children? Rhesus monkeys, vervet monkeys, pretty much whatever species of monkeys you try it on, the male monkeys enjoy wheeled toys more and the female monkeys plush toys more. The word reviewers use to describe the magnitude of the result is “overwhelming”. When intersex children are raised as other than their biological gender, their toy preference and behavior are consistently that associated with their biological gender and not the gender they are being raised as, even when they themselves are unaware their biological gender is different. This occurs even when parents reinforce them more for playing with their gender-being-raised-as toys. You can even successfully correlate the degree of this with the precise amount of androgen they get in the womb, and if you experimentally manipulate the amount of hormones monkeys receive in the womb, their gendered play will change accordingly. 2D:4D ratio, a level of how much testosterone is released during a crucial developmental period, accurately predicts scores both on a UK test of mathematical ability at age seven and the SATs in high school. The end result of all this is probably our old friend gene-culture interaction, where certain small innate differences become ossified into social roles that then magnify the differences immensely. As a result, high school girls are only a fifth as likely to be interested in computer science as high school boys, and sure enough women are only a fifth as well represented in Silicon Valley as men. All of this information is accessible for free to anyone who spends ten minutes doing a basic Google search. But instead we have to keep hearing how nerds are gross and disgusting and entitled and should feel constant shame for how they bully and harass the poor female programmers out of every industry they participate in. Penny blames nerds for not “holding men to account for the lack of representation of women in STEM areas” but SERIOUSLY WE DIDN’T DO IT. (except insofar as we helped acculturate kids. But that’s hardly a uniquely male pasttime.) (before you bring up that one paper that showed research leaders advantaged male over female researchers, keep in mind that first of all it explains only a small portion of the discrepancy, and second of all the female research leaders showed the bias even worse than the male ones. Yet Penny frames her question as “holding men to account”. This is that motte-and-bailey thing with patriarchy again.) --
• spaga 11y ago
  Interestingly enough, gender differences in the Big-5 personality traits have been shown and replicated across over 50 countries, and in fact MORE developed and MORE gender-egalitarian cultures widen that gap, rather than close it. [1] I bring this up because I also find it intriguing that, in the most recent Stack Overflow developer survey (2015), India indicates more female programmers, and Sweden less (in relation to the United States). I say this not to show that a more feminist country makes gender differences in personality stronger, or is causally linked to less female programmers, but rather to bunk the strength of gender-biased cultural narrative. I will leave these last comments, taken from a commenter on Slate Star Codex from a different essay: -- I grew up in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, at the time of “peak communism”, before leaving for greener (literally) pastures (figuratively) much later. There was plenty of casual sexism, and women (and men) were expected to marry in their early 20s, if not before, then have children right away. Women had to be as cautious as in the West when walking alone at night, and cat calls, ass grabs and unwanted sexual advances were not uncommon. Girls played with dolls and boys played with Lego (an awful Russian version of it, not snapping together well, and pieces often breaking apart), as well as soldiers and trucks. But one thing virtually did not exist, to the best of my recollection, though have no stats handy. No one thought that women are less capable at STEM. Ever since Lenin declared gender equality, among other equalities, back in 1917, women had just as much acceptance in engineering and academia as men. My middle school math teacher was a female (she was very good) so was my physics teacher (she sucked beyond belief, but then I often had lousy male teachers, as well). Our math club had roughly equal numbers of boys and girls. Yeah, I was a nerdy kid. Never got any grief because of that, though plenty because of my poor social skills. My less awkward math-loving friends had few issues. There were no “jocks” that I recall, though plenty of assholes and bullies, but the latter could be just as good at math and science as the bullied. Doing well in school was never a negative. Science was not considered the domain of eggheads, it was just one of the things people did for a living. Women were as expected to go into Medicine, Engineering and Science as into any other occupations. A few examples. My mother designed ship engines for a living. My grandmother was responsible for air and water quality in an area with probably half a million population. My wife’s cousin got her PhD in under Kolmogorov himself, wrote several influential papers and taught math for decades, first in the Soviet Union, then in the US. My aunt was a computer programmer and is doing very well off, having retired by now. Yet she was considered the “stupid” sister by her parents, compared to my mom who was the “smart” one. In my very STEMish university department there were as many female students as male. The child benefits were such that American women can only dream of. You get paid maternity leave a month or so before your due date, with your job held for you for six months or so, and held for you for up to three years, if I recall correctly. You automatically get a bit more money when you have children. Daycare/kindergarten was free, or almost free. There was no tenure. That is, you don’t get fired once you are hired, unless you do something criminal. What with being employed by the government and all. There were plenty of downsides to that, but competing for a permanent position was not one. Of course, there was as much politics as in any research institution or a university department. Promotions were few and far between, since almost no one ever left, except to retire, or feet first. Well, I’m stretching it a bit, there were occasional layoffs, just like everywhere else. But rarely any individual firings. So, the social experiment a feminist can only dream of undertaking had been run for 70 years, with a break to fight a war or two. Or three, but who’s counting. Similar social “experiments” had run in most other countries of the former Eastern Bloc. A nearly perfect control. Of course, then it all came crashing down. But not quite all. The egalitarian attitudes toward STEM and women in STEM did not change, only the economic conditions. So, given all this, what do you think the result of this experiment was? Feel free to guess or look it up, or just recall what you know. I’ll reply with what I remember, once/if you comment. [after a reply] In my university, despite there being about 50% or so female students, and overall more of them completing their computer degree than male, there were none in the top 5 of my graduating stream of 100 or so. Most of my classmates of both genders (there were not any other genders back then) in our high school for nerds, the same one that one Grigori Perelman went to, majored in Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology or Comp Sci from the top Russian schools. About half of the guys went on to get a postgraduate degree, and only one or two women. Sure looks to me like they got shortchanged by an unfairly narrow Bell curve, though maybe there are more politically correct explanations. Maybe they cared more about their family than their career, or something. When the times turned sour in the 1990s, nearly all of the girls left academia and did what they had to to get by, mostly marketing, accounting, real estate or web design. Some managed to leave the country before Yeltsin hit the fan. They did pretty well in engineering and programming, and I know exactly one who went on to do a postdoc, vs maybe a dozen or so guys, who ended up having a secure research position on Russia, or a tenured position in the US. None of my classmates of any gender got anywhere close to the Nobel-level, or even became somewhat famous. Well, except for Perelman, who got as famous as a mathematician can get, but we did not intersect in either high-school or university, due to the difference first in age and later in talent. In any case, my point is that there was a nearly perfect experiment performed, and most Western sociologists just ignore it. -- I do believe there is a gender bias, but I don't at all believe it is even close to being the driving factor behind women's apparent lack of interest in CS/programming or in entering/remaining in the industry. [1] http://www.psych.ut.ee/~jyri/en/Schmitt-Realo-Voracek-Allik_JPSP2008.pdf http://www.psych.ut.ee/~jyri/en/Schmitt-Realo-Voracek-Allik_... [2] http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#profile-women http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#prof...