I suspect its more a cultural/historical thing. Comparatively fewer women go for computer science because they have far lesser role models and mentors and icons of their own sex to look upon. Just like how only few men manage to dig into women dominated occupations. Rather than anything inherent in women that puts them at a disadvantage vis-a-vis men with regards to computer science or "hard" science in general.
Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
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Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#12Nuance is the most amazing thing. It's in abundance in this article.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#13> The ’80s were also the era of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the rise of the archetype of the lone, antisocial hacker in a garage spending all-nighters building machines that were at many times ambiguous and without a clear path to success. Without going into too much more detail because this essay is already longer than it needs to be, this can be seen as the linchpin in which computer science took a hard turn toward…
The thing is that's not how Bill Gates and Steve Jobs actually worked either (also Steve wasn't a programmer). This idea of the "lone, antisocial hacker" doesn't make any kind of sense in terms of the history I've read or experienced.
E.g, take a look at Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. These guys - and they were almost invariably guys - were nothing if not sociable, at least with eachother. What they were not is mainstream (there's a hipster gag in here somewhere but it's just too cheap and easy).
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had partners, and later teams. They might not have been the easiest people to deal with but "antisocial"? I don't think so.
I suppose in the 1980s it became possible to become a lone hacker simply because you actually could have an affordable computer at home in your bedroom. Even then though, there was a lot of socialising with other hackers at school (and a lot of bragging).
Programming, at least in my experience, has never been an exclusively solo pursuit (although I wouldn't go so far as to describe what a lot of what went on at my school as "collaboration").
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#14> The ’80s were also the era of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the rise of the archetype of the lone, antisocial hacker in a garage spending all-nighters building machines that were at many times ambiguous and without a clear path to success. Without going into too much more detail because this essay is already longer than it needs to be, this can be seen as the linchpin in which computer science took a hard turn toward…
And why not?
The propensity to take risk seems to be quite a low-level drive, and we definitely see strong hints that hormones can have a measurable influence[1] on risk tolerance in both men and women.
If you look past ourselves in the animal kingdom, males are far more likely to engage and risky and aggressive behaviors because males that don't take large risks by and large won't manage to reproduce.
And what is riskier than expending a lot of effort and time on individual work with 'ambiguous and unclear paths to success'?
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#15The article makes numerous assertions that school/work do not cater to the ways women learn/work best. I was on the edge of my seat expecting the author to hint at the ways women do learn/work best, but it never arrived. Was I just not reading closely enough? Edit: I wasn't reading closely enough. So my next question is, what would it take to have more women teaching CS and software development?
She "hints" at this in a couple of sentences:
> Rather, I was frustrated because the course consisted of lone work on exercises that seemed to have little application to the real world, the expectation that coursework required coding and debugging for hours after school threatened my ability to excel in other classes or in varsity sports (in spite of being a textbook nerd, it turned out I was good enough at rowing for a few colleges to recruit me), or to spend time buried in random books.
and
> that girls and women prefer collaborative rather than solo work, that they are more engaged in “things” if they can see the “people” aspect to it, and that they are prone to perfectionism and a fear of failure
I notice an inconsistency here: if women are "prone to perfectionism", why were "hours of debugging" a problem?
... Re fear of failure: computers are brutal. It either works or it doesn't, esp. when you're restricted to "artificial" problems as is often the case in university courses. It forces you to think in a strict and disciplined way (re. the above quote about "debugging for hours"). Yes, it can make you feel stupid because the negative feedback is immediate, and there's a lot of it, especially in the beginning.
Even for me, as a professional developer with ~20 yrs of experience, working with computers consists of mostly noticing just negative feedback. "The code works" is a non-event for 90% of the time. Of course it works, I engineered it to work. The 10% of cases when it is an event is in cases when I've used something new according to documentation and it actually worked! Yay!
However, "the code doesn't work" is an event in 100% of the cases. It requires analysis, drilling, fixing, maybe even leads to a bigger refactoring because a more fundamental issue was discovered, etc.
IMHO, and gender aside, if the person can't endure a constant stream of negative feedback, they should probably choose another field of work.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#16I suspect its more a cultural/historical thing. Comparatively fewer women go for computer science because they have far lesser role models and mentors and icons of their own sex to look upon. Just like how only few men manage to dig into women dominated occupations. Rather than anything inherent in women that puts them at a disadvantage vis-a-vis men with regards to computer science or "hard" science in general.
Yes I think that’s a large part of it too. Our brains are so adaptable to whatever environment we live in. You know I’m still waiting for an Aaron Sorkin film on Ada Lovelace. Aaron, if you’re reading this, can you just go ahead and make that film already?
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#17You only fail when you accept that you have failed.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#18The article makes numerous assertions that school/work do not cater to the ways women learn/work best. I was on the edge of my seat expecting the author to hint at the ways women do learn/work best, but it never arrived. Was I just not reading closely enough? Edit: I wasn't reading closely enough. So my next question is, what would it take to have more women teaching CS and software development?
She does say: that girls and women prefer collaborative rather than solo work, that they are more engaged in “things” if they can see the “people” aspect to it, and that they are prone to perfectionism and a fear of failure although I suppose you have to imagine what a tech classroom/work environment would look like if it supported folks with such learning preferences since she doesn't fully spell that out. *editted…
Pair programming and github projects seem like it would help. And also line them up for real-world working conditions.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#19> The ’80s were also the era of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the rise of the archetype of the lone, antisocial hacker in a garage spending all-nighters building machines that were at many times ambiguous and without a clear path to success. Without going into too much more detail because this essay is already longer than it needs to be, this can be seen as the linchpin in which computer science took a hard turn toward…
What's strange here is that the 1980s and 1990s were the period of the "lone coder". This was when Microsoft advertised in recruiting that every programmer got a private office with a door they could close. That's in the past. Facebook now has one of the largest bullpens on the planet in Menlo Park, so people can collaborate. Between office layout, "agile", Slack, Github, and StackExchange, programming is more of a social activity than ever.
So why isn't female participation coming back up? It was higher in the 1970s and 1980s than it is now.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
She does say: that girls and women prefer collaborative rather than solo work, that they are more engaged in “things” if they can see the “people” aspect to it, and that they are prone to perfectionism and a fear of failure although I suppose you have to imagine what a tech classroom/work environment would look like if it supported folks with such learning preferences since she doesn't fully spell that out. *editted…
Please don't use code blocks (indentation) to quote text. it causes side-scrolling in browsers, making it difficult to read on desktop machines and nigh impossible on mobile devices. A common method of quoting text on HN is prefixing the line with a ">". I personally like also wrapping it in asterisks to italicize the quote.
Hey HN can I offer some CSS to fix that