It's interesting that a lot of her experiences are similar to what the Google manifesto said - that currently, computer science is more targeted towards the way men learn and work than the way women learn and work. Although she was focusing more on the education side of things versus the work side, the core message seems to be that men and women learn and work differently, and that needs to be addressed to get more women in computer science. She is "perpetuating gender stereotypes" similar to the Google manifesto. Hopefully she doesn't get fired for it.
Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
21–30 of 136 posts
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#22> Rather, I was frustrated because the course consisted of lone work on exercises that seemed to have little application to the real world From my personal experience, exactly such courses have proven to have the most long-term value to me.
That's an interesting way to underscore the point that these courses reinforce a kind of bias.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#23> 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 s…
Because the workforce is the wrong place to try to fix gender diversity - don't get me wrong, we should put efforts in place to make sure don't discriminate, but the workforce is composed of people already interested (and at least partially trained) to do the work.
The reason female participation isn't larger is because of the education / training part of the pipeline. Having a welcoming workplace doesn't suddenly spawn people with skills wanting to work there.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#24> 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 key word in that sentence is "lone". The author uses "lone" six times. Look at the rest of the paragraph:
> "It was a manner of work utterly unsuited to everything we know about how women thrive and excel."
> "(Does the idea of being a lone hacker appeal to some women? Sure. [...] Population-level differences cannot be used to judge the abilities or inclinations of any individual.)" [Emphasis mine.]
The author's implication is that women (in general) are not as amenable to a lone environment as men are. I did find it frustrating that the author was not explicit about this. The piece concludes with:
> "Women succeed when they are in learning and working environments that address the biological realities about how women operate best. But, clearly, there’s a lot of misunderstanding around what this means."
But then the closest the piece gets to helping with the misunderstanding is to link to https://ncgsblog.org/2016/09/12/how-girls-learn-best/
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#25The 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…
Somehow most of the female programmers that I know well enough are not at all like this, so lets please not turn this into one-size-fits-all model and force it on every woman out there.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#26> 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 s…
I wouldn't be so sure that private offices is a male-only thing, or that Microsoft advertising it had to do with the "lone coder." I know quite a few women who complain about their open office work plans and would jump at an opportunity to get the same pay with a private office.
Rather than being about a male-dominated "lone coder", Microsoft's guarantee of a private office means two things:
1) that a private office is a benefit to their target employees, and
2) that most companies at the time did not have a private office
Otherwise, they wouldn't advertise it as much. In more recent times, I don't think that Facebook's push to open offices is as employee centric as Microsoft's push to private offices. Instead, I think Facebook (and Apple) are trying to save money, since an 8' x 10' office in San Fran costs an employer anywhere from $8,000 / yr to $30,000 / yr. So, it would have less to do with providing benefits to their employees and more about their own bottom line.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#27> 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…
There's another issue with this statement: Steve Jobs was never a hacker/programmer, he was a sales/product/evangelist weanie.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#28Earlier 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…
Somehow most of the female programmers that I know well enough are not at all like this, so lets please not turn this into one-size-fits-all model and force it on every woman out there.
I completely agree. I've worked with many good and bad programmers, both men and women, and it was usually only junior programmers and the bad ones that could not do their work without being 'collaborative' with others. Gender, like race, etc has nothing to do with it.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#29The 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?
What surprised me the most is that my understanding was that schools are actually designed to favor the way girls learn.
Seating still for hours, listening to somebody, remembering the whole thing to be able to spit it out the next day is not how little boys should be taught things. And I don't even think it's great for girls, but they seem better equipped to deal with it.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#30Isn't the title pretty clickbaity? I had to cheat my way through 2.5 years of comp sci in HS before I dropped AP Comp Sci BC. I never programmed a thing in all that time. I either copied from others or had a friend write any code for me. During the AP test I spent maybe 15 min on the written programming parts just writing the basics of Java and inserting BS in hopes of getting some points. Calling me a failed coder would be weird at that point. I was never a coder really. Just like if I got bad grades in science classes I wouldnt be a failed scientist.
I myself ended up trying to code PHP a couple more times. I didn't even think I knew the hang of HTML for years (I know there's not much to get). Until I did finally get the hang of basic coding then intermediate coding and so on, I never considered myself a failed coder before I got the hang of it.
I had my own reasons for "failing" at my high school coding (technically I got As but I knew nothing), just dividing things up by how genders might function or learn wouldn't have helped me. For example I personally had massive anxiety and confidence issues.
Not to dismiss issues with females not being in programming enough. We definitely need to get more women into STEM and programming.