Confessions of a Failed Female Coder • Hacker News Board

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#31

Post by orangecat » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 5:53 PM UTC

Santosh83 wrote: post #11

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.

That may be part of it, but as Scott Alexander noted (Section IV in http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...), not that many decades ago women had few role models in most professions. But that didn't stop women from quickly advancing in medicine, law, and many other fields.

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#32

Post by skinnymuch » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 5:54 PM UTC

bartread wrote: post #7

I don't know that you can call yourself a "failed coder" when, let's be honest, it could be argued you didn't try that hard to be a coder in the first place - it wasn't that you made your living do it but realised in doing so that you were bad at it. I'm not sure bailing out on a high school computing course, because it sucked (I'm not sure being a boy would have made any difference here), is nearly enough qualificat…

Yeah I basically wrote a post highlighting your first paragraph and being a guy who essentially failed at coding in high school and came out of it not barely being able to code something simple like a questionnaire.

Overall we definitely need to get more women into STEM and programming specifically. I'm not sure about this post though.

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#33

Post by skinnymuch » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 5:56 PM UTC

sidlls wrote: post #22

zvrba wrote: post #4

> 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.

Definitely. Though not necessarily a bias between male and female. Just a bias for people who can work well [enough] with that sort of learning.

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#34

Post by politician » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 5:57 PM UTC

js2 wrote: post #24

politician wrote: post #6

> 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…

The author asserts that the hacker scenario is the "linchpin" of her argument. Therefore, it seems to be a flawed interpretation to revise her argument to refer exclusively to one part of the scenario and ignore the other parts. If the author wanted to make the argument solely about the number of folks working on a shared project, why include the remark about "ambiguous" work?

Perhaps the author belives that individual work on unambiguous projects is amenable to women. The explanation you've offered excludes this possibility.

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#35

Post by ghaff » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 5:58 PM UTC

bartread wrote: post #13

politician wrote: post #6

> 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 wer…

I'd add that a lot of "lone time" characterizes a lot of STEM generally--but also historians, writers, and others. It may be a particular stereotype around programming but I'm not sure it's any truer, or perhaps even as true, with software development as it is with a lot of other fields.

Caroline works in an area (digital advertising/marketing) that involves lots of collaboration and working with people. I'm not sure there's just about any field in engineering or science in which at least individual contributors do the same degree of working with other people as opposed to working through problems individually.

Although she mentions it, I think Caroline also glosses over the shift that happens in the 80s a bit too quickly. She writes:

>The ’80s did see a masculinization of computer science as a field, but I think it’s simplistic to assert that it happened because pop culture pushed PCs as “for boys.”

I don't actually think that's the argument--or to the degree people do make that argument it's the most pertinent one. What did happen with gamers and the rise of the PC is that people who were interested in coding as a profession were increasingly expected to have started learning things on their own and to enjoy it as a hobby. This isn't really true to nearly the same degree of any other STEM field. Although I can't prove it, this seems to me the most logical explanation for why women entering CS peaked around that time.

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#36

Post by skinnymuch » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 5:58 PM UTC

politician wrote: post #6

> 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 quote seems to be wrong with Steve Jobs. Jobs wasn't really mainly a programmer though was he? I think he knew how to code and could get something going, but that wasn't really what he did.

Gates also didn't work alone a lot of the time.

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#37

Post by skinnymuch » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 6:01 PM UTC

zvrba wrote: post #15

psyc wrote: post #2

The 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 fo…

I'm not sure either quote applies necessarily to females specifically. At best seems to just be how this particular person is.

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#38

Post by clairity » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 6:03 PM UTC

GhostVII wrote: post #21

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 w…

the snide addition of "Hopefully she doesn't get fired for it." makes it hard to be objective about the rest of your comment, but putting that aside, i agree that there is a tinge of implicit buy-in of gender stereotyping in her writing.

it's almost certainly more complicated than just "biology did it". that biology simply _dictates_ the way we learn is naive, rather than being a complicated dance between biological inputs that get filtered through dynamic social perceptions rippling through an ocean of brains ever more intricately tied together by computer networks. i don't pretend to know the truth here, but i fully expect it to be marvelously complex and in possibly fascinatingly counterintuitive ways.

i wanted to like and even agree with the article, but it basically boiled down to "we learn differently", and i just find that woefully inadequate in explaining why women are underrepresented in tech.

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#39

Post by dnautics » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 6:03 PM UTC

I think beyond just "educational style" something we should consider is the way we socialize reward in young men and young women. This is a gross generalization (but when your metrics are bulk - as opposed to individual - results, as in number of entrants or number of employees, generalizations matter), but socially and educationally we train boys seek reward for building or doing things and train girls to seek reward for being something. By the very nature of the software industry, in particular, the rapid engineering cycle, will skew towards building and doing over a state of being.

I am not suggesting that these socializations are an inherent part of being male or female (and I would emphasize that you've got a serious problem if you're stereotyping an individual based on the bulk socialization), but I would suggest that if bulk gender parity is important, then forcing it without changing, or at the very least identifying/recognizing/selecting individuals who have deviated from, the pervasive gendered socialization is likely to cause serious problems.

As a side note, I personally find the consequences of this early socialization are also highly reflected in the very way that the gender debate manifests itself.

Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder

#40

Post by skinnymuch » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 6:04 PM UTC

rbatty wrote: post #9

psyc wrote: post #2

The 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…

The code formatting is confusing on mobile. Didn't know I could scroll through it.

Like I just said for another comment, that quote doesn't seem to be true just for women or even possibly for women more than men. The few female programmers I've worked with weren't like that. There's guys who will be like that.

I always thought ways of learning best were more on the people and environment (and how it affects the person) than gender by a long shot. I don't see why males wouldn't suffer just as much as women in the issues marked in her quote.