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Why Women Don't Code?

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Re: Why Women Don't Code?

#11

Post by macintux »

ioquatix wrote: post #7

My first computer was a BBC micro and I "wrote" my first code using GW Basic when I was between the age of 5 and 10. I now have two daughters, and it's my goal to give them every opportunity to do the same. Recently I sat down with my eldest and we wrote Ruby together to print out her name in rainbow colours on a terminal. She loved it. As part of the journey of being a parent, I've come to realise how gender biased…

I visited Toys ‘r’ Us shortly after they started shutting down, and saw a pile of drum sets. Half were black, half were pink.

I was pleased to see the black sets showed both a boy and a girl using the drums. However, the pink ones showed only the girl.

Progress? I suppose. We have a long road ahead.

Re: Why Women Don't Code?

#12

Post by bitcoinisqueen »

notjtrig wrote: post #2

Recent studies have shown that gender differences in personality tend to be larger in developed countries. I think more developed countries tend to have a toxic set of socal standards. If you want to figure out why women are underrepresented in technology, examine the differences between boys and girls toddlers and how they interact with their environment. There is a 'girls toys' isle in store but not a 'boys toys'.…

The differences in personality in more egalitarian societies is due to biological and psycho-social reasons.

When women are less constrained, then they follow their passions (ie: biological instincts and passions to work with people vs. things)

Follow Hanlon's Razor: Do not ascribe to oppression which could more simply be explained by exercising Freedom of Choice.

Why do we not discuss how women vastly outnumber men in Nursing and Teaching? The disparity there is remarkable.

What about Military?

The fact is that we have biodiversity (taller vs shorter people, brown hair vs lighter) and it we also have psychological diversity as well.

Re: Why Women Don't Code?

#13

Post by mantas »

dzink wrote: post #4

He argues that the 30% share current top US CS schools are getting is the global maximum. I think he is missing the “Whys” for women in tech and “perceived sense of individual strengths being too good for tech”, is not one of them. Coding is a form of communication. Knowing how to write is essential today and you’re not going to write less about your passions just because you are so much better at swimming. Some of t…

> - Because of economic opportunity - I could build tools that earn a living for me, so my earnings are not dependent on my work hours (a very VERY attractive feature for women).

Perhaps which is why developing countries like India has much more women engineers than rich developed countries? Once women can pursue their passion and have reasonable incomes, programming goes way down the list?

> Show everyone the basics and let them taste the opportunity it presents in a required K-12 class.

Is programming NOT a required class during high school anywhere in a developing/developed country? I got out of school a decade ago and programming was a part of "IT" class, which was required. From what I hear, now they're putting even more programming into curriculum and introducing it at earlier age.

Re: Why Women Don't Code?

#14

Post by RikNieu »

macintux wrote: post #11
ioquatix wrote: post #7

My first computer was a BBC micro and I "wrote" my first code using GW Basic when I was between the age of 5 and 10. I now have two daughters, and it's my goal to give them every opportunity to do the same. Recently I sat down with my eldest and we wrote Ruby together to print out her name in rainbow colours on a terminal. She loved it. As part of the journey of being a parent, I've come to realise how gender biased…

I visited Toys ‘r’ Us shortly after they started shutting down, and saw a pile of drum sets. Half were black, half were pink. I was pleased to see the black sets showed both a boy and a girl using the drums. However, the pink ones showed only the girl. Progress? I suppose. We have a long road ahead.

It's also interesting to note that not too long ago, pink was considered a masculine colour.

Re: Why Women Don't Code?

#15

Post by belorn »

ioquatix wrote: post #7

My first computer was a BBC micro and I "wrote" my first code using GW Basic when I was between the age of 5 and 10. I now have two daughters, and it's my goal to give them every opportunity to do the same. Recently I sat down with my eldest and we wrote Ruby together to print out her name in rainbow colours on a terminal. She loved it. As part of the journey of being a parent, I've come to realise how gender biased…

If you want to see the foundations of our society, ask and investigate what create social status. Even at preschool, kids usually arranging themselves into group with a hierarchy. Usually those groups are separated on gender, through at the youngest age group they tend to be a bit mixed and by the time kids hit puberty its almost fully sorted into groups of single-gender. Age 5 to 10 should provide a bit of insight into this process.

What signals is encoded in our society that make one girl to get higher social status among other girls. Similar, what signals are encoded to give one boy higher social status among other boys. In that difference between the two strategies for social status, what incentives has parents if they want their child to have high social status among other children.

From that point we can look at what puberty does to the incentives to maximize social status among one own gender, and the relation to dating. Add a few additional years and they have to pick career paths with accumulates all those incentives into a point where gender segregation really start to pick up speed.

Re: Why Women Don't Code?

#16

Post by voidr »

ioquatix wrote: post #7

My first computer was a BBC micro and I "wrote" my first code using GW Basic when I was between the age of 5 and 10. I now have two daughters, and it's my goal to give them every opportunity to do the same. Recently I sat down with my eldest and we wrote Ruby together to print out her name in rainbow colours on a terminal. She loved it. As part of the journey of being a parent, I've come to realise how gender biased…

> My mother taught me to flip all pro-nouns to female

There are languages where pronouns are not gender-red, they are neutral and you see the same results.

> I've come to realise how gender biased the world is

A lot of it is due to biology itself being "biased" and a lot of society evolved to accommodate those sex differences.

I think tech is over glorified and is presented as this boy's club where everything is amazing, ignoring the downsides. I don't think most people would find it fun to maintain a legacy financial application or to work every weekend to finish off the video game because the publisher refuses to adjust the release date.

Re: Why Women Don't Code?

#17

Post by lomnakkus »

voidr wrote: post #16
ioquatix wrote: post #7

My first computer was a BBC micro and I "wrote" my first code using GW Basic when I was between the age of 5 and 10. I now have two daughters, and it's my goal to give them every opportunity to do the same. Recently I sat down with my eldest and we wrote Ruby together to print out her name in rainbow colours on a terminal. She loved it. As part of the journey of being a parent, I've come to realise how gender biased…

> My mother taught me to flip all pro-nouns to female There are languages where pronouns are not gender-red, they are neutral and you see the same results. > I've come to realise how gender biased the world is A lot of it is due to biology itself being "biased" and a lot of society evolved to accommodate those sex differences. I think tech is over glorified and is presented as this boy's club where everything is amaz…

I think the poster may have meant proper nouns rather than pronouns?

(Well, I mean the "builder" part of "Bob the Builder" may need to be flipped in some languages, but I'd assume there aren't that many women named Bob, so...)

Re: Why Women Don't Code?

#18

Post by kbart »

creep wrote: post #6
notjtrig wrote: post #2

Recent studies have shown that gender differences in personality tend to be larger in developed countries. I think more developed countries tend to have a toxic set of socal standards. If you want to figure out why women are underrepresented in technology, examine the differences between boys and girls toddlers and how they interact with their environment. There is a 'girls toys' isle in store but not a 'boys toys'.…

Maybe it's cultural differences, maybe it's preference. I will provide an anecdote. I'm a woman who enjoys coding, and is currently in a math degree. Growing up, my toys were never pre-selected although my mother encouraged my love of puzzles (lego and toys like that). Still, I had an obsession with dolls as most girls seemed to, and I remember genuinely enjoying those things. There was no pressure, I simply liked ca…

Exactly. I grew up in quite poor family and shared room/toys with my sister the whole time - we played the same Lego sets, I made dresses from cloth scraps for dolls, we both collected toy cars and Kinder sets. Still, since the early childhood the differences were already clear and the gap only increased with the time. I strongly believe that the key reason on why we have few women in IT (or math, physics, engineering for that matter) is natural preferences combined with peer pressure, so simply making childhood sex neutral won't make a real difference.

Re: Why Women Don't Code?

#19

Post by amriksohata »

I remmeber attitudes towards info tech modules at school, some of the more popular girls would chatter that it's boring and not glamourous. This is because they've been taught they need to focus on other areas, now the geek will inherit the earth and they are all bandwagoning

Re: Why Women Don't Code?

#20

Post by gkya »

voidr wrote: post #16
ioquatix wrote: post #7

My first computer was a BBC micro and I "wrote" my first code using GW Basic when I was between the age of 5 and 10. I now have two daughters, and it's my goal to give them every opportunity to do the same. Recently I sat down with my eldest and we wrote Ruby together to print out her name in rainbow colours on a terminal. She loved it. As part of the journey of being a parent, I've come to realise how gender biased…

> My mother taught me to flip all pro-nouns to female There are languages where pronouns are not gender-red, they are neutral and you see the same results. > I've come to realise how gender biased the world is A lot of it is due to biology itself being "biased" and a lot of society evolved to accommodate those sex differences. I think tech is over glorified and is presented as this boy's club where everything is amaz…

My native tongue (Turkish) is one language without grammatical gender. Learning languages with it, it was immediately clear to me that that was a problematic thing. Luckily no revolutions are needed, as languages tend to become more analytical and lose grammatical gender progressively.

I think that what enabled women to gain many rights and at times actual equality in most societies was/is technology. Before widespread use of advanced technology, we needed actual muscle power to survive, and that was what shaped the societies since hunter gatherers through various stages of agrarian societies. As machines substituted raw muscle power in many areas of production, women could become part of the workforce too. And thus we had a virtuous cycle of more potential and more power, which affected in turn women's rights and their participation in many other areas. Since the decades following industrial revolution, they became more and more present steadily in politics, academia, culture, etc., becoming quickly co-protagonists of modern life.

Thus, I believe women should really get into technology, and become actual tech people instead of many faux-techie types we see that are promoted as symbols of how feminist a workplace/org is or as figurines to "lure" women into STEM and IT. I really want women to be the change they want. Today, there are few women in FOSS that are famous and revered for their technical skills, actually only Jessica McKellar comes to my mind (and I'm not talking the designer types here). I think they should just force their way in into the building blocks of the ecosystem.

As males, what can we do? Well, a Linus-y mailing list turns me as a male (from Turkey where both men and women enjoy casual swearing). So we get rid of it, not only to include more women, but also more men from among the sensible, mature demographic. We also do away with the caricaturising stereotypes. Many people think a programmer is an asocial and overweight nerd living in a cubicle in the morning and isolated in a badly-lit room in the evening/night. So we can just not spread misinformation about us. We also maintain our decency around females, because many weird shit guys do that I read in similar threads here in the past is just straight-out psychopatical and very cringy. Other than that, it's on women to make the decision and pursue the careers.

I dream of a world where one's sex is just a biological detail that matters in their amorous affairs and private life. And, futhermore, I know that it's totally possible ATM. It's only a matter of time.

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