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What happened to all the female developers?

blog.fogcreek.com

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Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#61

Post by sequoia »

diolpah wrote: post #9

A cursory look at the graph indicates that the only place women suffered was on their own code. Resume, phone skills, interpersonal skills, all great.

diolpah is referring to this graph, btw: http://blog.fogcreek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Gender-N...

@diolpah it is a very small sample, it probably carries no scientific relevance. It is, however, the author's fault for using it, not yours. Your analysis looks correct as far as the tiny dataset presented is concerned.

EDIT: "Because we can’t ask applicants their gender, we guessed based on first names." Nevermind. The author is a jackass for even including these data in the first place, it's as good as meaningless, even within that small cohort. Alex, Ashley, Sam, Pat, Lindsey, Jessie, any hippy name (see: my name), Quinn, Casey, Rowan... crap pseudoscience is crap.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#62

Post by known »

diolpah wrote: post #30
diolpah wrote: post #9

A cursory look at the graph indicates that the only place women suffered was on their own code. Resume, phone skills, interpersonal skills, all great.

The downvotes are appreciated. Where am I wrong?

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." --Oscar Wilde

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#63

Post by protomyth »

gaius wrote: post #4

This question makes no sense unless it is also asked in conjuction with "what happened to all the male primary school teachers"?

The reasoning for the decline in male primary school teachers (and daycare workers) has very little to do with women in CS. Guys have much more danger points in the legal system when accused of something. The risk / reward ratio is too far gone. This does not happen to women in CS.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#64

Post by CapitalistCartr »

jff wrote: post #31
gaius wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is actually the only plausible explanation at this point in history. The average woman looks at the long hours and job insecurity in high tech and thinks "this is just not worth it". Men, historically, have always done these kinds of jobs and still do. We don't see feminists agitating for more woman refuse collectors do we?

As opposed to the low-stress 9-5 world of medicine?

My girlfriend is a doctor. She mainly works in the ER, but sometimes fills in at doctor's offices and the out of hours clinic. She finds them horribly dull, and basically hates them. Except they pay $100-$125 per hour. She likes that part.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#65

Post by cjzhang »

[deleted] wrote: post #52

[deleted]

I personally feel that women get turned off to CS and in general tech courses because they're male-dominated and usually somewhat misogynistic, which makes being in CS classes and interacting with CS majors sometimes unpleasant and encourages them to do something else.

In general, women are perfectly intelligent and capable of studying (see: women in premed, women in law, etc, etc).

CS isn't some mystical major that's harder than every other major ever (me, I'm scared of business majors; those guys are cutthroat), and I don't think "women can't commit themselves and women can't study the same way and women don't do research" is really a good explanation for why there are fewer women in CS than there are in premed.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#66

Post by rweba »

Locke1689 wrote: post #7

And she said that one of the things that happens is that women don’t even think they’re qualified for something because it’s advertised in competitive language. The language of competition not only doesn’t appeal to many women, it actually puts them off. This doesn't make sense to me because easily the most competitive path I've ever seen is premed. Almost all of the premeds I know are competing for the best grades,…

" Honestly, when you hear the phrase 'the world’s best developers,' you see a guy. "

Thats the key right there - women are comfortable competing, they just have a hard time picturing themselves as the alpha geek hacker that this competitive language brings to mind for many people. At least thats how I interpreted it.

Also there are studies that women tend to underestimate their skills while men tend to overestimate them which might also be relevant, see Sheryl Sandberg's commencement address:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdvXCKFNqTY

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#67

Post by sp332 »

Here you go: It seems like sometimes the family computer is bought mainly for the boy to use and then he’s kind of forced to share it with his sister.

That pretty much explains it, doesn't it? Girls are discouraged from using computers because they learn from a young age that computers are the "domain" (property / territory) of boys.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#68

Post by jamesteow »

rweba wrote: post #66
Locke1689 wrote: post #7

And she said that one of the things that happens is that women don’t even think they’re qualified for something because it’s advertised in competitive language. The language of competition not only doesn’t appeal to many women, it actually puts them off. This doesn't make sense to me because easily the most competitive path I've ever seen is premed. Almost all of the premeds I know are competing for the best grades,…

" Honestly, when you hear the phrase 'the world’s best developers,' you see a guy. " Thats the key right there - women are comfortable competing, they just have a hard time picturing themselves as the alpha geek hacker that this competitive language brings to mind for many people. At least thats how I interpreted it. Also there are studies that women tend to underestimate their skills while men tend to overestimate t…

"Also there are studies that women tend to underestimate their skills while men tend to overestimate them which might also be relevant."

In general, men have far more pressure to be confident than women do.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#70

Post by JoshTriplett »

FeministHacker wrote: post #25
true_religion wrote: post #5

It's my understanding that in the early days working with computers was considered manually labor, something akin to data-entry of today. The "real" scientists and business people would instruct their CS conterparts to do a task, and how that task was accomplished was neither interesting nor remarked upon. As computation became cheaper, CS still retained many qualities of data entry especially in the business sector.…

Somewhere buried at home I have an old Cobol programming book, talking about how, as a programmer, typing was beneith you. Instead you were instructed to write neatly on cards and supply these to the typist for her to type in.

Ouch, that hurts to read quite apart from the offensive stereotype. Barring the pervasive use of shorthand, I don't think someone writing by hand has any hope of keeping up with even a moderately skilled typist, even when writing English rather than code.
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