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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?

#151

Post by maco »

ry0ohki wrote: post #76
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.…

That was my first thought, that these "computer analysts" of the 70s were glorified secretaries running punch cards through a system. It seems like I would have remembered or known a few more older female computer scientists if they were really 40%+ of the work force.

I don't know about the 70s, but one of my (female) professors worked on the code that took Apollo into space in the 60s.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#152

Post by maco »

flomincucci wrote: post #87

I'm a female developer. I'm not going for CS, but a Systems Engineering degree. I share classes with lots of women (well, in the best of situations, we're 1/3 of the total population of a classroom). Even knowing lots of women going for a SE degree, I can count with one hand the female developers I know. Most of them aren't interested in developing, but in functional analysis and leading teams.

"Most of them aren't interested in developing, but in functional analysis and leading teams."

That was the impression I had of SEs in general during my undergrad. The CS kids wanted to be developers. The SE kids wanted to be managers.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#153

Post by maco »

blahedo wrote: post #142

I'm so glad to see this message out there; a frustratingly small number of people are aware of the 1984(ish) peak in females in the field. My mom taught computer programming (Fortran) in a Chicago high school from 1967 until 1984, and was actually kind of surprised when I first asked her about gender balance issues in the field—they just weren't an issue then, and her classes were always more or less balanced. But wh…

Have you seen this article? http://geekfeminism.org/2010/08/10/restore-meritocracy-in-cs...

One way teachers can even the CS 101 playing field is by doing something totally different than what the kids taught themselves or learned in high school (which is probably object oriented programming, these days).

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#155

Post by jameshart »

gaius wrote: post #112
ovi256 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're getting downvoted, no doubt because the thing you remarked is a thing-you-can't-say. I completely missed it myself, but it's very telling: code screen eliminates women in a 28:5 (5.6) ratio, compared to men's 26:10 (2.6). A classic rebuttal is that the test could be biased. Reducing complex phenomena to one factor so that they can be digested on a 30-second news segment or put into soundbites by any politician…

How on Earth can you gender-bias a coding test!? The compiler doesn't know if you're a boy or a girl!

Easy - choose a domain where pre-knowledge is gender-biased: "Design a web application to manage a fantasy football league", "Implement a D&D character generator", "Implement an optimal queueing strategy to solve the urinal-allocation problem (http://blog.xkcd.com/2009/09/02/urinal-protocol-vulnerabilit... ).

Not suggesting that's what fogcreek do, of course, but just to demonstrate that a coding test could easily have a gender bias - or a cultural one, for that matter.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#156

Post by timsally »

rdouble wrote: post #95
saturn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it the case that if you want to get rich as a GP or specialist you have to start your own business, too? Also known as a practise? It is known that you'll never get rich working for someone else, but that applies to all trades and I don't see any reason why starting one as a programmer is dramatically different from starting one as a GP, or a plumber, or any other kind of highly skilled and valuable trade.

It depends on what you mean by rich. If you want beaucoup dollars (millions) it does help to own the cardiology clinic. However, my dad hires physicians for a rural health care system. A cardiologist in this area can get paid a salary of $350,000 per year, guaranteed three year contract. This is in the middle of nowhere, where a nice house can cost $100K and a king's mansion costs about $400K. That is "rich" by most…

The downside of course is that by the time your able to throw the dart at the map you're going on 40. Still, it sounds quite appealing.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#157

Post by mrkurt »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #37
mrkurt wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Premed and organic chem aren't advertised in "competitive language", though. How often do you see schools write course descriptions like "we're seeking the world's best chemistry ninjas to help us take our chemistry educating to the next level?"

Just as often as course descriptions say "we're seeking the world's best javascript ninjas".

We were comparing things like the Google Summer of Code description (referenced in the article) to premed (referenced in the parent of my comment). I'm sure programming courses don't have the competitive language, but I suspect premed courses correlate more strongly to the types of people who'd want to be doctors than programming courses correlate to the types of people who'd want to work at Fog Creek.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#158

Post by palish »

mapgrep wrote: post #28
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,…

She didn't say she was put off by competition, she said she was put off by competitive language in the job listing. She recommended more focus on the collaborative side of the internship - mentorship, line by line code review, and being part of decisionmaking. "Things that have to do with collaboration and learning appeal a lot more to female candidates." Couching something in mainly competitive terms does not just a…

Perhaps someone would like to paste some job listings from other fields, like realestate or nursing, so everyone can see how they compare with CS?

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#159

Post by Duff »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #98
Duff wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than that, medicine is more portable. At a typical large company, the ingress point into the company is at an entry-level position. Many women want to interrupt employment when they have children, which isn't practical for a IT person or programmer at a bank or government agency. My mother, to use a fairly typical example, is a nurse. She took 5-6 years off at various times when my siblings were born or when day…

Why should it be a big deal if you interrupt your career for a few years (whether to have a family or to travel the world...somehow I bet the second would be seen as ok in tech circles)? A good programmer can pick up a new technology in a couple of months. If you are hiring based on candidates winning resume buzzword bingo, you are going to get crappy candidates anyway. Hire for intelligence and capability and five y…

I agree.

I think paid sabbaticals have positive ROI too. Number crunchers don't think in those terms though.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#160

Post by gaius »

jameshart wrote: post #155
gaius wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How on Earth can you gender-bias a coding test!? The compiler doesn't know if you're a boy or a girl!

Easy - choose a domain where pre-knowledge is gender-biased: "Design a web application to manage a fantasy football league", "Implement a D&D character generator", "Implement an optimal queueing strategy to solve the urinal-allocation problem ( http://blog.xkcd.com/2009/09/02/urinal-protocol-vulnerabilit... ). Not suggesting that's what fogcreek do, of course, but just to demonstrate that a coding test could easily h…

Xkcd is wrong about that as it depends whether the man is a huncher or an arcer. I suppose you're right, only a man would know that. But Joel is well known for Fizzbuzz.
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