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What happened to all the female developers?

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Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#191

Post by stcredzero »

rjd wrote: post #177
mapgrep wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed, I never after for a job which is worded competitively. I done a lot of contracting over the years. Usually 3-6 month placements and I've learnt to spot a company culture from the ad. Sort of like after you've been looking at house ads for a while you start to understand the lies that are going on. Disclaimer: before reading on I'm jaded and bitter from years of dealign with a/holes, liars, and bad contracts.…

Buzz words are a keen sign you are going to be working with a bunch of sales men.

The prejudicial reaction to buzz words is one of the things that I've found really weird in the programming fields. Often, a buzz word was a legitimate technical term just a few years, or a couple of decades ago. It's not the word, it's how it's used. Rejecting someone because they use a given buzz word is just prejudice. It just means you're selecting those people who are so aware of the march of buzzwords, they don't use the stale ones. In some cases, these will be savvy programmers. In other cases, this will be skilled users of word salad.

Buzz words shouldn't trigger a decision. They should trigger questions.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#192

Post by stcredzero »

Duff wrote: post #93
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?

So women somehow magically ship from the factory with a natural instinct to avoid IT jobs? In my city, they gave a civil service exam for a garbage collector -- 2,000 people took the test.

So women somehow magically ship from the factory with a natural instinct to avoid IT jobs?

The fact that a large number of the original "computers" were actually women would seem to indicate not.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#193

Post by philwelch »

Udo wrote: post #190
philwelch wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're presupposing that it's some sort of cultural influence that came out of nowhere rather than (one of many) quite natural, pre-existing behavioral differences between men and women.

You're absolutely correct, I'm am. And you're presupposing that those differences are biologically hardcoded, I get that. I just don't agree with you.

I'm suggesting a possibility; you're presupposing a dogma.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#194

Post by protagonist_h »

pak wrote: post #82
ma2rten wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that does not mean that software engineers are not helping people (indirectly).

In my experience, maybe 2% of software engineers are incentivized more strongly by positive social change than by money or fame. These are the idealists, like Richard Stallman and former members of OLPC, who are often ridiculed by the rest of the community. Until the academic and governmental infrastructure is able to put anywhere near as much money into CS research as private industry, the majority of technologists…

In my experience, at least in US, less than 1% of medical students go into the field "to help people." In fact, nowadays saying you want to become a doctor "because you want to help people" sounds almost cliché. Most of them do it either for money, social status or because that's what their mom wants them to do. And while it's true that very few programmers are "incentivized by positive social change", many of them do it because they find it interesting and fun in some way.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#195

Post by Udo »

philwelch wrote: post #193
Udo wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely correct, I'm am. And you're presupposing that those differences are biologically hardcoded, I get that. I just don't agree with you.

I'm suggesting a possibility; you're presupposing a dogma.

Traditionally, dominant groups have often invoked (fake) claims of a naturally fixed order to protect, justify and market the status quo. For example, this line of reasoning has historically been used to assert that black people are a subhuman race incapable of higher intellectual thought and that women shouldn't be allowed to vote on the grounds that they are immature and hysterical by nature.

Another reason why I believe most of the omnipresent assumptions about a natural order are essentially bullshit is that I know quite a few men and women who violate these supposedly biological gender roles. They are not sick, they are not mutants, they are not troubled individuals with identity problems and they're not trying to be rebels. It's just that they don't care about their socially prescribed attributes.

Lastly, there have been quite a lot of experiments in psychology to successfully illustrate that expectations actually shape your capabilities. Not just the conscious idea of identity itself but indeed capabilities that were always thought to be innate are now found to be subject to variations stemming from motivation and expectation.

Recently I read about a study where participants were asked to do cognitive tasks that traditionally have a strong gender bias, for example spatial orientation. The results were as expected. However, the researchers then did a second run with a second group, explaining beforehand which tasks usually favor women and which tasks were better performed by men. The catch was: the experimenters lied, they actually switched the descriptions around. When this second group then took the tests, they performed according to the (now inverted) "expectations".

So I do have a few pointers that helped me arrive at this "dogmatic" position. So what's your position? What's the actual background of your suggested possibility?

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#196

Post by sliverstorm »

gsmaverick wrote: post #107
cjzhang wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't you just say "women can't code?" Also, the sample size is crap and the deviation is crap relative to the sample size, so you can't make very many truly meaningful observations from it.

That's what you wanted him to say so you could attack him. He was merely stating an observation of the given data in an unbiased manner.

diolpah, my grandparent here is why you were downvoted. Nowadays, the atmosphere around anything related to gender is super-charged, and people are hyper-super-extra-sensitive to anything that could even slightly be construed as debasing towards women, so even something as simple as observing measured data sounds to them like overt sexism.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#197

Post by _delirium »

gdilla wrote: post #75
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,…

Aren't we missing something here? Med schools try to have 50/50 gender split in their incoming classes. Heck, patients certainly 50/50. Med schools don't even want gender diversity, they want gender parity. CS departments can't fathom such a thing. And while employers like diversity, they don't need parity. Startups need skills, not stats, so it's not a priority for them either. I'm not saying females are not on par…

I think a lot of CS departments would be happy to aim at 50/50 gender parity, if their application pipeline were anywhere near close enough to support it. When applicant ratios are in the range of 90% male, it's very hard to get more than 20-30% women in the incoming class, even if you really go out of your way to aim at gender balance.

It took med schools a few decades too, over which they first removed overt barriers (like "medicine isn't for women" attitudes among faculty), then successfully convinced more women to apply, and then finally accepted many of those applying women. CS's troubles are complex, but I think one of the stickiest ones is that interest/disinterest in studying CS seems to develop around high-school (same as studying math), so the imbalance somehow has to be addressed at the pre-university level. Med-school doesn't seem to have the same differentiate-by-age-15 aspect.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#198

Post by tsotha »

rdouble wrote: post #168
tsotha wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, but you're gonna be crushed by debt and won't be starting making money until you're in your mid 30s. Programmers come out way, way ahead once you consider the lost opportunity and cost of all those extra years doctors spend in school.

People who say this haven't done the math or looked at real salary numbers. The average salary for a cardiologist is $308,000/yr. The average salary for a software engineer is $58,000/yr. The cardiologist makes six times as much money. Even with a 12 year head start the programmer comes out behind. Medical school debt can be paid off in 2-5 years. In addition, the cardiologist can keep practicing into her 60s whereas…

>The average salary for a software engineer is $58,000/yr.

That seems awfully low. I would never have stayed in this business if I was making anything close to that.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#199

Post by marquis »

alexgartrell wrote: post #180
marquis wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a core issue here I point out to my male colleagues, which I find to be true of myself as a female developer: as a stereotypical trait (I am generalising here, beware!) girls don't find sitting in front of a computer alone all that interesting. I personally value my personal time alone and am fairly unique in this respect (my boyfriend would love it if I wanted to hang out and work with him! But I focus best…

Can you explain what you mean by male posturing?

I don't mean it in anyway as insulting: when a group of guys are together there are in-jokes, playful physical competitiveness (especially when they all know each other well) and talk of girls. All fine things, but spending a year with a bunch of guys in the same room during the workday can get a little draining. If I'm having a bad day it gets difficult when there isn't another female around for support.

To clarify: I love working in any environment where I get on with everyone, regardless of gender/choice of music/language. But it's harder if it's a guy I don't get on with, or there is tension of any kind. Having another girl around to offset that makes a huge difference. Wouldn't it be the same if you're a guy and your workplace is all women?

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#200

Post by _delirium »

klipt wrote: post #163
maco wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The tone of that article seems to be "some college students are trying to game our grading system by learning programming in advance. Let's crush them by making them program in an obscure language!" To me that sounds like "some elementary school students are trying to game our grading system by learning reading in advance. Let's crush them by making them read in an obscure language!"

I agree it's tricky to do anything about it without seeming absurd, but I can also see the motivation. One semester isn't very long, so it's easy for incoming knowledge to completely swamp whatever a course could teach in 14 weeks. But if the goal of CS101 is to put people on track to a CS degree, and the purpose of grading is to give some indication of performance, having CS101 grades completely dominated by incoming knowledge rather than some sort of signal of ability-to-learn seems unfortunate.

On the other hand, this is true to some extent in other fields. For example, hobbyist writers, which these days includes kids who write long-form blog pieces, will tend to breeze through introductory portions of humanities curricula, since grades are often dominated by simple writing ability. If you can already throw together a coherent 5-page essay without having to learn how as a freshman, you're way ahead of the average 1st-year.

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