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What happened to all the female developers?

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Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#201

Post by klipt »

_delirium wrote: post #200
klipt wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incomin…

By the same token, a hobbyist robotocist would breeze through engineering courses. I'm sure there are good ways to deal with unequal skills - why not let the skilled people test out of the class and save time getting to a more advanced class?

But the way the article frowns on prior preparation as "gaming the grading system" hints at a desire to trample down the tall poppies rather than to improve everyone's experience.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#202

Post by psykotic »

rdouble wrote: post #121
psykotic wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Find product companies where top-percentile individual contributors can make a huge difference to the company's bottom line and are renumerated accordingly.

Was hoping for specific examples, but thanks anyway.

Sorry to be unhelpful. The specific examples I could have given you wouldn't have been useful in your personal job search and giving them would have meant betraying the confidence of close friends and acquaintances. My post's somewhat abstract answer was a common denominator.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#203

Post by flocial »

Forgot where I read it but like true_religion said, some female programmers came into the field by way of secretary. As they kept typing instructions, they eventually figured out how computers work.

This photo set from Bell Labs taken in the 1960s is pretty interesting:

http://www.luckham.org/LHL.Bell%20Labs%20Days.html

One thing to note is that despite computers being a novelty back then is that primary education was in a much better state and students had a stronger foundation in science and math regardless of sex. Many long-time teachers would say (with some nostalgia premium) that high school graduates of the 1960s are equivalent to college graduates of today.

Another thing that isn't touched on is that computer programming as it stands right now is not a very female friendly profession. Women will usually factor in the possibility that their careers may get derailed at some point by having a child. Careers where time away from the field doesn't obsolete your skills is a big plus for women. Medicine and law are excellent fields in that regard.

"Partly because it is so tricky to juggle kids and a career, many highly able women opt for jobs with predictable hours, such as human resources or accounting. They also gravitate towards fields where their skills are less likely to become obsolete if they take a career break, which is perhaps one reason why nearly two-thirds of new American law graduates are female but only 18% of engineers.

A study by the Centre for Work-Life Policy, a think-tank based in New York, found that, in 2009, 31% of American women had taken a career break (for an average of 2.7 years) and 66% had switched to working part-time or flexible-time in order to balance work and family. Having left the fast track, many women find it hard to get back on. "

http://www.economist.com/node/18988694

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#204

Post by philwelch »

Udo wrote: post #195
philwelch wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

For one, there are observed gender disparities in certain things (you mentioned spacial reasoning) which there is no apparent or plausible political agenda in artificially creating. In fact, the predominant political agenda is largely the idea that there are no differences between men and women. For another, disparities are often observed in infants. What mechanism do you propose communicates subtle social norms to infants? You also have proposed no plausible explanation as to where these expectations came from in the first place.

Further, you are misunderstanding the idea I'm proposing. I'm sure there are individual men who have, for instance, very poor spacial reasoning and individual women who have very good spacial reasoning. One does not reason about individuals the same way they reason about populations. As a population, men, on average, might be better at spacial reasoning. As an individual man or woman, a test of spacial reasoning will yield orders of magnitude more data about their spacial reasoning abilities than simply observing their sex. I have many personality traits that are more common in the opposite sex--I'm sure most people do. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of averages that leads one to take this as evidence for your viewpoint, however.

Ultimately, measures of a population only explain populations. They may explain why, as a population, most programmers are men. They do not explain why your sister is or isn't a programmer.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#205

Post by [deleted] »

andreiursan wrote: post #170

my experience: Where I work, on my floor we are either a proportion of 50% - 50% or 40%-60% (in favor for the Girls). Hey, but this is Romania, we don't have feminist movements and so on. Different society. Even in college we are something like 40%-60% (males win here) but we don't take it as a big deal... Btw found CS girls in college that were smarter than me on some fields of this domain :), and I know where to as…

[deleted]

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#206

Post by bugsy »

marquis wrote: post #174
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,…

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…

"girls don't find sitting in front of a computer alone all that interesting"

To be honest, the nature of the work is that most time working is spent in solitude. It's the same if you write novels or compose operas. Do we also say that writing novels is unfriendly to girls because sitting in front of the typewriter alone is not all that interesting? It is interesting if you are a writer or developer or opera composer because that is the nature of the work.

However, it should be noted that all these fields also have times when you are not deeply immersed in a project during which you socialize, travel, or even party. Many IT shops are run like slave ships with 16 hr days 7 days a week, that is not possible and yes such shops are deeply dysfunctional, and a turn off for psychologically healthy women and men.

However, if one doesn't like being alone and primarily loves to socialize with people, developing software and writing novels are the wrong careers. Not because of a conspiracy. Because of the way the work is. I would also likewise not recommend high pressure sales jobs to introverts.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#207

Post by yummyfajitas »

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…

If a person of any gender can't turn urinal allocation into selecting a subset of range(0,N) of maximal cardinality subject to the constraint that neighboring integers are excluded (assuming my quick skim of the problem didn't gloss anything over), they are a bad developer.

Lots of times you need to develop stuff without domain knowledge. My startup targets women's fashion, which I know very little about. If I were to give up or fail because the problem involves plackets and silhouettes, I'd have already quit and gone back to NJ.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#208

Post by sapphirecat »

stcredzero wrote: post #191
rjd wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The prejudicial reaction to buzz words is one of the things that I've found really weird in the programming fields.

At one level, like Google aggregating signals, responding to an abundance of buzz words is one of several ways to classify a given posting as promising or not. A few buzz words could be fine, but a company actually saying they "are building every website in AJAX, MVC, REST, and HTML 5" all in the same sentence is definitely problematic.

Separately, I think there are people who use buzz words to earn points among their non-technical colleagues, which seems to be cultural appropriation from programmers. You can also see this with words that have been redefined in pop culture, like 'hacker'. This naturally breeds resent and wariness of buzz words in general.

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#209

Post by dman »

imajes wrote: post #169
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…

hate to do this, but... "this". CS is one of the very few industries i've ever been been around which engages in the "i'm better than you" pissing contest, EVERY SINGLE DAY, and yet asks itself why everyone looks the same. I really do hope that at some point, we lose our sneer and arrogance and stop thinking that we're better than everyone just because we have some kind of exclusive skill that's alien to most.

What are the other few industries which engage in the "i'm better than you" pissing contest, EVERY SINGLE DAY?

Re: What happened to all the female developers?

#210

Post by yummyfajitas »

kenjackson wrote: post #129
gaius wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

males dominate high paying industries And low paying, dirty, dangerous industries too - and no industries at all, the majority of the homeless and the prison population are men! This is the nasty little secret at the heart of feminism - they only want advantages, not equality. Another thing feminists are very quiet about is the earlier retirement age...

And low paying, dirty, dangerous industries too Thia is not strictly true. For a couple of reasons: 1) Men have systematically blocked women from being a part of some dirty dangerous industries. For example combat soldiers, firefighters, even fisher men . It's possible women may not be particularly good at these jobs, artificial boundaries certainly don't help your case. 2) There are other low paying industries domin…

Women tend to be blocked from firefighting by the fitness test. Requirements like carrying a 80kg 100 yards, extending a ladder and running quickly were too hard for many women.

Fortunately, this problem is being solved in progressive countries - they are making the test easier.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1375381/Fire-service...

This isn't great for me - I weigh more than 80kg, so I run the risk of getting stuck with a firefighter who can't carry me out of a burning building. But hey, gender equality is great, right?

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