Why aren't there more ?
female bricklayers
male seamstresses
and on and on and on.
Is it really a problem? People do what they want, less women want to program, I see no problem with this.
Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
11–20 of 76 posts
Re: Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
#12I agree with point #2 "seeing people like me do it" but even taken down a notch to exclude the difference in gender. Personally, I have two sisters both of whom do programming after seeing my dad and I both do it. The other variables in their cases are just like everyone else in this community which has the same percentage of women in cs than other places (i.e. not sv).
Re: Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
#13Good post in whole, but part of #3 really caught my eye: >>When I go to Kindergarten Moms Night and someone asks what I do, "computer programming" usually ends the conversation I don't this is specific to women - I run into exactly the same thing talking about my tech job with friends, family, strangers, etc. There's also always an underlying question that gets avoided in these types of articles - what's the "correct…
What we know is there's a lot of unfair factors pushing jobs away from being demographically evenly distributed. We have no evidence that something other than that is "natural", so until then, yes, I think we should assume the correct percentage is demographically even. Especially given the centuries of history where we ignored the opposite and were totally, ridiculously, hideously wrong about all sorts of things.
Re: Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
#14Good post in whole, but part of #3 really caught my eye: >>When I go to Kindergarten Moms Night and someone asks what I do, "computer programming" usually ends the conversation I don't this is specific to women - I run into exactly the same thing talking about my tech job with friends, family, strangers, etc. There's also always an underlying question that gets avoided in these types of articles - what's the "correct…
Agreed. I always wondered whether one of the main reasons why there are less female than male programmers is that, well, most women simply prefer other professions.
I wish we were more specific though. It's not just 'male' programmers. I've lived in American cities with large African American and Hispanic populations, yet the vast majority of the programmer demographic I've worked with or have worked under or have met are white males with some limited degree of representation of Asian men.
And it's not that I don't care about women's issues, but I feel annoyed when I get grouped with other men just because I'm a man, despite the fact that race could also play a role in opportunities.
Re: Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
#15Good post in whole, but part of #3 really caught my eye: >>When I go to Kindergarten Moms Night and someone asks what I do, "computer programming" usually ends the conversation I don't this is specific to women - I run into exactly the same thing talking about my tech job with friends, family, strangers, etc. There's also always an underlying question that gets avoided in these types of articles - what's the "correct…
Agreed. I always wondered whether one of the main reasons why there are less female than male programmers is that, well, most women simply prefer other professions.
Simply prefer? That's a rug under which you can sweep quite a bit.
Suppose that 200 years ago you took a poll and most women "simply preferred" not to vote. What does that tell you about whether the womens' suffrage movement was right or wrong?
Re: Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
#16oh great, it's this thread again
If you are a looking for a name for that feeling, it's "entitled". As in, "As a guy, I am entitled not to be bothered by the problems women have getting into programming." To which I say: so what? Does it all have to be about you? Me, I have a cousin. She's 7. At the family reunion, she saw me using a screwdriver to take something apart. She immediately elbowed her way into the seat next to me, and politely insisted…
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Re: Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
#17Good post in whole, but part of #3 really caught my eye: >>When I go to Kindergarten Moms Night and someone asks what I do, "computer programming" usually ends the conversation I don't this is specific to women - I run into exactly the same thing talking about my tech job with friends, family, strangers, etc. There's also always an underlying question that gets avoided in these types of articles - what's the "correct…
As a web devloper from a relatively small town, I run in to number 3 quite a lot. I usually answer questions about my job saying "I make websites". Even then people take me as a wizard of all things electrical and ask me general computer questions.
As for the correct percentage of gender/race/whatever in programming, I don't think that really matters. I think a certain amount of people in general have the mindset to be a programmer and think the way a programmer does, and I don't really see anything like gender or race playing a part in someones ability to be a programmer.
Re: Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
#18My entry into programming was through making website layouts as a teenager. This was back in the days of geocities, expage, angelfire. There were lots of girls around my age doing this kind of thing, making personal pages, fanpages, CSS templates for other people. Then livejournal appeared, and now tumblr. Some of us made the transition from CSS to learning Ruby on Rails, but not a lot. I don't know why. But I don't think it's fair to say that girls aren't interested in code.
Re: Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
#19So I went to an undergrad for engineering, and my freshman class was 72% male, 28% female, and my major was probably 85% male, 15% female. At my first job, we never broke two women out of a team that was maybe a dozen engineers by the time we left. At my second job, there was briefly one woman but the rest of the time it was zero out of 8-9 engineers.
My law school class was 55% male, 45% female, and my firm was pretty close to even.
My experience makes me believe that the reason that there aren't more women programmers is mostly that there aren't more women programmers. I think men and women, generally, interact socially in different ways. By the time I left engineering, I found the fairly homogenous and almost exclusively-male mode of social interaction rather tiring. It was refreshing to be in an environment with a diversity of people who had different ways of interacting socially.
I don't think most of the typical canards really matter. Yes, programming is a nerdy profession that rewards people who can work solitarily for long hours on detail-intensive work. But so is law, so is medicine, so is accounting, and those fields have almost even ratios of men and women. I don't think there is anything about the work that deters women.
Re: Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
#20Why aren't there more ? female bricklayers male seamstresses and on and on and on. Is it really a problem? People do what they want, less women want to program, I see no problem with this.
Not seeing a problem isn't evidence that the problem doesn't exist. Announcing that you don't see a problem is a way of denying that there's a problem.