Maybe it's our prehistoric roots. You could compare programming to hunting: no talking.
Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
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Re: Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
#32Why 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.
And announcing there's a problem is not evidence that the problem does exist.
Re: Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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Re: Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
#34Why 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.
> People do what they want, less women want to program Fewer women want to program because they're taught from a very young age that they can't. As a result, we're losing out on a bunch of great programmers, which I think is a loss. I also think it's sad that girls are made to feel like these things are off-limits to them. I think the world would be a better place if every kid thought they could do whatever job they…
Whose teaching them they cant?
Re: Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
#35My 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…
Well, the exact numbers on the right-hand side are still unknown:
[girls interest in code] = [interest induced by predispositions] +
[… by unalterable social pressure] +
[… by alterable social pressure] ± chanceRe: Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The suffrage movement was certainly right. As is encouraging women (or for that matter, any person, regardless of gender/race etc.) to become programmers. I'm just saying that we may have to accept the fact that different genders, while deserving equal rights, may simply have different interests.
Re: Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
#37There's a lot that can be said about this but I want to give a personal answer to a question that has come up in this thread already, and that comes up often in these kinds of discussions.
It's usually framed as something like, "why do we care if there are more women in the programming world or not?" Here are a few answers that are true for me. Maybe these will resonate with some of you.
- I often meet women or read accounts written by women who struggle to simply exist in the world of programming without feeling like they are being called out as women all the time. This includes everything from being assumed to be ignorant of concepts to losing out on opportunities to being sexually harassed. As a male programmer, this makes me uncomfortable and unhappy as well--I want my female colleagues to feel welcomed and to equally "own" the identify of "computer programmer" (or software engineer, or what-have-you). Having more women programmers would help this, in many ways.
- I think it is possible we are missing out on some brilliant programmers coming into this field who could contribute things we haven't yet conceived of. Having more women programmers is not going to upset the balance in a zero-sum game; it's more for everyone. So having more women programmers could potentially help the world as well as provide all of us with more excellent colleagues.
- I would like to have more women colleagues because I enjoy the experience of working with women. Yes, I think women are different from men--but this is obvious if only because women will always experience the world differently from men. So I think having this perspective can only enrich a project and provide a more fertile ground for a successful project or team to grow.
I want to add one more thing. I get the sense that a lot of male commenters on HN feel immediately defensive about this subject, and feel like somehow they are going to lose something if they acknowledge that there is anything wrong or anything that could be fixed, or at worst, acknowledge that there is something that they could have handled better in the past.
But consider this: working in development, a concept that comes up again and again is software having a "smell." It seems obvious to me that the constant issues that come up relating to sexism in the industry is a very strong smell, albeit within the social fabric of the larger programming community. And it's equally obvious that the defensive, knee-jerk reaction is not productive. Consider, how would you approach this if it was a bug, and just wouldn't go away? If you were a good developer, first you would spend serious time trying to understand the problem and dig into it deeply, before you started writing code willy-nilly, right?
Re: Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
#38So 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 pret…
> By the time I left engineering, I found the fairly homogenous and almost exclusively-male mode of social interaction rather tiring.
Yes. This is one of the things I dislike the most about the startup world. I grew up with strong female authority figures, most of my direct academic advisors were women, and the first startup I worked at had a female CEO and a female CTO... over the years I've discovered that I tend to fare better with female leadership.
With an exclusively male office, there are some days during which the only woman I interact with is my girlfriend.
Re: Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
#39Maybe it's our prehistoric roots. You could compare programming to hunting: no talking.
I'm pretty sure hunting a mammoth involved an unbelievable amount of teamwork and communication, actually. Whereas picking fruit can be done very easily without talking to the other fruit-pickers at all.
Re: Why Aren't There More Women Programmers?
#40Good 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 other professions
Women are pushed away from CS because of sexism. A culture of sexism you contribute to with this comment.