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When Women Stopped Coding

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Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#171

Post by adventured »

lucio wrote: post #120
inmygarage wrote: post #21

I am a female born in 1983 and have always been deeply interested in computers, but have nonetheless felt inexplicably out of place for it. I was in advanced math classes my entire life and placed out of calculus in college. I took a summer programming class at a different university in 2000 and fell in love with programming. But when I got back to school, I took another CS class that was exactly as described in this…

If you really love programming, it does not matter what other people do. You learn more alone in front of a computer, solving things, than in a classroom. Youn do not need a degree to hack.

What jumps to mind, and what few people ever want to discuss, is that one of the possible differences between men and women - that women seek out highly social jobs / career paths at a higher rate than men - might be in play. That is, that women find it harder to suffer through the loneliness that can come with being a hacker.

I spent a lot of years working by myself, entirely alone. It never bothered me, all I wanted to do was learn and build. I've never met a woman in my entire life that would have been ok with that isolation.

Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#172

Post by adventured »

kasey_junk wrote: post #103
drcross wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

|it doesn't really make sense to generalize about more than half the population. It does in the context of gender. Sure there are outliers but men and women are generally interested in different things. To deny this is to fail to realise a huge aspect of human behaviour.

A) I'd love to see a citation about the differences in interest between sexes (or genders for that matter). B) Even if there is a difference for some statistically significant degree, given the population we are talking about the outliers can matter a tremendous amount (for instance if "only" 20% of women are interested in computers but are forced out due to culture, that is on the order of 30 million humans). C) Eve…

You can't be serious about thinking there's little difference between what men and women are interested in.

I don't know very many men with a strong passion for clothing, fashion, shopping, etc. Maybe 5% of the guys I know are passionate about those things. About 95% of the women I know are.

Sports. I really don't need to explain this one. If you've dated more than a few women, you'd find most of them have a relatively low interest in watching sports on TV. They'd rather be watching True Blood, or Gossip Girl.

Babies. My Facebook feed is non-stop overwhelmed with women posting endless parades of baby related content. Babies, babies, babies, all the time. This is a 27 / 40 something female thing in my observation. None of the guys do this, ever, outside of occasionally posting family photos.

I guess that must just be the people I know, and it just happens to perfectly match up with the cultural stereotypes.

Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#173

Post by adventured »

cauterized wrote: post #162
guard-of-terra wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about "Computer Science field has innate properties that discourage the female sex (biologically) from it"? Why is it fantastic? Because last time I've checked, women were also less interested in recreational fishing than men.

And why should recreational fishing be biologically less appealing to women than men either? - from a woman who quite enjoys fishing, tyvm

It's a great question. Why are women dramatically less interested in construction, coal mining, being fire fighters, joining the military, working on oil rigs, becoming welders or brick layers, etc.?

The two arguments are: it's either how we're wired, that is that we're wired (or even physically built) in such a way that we end up liking or pursuing different things; or it's society / social pressure or influence.

I wish we could scientifically prove once and for all, that men and women are identical, and thus should inherently like identical things; or that we are in fact different in various ways, and thus inherently are going to like different things to different degrees.

Do men and women like programming at a different rate because of how our brains are wired? It seems to me we'd have to start by determining whether our brains are different in such a way as to make that plausible; and if that's not the case, then it practically has to be a social driven issue. Now, how can we determine the brain aspect?

Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#174

Post by adventured »

Has anyone considered that programming in the 1970s and 1980s was in fact less hostile and more open than many other fields for women in terms of being merit based? Emphasis on that being a relative scale (less hostile than many other fields at the time).

And that during the 1960s through the 1980s, fields such as law or advertising were the opposite: openly hostile to women. With there being a critical difference being between aggressive and passive hostility.

As women gradually found it easier to move into fields such as law, they chose not to pursue computer science. That shift pulled women from pursuing computer science, perhaps because women found those other jobs more fulfilling for any number of reasons.

Nerds are typically not as aggressive in any sense, as the guys that would have worked in advertising or law, circa 1985 would have been.

Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#175

Post by kasey_junk »

adventured wrote: post #172
kasey_junk wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A) I'd love to see a citation about the differences in interest between sexes (or genders for that matter). B) Even if there is a difference for some statistically significant degree, given the population we are talking about the outliers can matter a tremendous amount (for instance if "only" 20% of women are interested in computers but are forced out due to culture, that is on the order of 30 million humans). C) Eve…

You can't be serious about thinking there's little difference between what men and women are interested in. I don't know very many men with a strong passion for clothing, fashion, shopping, etc. Maybe 5% of the guys I know are passionate about those things. About 95% of the women I know are. Sports. I really don't need to explain this one. If you've dated more than a few women, you'd find most of them have a relative…

Let me just say that I of course think there is a difference on average between what men and women report they are interested in but:

1) I don't think it is statistically dominant enough to be important for conversations about nuanced topics like computer science education. That is, just because on average more woman are interested in Gossip Girl than men, has no bearing on the difference between potential interest in computer science (especially given that an interest in computer science is already such a small minority of all people).

2) What people report they are interested in and what they would be interested in absent cultural stereotypes are 2 entirely different things. On big picture topics we are unlikely to change those stereotypes in a reasonable time frame but for something as constrained as CS education, the stereotype can (and potentially has historically) changed. For instance, to use your example, there are many, many women who are not in the least bit interested in babies, but they cannot admit this without an extreme social stigma being attached. Conversely, what would you think about one of your male Facebook cohorts posting an endless parade of baby related content? Those stigmas filter peoples behaviors.

3) social stereo types are extremely compelling minus data. For instance, I find your claim that 95% of woman are passionate about clothing ridiculous and the converse of 5% of men is also idiotic. It also may be extremely dependent on your neighborhood, background, location etc. Without data we can't know which of us is right, but many many people will assume you are.

4) Your sports example is also particularly pernicious. There is this belief that woman aren't interested in sports, yet at the youth level woman participate in sports at nearly the same rates as men. So if woman are interested in sports growing up, but have lower average televised attendance (and if you look that number up I bet it isn't nearly as disparate as you think) we can either assume that woman aren't interested in TV sports due to some inherent "woman-ness" or we can attribute it to sports on TV being targeted at men. If it is the latter that says nothing about differences in interest, only about differences in accommodation. There is at least circumstantial evidence about Sports being interesting for woman when you look at the viewership surrounding the Olympics. Figure skating & gymnastics post dominant TV numbers with high percentages of woman viewership. I'd also say that your data set of women you've dated might also be biasing your world view on this.

Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#176

Post by frostmatthew »

CalRobert wrote: post #72
grimtrigger wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this explanation extremely hollow. Most programmers didn't start programming when they were kids. They started when they realized it was a good paycheck.

Hmm.. I wonder if that's true of younger programmers, but I don't think I've met a single one around my age (early 30's, late 20's) who didn't start when they were young. I got my start near the end of high school and I felt _impossibly_ late. I still do, frankly.

> I don't think I've met a single one around my age (early 30's, late 20's) who didn't start when they were young.

This is probably partly confirmation basis and partly insufficient data. I doubt every time you meet a fellow developer you ask them how old they were when they first started programming.

I'm 35 and didn't start coding until about four years ago (when I decided to go back to school and switch careers) - there's another dev on my team that started even later, and I know several that never wrote a line of code before college. So yeah we're out there.

Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#177

Post by rayiner »

istorical wrote: post #30
rayiner wrote: post #5

The "women just aren't as interested in programming" trope rings hollow when the participation of women in CS majors is about half of what it was in 1985, a time when, by all accounts, programmers were far less socially mainstream than they are today.

Why? Don't really follow your logic. My hypothesis is that women (specifically teenage girls) just aren't interested in the field / profession so they decide not to study it in school or search for jobs in the field. Perhaps this is because they are discouraged from trying it by their teachers or media, perhaps its because they don't have the confidence to believe they'll succeed, perhaps they think it's not cool, pe…

The question is: why would female participation in CS drop by half from 1985 to today? Why would innate preferences change so dramatically in that time? Certainly, the usual characteristics trotted out for why CS isn't attractive to women were even more true in 1985.

Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#178

Post by tibiapejagala »

cscheid wrote: post #83
cheez wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where you're picking these numbers off and from which graph. The graph I linked has the following values(ish): * Men: 27,500 - 17,500 -> 1.57 ~ 36% drop * Women: 15,000 - 7,500 -> 2 ~ 50% drop So yes, you're right that women did seem to drop off more but not as much as you say.

The graph you linked to. I'm comparing the 1984 numbers to latest available, since 1984 is what the linked piece talks about (and which I mentioned in the original comment) > drop off was nearly identical for men > women did seem to drop off more These two statements cannot be both true at the same time.

What are you trying to prove with this cherry-picked time points?

Author notices that number of women in CS significantly went down in 1984 and searches for reasons. According to the graph provided in the parent comment it was actually CS as a whole which went down. Both lines on the graph are awfully similar, and one can assume that there wasn't any sudden catastrophe for women in CS at that time.

When analyzing 'What Happened To Women In Computer Science?' the absolute number is not important, but the ration of women in CS and when that went down (and why).

Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#179

Post by harryh »

rayiner wrote: post #177
istorical wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Don't really follow your logic. My hypothesis is that women (specifically teenage girls) just aren't interested in the field / profession so they decide not to study it in school or search for jobs in the field. Perhaps this is because they are discouraged from trying it by their teachers or media, perhaps its because they don't have the confidence to believe they'll succeed, perhaps they think it's not cool, pe…

The question is: why would female participation in CS drop by half from 1985 to today? Why would innate preferences change so dramatically in that time? Certainly, the usual characteristics trotted out for why CS isn't attractive to women were even more true in 1985.

I don't think it's entirely fair to say that female participation has dropped since 1985. The raw number of women has not, in fact, dropped. In fact it has risen, it just hasn't risen as fast as male participation.

Re: When Women Stopped Coding

#180

Post by cheez »

pjc50 wrote: post #107
nostromo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They were marketed almost exclusively to boys" You mean exactly like chemistry sets? Yet chemistry is the most equal major in terms of gender of graduates. I like Planet Money, but this story is unconvincing.

Chemistry sets went the other way and have almost entirely gone out of fashion due to health and safety issues.

Yeah, the new chemistry sets are much safer. Bleh.
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