

The Myth of Female Software Developers - ig1
http://blog.coderstack.co.uk/the-myth-of-female-software-developers

======
ses
You lost me at "performance at Maths A-Level is the best indicator of
performance at degree level Computer Science". I'm a crap to mediocre
mathematician, like many people I'm just not a natural. After dragging myself
through the Maths part of a foundation course I got a reasonable result for it
(my original Maths AS-Level was appalling). But in comparison my Computer
Science achievement has been extremely good. I think you can be a fantastic
software developer without being a fantastic mathematician. I put this down to
other attributes more important to programming success such as perseverance, a
dogged willingness to learn and problem solving skills. I agree mathematicians
can make great algorithmic thinkers capable of solving very complex academic
problems, but in terms of development, software engineering, solving business
problems and shipping software, I don't think it necessarily helps.

~~~
dpritchett

        development, software engineering, solving business problems and shipping software
    

These aren't exactly what Computer Science programs focus on. There's a lot
more theory (algorithms, data structures, etc.) and less practice in my
experience. Working through the MIT algorithms book (CLRS) will be rough
without the requisite math background. My MIS program was much more focused on
the things you listed than my CS program was.

~~~
araneae
The bigger issue here is that programming and computer science are related,
but not as much as you might think. It's like saying that if your main goal is
to be a proficient writer you should study English literature in college.
There are lots of kinds of writing and writing is useful in any field, and
besides which studying English literature might make you a slightly better
writer, but you shouldn't necessarily major in it if that's your goal.

I think it's a real travesty that somehow "programming" got parked under
"computer science" and hasn't made its way as a staple into other programs.

------
jsdalton
Reading this article, the thought occurred to me that perhaps it's the
"building stuff" part of computing that women aren't as interested in, as
opposed to the "math" part, which is the typical culprit.

So, did a bit of googling and found this article:
<http://www.archsoc.com/kcas/ArchWomen.html>

Interestingly, via the table at the end of that article, the two professional
occupations which had even _less_ participation from women than computing are:
Architects, and Civil Engineers.

~~~
ig1
But other fields which involve making things like Fashion and Design do have
more female participation.

~~~
die_sekte
In Comp Sci, Architecture and Civ Eng you basically have to make it stable,
make it work and—least & last—make it pretty. Fashion and Design have
_slightly_ different priorities.

I wonder what kind of gender ratio UX, UI and IA have.

~~~
qq66
In fashion and design you DEFINITELY need to be buttoned up and make things
work. Ever dealt with a poorly constructed shoe, backpack, or bedframe?

~~~
yummyfajitas
_Ever dealt with a poorly constructed shoe..._

Most women I know are quite happy to do so provided it is sufficiently
fashionable.

------
jerf
This article is vacuous. It claims to be able to disprove the "wrong
arguments" for the issues with data, but the only data appearing at all is
simply the reiteration of the fact that there aren't many women in Computer
Science, and then some logic that does not follow from the raw data. You can't
get to causation from there. It's not even showing correlations of particular
interest (we already know women are in other disciplines of varying
relatedness), let alone causation. This is argument-by-flurry-of-words(-and-
graphs).

~~~
ig1
You don't think the IT data disproves the more general hypothesis that females
dislike working with computers ?

Or that the data that females have the qualifications to get onto CS degrees
indicates it's not just an ability issue ?

~~~
jerf
"Dislikes working with computers" is a new argument you just made; the article
cited "Working with computers is a "solitary" activity which attracts more men
than women", IT is not particularly a solitary activity in practice. Not like
programming can be, though the solitariness seems overstated to me there too.
It doesn't do anything to disprove the assertion that there is something about
_programming_ particularly distasteful to women, the real argument. (Which I
am neither advancing nor attacking here.)

Like I said, all this article "showed" was a reiteration that there are "no"
women in programming. You can't get to causation from there.

Besides, if you're going to argue that because women go into IT you can
disprove some things, you need to take it _all the way_ , not just use it to
prove a couple of pet points then run away from the other implications, like
the fact that there are obviously no systematic barriers to women in IT, and
it seems rather unlikely to me that there are systematic barriers to
programming occupations that don't exist in IT. Certainly I'd like to see one
demonstrated rather than asserted if it's going to be the core of your
argument. So using this same data we can plausibly argue that the data shows
that there is something about programming that women legitimately of their own
free will prefer on average not to do.

This is not the argument I am advancing; if I were I'd be refining it a lot
more. My point for this post is that there mere fact that I _can_ use this
data in favor of such an argument is proof that the data proves nothing. It's
not enough. (Trying to disprove the previous paragraph in a reply would be
entirely missing my point.)

------
Umalu
A similar article could be written asking why so few men go into elementary
school teaching or nursing. Men are just as qualified as women for these
positions, but pursue them at a far lower rate than women do. Looking at
qualifications clearly isn't enough. The hard question to answer is why so
many qualified women choose careers other than CS.

~~~
gaius
In the UK at least, the answer to that is obvious - the government assumes
that any male who wishes to work with children is a paedophile and the onus is
on him to prove otherwise. So men simply refuse to endure that systematic
humiliation.

There are actually no barriers to women working in IT other than their
personal interest in doing so.

~~~
klaut
I have to agree with this comment. I've never seen a country so scared of
children as is the UK.

------
mduerksen
I think the suggested reaons for the importance of equal gender distribution
of software developer are exaggerated.

Not being able to code is by far not as severe as not being able to write and
read. Literacy enables you to take part in society, and prevents you from
being cheated in all parts of life. While it's true that compentence in
_using_ software is increasingly important, it will always be a small fraction
of the population who is able (or willing) to actually produce the technology.

It is important to be able to drive a car, but nobody considers it harmful
that not everybody can build one.

PS: I would love to see more female developers, but they should be in the
field for the love of it, not because someone else told them it's important
for their career.

~~~
ig1
Software development is now the 7th most common graduate-level profession for
men in the UK. It's more common than teaching. It's easy to miss how pervasive
software development is becoming.

Even in non-software fields like finance and marketing, you see more and more
jobs requiring the ability to put together models in VBA, etc.

~~~
mduerksen
My point wasn't that it's not useful to be able to program.

A lot of things are useful _and_ pervasive (like motors), but being able to
read is just uncomparably more important. The article claims that it has the
same degree of importance, and that's totally exaggerated IMHO.

------
parfe
>How can we fix it?

This is straight up begging the question. The article is taking it as fact
that we should fix it.

I don't see people trying to get more women into garbage collection, snow
plowing, roadkill removal, framing, or masonry. And framing in particular
includes plenty of math when it comes to laying out rafters to build the roof.

I think it has to do with type of computer gaming that boys gravitate to which
encourages experimentation with the computer (swapping out video cards, adding
RAM, etc) that I just don't think young girls are encouraged (or motivated by
slow specs) to do.

~~~
cosgroveb
> The article is taking it as fact that we should fix it.

Assuming that women are every bit as intelligent as men, our field is missing
out on roughly half the population of brilliant minds that could be inventing
the Next Big Thing. No?

Edit: OK. Summary of the answers so far. A) Cannot necessarily make the above
assumption. B) Women on average may be as intelligent as men but they will
never be geniuses like Einstein (or likely to go to prison). and C) We don't
need that many engineers anyways.

Conclusion: they should stay in the kitchen

~~~
geebee
No way is the conclusion that they should stay in the kitchen. The conclusion
is that maybe women are better off in medicine, law, dentistry or other
processions, not because they're women, but because most people would be
better off in these fields.

I think that the reason people fail to understand why there are so few women
in software development is because they frame the issue the way you just did.
They think about how to convince a young woman that engineering is better than
home economics.

Instead, try this as an exercise: imagine you're a career counselor at a
university, and a very bright young woman has just entered your office asking
for advice. She's a top student who can handle math, science, and
arts/humanities, and she's got the chops to score in the high percentiles on
whatever standardized test is required for a grad program.

Imagine a conversation where you try to talk her out of becoming a
cardiologist and sell her on a grad program in computer science. Make sure you
consider employment prospects, earnings potential, social prestige, job
stability at age 48, and so forth.

This conversation will demonstrate why it's not engineering vs staying in the
kitchen. Young women are starting to out-achieve young men in the US, and I'd
be surprised if this isn't the case in the UK.

People (who are aware that the achievement gap is now starting to favor women)
often think of the scarcity of women in engineering as a dark spot in an
otherwise bright picture, but one that should still be remedied. I think
they're missing the possibility that the evident aversion women have to
engineering or CS is actually a _positive thing for women_ \- that women have
realized that they can achieve more _real power and influence_ in other
fields. By "better off" I'm not talking about some condescending "oh, you'll
be happier at home with the kids" kind of thing. I mean wealthy, high income,
highly influential, positions of power in business and government kind of
"better off".

Now for a slightly lame backtrack - I actually do think that science and
engineering are amazing fields, and the scarcity of women is a complicated
thing - especially at the undergraduate level (after all, the most common
academic background at the bachelor's level for fortune 500 CEOs is
engineering in the US). However, I do think that the perspective I described
above needs to be a big part of the analysis. People seem to view the low
participation of women in certain technical fields as a negative for women
without adequately understanding the other things women are doing and the
possibility that they may be making better choices than men.

~~~
jdp23
> maybe women are better off in medicine, law, dentistry or other processions,
> not because they're women, but because most people would be better off in
> these fields.

really?

if you had a teenage son or younger brother, would you be encouraging them to
be a doctor, dentist, or lawyer? or would you be encouraging them to learn
about computers, software, networking, mobile phones, social networks, the
cloud, the web, and all the other cool things we love that are changing the
world?

~~~
geebee
I would encourage my child to pursue his or her own passions My goal is to
expose my kids to a broad range of fields, and strive to ensure that they are
well educated enough to understand and make wise decisions about their own
lives.

But if we're concerned about how women aren't going into graduate engineering
or CS programs, that means we think something's wrong with their choice,
right? It might not be their fault. It could be discrimination, an unfriendly
environment, a lack of friendly encouragement (or a lack of pressure, which
also works, though often at the expense of the person's happiness).

So think of it this way - if my daughter was interested in following grandpa's
steps and going into medicine rather than dad's steps and going into
computing, I certainly wouldn't discourage her.

BTW, I've posted about an article from the RAND foundation about the
"shortage" of science and engineering PhDs in the US (it's easy to find on
their site). RAND found that this is, essentially, a rational reaction to poor
prospects and pay relative to the professions. I understand we're not robots,
passion matters. But when researchers are RAND are reaching this conclusion,
it starts to be very difficult to hold the position that women are somehow
losing out by choosing professions over grad programs in CS/Eng.

~~~
jdp23
okay, suppose your son is like most smart teenagers: he loves hanging out with
his friends on social networks and talking on the phone, video games, and
talking with other smart people who share his interests. he hates going to the
doctor and the dentist and thinks that most lawyers don't add a lot to
society. he likes all his classes: math, science, english. what would you
recommend to him?

> it starts to be very difficult to hold the position that women are somehow
> losing out by choosing professions over grad programs in CS/Eng.

but that's not what this article was about. we're talking choices at 16 years
old, long before people have chosen a specialty.

------
compay
I was at a conference where a developer from India said that this is much less
of an issue there; that the ratio of female/male developers is much more even.
I thought that was pretty interesting - can anybody from (or with experience
in) India comment on that?

~~~
wisty
I think that CS is seen as a profession like medicine or law in India. Not a
paid hobby for geeks like in the rest of the world.

~~~
dpritchett
I see people on LinkedIn nowadays with degrees from IITs and jobs in something
completely different. You might be right.

------
sabatier
When I was choosing what degree to do at university I didn't even consider
computer science because I hadn't been exposed to computer science education
before that so I didn't know what it was like and that I might be interested
in it. I went to an all-girls school so it was probably assumed that girls
would have no interest in it, in the same way that I wasn't offered courses in
other typically male-oriented subjects like woodworking, mechanics etc. It
wasn't until I took a computer science module as part of my business degree
that I developed an interest in it and decided to do a masters in it.

So for me, the main reason I didn't study it at undergraduate level is that I
simply wasn't exposed to it enough during my formative years to develop an
interest in it, not through any perceived mathematical difficulty or that it
is sometimes seen as a solitary activity.

------
tehjones
My sister started out in the same Computing program that I am currently in,
she managed around half a year until she switched to a law program.

She was doing quite well, better than most she was told when she left.

She left saying that computing was boring for girls, she had no outside
interest in the subject and struggle to get into the right frame of mind for
computing.

Look at this, computing is boring for girls. Her words not mine, if you look
into the social stigma behind computing studies. I get called a nerd or a geek
when people find out about my degree, it is even less cool for most girls to
get into the subject. I honestly think there is a much stronger social side,
where woman and young girls just do not want to get into this field.

~~~
ig1
If a guy you knew dropped out of CS (about 10-15% of them do in the first
year) saying it was boring, would you be saying that computing is boring for
guys ?

It seems hard to argue that there's a social stigma associated with computing
that doesn't exist with IT, given that most people outside the field generally
don't know the difference. So would you explain the difference in take up
between the two fields ?

------
JonnieCache
_> To get onto a good Computer Science degree you generally need to have a
strong grade at A-Level Maths (which students study between the ages of
16-18)_

I stopped maths at 16, I hated it. I did CompSci at uni. About a third of unis
in the UK have stopped requiring maths A level for compsci courses. They tend
to be less 'pure' compsci courses and more generalised programming/IT/'making-
stuff-with-computers' degrees.

I did do a Computing A-level though, which is quite rare. It was better-taught
and more educational than a lot of my degree. And it was free. Goddammit.

~~~
ig1
Graduates from higher-ranking universities are much more likely to get tech
jobs (we're talking 2-3x more likely), so the top universities (which require
maths) are supplying a disproportionately large number of the software
developers.

~~~
JonnieCache
_> Graduates from higher-ranking universities are much more likely to get tech
jobs (we're talking 2-3x more likely)_

Sweet. Apparently having arsed around at a non 'top' university and still
having got a tech job means I am in a statistically small cohort of
awesomeness.

~~~
ig1
If you want to see the stats for the graduates from your degree you can see
them at <http://unistats.direct.gov.uk/>

------
karinqe
One of the reasons may be, that men always help women with their computers.
They don't need to clean it off spyware, reinstall windows or anything,
because their IT friend will do it for them. So they don't need to explore how
anything works, it's just a stupid black box for them. Why would they go and
study Computer Science? They probably don't know what it is about.

I got into computers thanks to my little brother - I didn't want to admit that
he knows something better than me. So I tried to fix it myself. Somehow, while
searching for sites about how to fix this and that, I found some discussions
on how Windows sux. Found Linux. Found out about programming...

------
simias
I wonder how we could gauge how much of this apparent "predestination" is due
to the innate differences between men and women and how much is simply a
consequence of the way our society works. Most people will paint a newborn
girl room pink and a boy room blue.

I don't think we should ignore or even try to dim the differences between men
and women (diversity is a chance), but maybe society should give more room to
children when it comes to choose what they want to become, and not brainwash
them since early childhood that GI Joes are for boys and baby dolls are for
girls.

------
abstractbill
When I was finishing up my A-levels and deciding what to study at degree
level, the standard advice was that if you thought you might one day want to
work with computers, to _not_ take a computing degree (because at the time
they were regarded as lower-quality than more traditional subjects), but to
take something like maths instead. I don't know if that advice continues to be
given, and I can't think of an _obvious_ reason why women would pay more
attention to it than men, but maybe someone else can?

~~~
mortice
I think you pick up on an interesting point - the focus on Computer Science
qualifications above GCSE level. The drop-offs the article points to are
between A-Levels and degrees and, to a lesser extent, between GCSEs and
A-Levels. But those drop-offs can only be said to explain the gender disparity
among professional developers if you accept that the vast majority of software
developers working professionally today studied Computer Science at degree
level. I'm not sure that's true, and I'm equally unsure that it _should_ be
true.

Given that there's a software developer shortage overall and that software
development jobs don't tend to require CS degrees, wouldn't it be more prudent
to make the professional end more attractive rather than concentrating on
outreach for degree programmes?

~~~
ig1
Certainly among graduate employers CS degrees are the dominant source of
developers (although you do get a number of Maths/Physics/Engineers as well).
Unfortunately I don't think there's any good data on it. I wrote to the
minister for universities a few weeks back trying to persuade him that HESA
should be collecting this data, but I haven't heard back.

The problem for companies taking people without programming experience is that
it's very high-risk. If you hire someone and after training find they can't
program it's very hard to fire them.

------
trustfundbaby
I can't understand why we can't just go with "Women just aren't interested in
Programming" and leave it at that.

I never considered going into fashion or nursing or anything other remotely
female dominated profession, because they just weren't interesting to me, and
no amount of PR would have changed that.

~~~
mcantor
The problem is that some women _are_ interested in programming, but are
discouraged by the education process, which is as male-dominated as the field
itself. I know several guys who are in fashion, nursing and other female-
dominated fields, but they have never been made to feel ostracized and
alienated to the extent that budding female programmers are.

------
iterationx
Nobody ever says maybe our brains are wired differently. Maybe there's some
innate differences between the sexes.

Not to say that they can't, I knew a girl who was taking non-linear
differential crypto-analysis at as a junior in high school.

~~~
compay
Other technical fields have a higher male/female ratio, so neurological gender
differences doesn't seem like a promising hypothesis.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The only technical fields I can think of with significantly higher ratios are
either a) softer (biology), or b) have a teaching track which attracts women
(math teacher).

When I was in grad school, the math major had lots of women. The vast majority
were education minors. The undergrads taking grad courses (note: every serious
math major does this) were mostly men.

------
CaptainCasey
Just as a counter-point to this stupid title, my workplace has 50% more Female
Software Developers than Male Software Developers

