

Why are there fewer female programmers? - jlm382
http://trogger.com/discussions/why-are-there-fewer-female-developers

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nolanbrown23
It's not programmers that are at fault for the lack of women in the industry.
While there are stereotypes about the geeky programmer, those are rapidly
dissipating with most of the populating spending just as much time in front of
the computer as a programmer.

From what I've seen and know the programming industry to be like, it's highly
competitive and has a "if you can't cook, get out of the kitchen" attitude
(which I'm not knocking as a fault). The root of the problem is that society
doesn't encourage the competitive side of a woman. Men and women alike see
them as being something of a bitch if they are even remotely competitive.

Programmers see everything as a challenge of their mental abilities and women
just aren't raised that way. So if you want you want to start seeing more
women developers, start encouraging them to be more competitive. That is what
the root of the problem is. (Although on that note, don't encourage them to
compete with the boys, encourage them to compete with themselves first and
foremost. If they compete "against" the boys and lose, it reinforces the idea
that boys are better.)

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DaniFong
Your analysis fails to distinguish between programming and other competitive
fields, such as law and academic science. But the proportion of women in those
fields is increasing, whereas it's decreasing in programming.

~~~
nolanbrown23
I'm not saying competition is the only cause, just that it's a root cause. I
haven't heard your claim before, so if you have numbers, I'd be interested to
see them.

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noss
As a guy, most of the time I feel rather embarrassed by suggestions on how to
get more women into programming. The ideas tend to be so naive or full of
prejudice.

I think that programming should be taught early in school. Not to become
proficient with any language or so, but to understand computation at some
fundamental level. Alan Kay probably have some very good ideas for how to run
such classes.

As it is now, some guys really did get started with programming at the age of
5, or other single digit age, and by the time "ordinary people" reach
university age and meet programming, these guys with 10 years of programming
pretty much dominate the classes and mess them up.

Try being a newbie in any field and surround yourself with people that have
5000h of experience that give you dumb stares.

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jleyank
If you are "good" and able to pick your field in the science/technical arena,
would you pick something that's at risk to outsourcing and flooded with
competition? Or, would you pick something that's harder to outsource, pays
better and offers a better work/life balance?

I've build systems for years and years, and it would have been WAY better
career-wise to be a user of the bloody things than a developer.

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der_ketzer
I think, as others, it's all about stereotypes. At the University where I
study, many girls say "I don't study Engineering because it has a lot of maths
and I don't like them. I prefer psychology", but in many events at the Math
Faculty there were more girls studying math than boys. A mistery to me.

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mindhacker
Because of the quite the same reasons as to why there are fewer female
physicists, mathematicians and engineers.

There has been a lot of study done around it.

[PDF]
[http://rhig.physics.yale.edu/~nattrass/Talks/BNLICWIP/Nattra...](http://rhig.physics.yale.edu/~nattrass/Talks/BNLICWIP/NattrassBNLICWIP.pdf)

[PDF] <http://polymer.bu.edu/hes/nicholson-viewgraphs.pdf>

[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?tp=&arnum...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1487810&isnumber=32006)

~~~
Tangurena
In grad school, I was a member of the local student chapter of SWE (the
society of women engineers) [1][2]. One of the studies they came up with had
the implications that boys were steered _towards_ engineering, while girls
were steered _away_ from engineering [3].

Part of the problem is that engineering and IT aren't _cool_ for most values
of "cool." I personally don't think that it is a problem, let alone something
that needs to be cured. However, I also recognize that I'm not everyone.

As an older developer, I'm also reminded of this comment:
[http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1033515&cid=258...](http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1033515&cid=25807237)

Notes:

1 - I'm tired of hearing about "well, what about the society of _men_
engineers" as engineering is so overwhelmingly populated by men, almost every
engineering organization is "SME".

2 - Why did I (a man) join? Mostly, my lab partner asked me to join because
they didn't have enough students and were in danger of being decertified as a
student club/group/organization.

3 - The numbers I remember were along the lines of: 95% of women who enter
engineering have a family member or close/influential personal friend who
is/was an engineer. With men entering engineering, the number is 60%. Also
women engineers drop out of engineering at twice the rate of men dropping out
of engineering.

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joe_the_user
The interesting and depressing thing is that I read another statistic noting
that women are actually less common in the programming world than previously
and this is different than most other previously male dominated fields.

The reasons I can think of: 1) Programming is becoming more a lifestyle and
subculture and less a codified discipline. 2) Being a subculture makes the
stereotype of programmers more influential than earlier.

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octane
Because sitting in one spot for 10+ hours a day reading page after page after
page of naked computational logic does not appeal to those with feminine
sensibilities.

We're all fucking crazy for doing it, you know.

~~~
Jem
I don't know about that - while I was a huge tomboy growing up and wouldn't
consider myself to have "feminine sensibilities", most of the female
programmers and computer techs I know are very girly.

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milkmandan
If languages are designed "by men for men" then I suppose we need some women-
designed languages to embody 'horizontal thinking' and all that.

~~~
vorador
And what about creating a language for left-handed people then ?

~~~
octane
That's called Tcl.

~~~
vorador
What do you mean by that ?

