
What happened to all the female developers? - buzzcut
http://blog.fogcreek.com/girls-go-geek-again/
======
Locke1689
_And she said that one of the things that happens is that women don’t even
think they’re qualified for something because it’s advertised in competitive
language. The language of competition not only doesn’t appeal to many women,
it actually puts them off._

This doesn't make sense to me because easily the most competitive path I've
ever seen is premed. Almost all of the premeds I know are competing for the
best grades, the best resumes, and the best internships. Organic chem is like
a giant free-for-all where everyone tries to beat the curve. And yet, at least
50% of biology and medical students are women. Why are women turned off by
competitiveness in CS (which I think is less common in my engineering classes
where people often try to help other people and don't compete for the best
grade), but not in medicine?

Aren't we just applying cultural influences to both genders in either case?

~~~
rdouble
_Why are women turned off by competitiveness in CS ... but not in medicine?_

Maybe they are just more practical. The worst physician's salary averages
about $50K more than the best programmer's salary. Nurses get paid as much as
programmers. If you do pre-med but can't get into med school, you can still
get into public health, physical therapy, dentistry, optometry, pharmacy,
etc... If you do CS but can't get a job at Google, you can get into TPS
reports or be unemployed. That last part is grossly simplifying, but compare
getting a programming job someplace like Wyoming or North Dakota vs. getting a
medical job in the same place.

~~~
gaius
That is actually the only plausible explanation at this point in history. The
average woman looks at the long hours and job insecurity in high tech and
thinks "this is just not worth it". Men, historically, have always done these
kinds of jobs and still do. We don't see feminists agitating for more woman
refuse collectors do we?

~~~
jff
As opposed to the low-stress 9-5 world of medicine?

~~~
dpritchett
Doesn't an M.D. imply more job security and a higher starting wage than any
C.S. credential?

~~~
gaius
Quite. Can't outsource a surgeon, can you? Not to mention the social prestige.

~~~
joeyo
At the risk of getting quite off-topic, in my opinion most physicians will
eventually be replaced by a combination of Bayesian diagnostic software and
surgical robotics. There will be an intermediate period where physicians will
control and oversee the software and robots, but this too will pass.

Those tasks which cannot be easily roboticized (for example, all the soft
skills) will be shifted over to nurses.

~~~
nradov
It's a lot more complicated than that. Bayesian analysis alone is insufficient
to produce accurate diagnoses, and even with more advanced clinical decision
support tools you still need a human to carry out the observations. Physicians
won't be generally replaced until we have strong AI (at which point _everyone_
gets replaced).

------
true_religion
It's my understanding that in the early days working with computers was
considered manually labor, something akin to data-entry of today. The "real"
scientists and business people would instruct their CS conterparts to do a
task, and how that task was accomplished was neither interesting nor remarked
upon.

As computation became cheaper, CS still retained many qualities of data entry
especially in the business sector.

As such, the whole profession was looked down upon. Men didn't want to enter
it since after all they could simply be scientists and businessmen instead. So
those who took it up were first women, then social outcasts (I'm exaggerating
a bit here).

\---

Around the 90s, everything started changing.

CS was still looked down on, but computing was so cheap and easy that you
didn't need to trust it to someone with a specific degree to do so.

As such, the scientists and business people I remarked upon earlier began
using their own computers. And where they didn't, they didn't hire someone
with a CS degree to do it.

Also, the programming aspects of CS were better separated from data entry.
Programmers which once were reviled, now could command healthy incomes and
thus it became an attractive job for men.

Women on the other hand could get _any_ job they preferred, and did prefer to
get jobs in their own interest instead of CS which they might have only taken
before because it was one of the few 'low class' labors that still made use of
the mind and education.

~~~
FeministHacker
Somewhere buried at home I have an old Cobol programming book, talking about
how, as a programmer, typing was beneith you. Instead you were instructed to
write neatly on cards and supply these to the typist for her to type in.

~~~
MostAwesomeDude
I'd like to think we've grown a lot as a culture since then. I mean,
seriously, do we really want to return to a time when the ALTER verb existed?
:3

~~~
groby_b
Unfortunately, we're still in that time. I don't see "ALTER TABLE" go away any
time soon :)

~~~
olliesaunders
Yup. SQL is from the dark ages. No wonder people are trying to abstract it
away all the time.

~~~
groby_b
Just to clarify, I was kidding. I'm fairly certain the GP was referring to
COBOL's "ALTER x TO PROCEED TO Y" statement.

All of you who didn't get the reference, you don't even know how lucky you are
:)

------
joe_the_user
I worked many years ago as a substitute teacher in Oakland, CA. During that
time, there was interesting pattern. The vast majority of the older teachers
were black and the vast majority of younger teacher were white. At a glance,
this would seem strange given that discrimination was being actively attacked.
But what was happening was more socially prestiges opportunities were opening
for black college graduates and so few of them wanted to go into teaching, a
field with less prestige than, say, law or business.

I suspect something different but with related qualities is going on with
women and programming.

* Women now have more and more opportunities in a number of fields (I recall a statistic claiming the average income of a young woman college graduate in New York was higher than that of the average male college graduate).

* Programming has become a less desirable, less socially prestiges occupation.

* Programming became a more hobby-based occupation - the expectation is more that a programmer have been tinkering with computers forever and thus (as per the article).

* Programming became a more male-identified occupation through the media and through the hobby aspect.

* Age discrimination pushes the previous women programmers out of the field (and contributes to the field losing social prestige).

~~~
sunir
I believe this is the major force. The reason why medicine equalized first was
that it is the highest status profession. Law, business and accounting are
similarly equalizing faster.

Low status professions are losing women. Usually low status non-labour
professions like teachers, librarians and nurses were done by women primarily
but computer science started off early equal so now it is skewed male.

It sucks to be in a low status profession but that's the way it is.

------
curtis
I wonder what the percentage of high school graduates who can program is,
broken down by gender. My guess is there's close to an order of magnitude more
18 year-old males who can program than there are 18 year-old females, at least
in the U.S., anyway. Furthermore, I'd guess that many if not most 18 year-olds
who can program (male or female) are largely self-taught.

My thesis here is that teenage boys are much more likely to learn to program
on their own than teenage girls are, regardless of raw aptitude. This might be
true of technical skills in general, but programming (I would contend) is
unusual in how easy it is to learn on your own.

This is just a hypothesis on my part, and I don't have hard numbers to back it
up. It's a question I'd like to see asked, though.

~~~
benmccann
Except you don't have to be able to program to be accepted to a CS program, so
that shouldn't have a dramatic effect on why there are so few female students
interested in CS.

~~~
curtis
This is true, but I'd contend that people who already know how to program are
a lot more likely to enter a CS program, so you still get an imbalance.

The situation I'm describing is based on my experience in the U.S. In other
countries it might well be the case that hardly anybody male or female, learns
to program before college. If my theory is correct, then there should be less
of a gender imbalance in CS programs in those countries.

~~~
temp_id
Data point for one non-U.S. country: in India, computer programming (in
BASIC/Pascal/C/etc.) (and also a bit of elementary computer architecture and
elementary computer science) has been part of the schools' curriculum for some
years now, AFAIK. High schools, that is, not colleges. (The use of the term
"school" to mean college (as well as high school or lower) is an Americanism,
I believe.) Also, even in schools that don't have computer subjects as
standard, many students join private computer classes. I'm not commenting on
the quality of those classes, which can vary widely - from hole-in-the-wall
fly-by-night operators (cashing in on the software "boom") to quite good ones,
that's another story entirely ...

Also, I don't have specific numbers, but going by observation and reports,
there are a good number of girls/women who go into the software field. It's
seen as a good option for women workers here because it is a white-collar job,
seen as prestigious - good office environments, at least in the mid- to high-
end companies, air-conditioning, good pay compared to many other types of
jobs, etc.)

------
peterwwillis
Why did I (a boy) get into computers? I was a nerd and I had one friend and no
social skills. I played no sports and did nothing but play with action figures
and watch TV - until I found the computer. I never gave it up until I grew up,
and now it's a job and sometimes a hobby (when i'm home long enough to play
with it). Would you say it's more likely or less likely that an equal
percentage of girls to boys would have similar experiences? Or would you say
that girls might just have an easier time socializing and might be less
prompted to lose themselves on the computer?

Why do we even care about which sex works more in that field? If we had the
answer to this question, and somebody decided to increase the population of
women in the field... Is it going to produce better code or something? What's
the point other than just playing with social structures for fun, or
exercising some strange need to reach some kind of artificial equilibrium
anywhere we see what we perceive as an imbalance?

tl;dr there's not as many friendless geek women and who cares who's coding
anyway

------
blahedo
I'm so glad to see this message out there; a frustratingly small number of
people are aware of the 1984(ish) peak in females in the field. My mom taught
computer programming (Fortran) in a Chicago high school from 1967 until 1984,
and was actually kind of surprised when I first asked her about gender balance
issues in the field—they just weren't an issue then, and her classes were
always more or less balanced.

But what they also were was everyone's very first exposure to a computer.
Without exception, her students had never written any sort of program before,
and they were recruited from good students in the math and physics classes,
coming to programming with an open mind and no preconceptions. (A _lot_ of
them, girls and boys both, went into technical computer-related fields.)

The change, as has been noted elsewhere on this page, surely has to do with
the introduction of computers, but my hypothesis is that it wasn't just home
PCs (not in the 80s) but classroom PCs that were the problem: in a lot of
places, computers in the classroom were a fad and showed up with no training
of the teachers, so they sat in the back or the side, mostly unused... unless
one or two of the students pestered the teacher to play with the computer, and
then used the manual and/or trial and error to figure it out. Guess which
students were doing that more?

But that, I think, wouldn't be enough. The knowledge should equalise after one
or maybe two terms of college CS, right? But I'm pretty sure the real problem
was that professors inadvertently reinforced and magnified the difference
between students who'd had previous computer experience (primarily boys) and
students who hadn't (of both genders). It turns out that as a teacher, it's
very, _very_ easy to look around the classroom, see that X% of the students
seem to be getting something, and decide to move on. (You can't wait for 100%,
usually, so it's always a judgement call.) That's fine if it's something
you've taught well and only the weak students are struggling, but what if it's
something you absentmindedly glossed over? Half the class understands it, so
you must have covered it, right? This is very insidious, and even being aware
of it is not always enough to combat it; and if the divide of "has experience"
vs "no experience" partially reflects a gender divide, that divide will only
get reinforced.

~~~
maco
Have you seen this article? [http://geekfeminism.org/2010/08/10/restore-
meritocracy-in-cs...](http://geekfeminism.org/2010/08/10/restore-meritocracy-
in-cs-with-an-obscure-functional-programming-language/)

One way teachers can even the CS 101 playing field is by doing something
totally different than what the kids taught themselves or learned in high
school (which is probably object oriented programming, these days).

~~~
klipt
The tone of that article seems to be "some college students are trying to game
our grading system by learning programming in advance. Let's crush them by
making them program in an obscure language!"

To me that sounds like "some elementary school students are trying to game our
grading system by learning reading in advance. Let's crush them by making them
read in an obscure language!"

~~~
_delirium
I agree it's tricky to do anything about it without seeming absurd, but I can
also see the motivation. One semester isn't very long, so it's easy for
incoming knowledge to completely swamp whatever a course could teach in 14
weeks. But if the goal of CS101 is to put people on track to a CS degree, and
the purpose of grading is to give some indication of performance, having CS101
grades _completely_ dominated by incoming knowledge rather than some sort of
signal of ability-to-learn seems unfortunate.

On the other hand, this is true to some extent in other fields. For example,
hobbyist writers, which these days includes kids who write long-form blog
pieces, will tend to breeze through introductory portions of humanities
curricula, since grades are often dominated by simple writing ability. If you
can already throw together a coherent 5-page essay without having to learn how
as a freshman, you're way ahead of the average 1st-year.

~~~
klipt
By the same token, a hobbyist robotocist would breeze through engineering
courses. I'm sure there are good ways to deal with unequal skills - why not
let the skilled people test out of the class and save time getting to a more
advanced class?

But the way the article frowns on prior preparation as "gaming the grading
system" hints at a desire to trample down the tall poppies rather than to
improve everyone's experience.

------
pflats
_"In the past year, the number of women majoring in Computer Science has
nearly doubled at Harvard, rising from 13% to 25% (still nowhere near the 37%
of 1984). [...] In the past three years, the number of female Computer Science
majors at MIT has risen by 28%. And, at Carnegie Mellon, the portion of
Computer Science majors who are women has moved from 1 in 5 in 2007 to 1 in 4
last year."_

Focusing on the elite computer science schools obscures the overall statistic
(which I don't see mentioned in the article). These schools specifically
recruit and admit as many qualified females as they can into their program. At
CS4HS, a CMU/Google conference for high school CS teachers, we were told as
much, and tasked to do our own part to diversify our CS classes.

------
dpritchett
This post is presumably part of the patio11 campaign to boost Fog Creek's SEO
and conversion rates by publishing "content you can't get anywhere else".
Looking good!

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588431>

~~~
rmc
That's what I thought, but FogCreek and Joel Spolsky probably has billions of
in bound links from Joel's writing. Surely they wouldn't _need_ to attract in
links?

~~~
joshuacc
1\. The fact that Joel's blog is on a separate domain means that Fog Creek
doesn't reap all the SEO benefits that it could have from links to his
writing.

2\. Having people visiting the same website where the software is actually
sold gets them one step closer to purchasing.

3\. There's the "top of mind" marketing effect of constantly having Fog
Creek's blog posts on the front page of HN and other tech news aggregators.

~~~
rick888
If it's on a separate domain, it's probably because they want to do some SEO
testing without losing any rankings for the origianl fogcreek site.

~~~
dpritchett
The wildly influential Joel on Software blog has been on joelonsoftware.com
for ten years. FogCreek.com is where they sell their products.

------
gaius
This question makes no sense unless it is also asked in conjuction with "what
happened to all the male primary school teachers"?

~~~
kscaldef
I don't see any reason they need to be asked in the same article actually. Was
there ever a time when 40% of primary school teachers were male? It's not
clear to me that there's any strong parallel between the two professions at
all.

~~~
BDFL_Xenu
It is a good question to ask though, as there are societal pressures against
men going into any profession related to children (e.g. the pedophile scare).
But asking it _here_ is just cheap whataboutery to silence the discussion.

------
flocial
Forgot where I read it but like true_religion said, some female programmers
came into the field by way of secretary. As they kept typing instructions,
they eventually figured out how computers work.

This photo set from Bell Labs taken in the 1960s is pretty interesting:

<http://www.luckham.org/LHL.Bell%20Labs%20Days.html>

One thing to note is that despite computers being a novelty back then is that
primary education was in a much better state and students had a stronger
foundation in science and math regardless of sex. Many long-time teachers
would say (with some nostalgia premium) that high school graduates of the
1960s are equivalent to college graduates of today.

Another thing that isn't touched on is that computer programming as it stands
right now is not a very female friendly profession. Women will usually factor
in the possibility that their careers may get derailed at some point by having
a child. Careers where time away from the field doesn't obsolete your skills
is a big plus for women. Medicine and law are excellent fields in that regard.

"Partly because it is so tricky to juggle kids and a career, many highly able
women opt for jobs with predictable hours, such as human resources or
accounting. They also gravitate towards fields where their skills are less
likely to become obsolete if they take a career break, which is perhaps one
reason why nearly two-thirds of new American law graduates are female but only
18% of engineers.

A study by the Centre for Work-Life Policy, a think-tank based in New York,
found that, in 2009, 31% of American women had taken a career break (for an
average of 2.7 years) and 66% had switched to working part-time or flexible-
time in order to balance work and family. Having left the fast track, many
women find it hard to get back on. "

<http://www.economist.com/node/18988694>

------
afims
Based on the handful of women I know who can program, there seems to be a few
reasons why not many go into CS: 1) It seems they aren't exposed to it as
much. They're less likely to read about it on the internet. Or learn about it
from relatives. Or take classes in it. 2) The handful that I know who took
programming in high school never (or barely) turned it into a hobby, even if
they later declared CS as their major.

Meanwhile, I know tons of guys who got into programming by themselves, or
because their parents did it. Also, all of the CS guys I know who took
programming classes in high school did some outside of class for fun.

So, when some women become CS majors, they get intimidated. They see
"everyone" outperforming them, since everyone is mostly guys with a pre-built
set of skills. Even guys who are so-so at something quite frequently talk like
they know stuff; that's just the way guys behave. This worsens the above
impression. There's an actual culture difference. Can't stress the importance
of this enough.

As a result, instead of thinking "These guys have years on me and I need to
catch up and put lots of work in," many women think "I suck at this," and
quit. Then next set has the same problem.

EDIT: removed a bit of unintentional italicizing

------
flomincucci
I'm a female developer. I'm not going for CS, but a Systems Engineering
degree. I share classes with lots of women (well, in the best of situations,
we're 1/3 of the total population of a classroom). Even knowing lots of women
going for a SE degree, I can count with one hand the female developers I know.
Most of them aren't interested in developing, but in functional analysis and
leading teams.

~~~
Udo
> _Most of them aren't interested in developing, but in functional analysis
> and leading teams._

But why is that so? Is it because we as a culture have decided that "men are
focussed on building things" and "women are focussed on social interaction"?
I'm interested in the thought process that actually motivates people to decide
what they prefer to be working on.

When I look back on how I got started with programming, the overwhelming
aspect for me was the incredible coolness of being able to make anything I
could dream of. It's this feeling of creative empowerment that really drives
me to this day. And somehow I never thought of this as being a gender-specific
motivation, but I would like to hear more opinions on whether I'm mistaken or
not...

~~~
philwelch
_Is it because we as a culture have decided that "men are focussed on building
things" and "women are focussed on social interaction"?_

"Decided" or "observed"?

~~~
Udo
That's the same thing. When a culture "decides" something like that it becomes
a behavioral reality. The human mind is incredibly plastic. Cultural
expectations and preconceptions shape us tremendously, they play a big role in
all issues where identity or life goals are concerned.

~~~
philwelch
No, you're presupposing that it's some sort of cultural influence that came
out of nowhere rather than (one of many) quite natural, pre-existing
behavioral differences between men and women.

~~~
Udo
You're absolutely correct, I'm am. And you're presupposing that those
differences are biologically hardcoded, I get that. I just don't agree with
you.

~~~
philwelch
I'm suggesting a possibility; you're presupposing a dogma.

~~~
Udo
Traditionally, dominant groups have often invoked (fake) claims of a naturally
fixed order to protect, justify and market the status quo. For example, this
line of reasoning has historically been used to assert that black people are a
subhuman race incapable of higher intellectual thought and that women
shouldn't be allowed to vote on the grounds that they are immature and
hysterical by nature.

Another reason why I believe most of the omnipresent assumptions about a
natural order are essentially bullshit is that I know quite a few men and
women who violate these supposedly biological gender roles. They are not sick,
they are not mutants, they are not troubled individuals with identity problems
and they're not trying to be rebels. It's just that they don't care about
their socially prescribed attributes.

Lastly, there have been quite a lot of experiments in psychology to
successfully illustrate that expectations actually shape your capabilities.
Not just the conscious idea of identity itself but indeed capabilities that
were always thought to be innate are now found to be subject to variations
stemming from motivation and expectation.

Recently I read about a study where participants were asked to do cognitive
tasks that traditionally have a strong gender bias, for example spatial
orientation. The results were as expected. However, the researchers then did a
second run with a second group, explaining beforehand which tasks usually
favor women and which tasks were better performed by men. The catch was: the
experimenters lied, they actually switched the descriptions around. When this
second group then took the tests, they performed according to the (now
inverted) "expectations".

So I do have a few pointers that helped me arrive at this "dogmatic" position.
So what's your position? What's the actual background of your suggested
possibility?

~~~
philwelch
For one, there are observed gender disparities in certain things (you
mentioned spacial reasoning) which there is no apparent or plausible political
agenda in artificially creating. In fact, the predominant political agenda is
largely the idea that there are no differences between men and women. For
another, disparities are often observed in infants. What mechanism do you
propose communicates subtle social norms to infants? You also have proposed no
plausible explanation as to where these expectations came from in the first
place.

Further, you are misunderstanding the idea I'm proposing. I'm sure there are
individual men who have, for instance, very poor spacial reasoning and
individual women who have very good spacial reasoning. One does not reason
about individuals the same way they reason about populations. As a population,
men, on average, might be better at spacial reasoning. As an individual man or
woman, a test of spacial reasoning will yield orders of magnitude more data
about their spacial reasoning abilities than simply observing their sex. I
have many personality traits that are more common in the opposite sex--I'm
sure most people do. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of averages that
leads one to take this as evidence for your viewpoint, however.

Ultimately, measures of a population only explain populations. They may
explain why, as a population, most programmers are men. They do not explain
why your sister is or isn't a programmer.

~~~
Udo
I understand your belief, I just don't share it. But coming back to the issue
that started this discussion: is it your contention that there are very few
female developers because of biological reasons? If so (all pop evolutionary
psychology and sociopolitical agendas aside) that's a depressing thought,
because that would mean there is absolutely nothing that can be done about it.
Without even trying, we already give up. It actually makes me uncomfortable
that women are so extremely underrepresented in a field that I care about.

~~~
philwelch
_But coming back to the issue that started this discussion: is it your
contention that there are very few female developers because of biological
reasons?_

Again, I'm not making a contention, just suggesting a possibility.

Furthermore, I admit that some factors _are_ social--for instance, if software
development weren't a low-status profession in the US, there would probably be
more women developers. I'm just not convinced that it _all_ comes down to
social factors.

 _If so (all pop evolutionary psychology and sociopolitical agendas aside)
that's a depressing thought, because that would mean there is absolutely
nothing that can be done about it._

It's not a depressing thought unless you have a sociopolitical agenda of
having every single profession evenly split between men and women.

~~~
Udo
> _It's not a depressing thought unless you have a sociopolitical agenda of
> having every single profession evenly split between men and women._

I like to think that I don't. I am however uncomfortable with the makeup of
this specific field because I believe it is missing out on a huge potential
source of creative and intellectual influence. In other sciences, this is not
even a problem: there is no shortage of women hacking DNA, for example. So
this makes me vaguely optimistic that CS could in theory be enriched by better
recruitment.

Decades ago, there were no women surgeons because it was perceived as not
being "in their nature". Look at hospital staff today, the situation is
changing profoundly. I hope some day we can do the same for software
development.

------
jwwest
I can barely put up with all of the jerks in our industry as a man, I don't
want to think about what it would be like as a woman.

------
elehack
The pictures in the article show an old IBM-style computing facility, the
domain of the sages in white robes who tend the machine. This raises two
questions in my mind:

1\. Have hackers and the hacker culture risen in importance and influence in
the broader tech ecosystem since, say, 1985?

2\. Has this resulted in a change of computing culture contributing to the
decreasing numbers of women entering the field?

One of the things present in Levy's _Hackers_ was that the vast majority of
the movers-and-shakers in the hacker community were men. Roberta Williams was,
I believe, the only woman mentioned in the book with any direct involvement in
computing. Has that culture risen in influence, and is it (partly) to blame?
The IBM terminal & mainframe rooms with their hospital-clean appearance don't
make press much any more.

------
ohyes
"But that means that I can’t really talk to my friends about the stuff I do
for my classes, which is frustrating. Sometimes, there’s a really cool idea
presented in class, but it’s only cool if you already know the background
information to understand it – to grasp how and why it’s cool. Trying to
present enough background to explain why this concept is awesome during the
course of a conversation really just doesn’t work, as they don’t get a deep
enough understanding of the background to see why it’s cool and spending
several minutes attempting to explain frustrates me and bores them."

As a male software developer, this frustrates me too. You just get eye-rolls
and snarky replies of 'flux capacitor?'

~~~
elliottkember
I hear you on this one. I think it's fashionable to not have to know anything.
Look at our role models, for example - celebrities. Not so many scientists or
mathematicians, mostly glitterati or athletes. It's a bit worrying.

------
wisty
It could also be about riskiness. Computing moved from stable and secure to
very risky and with nightmare hours, though I'm not sure when.

------
WalterSear
For better or worse, the thing that jumps out at me from that graph is that
the numbers all look similar until you get to the code review, where half as
many women made the cut as men.

If this is a statistically significant difference, it speaks volumes.

------
ig1
"What happened to all the talented female teachers?"

In the 1960s teaching was one of the few professional occupations considered
"suitable" for women, and as a result many of the best and brightest women
went into education. As other occupations opened up to women this resulted in
a huge brain drain, with the average ability of teacher to drop dramatically.

I imagine the same happened in programming as well, as women has more choices
open up to them they naturally moved on to other fields.

------
kamaal
While we analyze why there isn't much gender diversity as it is before. We
must also understand how much the industry has changed over years. The volume
of work that existed back in the pre - 80's era and now isn't even comparable.
And with volume the culture of our profession has changed drastically.

If its your usual 9-5 job, where you have to apply routine steps everyday then
it would have been OK. But being progressive in programming requires you not
just to work hard(And in most cases working under difficult deadlines and
overnight) you also have continuously keep learning and update yourself with
things that come along everyday. This is pretty demanding if you have a
family, kids and especially when you are pregnant etc. There are physical
limitations in those issues. If I look at the way my career has been, I sort
of had to stay and overnights and work on difficult deadlines many times over
long periods. It becomes very difficult for a mother with kids to accommodate
work and family in that kind of schedule. So she has to often opt to be one
side. A general counter point presented to this argument is to ask the Project
manager to be more come with a more accommodating plan.This is often not
possible due to economic reasons, given the time, money and resource something
needs to be delivered. This has nothing to do with male domination in the
society, these are just unavoidable situations.

This is typical of many other professions. Why don't we find as many female
cab drivers as male ones? Why don't we have as many frontline female
soldiers/nurses?

Let alone all that, if the current biological situation was reversed. And men
could stay at home(Do the house choses, kids, food etc) and women had to take
all responsibilities of house, family, money and security for their whole
life. How many women in mass(not individual cases) would be happy with such a
tiring and demanding life?

Well I guess everything in the nature and the way things go have a purpose.

------
fauigerzigerk
_But the most common explanation is that the rise of personal computers led
computing culture to be associated with the stereotype of the eccentric,
antisocial, male “hacker.”_

I think that's right, but the question is why girls did not use the
opportunity that presented itself and put their own cultural stamp on it.

------
6ren
Do the influxes of women correlate with industry stability?

Women tend to not like to waste their time, but men will take high risks for
high returns (according to <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2767867>). So,
men will explore, discover, invent. Some get rich; most get nothing. Women
prefer reliable reward for effort e.g. law and medicine.

But the computer industry has been characterized by periodic disruptions of
new hardware (mainframe, minicomputer, desktop), and while those revolutions
were opportunities to make a fortune, they were not stable. Currently, the
early land-grab of the web seems to have subsided and its future looks secure
(e.g. smartphones aren't dethroning it). If we have entered a period of
stability, it may be more attractive to women.

------
lutorm
If you plot women's share of doctorates in different fields, it's pretty
telling that CS is the _only_ field in which the fraction of women dropped
significantly between 1920 - 1960. In 1920, 20% of mathematics and CS PhD
degrees went to women, by 1960 it was down to 5%. It took until around the
turn of the century for it to get back up to 20%. (See
<http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf06319/>)

------
ladyphp
Asking why there aren't more female developers is like asking why there aren't
more guys who go into nursing or more guys who wanna be fashion designers or a
chef.

Perhaps its personal interest, societal view that industries like games and
computers are more masculine...

Honestly, who cares if the developer is a chick or a guy as long as the
application or site being built is useful

------
fossuser
"In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the
systems analysts in America were women. ... the percentages of women who
earned Computer Science degrees rose steadily, peaking at 37% in 1984."

While that's definitely higher, still seems like the field was male dominated
(the majority were male).

~~~
Cushman
That 37% dropped to 20% by 2006— nearly halved. It might not seem like a large
percentage difference, but consider that that's the difference between the
field being under 2:1 male and 4:1 male. _That's_ the observation of interest
here.

~~~
fossuser
Definitely true, I was actually surprised the field wasn't originally the
majority female since I remember reading that the original programmers were
nearly all women.

------
andreiursan
my experience: Where I work, on my floor we are either a proportion of 50% -
50% or 40%-60% (in favor for the Girls). Hey, but this is Romania, we don't
have feminist movements and so on. Different society. Even in college we are
something like 40%-60% (males win here) but we don't take it as a big deal...
Btw found CS girls in college that were smarter than me on some fields of this
domain :), and I know where to ask if I have a question about those fields.

other answer: Depends on the "society" although while I was in the USA
everybody was blaming it... and believe me is not because of it, is because of
those who like to blame it ;).

Last but not least... my girlfriend is a developer.

------
sp332
Here you go: _It seems like sometimes the family computer is bought mainly for
the boy to use and then he’s kind of forced to share it with his sister._

That pretty much explains it, doesn't it? Girls are discouraged from using
computers because they learn from a young age that computers are the "domain"
(property / territory) of boys.

~~~
mctavjb9
Happily not the case in my family. The Apple II Plus was my Christmas present
in 1980. My younger brother (now an MBA) was content playing video games when
I wasn't hunched over the keyboard writing BASIC programs with alarming
numbers of GOTO statements.

Do you really think that girls are discouraged from _using_ computers in this
day and age? I'm always excited to meet women who can code or who show even
the slightest interest in learning how to actually program a computer because
there don't seem to be very many of us (even in a place like Boston). That
being said, most women that I know who are approximately my age or younger are
at least reasonably adept at using software that other people wrote.

~~~
sp332
No, I just meant that if the present is given to the brother, then girls learn
that computers are for boys. Especially if he defends it from her :)

------
SanjayUttam
Totally off topic, but, is that Font intended?

------
diolpah
A cursory look at the graph indicates that the only place women suffered was
on their own code. Resume, phone skills, interpersonal skills, all great.

~~~
diolpah
The downvotes are appreciated. Where am I wrong?

~~~
cjzhang
Why didn't you just say "women can't code?"

Also, the sample size is crap and the deviation is crap relative to the sample
size, so you can't make very many truly meaningful observations from it.

~~~
gsmaverick
That's what you wanted him to say so you could attack him. He was merely
stating an observation of the given data in an unbiased manner.

~~~
sliverstorm
diolpah, my grandparent here is why you were downvoted. Nowadays, the
atmosphere around anything related to gender is super-charged, and people are
hyper-super-extra-sensitive to anything that could even slightly be construed
as debasing towards women, so even something as simple as observing measured
data sounds to them like overt sexism.

------
maeon3
Of all of the female computer programmers I've gotten to know well and worked
with (maybe 4 or 5), none of them were half as good as the average male
programmer I've gotten to know.

Programming is, and always will be a male profession. The only thing that will
change this is if we force women to learn programming, but even then you can't
make them like it. I think the solution here is to realize that there is a
physical pre-programmed revulsion to everything that Higher math, Physics and
Programming have to offer.

~~~
zerohp
I've had the opportunity to work with several women programmers. I don't think
they were worse than average but none of them live to write software and use
technology as a lifestyle. I have never met a female programmer that was self-
taught.

I think the answer to the original question (in the title here, not the Fog
Creek post) is that the rise of personal computers, and parental influence on
girls at the time drove them away from it. Prior to the personal computer,
most programmers were being introduced to the field in college. At the dawn of
personal computing, parents viewed it as a male activity, like radio or
electronics. Once this generation reached college, the males had many years of
experience exploring their curiosity at home that the females did not have.
College course work had to adapt to this with increased expectations of
incoming freshman into Computer Science programs, which left those without
computer experience intimidated and struggling.

~~~
Jem
> I have never met a female programmer that was self-taught.

Hi, how you doin' :)

