
My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer - jeanhsu
http://www.jeanhsu.com/?p=134
======
peteforde
I've found that in the last few years as the "we must encourage more women
into tech" train has gained speed, people have lost sight of the importance of
removing barriers in favour of recruiting girls simply because they are girls.

In addition to being totally messed up politically, it's really harmful to
your self-esteem if you think that you are being given special treatment to
satisfy someone else's political correctness quota. Not to mention that eager
men (with the best of intentions, no doubt) over-compensating can lead to
"othering", that feeling that everyone is going overboard making you so
welcomed that you kind of want to barf.

My current speculation is that for most girls, it's actually their parents
that instill a nagging sense of doubt regarding what they are "supposed" to
consider good career options. Therefore, I think the key is to reach young
minds.

Girl coders: go speak at public schools or high schools today!

~~~
marquis
On your comment about parents guiding their girls into certain careers, I
don't see that as being so prevalent today. Part of the issue is that coding
isn't viewed as a social experience, so it isolates - especially - girls, as
teenagers feel peer pressure to be doing social activities. I strongly
remember being 15 and wanting to be in the computer lab, but it was deemed
unseemly by my peers and at that age it's more important to keep your
relationships intact. So I started coding in my early twenties when my peers
were busy studying or working so the social aspect was less of an issue.

~~~
mattdeboard
Perhaps in some subcultures, but I know in at least a one immigrant community
girls seem to be actively dissuaded from pursuing any engineering degrees
whatsoever and steered instead toward the medical field in some capacity, or
business degrees. When my significant other told her family she was changing
majors to an engineering field away from a business field, they were pretty
upset.

In addition I noticed in the Bay Area when I lived there for a few years many
of the immigrant Asians really didn't give a damn one way or the other what
their daughters did. This is actually worse, in my opinion.

Ah well, here is to the hope more of the sublimely proficient women I know
seek engineering careers instead of pigeonholing themselves into "touchy
feely" crap fields like marketing & PR.

~~~
dantle
Can you clarify why you think parents not giving a damn about what their
daughters do with their careers is worse?

~~~
Someone
_didn't give a damn one way or the other what their daughters did_ doesn't
mention the word career. I do not know whether that is what was intended, but
I interpreted it as "parents not giving a damn about whether their daughters
have a career".

------
fleitz
Why does it matter how many women are in tech? If we're all equal then it
doesn't.

Not all the people I socialize with are into computers. Most aren't. You can't
make all your friends in your own industry. I don't care if a person is a man
or a woman, unless there are seriously extenuating circumstance I won't work
or socialize with them if their assholes. The problem is that in geek circles
there is a heavy social penalty of advocating that someone be ostracized for
behaving like an asshole, everyone has to be included no matter how much no
one else wants to hang out with them.

There are a lot of anti-social retards in tech regardless of gender. I'm quite
happy with it as there are lots of people willing to hire devs who are willing
to not be condescending and have some semblance of adherence to social norms.
As the OP pointed out quite accurately in their post 'I realized he was just
an asshole who probably wouldn't get too far in life anyways.'

Many people are hardwired to respect the opinion of anyone who forcefully and
confidently expresses it. It's a two way street though, want people to think
you know software engineering or any other topic? Just say something
reasonably intelligent in a forceful and confident way, also if someone else
has said it that they respect mention that person as having saying it. Most of
the debates in software engineering are subjective in nature as much as
everyone involved in the decision likes to claim otherwise.

If you know your rhetoric you'll have no problem intellectually disarming most
people in CS. CS geeks think they only pay attention to logos but
realistically there are a lot of CS decisions made based on ethos and pathos.
I'll probably be down modded for saying this but the appeal of open source is
based largely in ethos and pathos, and not logos.

I'd settle for more people in tech who can write working code with out being
an asshole regardless of gender.

~~~
tjogin
We _are_ equal, but we are also _different_. These things are often conflated,
but they are not the same.

~~~
bethling
Exactly. And teams do better when there are different perspectives, different
ways of thought. Women have a different set of life experiences, and if we're
dissuaded from technology, then the rest of the technology world misses out of
those different perspectives. There's nothing better or superior about them,
they're just different.

It's not that women should be encouraged because we're women. It's that 1/2
the population often feels (at least to some extent) like outsiders to the
field. If there are other groups that feel the same way, then that needs to be
dealt with as well. It's just that lack of women tends to be noticeable - in
15 years of software development I've only had 3 other women developers on my
team.

~~~
patio11
I am unconvinced that women have different perspectives in a way which my XML
file mapping university courses to university departments cares about, or that
checking for absence of the Y chromosome is more efficient for identifying the
different perspectives on XML files versus just asking for one's perspective
on XML files.

Additionally, it is highly likely that if we actually looked for different
perspectives, optimizing for them honestly would routinely result in
allocating scarce resources (like jobs) away from individual women. This is
_exactly_ what happened in university admissions: if you do something like
e.g. give extra bonus points for foreign languages on the theory that it
privileges children of immigrants over rich white kids at Andover, you'll find
that rich white kids at Andover are quite capable of bending their
considerable resources to the acquisition of foreign language skills if you
give them sufficient incentive. (This is why universities desiring a
particular racial balance in the United States achieve it through severe and
pervasive racial discrimination.)

~~~
bethling
The lack of a Y chromosome doesn't help or hinder any given task, but the best
teams seem to have people who look at the big pictures differently. Having
different points of view means having different ways of looking at problems,
and will (I feel) lead to stronger teams.

The solution isn't to optimize the process to hire more women, it's to look at
the reasons why women avoid tech. Getting more qualified people into the
hiring pool can only help.

When I started off in CS, the introductory class was 60/40 (approximately the
same as the school) at the start. By the end it was 85/15 - women dropped it
at a far higher rate then the men. Why? I don't think it has to do with men
being better at it than women, I think a lot of it has to do with what we're
told to expect of ourselves.

Everyone in that class was smart, and almost everyone was used to getting A's
throughout high school. A guy who got a B or C would look at it as they we're
doing well enough and work harder, a woman would be more likely to think that
"they" were right and this field wasn't for them.

In high school, my guidance counselor told me not to bother applying to MIT,
and if it wasn't for my parents standing up for me, I likely wouldn't have. I
know other women who heard the same sorts of things growing up. That's where
the problem lies, it's not something that can be fixed easily. Maybe it's too
deeply rooted in our society to be fixed any time soon, but I think that if we
at least can help women over that hump and get them to realize that they can
do it, that the numbers will come up, and everyone will benefit from it.

------
gvb
The key quote: "It is also very intimidating to take classes where it seems
like most people know all the material already and have been programming since
middle school or earlier..."

The key to getting more females in CS is to expose them to programming in
middle school or earlier.

Jean put her finger on why recruiting females for CS at the college level is
so difficult: if they are starting programming in college (or even high
school) when most of the class has been programming for years, they are _way_
behind on the learning curve and have a daunting task to catch up.

~~~
timr
You've missed the most important two words of that quote: _"seems like"_. She
goes on:

 _"Something that frustrates me about the field of computer science is that
there are a lot of jerks who think that just because they've "mastered" some
programming language or know some obscure unix commands, they are gods and you
are nothing."_

And frankly, that's the level at which a typical CS freshman is operating.
Lots of knowledge about "coding"...very little knowledge about anything else.
The playing field is much more level than it initially seems, but because the
CS 101 classes are mostly about writing toy code it's easy for prior coding
knowledge to be intimidating. In my own undergrad CS program, the CS101
hotshots fared no better, on average, than the kids who came in with no
experience at all. In fact, a few of the loudest initial braggarts were the
most spectacular flameouts, and about an equal number of the no-prior-
experience kids ended up the honors graduates.

Universities could do a lot to combat this problem -- it might be a good idea
to let the high-school coding jocks place out of the first CS classes.
Alternatively, making first-year classes more about math and less about code
would probably put 99% of all incoming students on an even playing field.

~~~
bm98
One of the beauties of programs that teach Scheme and ML (or OCaml or F#) in
introductory CS is that they level the playing field. The typical high school
computer hot shot has never seen anything like functional programming before,
and is no better off than anyone else in the class. Follow that with the
theoretical foundations of CS and you have plenty of hot shots at the bottom
of the class. A professor of mine once said, "Some kids just can't hack the
math."

~~~
strlen
That's the theory (and I am a strong proponent of teaching Scheme or Haskell
in introductory CS followed by C in a data structures class: Visual Blub#++2EE
on Rails is something you can learn on your own when you need it for a
specific task), but that's not how it is in practice.

My girlfriend took Berkeley's introductory CS class as an undergraduate. She
did well in the class, got an A, but she was really put off by the attitude of
many classmates who had prior programming experience and judged her for not
having any. It doesn't have to be with programming languages: it can be with
things like setting up your UNIX shell, using emacs, ssh etc... something that
we take for granted but had to learn at one point or another.

While she didn't intend to Major in Computer Science in the first place, I
can't help but think that the environment was almost deliberately designed to
make sure that somebody who had great potential to be an excellent programmer
couldn't accidentally realize it (much as Jean, the author of the article
did). Women who are good at programming still end up deciding against it as a
career; on the other hand, many men are horrible at programming, but persist
at it.

Interestingly enough, in Russia/former USSR the male:female ratio is in
Computing is slightly better (more females) than other technical fields. I am
not sure whether that's still the case (I left former USSR in 1996). My mother
is a software engineer (she introduced me to Scheme and OCaml, back when you
weren't considered a real programmer if you worked in anything other than
C++). She had many female colleagues when she worked in a Computer Science
research lab (back in the days of [Soviet clones of-] PDP-11s, VAXen and IBM
370s, ATT UNIX, etc... when programming was much more incidentally complex
than it is now).

~~~
strlen
Quick note: forgot to state that Berkeley's intro CS course is taught in
Scheme and uses the SICP book.

------
luu
_[The professor] once told me that even though the females are fairly quiet,
and the boys in the class showed off a lot, when it came down to projects and
exams, the female average was often higher_

At his confirmation hearing, when Greenspan was asked why Townsend-Greenspan
employed so many women (> 50%, compared to about 5% in finance at the time),
he replied that since he valued women as much as men, but other firms didn't,
he could get better work for the same money by hiring women. Are there any
software companies doing the same thing today, and if not, why not?

~~~
Stormbringer
Interestingly Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett's mentor had a similar problem,
he was Jewish and none of the firms on Wall Street would hire a Jew, so he had
to start his own firm.

~~~
mynameishere
Right. No Jews allowed in finance.

<http://www.buffettsecrets.com/benjamin-graham-biography.htm>

Somehow I suspect if you said something like,

"Enrico Caruso was Italian, and so couldn't find a job since none of the opera
houses would hire an Italian..."

...the bullshit detectors would have tripped more readily.

~~~
mwerty
What does that link show?

~~~
mynameishere
_[he] took a job as a chalker on Wall Street with Newburger, Henderson and
Loeb. Before long, his natural intelligence won out when he began doing
financial research for the firm and he became a partner in the firm. He was
soon earning over $500,000 a year, a huge sum; not bad for a 25 year old_

Fyi, Jews have been prominent in finance since Joseph, at least.

------
binbasti
Last year I attended a panel about women in tech on the fairly new CCC
congress "SIGINT" in Cologne, which focusses more on society and politics. The
panel itself was rather boring and not really insightful, but during the Q&A a
young woman from Eastern Europe pointed out something interesting: she stated
that in her country there's a 1:1 male/female ratio in all science fields at
the universities, including computer science. I haven't checked the facts, but
even if that is not entirely true, the difference to Western countries is
astounding. She went on to say that the problem is entirely with culture, and
all aspects of it, and that the numbers were just reflecting that.

The women on the panel, who were all Westerners, couldn't even comment on
that. They were just plain speechless, and rightly so, because most of their
arguments involving bullying boys, mother nature, and other standard points
were pretty much refuted by the simple fact that there already exist places in
the world where this topic is not even an issue. And it's not the ones you
would usually relate to human progress.

~~~
binbasti
I found some numbers, albeit a little old:

 _Exemplar: Bulgaria

The participation rate for women in these fields is slightly higher than for
men: 7.8 percent of the female college-age cohort obtained an NS&E degree in
Bulgaria in 1992; 7.2 percent of males in this age group obtained such a
degree in that same year.

In 1992, women obtained 57 percent of all university degrees. In addition,
they obtained half of the engineering degrees, 70 percent of the natural
science degrees, and 73 percent of the mathematics and computer science
degrees. These percentages have not changed since 1975 (Stretenova, 1994)._

<http://anitaborg.org/files/womenhightechworld.pdf>

------
ernestipark
Really well written article. I'm not a female, but I resonate with a lot of
her points, especially:

 _They can say something so simple as "Oh don't you know that command?" but in
an inadvertently condescending voice that makes you feel like you're the only
person who doesn't know it. As someone just testing out the CS waters, that
type of experience in every class can be very daunting._

In general, computer science tends to be a major where people go into college
with a lot of prior-knowledge and I have seen this discourage many people from
majoring in it.

~~~
yummyfajitas
It's hardly the only such major. Art and music schools _require_ you to have a
lot of prior knowledge - your portfolio is part of your application.

~~~
marquis
Many schools allow you to apply based on other factors. New enrollments at
music schools (not the top ones, but still some very good ones) allow you to
take a starter course the summer before school starts so you can learn to read
music. Music has changed so much in the 20th century that a prerequisite in
music theory isn't going to hinder you if you show the ability to apply your
analytical skills.

Having been through music classes myself I noted I was initially wary of those
who hadn't been trained musicians since the age of 7, but quickly realised
that it really didn't matter and some of my peers really excelled at music
having picked it up even as an adult.

Doesn't apply to performance/dance schools though, obviously - you can't get a
degree in piano performance if you're just starting at 18, unless you're a
rare genius.

------
nostrademons
"One of the challenges for me while I was at Google was to speak up when I
didn't understand something"

That is a problem for perhaps 90%+ of Googlers, regardless of their gender.

~~~
solipsist
This makes me never want to consider applying there. Can someone elaborate on
why Google has this intimidating atmosphere?

~~~
nostrademons
I don't really want to give the impression that it's this totally intimidating
atmosphere all the time, because it does fade with time, and most engineers
learn to ask questions abundantly, and most engineers are also really great at
answering questions. One of the most commonly cited perks of being at Google
is the ability to ask anything of anyone. Have a question about HTML 5? Shoot
hixie an e-mail. Digging into the internals of Python? Guido works there, as
do a number of other core Pythonistas. Building a Go app? Rob Pike can answer.

That said, it _is_ intimidating starting as a Noogler, largely because of the
huge volume of proprietary material you need to learn. There's one true way to
store structured data, and while it's open-sourced (Protobufs), you've
probably never used it. There's a unified JavaScript library (Closure), but it
wasn't open-sourced until recently. There're logging, and log-processing, and
monitoring, and RPC, and cluster management systems to learn. There're a bunch
of storage options, some of which you may've read about in public but never
used (BigTable), some of which will be completely new to you.

The scale of problems that Google tackles is also bigger than most people are
accustomed to. In a lot of the industry, a few-dozen node cluster is fairly
large. At Google, thousands of machines are routine. Big-O notation can be
ignored at a lot of shops, but at Google-scale, anything that runs in greater
than O(N log N) will usually take centuries. Most frontend web devs never
worry about latency; at Google, we care very much. A/B testing has recently
made a lot of headlines and had some neat libraries developed for it, but its
centrally ingrained in Google's feature development processes.

When you first start out - particularly if you're used to _always_ having the
answers, as many Google engineers were - that can be intimidating. There's
suddenly so much you don't know, and yet you know (through Google's public
reputation) that software obviously gets written there. Once in a while, it's
even _good_ software.

For your first few weeks, you probably won't even know what questions to ask,
because there's such a volume of knowledge out there. Oftentimes, somebody's
already solved your problem, but you don't know about it because it might
never occur to you that someone's already solved it. There're also things that
Google pays attention to that many other shops don't - in many other
employers, you'll never have to deal with internationalization, or handling
Chinese characters, or right-to-left languages, or XSS, or managing HTTP
resources when you have a large fleet of potentially-out-of-sync webservers.
When I started doing code reviews for the websearch webserver, the tech lead
said, "We don't expect you to know everything, but we expect that by now
you've learned enough to know when you need to ask someone."

~~~
plinkplonk
I've never really understood the fear of appearing dumb in comparison to
people who are smarter or more knowledgable than you. Isn't it true in sw dev
that almost everyone can be dumb relative to other people? Almost everything
can be learned with dedication and effort and the better the people you
sorround yourself with are, the faster you level up.

And isn't being the dumbest person in the room/company a blessing? This just
means that people are paying you to increase your skills and learn from people
better than you. How much better can a job get?

I have no intention of ever working for Google but the "lots of people there
are way smarter than you" would be the biggest draw if I did.

edit: Now that I think about it, my habit of asking "stupid" questions (not
only about technology) and the fact that I don't really care what people think
of me when I do so have stood me in good stead especially with advancing age.

I've seen many friends get stuck trying to maintain the illusion of knowledge
or understanding and "live in fear" of "being exposed for the ignoramus I am".
I don't really care if someone thinks I am an idiot as long as I learn
something. Attaching your ego to the _perception of others_ is a dangerous
hang up imho

~~~
jasonlotito
> I've never really understood the fear of appearing dumb in comparison to
> people who are smarter or more knowledgable than you.

Consider every joke you've ever heard about a clueless client. Think of every
joke you've heard about some support call some tech guy had to take. Think
about the "cup holder" joke, the ID 10T given to a customer, or the multitude
of stories told on TheDailyWTF.

No one likes to be the butt of a joke.

> I don't really care if someone thinks I am an idiot as long as I learn
> something. Attaching your ego to the perception of others is a dangerous
> hang up imho

This is true. But also realize that a large portion of the population have
this hangup to some degree.

The one thing I can credit to really demonstrating that their is no harm in
asking was asking this girl out in high school. I did it at the worst possible
time: in front of her friends and mine as well. I just asked, simply and
plainly. She was flabbergasted. She invited me to dinner that very night, with
her friend. I was promptly told by that friend later that evening when we were
alone for a moment that the girl I had asked was "in shock, but in a good
way." We ended up dating. I'd never done anything like that before.

It occurred to me that it's easy to ask, and that anyone who looks down on
asking are people that know less than they let on themselves.

I still fall into the trap. But it's handy to realize that asking can lead to
surprisingly good, and fun, results.

~~~
Shorel
> No one likes to be the butt of a joke.

I think the trick is to always have the last word. It doesn't matter if you
make fun of yourself, but it does matter that the one who makes fun out of
someone, is you.

So I some times make fun of myself and nobody think I'm a lesser being for
that.

------
brainfsck
"It's no secret that females in Computer Science, both in academia and
industry, are scarce... currently sitting at about 12% to 20%."

I wonder how much of the gender discrepancy in CS can be objectively
attributed to personality differences. Populations who participate in certain
logical activities have rare personality traits
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=946249>,
[http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=112...](http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=112400))
which are far more common in men than women.

If this is the case, is it possible that direct attempts to "increase the
number of women in CS" are misguided?

~~~
sp332
This fits a hypothesis I've been formulating for a while: CS doesn't need to
attract more women, it needs to attract more _people_. It's not a mystery that
CS isn't appealing to women. Honestly, the atmosphere and culture of most CS
departments just aren't appealing at all.

Can anyone answer, for their alma mater: unless you're already coding "10
hours straight, forgetting to eat and losing track of time into the wee hours
of the night", what is the incentive to study CS?

edited for clarity

~~~
Stormbringer
Even if we accept all of your assumptions, there is an alternative conclusion:
that the problem is the CS culture, and the _culture_ needs to change.

~~~
sp332
Sorry, it's a bit late here so I might not be thinking real clearly but, isn't
that what I said?

~~~
peteforde
No!

Your comment only implies that bringing more people will solve the problem.
Sadly, that will just reinforce the current social proofs that loud assholes
dominate CS.

~~~
tbrownaw
"CS ... needs to attract more people."

"Honestly, the atmosphere and culture of most CS departments just aren't
appealing at all."

I read this as saying that we need to fix the culture in order to attract more
people.

------
scottjad
I think that the % of women graduating from CS programs is a horrible
indicator of the % of women programming in industry. The author hints at this
in the last paragraph.

At Clojure Conj I think there were 0 women (other than guardians of minors)
out of 200 people. On programming mailing lists I almost never see female
names.

I think CS graduation rates might be much higher for a number of reasons. I
think females have higher college graduation rates overall in the US, they may
be more likely to switch fields and pursue a graduate degree, to switch out of
programming after graduating, and in a field like programming where many are
self-taught they may be less likely to learn programming out of the classroom.

------
16s
I used to work with graduate EE students in a research lab. We had male and
female students. They joked around a lot. Nothing ever too serious. If you
pulled your weight, you had everyone's respect.

One day, a top male student came into the lab. A female student was writing
some code.

Guy: "What are you working on."

Girl: "Code for the new project."

Guy: "What are you writing it in."

Girl: "Perl."

Guy: "Perl!? (long pause) now that's a man's language."

Girl: "Rolls her eyes... shut-up dumb ass."

That's an example of the banter. The girls wrote just as much code and did all
the things the guys did. The only major difference was numbers. There were 6
guys for every 1 girl.

Edit: spelling

------
dennisgorelik
\--

They can say something so simple as "Oh don't you know that command?" but in
an inadvertently condescending voice

\--

"Condescending voice" is a matter of perception. It's quite possible that
these engineers were totally ok that she did not know some stuff.

Still it's possible that females are more sensitive to [imaginary]
condescending tone, so they shy away from the field.

~~~
marquis
>females are more sensitive to [imaginary] condescending tone

I have male friends who are also very sensitive to criticism, and female
colleagues who can be very _in_ sensitive. Please be careful of applying a
general personality issue to a gender - I understand how this could make sense
at first glance but it's too vague and comes across as reductionist.

~~~
dennisgorelik
1) From my observation females on average are more sensitive to [perceived]
criticism than males. "Sensitive" in the sense that females usually avoid such
experience. Males might be sensitive too, but they might try harder to
overcome it.

2) "Try harder" attitude is not necessarily better than "Avoid potential
confrontation" attitude. But the difference might explain why there are so few
females in software development.

3) There are other reasons behind gender ratio in software field. For example,
software development requires more abstract thinking which on average is
easier for males. Females focus more on more practical things and care a
little bit less about abstract stuff.

4) All of the reasoning above is about comparing averages. Individual female
might outperform average male in abstract thinking and "try it harder"
attitude.

~~~
btilly
_There are other reasons behind gender ratio in software field. For example,
software development requires more abstract thinking which on average is
easier for males. Females focus more on more practical things and care a
little bit less about abstract stuff._

Overgeneralize much?

Did you know that women, on average, do BETTER in Calculus than men? I guess
it is a good thing for them that there is none of that hard abstract stuff in
math!

~~~
forensic
Women do better in all schooling.

This is mainly because in the 70s all the curriculums and teaching strategies
were rewritten to emphasize feminine learning styles.

When was the last time you saw a teacher in a classroom use the socratic
method? That's a male learning strategy that is no longer used because women
find it confrontational and competitive.

Male learning styles tend to emphasize contest, competition, oppositional
debate, and criticism while female styles emphasize co-operation, discussion
without criticism, observational learning, and role modeling.

The schools from kindergarten up have shifted almost completely to female
learning styles.

Is it surprising that women make up 60%+ of university students and almost
always have higher marks?

The special clubs and programs and self-esteem boosting women get from the
media and so on helps too I'm sure. When was the last time a Dove commercial
told some nerdy guy that he is beautiful the way he is? :p

~~~
btilly
That's a lot more big generalizations. Citations would be nice.

And it is getting away from the main point. Which is the claim that women are
bad at abstraction, versus my concrete evidence that they are capable of it.

If you need another data point, back when I was in grad school something like
40% of graduate students in math were women. From my experience, they weren't
the bottom 40%. And were quite capable at abstraction.

I truly don't believe that women aren't in CS because it is too hard for their
pretty little heads. OK, sure, _most_ women wouldn't succeed in CS for that
reason. But the same is true of most men.

~~~
dennisgorelik
1) Would our own experience in school serve as a good confirmation that
discussions and competitiveness are not really promoted in schools?

2) Women are not bad at abstractions. They are just not interested in dealing
with abstractions as much as men do. That explains why there are so few women
in software development.

~~~
btilly
My personal experience is not consistent with #1.

My personal experience of women who choose to go on in advanced mathematics
(of which there are almost as many as there are men) is strongly at odds with
your claim #2.

------
patrickgzill
Any sufficiently driven, or competitive woman, will do far better financially
and "psychically" to go into management or marketing sides of a tech-related
field.

CS / software engineering is an underpaid ghetto, and as outsourcing
continues, will remain so.

Perhaps I should have pointed out Philip Greenspun's take:
<http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/acm-women-in-computing>

~~~
Nobido
That's a sad way to approach a career. Really, most industries are an
"underpaid ghetto" by those terms, especially for women. Wouldn't any person
be better off "psychically" to do a job they enjoy and are driven to pursue? I
don't feel like the same person who is passionate about coding would
neccesairily be so passionate about marketing.

~~~
forensic
Plenty of industries feel overpaid.

They have protective associations that get them lots of pay for a smaller
chunk of work.

All the professionals are well paid just for having a protected market:
Doctors, Lawyers, Psychologists, Nurses, Actuaries, Accountants, etc. None of
the work is particularly challenging - they are paid lots for their
professional status and because they have associations that lobby and market
the profession as a whole. They have standards bodies and certification boards
and so on.

The reason for these things is to increase their pay. Pure and simple.

Then you have the blue collar workers who have banded together to fight for
higher wages - this goes for both union and non-union. They are manly men who
are unwilling to be shat upon and for that simple reason get paid more. They
also get bonus money for doing jobs that are not prestigious.

Being a plumber is hardly challenging by MIT standards but a first year
plumber rakes in cash hand over fist and has zero competition with India.
Likewise for all construction related fields that are booming - especially in
Canada. A first year construction apprentice working in the Canadian oil
fields can make $100k in a year if they choose to. This requires no high
school diploma.

Meanwhile the effeminate computer science dweebs get manhandled by MBAs into
working unpaid overtime - reducing the pay of everyone in IT - not just
themselves.

------
Stormbringer
I knew several blokes who had the same problem, they were getting straight A's
but they didn't believe they were 'worthy' to work in the industry if there
was even one person in the class that was better or smarter than them.

Funnily none of the guys getting B's or C's had that psychological problem.

------
aming
Interesting article. Did not expect a negative experience for the author in a
post-secondary institution.

On her point about being at a disadvantage compared to the other students
since she had low experience with computer science (having only taken classes
in high school). In my point of view, I think she had sufficient exposure to
compsci. I didn't get into computer science, or even know of its existence,
until my 2nd year in university.

I definitely do think personality has an effect on the experience. The author
of the article, I think, took comments and retorts too seriously or
negatively. In addition, I think she uses her gender as a weakness but rather
it has no effect on her ability at all. Though at least she recognized the
asshole soon after his outburst.

In my experience, I don't see a decline of females in computer science, rather
it is a increase. I have passed by the portraits of graduated students in my
hallways and definitely there are way more females than in the previous years.
Matter of fact, it was almost a 1:5 ratio of females:males (may not be super
accurate).

------
skeltoac
The word "sexism" is too often used without any discussion of its definition.
Here are a few definitions for "sexism" from Google:

I. discriminatory or abusive behavior towards members of the opposite sex II.
prejudice or discrimination based on sex; especially: discrimination against
women III. attitudes or behavior based on traditional stereotypes of sexual
roles IV. Attitudes, conditions, or behaviors that promote stereotyping of
social roles based on gender.

The sexist remark in II is quite common. In some dictionaries the word
"sexism" is itself defined in sexist terms: "sexist - a man with a
chauvinistic belief in the inferiority of women". It may be warranted by the
attitude's prevalence; it is sexist nonetheless because it promotes
stereotyping.

Definition IV is probably the most enlightening of the bunch. One valid yet
unpopular answer to the question "why so few female software engineers" is
that most parents provide a sexist (IV) upbringing. Given the standard
attitudes (gender identification), conditions (girl's toy collection), and
behaviors (mom's occupation), the odds are stacked against a female becoming a
software engineer even before she enters the first grade. These things change
but it takes generations.

Inspecting my own behavior as a male software engineer, I would find myself
guilty of several of the attitudes and behaviors mentioned in the article. My
first hope is that I do not discriminate by gender (I'm a jerk to men and
women equally) and my second hope is that I can be less of a jerk to everyone.

------
Tycho
A lot of tech people do seem intent on 'sandbagging' engineers of feebler
talent/knowledge. Some of the conversations remind me of this:
[http://www.kontraband.com/videos/5173/Family-Guy-
Skywalker-S...](http://www.kontraband.com/videos/5173/Family-Guy-Skywalker-
Sandbagging/)

The thing is the uber-geeks do this to each other too, the difference is to
them it's water off a duck's back.

------
leon_
> As I grow as a developer, I realize that hey, I am really good at what I do
> and I've gotten to where I am because of that.

3 years out of school and already a big ego :)

~~~
wccrawford
Or a healthy one. It's not hubris to recognize your own strengths and
accomplishments.

~~~
kolektiv
It's hubris to recognize it outside of your own head! Although that's rather a
culturally biased observation I admit.

------
HilbertSpace
For why so few girls major in computer science in college, below is my answer.
Sorry to say this, but I have to conclude that my points below are the main
ones to explain the data and so far have received too little attention on this
thread.

From a standard point about good parenting, nearly all the girls with good
parenting had mommies who were happy being mommies.

For more, I draw from

E. Fromm, 'The Art of Loving'.

and

Deborah Tannen, 'You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation'.

So, I continue:

Way before age 5, the little girls realize that they are small versions of
Mommy and NOT Daddy. They know in absolute terms that they are a GIRL and NOT
a BOY.

Since their mommy was happy being a mommy, the little girls want to be like
Mommy and on the 'mommy track'.

By about age 18 months, little girls are already masters at eliciting positive
emotions from adults, MUCH better than boys. The girls are also MUCH better at
reading emotions than boys. Facial expressions and eye contact are part of how
the girls read and elicit emotions; other ways are to 'act' (they are MUCH
better at acting than the boys) cute, meek, and sweet and to be pretty. Since
being pretty lets them do better eliciting positive emotions, they love pretty
dresses with ruffles and ribbons. So, they are in a 'virtuous circle': They
act sweet, elicit positive emotions in an adult, e.g., father, grandfather,
uncle, get a gift of a pretty dress, wear the dress, elicit even more positive
emotions, get even more pretty dresses, white bedroom furniture, patent
leather shoes, cute stuffed animals, etc.

Having to act like a boy or be treated like a boy, instead of like a girl,
would be terrifying to them.

So, in their first years, such little girls, to be on the 'mommy track' want
to play with dolls and not Erector sets, want to work at being pretty and not
how to hot rod a car, want to learn how to bake a cake and not how to plug
together a SATA RAID array.

Give such a girl a toy truck and she will know instantly that the toy is 'for
boys' and will avoid it as a big threat.

Generally, from a little after birth and for nearly all their lives, human
females are MUCH more emotional than human males. So, they pay a LOT of
attention to emotions, both theirs and others'.

One of a human female's strongest emotions is to get security from membership
in, and praise, acceptance, and approval from, groups, especially groups of
females about their own age. That is, they are 'herd animals'. Gossip? It's
how they make connections with others in the herd. Why do they like cell
phones so much? For more gossip. Why pay so much attention to fashion? To 'fit
in' with the herd.

In such a herd, in most respects the females try hard to be like the 'average'
of the herd and not to stand out or look different. [An exception is when a
female wants to lead her herd, e.g., go to Clicker, follow the biographies,
get the one for the Astors, and look at Ms. Astor and her herd of 400.] Well,
as long as human females with good parenting are on the 'mommy track', and the
human race will be nearly dead otherwise, the 'average' of the herd will
emphasize the 'mommy track', dolls, looking pretty, cakes, and clothes and not
Erector sets, hot rodding cars, or building RAID arrays.

When it comes to a college major, any human female 18 months or older will
recognize in a milli, micro, nano second that her herd believes that
mathematics, physical science, engineering, and computer science are subjects
for boys and NOT girls. Instead the girl subjects are English literature,
French, music, acting, 'communications', sociology, psychology, nursing, maybe
accounting, and K-12 education. By college the girls have been working 24 x 7
for about 16 years to fit in with the herd of girls, and their chances of
leaving the herd in college to major in computer science are slim to none.

Don't expect this situation to change easily or soon: Mother Nature was there
LONG before computer science, and, as we know, "It's not nice to try to fool
Mother Nature.". Or, to get girls to major in computer science, "You are
dealing with forces you cannot possibly understand.". Having women pursuing
computer careers give girls in middle school lectures on computer careers will
stick like water on a duck's back -- not a chance. Nearly all the girls will
just conclude that at most such careers are for girls who are not doing well
fitting into the herd of girls, are not very good socially, don't get invited
to the more desirable parties, don't get the good dates, are not very pretty,
and are not in line to be good as wives and mommies. By middle school, the
girls have already received oceans of influences about 'female roles', and
changing the directions these girls have selected and pursued so strongly for
so long is hopeless.

Besides, 'middle school' is an especially hopeless time: The girls have just
recently entered puberty, just got reminded in overwhelmingly strong and
unambiguous terms that they are now young women, have received a lot of plain
talk from their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and older sisters about the
birds and the bees, in their gossip with their herd members have been
discussing the birds and bees with great intensity, already have a good
woman's figure or nearly so, really, are well on their way to, in another year
or so, being the most attractive physically they will ever be and know it,
notice men of their age up to age 80 or so looking at them as women, and are
in no mood to consider being 'more like boys'. Middle school is about the
worst possible time to try to get the girls to fight Mother Nature.
Suggestions of such lectures are 'clueless' in grand terms.

So, a typical scenario is a boy in middle school who is really excited because
he just understood how an automobile differential (TCP part of TCP/IP, binary
search, virtual memory, etc.) works and with great excitement tries to explain
it to a girl his age at, say, lunch, and we have a strict dichotomy: The boy
is totally clueless that the girl couldn't be less interested. The girl sees
right away that she couldn't be less interested, not to offend the boy unduly
pretends to be a little interested, and sees in clear terms that the boy is
totally clueless at perceiving her lack of interest. She concludes that he is
so clueless he is really easy to manipulate (a fact she suspects could be
useful and saves for later). The boy doesn't understand the girl, and the girl
regards the boy, and soon, all boys less then 2-6 years older than she, as at
least 'socially' immature and, really, just immature. She wants nothing to do
with such 'children' (she already understands that a woman needs a strong man)
and will concentrate on boys 2-6, maybe 8 or 10, years older than she is. She
has a point: She was likely more mature socially at age six than he will be at
age 16.

Look, it's WAY too easy to fail to understand: So, we can just assume a
simplistic 'rational' model. In this model, sure, we can teach 2 + 3 = 5 and
(2 / 3) / ( 5 / 4 ) = 8 / 15, and both the boys and the girls can learn,
although typically the girls will do better on tests in such things than the
boys. So, we entertain that the boys and girls can exercise all their
'rational' abilities and, thus, can learn and do well with anything their
rational abilities permit. Nonsense. Naive, clueless nonsense. Instead, Mother
Nature says that in addition to rational abilities are emotions and commonly
has the emotions overwhelm the rational abilities.

Net, such a simplistic rational model is clueless, even dangerous, nonsense.
Give a girl of 4 a toy truck and take away her dolls in pretty dresses, and
she will cry, and the crying will be heartrending to any adults around who
will quickly swap back the truck and the dolls. It's no different at age 13 in
middle school or 18 in college.

Actually, there can be a reason for a girl in college to take some courses in
computer science: Look for a husband!

It may be that in college girls of Asian descent are more willing to pursue
math, physical science, etc. than are girls of Western European descent.

~~~
msy
This is without a doubt some of the most sexist, lazy, stereotypical
biological determinism I've had the misfortune of reading. It's embarrassing
to even have this here, let alone have it upvoted. It's the kind of drivel I'd
expect in a Slashdot thread. I'm sorry you have such a narrow experience of
women.

~~~
wazoox
In fact he reeks so perfectly of the lazy, stereotypical geek by his complete
misunderstanding of women that you wonder if he actually ever met one, out of
his own mother.

