
Why Women Don't Code? - jseliger
https://quillette.com/2018/06/19/why-women-dont-code/
======
ioquatix
My first computer was a BBC micro and I "wrote" my first code using GW Basic
when I was between the age of 5 and 10.

I now have two daughters, and it's my goal to give them every opportunity to
do the same.

Recently I sat down with my eldest and we wrote Ruby together to print out her
name in rainbow colours on a terminal. She loved it.

As part of the journey of being a parent, I've come to realise how gender
biased the world is. It's even encoded in our picture books. My mother taught
me to flip all pro-nouns to female. Because, otherwise, it's "Bob the Builder"
and "Mr Fox climbs the mountain". Pick up any kids book and count the
male/female ratio. Look at who does the talking, who makes the decisions. It's
encoded in our kids from day 1.

Until we change the foundations of our society, we will have results like
this.

~~~
voidr
> My mother taught me to flip all pro-nouns to female

There are languages where pronouns are not gender-red, they are neutral and
you see the same results.

> I've come to realise how gender biased the world is

A lot of it is due to biology itself being "biased" and a lot of society
evolved to accommodate those sex differences.

I think tech is over glorified and is presented as this boy's club where
everything is amazing, ignoring the downsides. I don't think most people would
find it fun to maintain a legacy financial application or to work every
weekend to finish off the video game because the publisher refuses to adjust
the release date.

~~~
gkya
My native tongue (Turkish) is one language without grammatical gender.
Learning languages with it, it was immediately clear to me that that was a
problematic thing. Luckily no revolutions are needed, as languages tend to
become more analytical and lose grammatical gender progressively.

I think that what enabled women to gain many rights and at times actual
equality in most societies was/is technology. Before widespread use of
advanced technology, we needed actual muscle power to survive, and that was
what shaped the societies since hunter gatherers through various stages of
agrarian societies. As machines substituted raw muscle power in many areas of
production, women could become part of the workforce too. And thus we had a
virtuous cycle of more potential and more power, which affected in turn
women's rights and their participation in many other areas. Since the decades
following industrial revolution, they became more and more present steadily in
politics, academia, culture, etc., becoming quickly co-protagonists of modern
life.

Thus, I believe women should really get into technology, and become actual
tech people instead of many faux-techie types we see that are promoted as
symbols of how feminist a workplace/org is or as figurines to "lure" women
into STEM and IT. I really want women to be the change they want. Today, there
are few women in FOSS that are famous and revered for their technical skills,
actually only Jessica McKellar comes to my mind (and I'm not talking the
designer types here). I think they should just force their way in into the
building blocks of the ecosystem.

As males, what can we do? Well, a Linus-y mailing list turns me as a male
(from Turkey where both men and women enjoy casual swearing). So we get rid of
it, not only to include more women, but also more men from among the sensible,
mature demographic. We also do away with the caricaturising stereotypes. Many
people think a programmer is an asocial and overweight nerd living in a
cubicle in the morning and isolated in a badly-lit room in the evening/night.
So we can just not spread misinformation about us. We also maintain our
decency around females, because many weird shit guys do that I read in similar
threads here in the past is just straight-out psychopatical and very cringy.
Other than that, it's on women to make the decision and pursue the careers.

I dream of a world where one's sex is just a biological detail that matters in
their amorous affairs and private life. And, futhermore, I know that it's
totally possible ATM. It's only a matter of time.

~~~
voidr
> women could become part of the workforce too

> women's rights and their participation in many other areas.

> Since the decades following industrial revolution, they became more and more
> present steadily in politics, academia, culture, etc., becoming quickly co-
> protagonists of modern life.

Some studies say that as a result they are unhappier and have less children.

See: [https://www.frbsf.org/economic-
research/files/wp09-11bk.pdf](https://www.frbsf.org/economic-
research/files/wp09-11bk.pdf)

> I dream of a world where one's sex is just a biological detail that matters
> in their amorous affairs and private life.

Do you want men and women to act, think and feel exactly the same?

~~~
gkya
I dont want to be men and women, I want to be persons. I want us to transcend
all the categories.

We dont work to be happy. We work to earn money. Also, women are not baby
factories. Just like we are not sperm dispensers.

~~~
jack9
> I want us to transcend all the categories.

I don't think that's a happy outcome. Identity is important.

~~~
gkya
Identity could be personal. I think on this matter quite often. It would be
off-topic to ponder on this at length here, but I can summarise saying: I
think categories and identity are different, and tye former takes away from
the latter, instead of adding to it.

------
notjtrig
Recent studies have shown that gender differences in personality tend to be
larger in developed countries. I think more developed countries tend to have a
toxic set of socal standards.

If you want to figure out why women are underrepresented in technology,
examine the differences between boys and girls toddlers and how they interact
with their environment. There is a 'girls toys' isle in store but not a 'boys
toys'.

Work you way up to 4th grade and see that most girls remain interested in math
and science but when they hit 6th grade something changes, a young woman feels
pressure to express herself in certain ways or face social stigma.

There's a reason Big Bang theory is one of the few American shows banned in
China, it's not just good old fashioned American anti-intellectualism, it's
social engineering.

~~~
creep
Maybe it's cultural differences, maybe it's preference. I will provide an
anecdote. I'm a woman who enjoys coding, and is currently in a math degree.
Growing up, my toys were never pre-selected although my mother encouraged my
love of puzzles (lego and toys like that). Still, I had an obsession with
dolls as most girls seemed to, and I remember genuinely enjoying those things.
There was no pressure, I simply liked caring for and dressing up tiny models
of myself and my friends. I think for most girls this is genuinely a true
preference that carries on into adult life. In fact, I'm still toying with
either becoming an independent developer or a math teacher for young children,
and often wonder if I'd even like to be a stay-at-home mom and do some
freelance stuff.

I don't think we can say either way what it is that "keeps" girls from
science, but I honestly lean towards the preference angle. There are
differences between males and females and that's okay.

~~~
kbart
Exactly. I grew up in quite poor family and shared room/toys with my sister
the whole time - we played the same Lego sets, I made dresses from cloth
scraps for dolls, we both collected toy cars and Kinder sets. Still, since the
early childhood the differences were already clear and the gap only increased
with the time. I strongly believe that the key reason on why we have few women
in IT (or math, physics, engineering for that matter) is natural preferences
combined with peer pressure, so simply making childhood sex neutral won't make
a real difference.

------
dzink
He argues that the 30% share current top US CS schools are getting is the
global maximum. I think he is missing the “Whys” for women in tech and
“perceived sense of individual strengths being too good for tech”, is not one
of them.

Coding is a form of communication. Knowing how to write is essential today and
you’re not going to write less about your passions just because you are so
much better at swimming. Some of the reasons I pursued coding were:

\- Because I grew up in the middle of nowhere and knew the whole world could
see my work online. I didn’t want to be put under a lid. Code, like writing,
lets your work be seen across locations and time.

\- Because of economic opportunity - I could build tools that earn a living
for me, so my earnings are not dependent on my work hours (a very VERY
attractive feature for women).

\- Because every coding effort is cumulative. No work result is dependent on
the testimony of others. You can see if it works or doesn’t and the more you
do, the more people see when they see you. Fantastic property when women are
often discounted in the workplace.

\- Because no matter what new passion I develop, I could always make a living
building something around it with code. Handy skill, if you think you have
social abilities, not a disadvantage.

The curious part was that I’ve always loved to code, but the periods of
burnout that I’ve experienced came from work culture not the nature of the
work. Coworkers hitting on female programmers and retaliating when feelings
are not reciprocated; meatgriding business models that push for time spent
billing vs actual productivity; discounting biased people, who make your life
hell by presumption instead of fact. The cure was always to take an
entrepreneurial route - work to rise above the role that drains you by using
some of those notorious social skills, then build a kick ass project that
relies on your skill and not someone else’s permission.

Coding is not a narrow career path and neither is a CS degree. It is a power
and a freedomm. Show everyone the basics and let them taste the opportunity it
presents in a required K-12 class.

~~~
ioquatix
I agree with a lot of your points. But I feel compelled to respond.

> Coding is a form of communication

Yes, but it's also so much more than this. Not everyone is capable of the
mental gymnastics or visualisation required to be a good software engineer,
and that's okay.

> Because of economic opportunity...

While there are a ton of practical reasons to do things in life, if you don't
love algorithms and data structures (at some level), programming will
ultimately be a chore.

That being said, I agree that learning to write code is empowering, and
everyone should learn to do it. But that's different from working as a
software engineer.

You might enjoy this talk:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imV3pPIUy1k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imV3pPIUy1k)

~~~
dzink
True, and the mental gymnastics in Law, Surgery, and a number of other fields
are also hard, if not harder, but they still attract =>50% women these days.
Maybe we could draw some of these women by showing the broader purpose behind
coding as a challenge worthy of a career. Working as a software engineer is an
undersell. You could be a founder of a tech company, a researcher in AI tool
that finds cancer better than Radiologists.

------
1auralynn
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that women have to hear "Well...
maybe it's just that women aren't naturally good at programming" 17 billion
times throughout their careers.

~~~
ralusek
Do they hear this from white men smoking cigars?

------
amriksohata
I remmeber attitudes towards info tech modules at school, some of the more
popular girls would chatter that it's boring and not glamourous. This is
because they've been taught they need to focus on other areas, now the geek
will inherit the earth and they are all bandwagoning

------
TheCoelacanth
"Equality of outcome" is a straw-man. Inequality of outcomes sometimes get
presented as evidence of inequality of opportunity, but it is hardly the only
evidence.

