
No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting - CodeLikeAGirl
https://code.likeagirl.io/no-need-to-pinkify-c5609faf6f7f
======
drblast
The title here is misleading, I think the article is right.

I didn't get into tech because it was interesting, at least not initially. I
got into computers because the movie War Games was cool as hell and I wanted
to be like Matthew Broderick's character in that movie. I was 5 or 6 when I
saw it.

It was only after I got a Commodore 64 that I learned that it was going to be
really difficult to do the things in the movie. But the idea that with enough
practice I could be like _that_ was very appealing. I don't think girls today
have anything similar.

Let's be honest, very few children are that into math or computer science
where it becomes an end unto itself. That comes much later. Younger males in
the industry today seem to have grown up in the gamer->modder->hacker path
that didn't really exist when I was a kid, and certainly doesn't exist for
girls today.

And if you're asking the tech industry full of nerds to fix this problem for
kids of any gender you're going to get something completely misguided.

Complain to Hollywood. When the military wants to recruit people they don't
change to be more appealing, they help make "Top Gun."

~~~
softawre
> gamer->modder->hacker path

This doesn't exist today? What about Minecraft mods, or building Redstone
circuits? Game modding is as big as it was when I went through that cycle,
isn't it?

At least, that's what I plan to show my daughter when she gets a bit older to
test her interest.

~~~
jayd16
Games are often male dominated and the culture can be toxic.

~~~
hood_syntax
> male dominated

True, but shouldn't/doesn't matter, especially if the game has no voice chat
required (or encouraged by the nature of the game). When I played WoW for a
little over a year, the guild I was in had several women. LoL has lots of
female players (mostly due to the size of its playerbase), Hearthstone even
has a few popular female streamers.

> culture can be toxic

Also true, but most mainstream companies are responsive to feedback about
negative players via reporting functionality or something of the like. You
deal with negative interactions as a female just by being on social media,
games are no different. The main difference is that being a dick to someone is
a bannable offence in a lot of mainstream games.

------
amiga-workbench
I have noticed that some women only tech events tend to go very lightly into
technical matters and lean more towards the social justice side of things and
I can very easily see just how unappealing such events would be.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
No, I'm pretty sure its "Code like a girl". That's the name of the submitted
and is the completed form of said URL.

I'm also reasonably sure that referring to women professionals as "girls" is
also one of those things you shouldn't do.

Right hand, meet left hand. These are adults, and they happen to be
male/female/white/black/asian/whatever. (Unless we're actually talking about
k-9 school aged females. Then girl is accurate.)

Edit: I don't get the downmod. The first thing to change is our language. They
are professionals, not girls. When our language entails using that modifier,
it sets the emotion starting at that point. So, set the barrier to that of
men, unless you think "son" and "boy" are acceptable ways to address other
male professionals.

~~~
Disruptive_Dave
You aren't allowed opinions, my friend. Right or wrong, you must be gender
biased (unless it's against females) or you mustn't raise points.

~~~
dang
Could you please not do this here? Comments like this only make the discussion
worse for everyone. It's a form of peeing in the pool, and it breaks the site
guidelines badly, so we ban accounts that do it repeatedly.

Any good-faith view is possible to express thoughtfully, so that's what we ask
of HN users.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
EncipheredBy
So, one thing that this article ignores is that kids pick up really strongly
on what is expected of their gender. I think the "let's make programming more
pink" thing is silly, BUT hey, isn't that what toy manufacturers and clothing
manufacturers all do to signal "hey girls, this is for you!"?

So if you slap a bunch of pink stuff on things, yeah, you're kind of making an
invitation to them to join in.

BUT I think that the "girl" version of things is also always assumed to be the
"easy" version of things. Which girls pick up on too.

As a woman trying to get into tech, I'm super uninterested in woman-only
bootcamp type things, since I feel like the perception will be that I
"couldn't make it" in the "regular" bootcamp.

I do think it might be different for little kids though, as they might be
operating more on the "I want to do what's expected of my gender" level than a
grown up who is able to think "I don't care what's expected of my gender."

~~~
Steve_T_online
Agreed, although in fact I have found that the younger children tend to be
pretty gender-neutral in what interests them when coding. It is only really
when they hit 9 or 10 and above that I have started to notice the girls
favouring pink or flowery items more than the boys.

~~~
bigger_cheese
An interesting personnel anecdote I work in an industrial plant the diversity
statistics here are pretty bleak - we have an internal social media site -
mostly it is just used for company announcements and that sort of thing. The
most popular post I can recall from recent memory was a picture of a pair of
purple steel-capped boots and a bit of a blurb that one of our suppliers was
now offering a choice of colors. It generated hundreds of comments mostly
along the lines of "wow how can I order a pair of those" a lot of the comments
were from female employees the whole tone was overwhelmingly positive.

Now I'm a male and hardly what you would call fashion conscious I wear steel-
capped boots because it's a safety requirement I couldn't care one way or the
other what color they are. Does offering brightly colored safety equipment
count as pinkify-ing my workplace? At least some portion of people seem
appreciative of having the choice available.

------
kradeelav
I honestly feel like framing the debate around surface elements like color (of
all things) is worse than useless, and would rather people focus on what
tech-y groups have historically attracted young girls with no problem -
neopets(1), for example.

(The linked article below focuses on a few things that really resonates with
me - emotional security paired with the freedom to play and hack, not having
to ~present~ a gender to participate, having an aesthetic flexibility around
your own spaces, etc.)

(1) [http://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/neopets-a-
look-i...](http://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/neopets-a-look-into-
early-2000s-girl-culture-w509885)

~~~
stinkytaco
Some of the problem with this discussion is the fact that we talk about
technology as an end in itself. We expect that people will get interested
because they like tech for techs sake, not because they view tech as a means
to some other end. It's possible to become interested in tech because you'd
like to build things or make movies or program games. My daughter is really
ambivalent to "engineering", but she'd very much like to make movies and has
become fairly tech savvy as part of that process.

~~~
Steve_T_online
The pursuit of knowledge in technology can be an end in itself. Very often
there is another purpose, such as your daughter wanting to make movies, so the
tech knowledge happens through that greater desire. However a (small)
percentage of children in my classes will quite happily play with BIDMAS
equations in Python for an entire hour-long lesson, and then come back at
lunchtime to see how addition and subtraction are affected by parentheses.
They come back just for the kick of seeing maths equations calculated in a
coding language, and they are an equal mix of male and female.

------
sthielen
I think there is a balance to be found between "pinkifying" and "de-blueing"
(to wrangle an inversion out of that word). Many of these early education
coding platforms use "play" to introduce fundamentals and concepts to kids.
They're not intended as formal platforms for computer science education; they
want to let kids do cool things and get excited about programming and possibly
ramp up into that more formal programming education.

Letting kids manipulate characters from properties to which they've already
been exposed is a good way of creating that initial interest. The issue is
that assets like Minecraft Steve, or R2D2, or things like that, while
obviously loved by no shortage of girls, are still primarily marketed toward
boys. Until we can effectively move that needle at a higher, more societal
level, I think it's valuable to incorporate media properties targeted toward
girls into these kinds of platforms simply in order to engender that initial
interest. A kid (regardless of gender) who loves BB8 should be able to use
their learn-to-code-platform-of-choice to make BB8 run in a circle. A kid
(again, regardless of gender) who loves American Girl should be able to use
that same platform to make Julie say something funny.

My company has been doing some work with the Girl Scouts, teaching girls to
build games and apps in Augmented Reality, and while the interface/platform
itself is sterile and professional (& obviously if you think theming an IDE
pink will help "appeal to women," this is an issue), the girls naturally
gravitate to characters and assets from the properties to which they are
already exposed and are already fans. This includes everything from Minecraft
Steve, to Spongebob, to lolcats (which are, apparently, still a thing) to
Elsa, and Barbie.

~~~
Steve_T_online
I teach Computing from Years 1 to 11, and amongst the Lower Primary school
students (Years 1 to 4) I use Espresso quite a lot. The children love
Espresso. It has a variety of characters, and the girls in my classes will
happily select characters such as vampires, monsters, cars, trucks. Equally
many of the boys will choose rainbows or flowers. The gender divide
differences are much more obvious in Secondary, where the students are then
feeling societal pressures to conform to certain stereotypes, either
consciously or subconsciously.

------
jorjordandan
My daughter is six. I never wanted her to be interested in things that were
traditionally gendered - but she just is. I would buy neutral toys, but her
eyes would light up when she saw the babies and pink princesses. So, is she
wrong to like those things? We have done the minecraft hour of code together,
(she likes minecraft too) but if there was an even more 'girly' version I an
guarantee that she would be more engaged by it. Of course she is interested in
coding because it's interesting, but if it takes some marketing to get her in
the door, so what?

Furthermore, I love to buy her books etc such as "Suzy shier engineer", but I
wonder why all the books where girls are engineers or inventors or programmers
they have to be wearing jumpsuits and glasses and rarely anything pink. I
suspect it's because the books are sold based on the biases of the parents. I
feel like my daughter gets the message that "You can be a pretty princess
girl, or you can be a smart girl". So I say the opposite. Give my daughter
some princess engineers in pink dresses please. She recently saw a barbie
movie at a friends house (i know) and barbie was coding and it palpably raised
her interest in the whole endeavor.

~~~
waisbrot
She's not wrong, but to say "she just is [interested in things that are
traditionally gendered]" seems a little incurious. Princesses, pink ponies,
and frilly dresses did not exist when modern humans came into being. So liking
or disliking those things is almost entirely a matter of socialization and not
some kind of biotruth.

While you may have tried to socialize her away from "girly" stuff, peers are
often a stronger influence than parents.

~~~
watwut
I would really like to know why this was dovnvoted. Horses used to be boy toys
when men worked with horses and now are exclusively girl toys.

~~~
mantas
Because girls usually loved shiny-but-useless objects. Meanwhile boys
preferred work tools. Horse happened to move from work tool to shiny-but-
useless thing.

~~~
watwut
Girls liked toys that resembled female work: sewing, cooking, babies. Funny
thing is, it was women who fought to be allowed into work, not men.

I can play the game too. Meanwhile boys liked thinks that make noise and are
"cool" which is usually useless and often nothing but aggressive.

~~~
mantas
So yes, girls like girly things - home making, looking after family and making
nice things they need to get male attention. Meanwhile boys like toys about
jobs to provide to family. Or aggressive toys imitating tools to fend off
aggressors or attract females.

Checks out, no?

------
1auralynn
The real way we're going to see equity in girls going into computer
science/tech is for it to be an academic requirement, or at least an honors-
level course in all high schools. In my high school in the 90's, computer
science was practically a vo-tech class so none of the smart girls took it -
hobbyist boys were the ones with the most experience going into college. I had
an engineer dad, was super into computers, and I didn't even think of taking
it.

Another approach is for it to become a more acceptable hobby for girls, but
the social pressure is strong still for girls in the opposite direction. I
think that one's a harder battle in a lot of ways.

~~~
20years
Totally agree with you here. I think middle school is actually the prime age
to start teaching it but not the drag/drop scratch/block type stuff you see in
the lower grades. It should be a requirement just like Math and English.

~~~
r3bl
In my country, it is an obligatory class at the equivalent of the US middle
school level (10-14 year old).

However, doing something as complicated as "computing and informatics" (a
literal translation of the subject name) that early in the school education
just made it absolutely terrible, much worse than the traditional classes were
in my school.

I still excelled at it, mostly because of books (the Internet wasn't as
widespread as it is today), and was a part of the state-sponsored small
contests that test student's knowledge in that subject. Finished first on the
municipality level, shared the second position on the regional level, and
didn't go to the state level competition (was a bit too far away). That's what
made me pursue IT further.

However, all I've ever learned during those four years was:

* Installing a pirated copy of Windows XP on desktops.

* "Blind typing" (typing properly on QWERTY keyboard without looking at the keyboard) and clicking on things in MS Office (2003) to make the document appear as in given screenshot.

* Mashing two malfunctioning desktops together to create a functioning one.

* Very basic programming (mostly if-else statements and loops). In QBASIC (from 1991). In 2008. (edit: This is what the competitions were about.)

My point being: You can still introduce it as an obligatory subject and fuck
it up pretty badly. Including myself, two out of 120 kids in that school in my
generation continued pursuing IT by joining specialized high schools (also a
thing in my country) dedicated to IT. Neither me nor the second kid are
female.

So, while I agree that it's a step in the right progress (the one which my
country made in the second half of '00s, but fucked up pretty badly in its
execution), it's far from being the final step. It brought us the equivalent
of nothingness in spreading the IT. The IT is still associated as a "male
field", regardless of the fact that the subject is obligatory for everyone in
that age range for about 15 years.

~~~
20years
Thanks for sharing your experience. Very interesting. What country are you
from?

"However, doing something as complicated as "computing and informatics" (a
literal translation of the subject name) that early in the school education
just made it absolutely terrible, much worse than the traditional classes were
in my school."

Oh wow! Yeah, that seems like a little much for middle school. I was thinking
more so at the level of teaching them how to code fun stuff in Python or
JavaScript. Let's not scare kids away at this age just yet and it sounds like
the program your school had did just that :(

"The IT is still associated as a "male field", regardless of the fact that the
subject is obligatory for everyone in that age range for about 15 years."

Honestly, I am not even so sure that requiring it will necessarily increase
the count of women that go into this field. If anything, it will at least
introduce it to more women showing them possible opportunities. I as a women
in tech for 20 years have my own theories on why many women don't go into this
profession but they are unpopular opinions here.

The main reason I would love to see it included as a main subject is because I
want our youth (men and women) to be prepared for the jobs of our future. I
truly believe that almost every profession will require programmers or tech
specific roles in the very near future and our education system is not
preparing our youth for that.

~~~
r3bl
Alright, I'm going to go deeply out of the topic here, but it's necessary in
order to give you a full answer, for you to understand my frustration, and for
you to understand how fucked up that obligatory subject could really get.

> What country are you from?

Bosnia & Herzegovina.

> I was thinking more so at the level of teaching them how to code fun stuff
> in Python or JavaScript.

Yup, I am all up for that. I am the first one to applaud and donate to smaller
projects that are aiming in that direction.

Meanwhile, the government (on the district level, think: District of Columbia)
signs a deal with Microsoft in which Microsoft gives a substantial discount to
their education platform, such projects get shoved away, and people are now
being taught in other slightly more up-to-date Microsoft-dependent
technologies. Of course, none of the licenses are provided to the students
themselves to have at home, so piracy is at its peak. In fact, the only cases
of prosecution for piracy I've ever heard of inside Bosnia is the prosecution
of businesses that can't show Microsoft's licenses when asked for them by the
regulators. Once you are being asked for them, you better have the boxes or
receipts somewhere in your closet. It doesn't matter if you're using them or
not. Good luck convincing the random inspector that your company is not
Microsoft-reliant.

In other words, I haven't seen _anyone_ using _any_ non-Microsoft OS before I
started messing around with Linux-based operating systems myself when I was
18. To this day, out of all the local people I've ever met personally, I could
list on top of my fingers the amount of local people I've seen using non-
Microsoft OS (as in Macbooks, the amount of Linux users I've met in person is
still 0).

From my time in that middle-school equivalent, I've also went to a IT-
specialized high school and an IT-specialized college. Around 90% of all IT-
related topics, 90% of them you are simply unable to run on anything not made
by Microsoft. The moment I found out I was supposed to start learning server
administration exclusively in Microsoft Server was the moment when I quit that
college. I've managed to win some smaller fights (like submitting essays in
.odt instead of .doc(x) which was listed as "obligatory"), but this was way
out of my reach.

So yeah, it's no longer just the ridiculous educational system, it's a
ridiculous educational system that's now backed up financially by Microsoft.
The only hope of breaking this monopoly is during the negotiations about
joining the EU, but realistically, that won't happen any time soon unless
something drastic happens.

So yeah, here I am, two years after I've made that decision to quit college,
with two years of work experience working with open source exclusively, on a
Mozilla-sponsored fellowship, into month four of waiting for the work permit
to get the fuck away from this country, writing this comment on HN because I'm
technically unemployed if the EU country I'm applying for work permit with
doesn't give me a work visa really soon. If it goes well, I will finally break
free of the chains possessed by simply being interested in the "wrong thing"
in a wrong country. If not, realistically, the best I could do to even have a
job in the IT field in my country is to return to Microsoft.

------
whatshisface
Do we know if pinkifying works? I mean, of course as a male I find it hard to
support increasing the number of purple headings in the world but presumably
people do it because they've had success - right? Just because mature, grown
women (who have already been selected for liking the paint tech already has
enough to learn about it) aren't motivated by pink and flowery stuff doesn't
mean it can't be the weird glitch in young girl's brains that toy corporations
have optimized themselves to exploit so well.

~~~
nvarsj
My daughter loves Legos because of “Lego Friends”. So I think it does work.
Just like my son is attracted to things with swords and explosions. The hook
matters.

------
didibus
This makes me wonder, have computers inherently been designed as boy toys? I
don't support continuing the teaching that girls should like pink things,
dresses and flowers, but it does exist quite strongly. So if we assume boys
are thought or predisposed to like esthetic X, while girls are thought or
predisposed to like esthetic Y. Have computers been designed to esthetic X?

Basically, my point is, are computers gender neutral in their design? Or are
they boyified? If they're boyified, then maybe we do need to alter their
design, and work to make them more neutral or have girlified versions.

Note: What would be the boy term for pinkifying?

~~~
bdamm
It's telling that there isn't even a term for this. You've hit a major point
here.

~~~
jandrese
Also, you rarely see people fretting over the low percentage of males going
for primary education jobs. In many ways these jobs are just as or more
important than computer programming, but nobody cares that it has such a
lopsided gender ratio.

Personally, I don't even care about it, but it makes me pause to consider why
I have to be so concerned about the lack of women in CS. Am I being an asshole
and trying to shove people into a career they have no interest in?

~~~
didibus
I think the two possible issues are:

1) Job availability and remuneration. CS is a high ROI profession currently.
It pays well, has lots of open jobs for it, and takes relatively low
investment to get into. If it wasn't so, they'd be much less talking about its
gender gap.

2) The treatment of the minority gender in a particular field. There might be
low males in primary education, but those that are in the field, do they find
themselves at a disadvantage? Do they feel like the majority female create a
toxic environment for them, making them feel uneasy about working in that
field?

But I'll add one more:

3) People in STEM might actually be very open minded and progressive, much
more open to talk about issues and much more interested in fixing them, and
not letting bias be truth. This might be why you hear about women in stem and
their difficulties, while you rarely hear about the difficulties of women in
other male dominated fields.

~~~
photojosh
> 2) There might be low males in primary education, but those that are in the
> field, do they find themselves at a disadvantage?

No, they don't. They are given extra responsibility and promotions much
quicker than the women. I think the staff division in our local primary school
is something like 4 guys and 25+ women. Everyone loves them.

------
curun1r
Pinkifying to appeal to women...sure, it's probably patronizing and wrong-
headed.

Pinkifying to appeal to young girls...absolutely need more of this. Almost
every engineer I've ever spoken to on the topic had Legos or some other toy
that involves combining building blocks of some sort into a larger whole when
they were a child. We absolutely need to pinkify these toys to build
engineering instincts in young girls if we want to see them gravitate towards
engineering careers in later life.

~~~
twobyfour
You might be surprised to learn that girls aren't attracted only to toys that
are pink and flowery or related to traditionally feminine pursuits. I find
that assumption damaging.

As a girl, my favorite toys were legos, blocks, and the toy cars that sadly
were more often gifts to my brother than to me or to us both. Ideally all
three together (racing cars down the hallway on ramps built from blocks and
lego? Win!)

None of them were pink. None of them were dolls. None of them involved
families or housekeeping or kitchens or flowers.

But then, I was one of the lucky ones who didn't have pink things and "pink is
for girls" and "girls should play with dolls" pushed on her from a young age.

Just make the toys unisex and be glad when any of your kids play with any of
them instead of looking askance at your daughter when she reaches for the
legos or your son when he picks up a doll, and they'll be fine. Legos are
girls' toys too, regardless of what color they are.

~~~
EncipheredBy
I also was pretty gender-agnostic in my choice of toys as a child, and get
annoyed at parents who I assumed pushed "girly" stuff on their kids.

But then I got to know parents who were trying to actively discourage their
kids from like princess garbage, but they couldn't stop it because the kids
learn from their friends. I'm no child psychologist, but there's probably some
age where what their peer group thinks is more important to them than what
their parents have introduced at home.

I don't know how to avoid that when having kids myself besides being careful
that I'm not plopping them into a school full of girls who _are_ being told
which things they should and shouldn't want to play with.

~~~
twobyfour
The solution for my parents was to send me to an all-girls school with a
feminist bent. That had its own drawbacks in plenty, but the upside was an
upbringing relatively free of gender stereotypes.

And talk to them about it. If they're hearing one thing from their friends and
another at home, they _will_ experience cognitive dissonance, and they _will_
wonder about it, even if they don't know to ask about it.

Edited to add: pinkification and genderization of toys seems to have
accelerated since I was a kid. Entire aisles of toys in pink boxes instead of
a single shelf of barbies. The explosion of Disney princesses hasn't helped
either. (I remember being a teenager going to see The Little Mermaid and my
mom explaining that it was a big deal because it was Disney's first animated
feature in decades.)

I think maybe to some degree people are subconsciously frightened that women
are now able to wear anything men can wear, do anything men can do. The
reaction is to make sure that there are still differentiators between men and
women (because, OMG, how can you interact with a person without being able to
define you understanding of them based on gender? [never mind that we do it
all the time in places like HN]) - and the easiest way to do that is to make
sure the girls are pink! That way you can tell them apart!

~~~
klipt
Or it's just data driven marketing.

"Research shows that sales and profits go up when we make girls' toys pink."

"Okay then, make girls' toys pink!"

Anyway, my guess is that whatever strategy would encourage the majority of
women to go into programming isn't necessarily something women on hacker news
would like, because women on hacker news are part of the self selected
minority who _already_ buck gender trends. You don't need pinkification
because, if you were the type of person who did, you wouldn't be here.

~~~
twobyfour
You make a very good point!

I'll just note that some of us who might have been most attracted to the
profession would be turned off by pinkification, and that we may be harder to
recruit into recruiting efforts that we perceive as ghettoizing. I quit a
women's organization dedicated to a specific technology because all the
meetups they organized seemed to be oriented around manicures.

Someone mentioned above that law and medicine have evened out (or even begun
to invert) their gender ratios over the past generation. They didn't do that
by pinkifying the profession - by giving little girls pink stethescopes or
gavels. They did that by changing expectations of who turns out to be a doctor
or lawyer - the expectations of both children who hadn't yet chosen their
profession and of the adults who guide their choices; choose whether to admit
them into study programs; and eventually hire them.

~~~
chongli
_I 'll just note that some of us who might have been most attracted to the
profession would be turned off by pinkification, and that we may be harder to
recruit into recruiting efforts that we perceive as ghettoizing._

You touched upon something that's critical to the whole issue: the perception
of traditionally female stuff as inferior. The feminist movement has come a
long way getting women through the door and into traditionally male-dominated
fields. What still remains as an enormous challenge is the elevation in status
of traditionally female roles and norms.

For as long as we think of silver and black and blue as high status and pink
and purple as "ghettoized", we have a problem. Just as we have a problem that
nursing and teaching are low status compared to other professions.

For as long as we consider care work to be inferior to business work, women
will never be truly free.

~~~
twobyfour
Absolutely, I agree with that. But I also think that misses the point that we
need to eliminate the notion that pink is girly and blue is boyish - or
rather, that there are colors, interests, and pursuits that are masculine and
others that are feminine.

------
TallGuyShort
I too can think of more than a few pink- & flowery-themed events for women in
tech that I've seen, but all that I can think of were organized almost
entirely by woman who worked or were getting an education in tech. I would be
surprised to learn that that trend was substantially atypical. They're weren't
being condescending or stereotyping: they were being themselves. I don't see
anything wrong with that. The alternative is social pressure that girls who
get into tech can't be into other traditionally "girly" things which seems
counterproductive and hypocritical.

~~~
sp332
I think what it's arguing against is the idea that pink is what attracts
women. Women are interested in the robots etc and the pink & flowers are a
side effect of including women, not a cause.

------
pmarreck
Let anyone who is interested in the thing, do that thing. And then get the
fuck out of that person's way.

This current obsession with gender-asymmetric ratios in various careers is
ridiculous. There is absolutely no evidence that everything would be 50/50
man/woman in an ideal(ized) world.

I shouldn't even have to say this, but the smartest programmer I know is a
non-cisgender female.

------
justicezyx
While HollyWood is relentlessly ridicule "nerds" "tech-savvy members of the
society" "scientists", some are still believing colors, nouns, wording are the
root cause of gender inequality in tech industry.

These people are either maliciously hiding some intentions, or are plain
ignorant.

------
vinceguidry
I don't think attempts to improve the aesthetics of coding in order to attract
a more diverse audience is in any way a bad thing. Some people just need to
chill.

------
epx
I guess that each market, each country has a different dynamic. For example,
here in Brazil, there has always been a good % of women in IT and software.
But there was one thing: 99.995% of jobs were ERP development or Novell
Netware. I always liked low-level software and systems development, but I kept
doing that as a hobby with _very_ occasional consulting in systems development
from 1988 to 2005.

Most of the few hobbyists were men as well, some even became lawyers to make a
living, so scarce was the work in this area, even for the best. Now that non-
ERP software development is the high-paid job and ERP development is drying up
because big boys e.g. SAP are eating into the local market, everybody wants a
piece of the action.

So I don't feel too bad about gender imbalance in this particular branch.
Nobody is preventing anyone from buying an Arduino and/or publish apps on App
Store.

------
Disruptive_Dave
The irony of the source name here is wonderful.

~~~
menacingly
I think that's more a misunderstanding about what they're trying to do with
the name. Perhaps the misunderstanding they're trying to address with the
name.

~~~
Disruptive_Dave
I can see that, and I think I get what they were going for. But you simply
can't choose to complain about using colors to attract women to tech (vs.
letting the actual tech stuff be the draw) and then choose to utilize all the
"Like a girl" stuff they've gone with. I see so many of these events that are
branded "like a girl" "be a girl boss", etc. and it stinks of selective bias.

------
tempodox
I would be genuinely interested in what “code like a girl” means in practial
terms. Do girls/women code differently than boys/men, and if so, how? Since
females are so exceedingly rare in our profession, I haven‘t had the
opportunity to find out myself.

~~~
knodi123
It's just a rhetorical device. The phrase "play like a girl" has already been
established and associated with various advocacy groups trying to increase
sports opportunities for girl who were previously discouraged from
participating in the traditionally male activity.

But I think that the original phrase, "(do it) like a man" was meant to
contrast with "like a boy", as in "be a mature and skilled adult, not an
awkward and timid adolescent". If I'm right about that, then "code like a
girl" is humorously ignorant, since "woman" would fit better. Unless this is a
children's outreach thing? I dunno about that part.

~~~
jpindar
I disagree that it has anything to do with man vs. boy.

The phrase "play like a girl" is a reaction to "throw like a girl" and "fight
like a girl", which meant to do those things in a less than effective way. Now
that phrase is being redefined as a statement that girls can do things just
fine and doing something like a girl does not mean doing it badly.

~~~
knodi123
so when people used to say "be a man about it", were they contrasting with
women? (instead of with little boys as I assumed?)

~~~
jpindar
Hmm... "be a man about it" could be taken either way, but I would tend to
think of man vs. boy.

------
lerie82
This is an article coming from a website named... "code like a girl",
contradictory?

------
Animats
Naomi Wu, from Shenzhen, is doing this better.[1] She's become very visible
and has a biting wit. The publisher of Make magazine called her a phony, she
didn't back down, and he had to apologize.

[1] [https://twitter.com/realsexycyborg](https://twitter.com/realsexycyborg)

------
LeoJiWoo
I don't see the problem in pinking stuff.

If that's the social cue to make tech okay for a large majority of girls,
what's the harm. Most people seem to want to be male or female.

The more options the better, I think. We need to increase the amount of women
in tech.

~~~
tzahola
>We need to increase the amount of women in tech.

How about truck drivers? Do we _need_ to increase the amount of women there
too?

~~~
twobyfour
To the degree that it's an opening to economic opportunity, then yes, why not?

FWIW, truck driving (at least long-haul) is a little different from
programming in one important regard: it takes the driver away from their
families for days at a time. This is typically more problematic for women than
for men, since women are still more likely to be responsible for care of home
and family, whether they want to or not. (IMO that's another issue our society
needs to address w.r.t. gender equality, but it's a bit tangential to the
current topic of discussion.)

By contrast, programming jobs are no more gender-loaded in terms of the
lifestyle involved than law jobs are. There's no reason for women to self-
select out of them aside from being told that programming isn't for them or
being made to feel unwanted.

~~~
randomdata
What about agriculture? That industry has faced labour deficiencies for years,
and the need is only growing with tightening controls on migrant labour.
Interestingly, worldwide, women are more likely than men to work in
agriculture, but in the USA the industry is overwhelmingly dominated by men.

Why isn't there a big push to get women into US agriculture like there is for
US tech? Where is the government creating "farming" classes in school like
they have done with coding?

~~~
twobyfour
I don't know.

But just because another industry isn't working on their problem doesn't mean
we shouldn't work on ours.

~~~
randomdata
I work in agriculture, so it is my industry and my place to work on. But
realistically this problem does not seem exclusive to any particular industry,
so I'm not sure it even makes sense for a specific industry to try and attack
the problem in a way that only applies to that industry. There must be some
solution that applies generally? Why not work together?

------
rcruzeiro
This reminds my of the most cringeworthy recruitment video I ever saw for a
tech company [https://youtu.be/CscRkjZ6zDE](https://youtu.be/CscRkjZ6zDE)

------
glhaynes
I adore @sailorhg's
([https://twitter.com/sailorhg](https://twitter.com/sailorhg)) work on femme
techy stuff. Her zines aren't the best way for me to learn and her clothes
_definitely_ aren't for me! — but they certainly are for some people, and
that's super-exciting.

------
hungerstrike
This site is a hypocrite then because less than a third or even a quarter of
the articles are about technical subjects. Most of their articles are about
social justice.

This is typical for just about every "we need more women in X" campaign that
I've seen.

------
pmdulaney
Society does not have an interest -- using "interest" in the legal sense -- in
getting girls into tech. But a fair society DOES have an interest in
eliminating gender-based barriers should they choose to go into tech.

------
minimaxir
A note to OP: using baity submission headlines in HN is counterproductive, as
it’ll just get the submission quickly flagged. (And per HN rules, the source
headline should be changed if the source is baity)

------
vfulco
Tell that to all the SJWs trying to force people to do what they don't like.

------
oculusthrift
if this was true then why are there so few?

------
shak77
I agree with this, girls that like coding aren't usually very interested in
girly stuff. I don't think you can lure feminine girls into coding just by
pinkifying it. All of this is just demeaning the profession.

~~~
lucozade
> girls that like coding aren't usually very interested in girly stuff

You might have a causality problem here. For example, my daughter, who is
definitely at the girly girl end of the spectrum sees no problem with being a
lawyer or a medical doctor. That probably wouldn't have been the case a
generation or so ago (at least here in the UK).

> All of this is just demeaning the profession

As the father of said girl, and being acquainted with a lot of her peers, I
can reliably say that if our profession became more attractive to them it
would not be demeaning the profession in any way whatsoever.

~~~
randomdata
What did the medicine and legal industries do to "pinkify" themselves in the
last generation?

~~~
lucozade
I didn't say they did. But those professions weren't attracting "girls who
like girly stuff" either and now they are. So maybe we're not attracting them
for similar reasons.

And, fundamentally, what changed in those professions is they accepted that it
was them that needed to change to be more attractive, not some failing in
girls.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that they're paragons of equality because they
aren't. But in the specific question of attracting girls, even ones who like
"girly stuff", they have solved that problem admirably.

~~~
randomdata
I'm not sure about the UK, but here in North America, students attending post-
secondary schools are predominantly female. The opposite was true a generation
ago. Doctors and lawyers typically require a post-secondary degree. Could it
be that the rise of women practicing as doctors and lawyers is a result of men
not being able to, rather than more women taking interest in the profession?

What's interesting to me is that male dominated fields tend to be those that
are a free-for-all, that require no special credentials or vetting. This is
not limited to tech, but seen across a wide variety of industries. Does this
simply mean that men are more likely to be found in these careers because
those are the jobs they are able to do?

In a perfectly free market, where anyone was free to do whatever job they
wanted, perhaps we would see an even distribution of genders? But in this very
non-free labour marketplace we have, with many artificial barriers to entry,
perhaps that is what has lead to this disparity not only in the careers with
those barriers, but also those without, rather than any specific gender having
a preference for certain types of work?

------
Danihan
"YOU NEED TO TRY HARDER TO APPEAL TO MINORITY GROUPS."

\- 2 seconds later -

"STOP USING STEREOTYPES TO APPEAL TO MINORITY GROUPS, IT'S OFFENSIVE."

I mean, I understand the sentiment, but I can also see why many industry
professionals begin to think this sort of thing is a catch-22 where smug
criticisms will be levied, regardless of conscientiousness.

~~~
ucaetano
"YOU NEED TO TRY HARDER TO APPEAL TO MINORITY GROUPS _by not stereotyping,
patronizing, abusing them and creating a hostile environment_ "

There, I fixed it for you. You can appeal to minority groups without using
stereotypes.

~~~
stinkytaco
I'm genuinely curious here: how? Isn't appealing to minority groups by
definition setting them apart from other groups? If we're not going to
genericize all appeals (thus introducing the built in cultural bias of
appealing to most people, i.e. the dominant group) don't we have to say "this
thing that is unique to your cultural group is why you should be interested"?
That sounds like it almost must include some stereotype. That doesn't mean
patronizing, but it does mean making some assumptions about the group in
question and why they might be interested.

~~~
ucaetano
"Isn't appealing to minority groups by definition setting them apart from
other groups?"

No, in a world where minority groups are set apart, appealing to them can be
as simple as _not setting them apart_ , by no harassing, abusing,
discriminating, etc.

You don't need pink office chairs to make an office space welcoming for women.
You just need NOT to have catcalls, rapists, abusers, sexist jokes, etc.

Simple stuff, really.

~~~
stinkytaco
The point I'm trying to make is that if we are indeed to engage to appeal to a
specific group, we need to make assumptions about that group.

Your example above is a different problem. In that situation we are trying to
not be hostile to a specific group. That's really a much easier problem to
identify (not solve) because hostile behavior is hostile behavior, no matter
who you are. It's incredibly important to solve that problem, but there we
really have a universal solutions: treat people with respect, regardless of
sex, race, sexual orientation, etc. Build policies that enforce that respect
and hopefully build to a cultural shift where respect is assumed.

But "appealing to minority groups" is another problem entirely. We're assuming
that we have a problem that is due to some inherent bias in the way our
culture has portrayed or encouraged a behavior. In this case that boys are
more interested in tech because they got "STEM toys" as kids or that the toys
that are available appeal more to boys or that the messaging surrounding tech
is unconsciously biased towards boys. None of those problems involve being
hostile towards girls. We also assume (correctly or incorrectly) that
adjusting that bias could bring a better balance to this area.

That involves targeting a message or policy to a specific group. In that
situation we've defined a problem: "girls are not interested in technology to
the same extent that boys are" and are presumably trying to say "how do we get
girls more interested in technology". I would argue that "don't be hostile" is
only part of the problem, it does not address inherent cultural bias. If we
assume that bias exists, then we need to make assumptions about girls and
build solutions accordingly.

~~~
ucaetano
> In that situation we've defined a problem: "girls are not interested in
> technology to the same extent that boys are"

Are you sure that's the problem? What if you restate it as "at some point in
their lives, girls become less interested in technology than boys" or "at some
point in their lives, girls' interest in technology declines, unlike boys'"

Now you have very different problems and very different solutions. Why does
that interest decline? What is driving it? Could it be a self-propagating,
hostile, "boy's club" environment in technology?

Maybe you don't even need to market to them, if they never lose the interest
in it.

And based on some data, I believe that my definition of the problem is
probably closer to the real problem than yours:

[http://www.randalolson.com/wp-content/uploads/percent-
bachel...](http://www.randalolson.com/wp-content/uploads/percent-bachelors-
degrees-women-usa.png)

So maybe we're asking the wrong questions.

~~~
stinkytaco
I'm not sure what that data shows us. It shows us that more women get
engineering degrees and fewer computer science degrees since 1980? It shows us
that more women get degrees period, actually. It's also showing us a snapshot
in time: women between the ages of 18-22. That doesn't really address at all
the problem of "girls before 18".

Girls have only recently drawn even with boys in attendance in high school
stem classes, and still lag quite a bit in computer science. And minorities do
even worse [1]. Anecdotaly, my experience also bears this out. The First
Robotics clubs in my area (aimed at ages 9-14) are majority boys, despite
several teams (including my daughter's school) being coached by female
engineers specifically hoping to encourage more girls.

I don't think it's the wrong question.

[1]: [https://ngcproject.org/statistics](https://ngcproject.org/statistics)

~~~
ucaetano
> I'm not sure what that data shows us.

It shows that women _were_ interested in tech, but something happened in the
80's that mostly killed that interest.

So the problem isn't that females aren't interested, but that something kills
that interest. What is that?

~~~
stinkytaco
Well, for computer science, that does seem to be the case. But not for
engineering, physical sciences or math. And considering that most people are
granted a degree before they enter the workforce, I don't believe it can
entirely be the workforce culture that's deterring them. So I guess I would
argue that it's just as likely to be how we message technology as how we treat
women in the workforce, if not both.

~~~
ucaetano
Or it could be that computer science (what most people refer as "tech") came
to be dominated by the boy's club videogame/nerd culture from the early 80's,
which pushed women out.

It goes back to another topic here on HN: I don't know of any other career so
dominated by a culture as SWE/tech.

~~~
Danihan
Sure, I think you're probably correct that rampant video game culture probably
did begin to alienate women, even back in the eighties, since they saw that
computers were mostly being used as tools for violent competition and most
women were not very interested in that.

That's where our opinions will probably diverge though, because I also believe
boys glean more enjoyment from video games simply because they are
biologically-predisposed to enjoy violent / high-stakes competitions more
intensely.

[http://www.radford.edu/~mzorrilla2/thesis/differencesinplay....](http://www.radford.edu/~mzorrilla2/thesis/differencesinplay.html)

[http://assets.ngin.com/attachments/document/0042/7590/Do_Boy...](http://assets.ngin.com/attachments/document/0042/7590/Do_Boys_and_Girls_View_Competition_in_Different_Ways.pdf)

It's not just video games, look at the gender ratios in competitive poker, or
chess, or debate. All very similar.

Since there seems to be a strong chance that the root of the problem is innate
/ hormonal / biological it's not an issue that's "easy" to even rationally
discuss, let alone solve, as you keep stating throughout the thread.

~~~
ucaetano
> video games simply because they are biologically-predisposed to enjoy
> violent / high-stakes competitions more intensely.

You're making the assumption that all games must be competitive and violent
and therefore women will enjoy it less.

That is wrong.

Not only women enjoy video games as much as men, they already outnumber men in
gaming in many markets.

Every time you make an assumption, think if that assumption is being driven by
gender stereotypes.

"Since there seems to be a strong chance that the root of the problem is
innate / hormonal / biological it's not an issue that's "easy" to even
rationally discuss, let alone solve, as you keep stating throughout the
thread."

No, women liked technology, then they were pushed out by a hostile culture.
The problem isn't hormonal or biological, it's cultural.

The problem isn't women not liking violent games, is men treating women like
shit.

~~~
Danihan
>Every time you make an assumption, think if that assumption is being driven
by gender stereotypes.

I have, and most of the time the stereotypes have some truth to them, however
unfortunate it may be.

> The problem isn't hormonal or biological, it's cultural.

Culture doesn't spring into existence from a vacuum, it arises from the
aggregation and normalization of the biological impulses and drives of many
people.

