
Girls and Software - forgottenpass
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/girls-and-software
======
superuser2
>Parents are warned to keep kids off the computer

This point cannot be overstated. I'd _never_ have been a hacker without vast
quantities of unsupervised, unfiltered internet time around age 9-12.

The largest enabling step for me was when I got my own laptop which I was free
to break (software-wise) and free to take into my room so I could focus away
from the distracting noises of the kitchen/living room.

Much of even the HN community would consider this irresponsible parenting.
Probably even my parents wouldn't have let a _daughter_ talk to strangers on
IRC about something they don't understand. But how else is someone with
nontechnical parents supposed to get started?

It's _sooo_ much different when it's something you choose to do with your free
time, rather than something half-assedly forced on you by parents or school
curriculum. Especially to a kid.

~~~
simias
I don't agree. Having unlimited access to technological resources is great, I
don't think anybody is denying that.

But with unlimited net access also comes extremely violent videos, social
networks with all kinds of shady types hanging around etc...

I really don't think it's responsible to let a 9-12 yo alone on the net in
their room. Enabling them to access the net easily while still supervising
what they do, giving them advice on how to use the web, find what they want
etc... That sounds reasonable to me.

I may be a bit bias because while I consider myself a hacker I didn't have the
net before I was 18 at home. My parents didn't care for it, only when I moved
to my own studio did I get an internet subscription.

Before that I would use floppies (and later USB sticks) to download stuff from
the high school library's computers and buying programming books. Didn't stop
me from learning C and writing games on my TI calculator.

Maybe I'm just a bit paranoid, but on the web you're always one click away
from a video of someone being burned alive or decapitated with a chainsaw.

~~~
superuser2
>Enabling them to access the net easily while still supervising what they do

The draw of programming for me was that I do could do interesting work and
create something _all by myself_ , by the force of my own mind. I loved it
largely because I could do it independently, without mommy and daddy steering.
I would have lost interest quickly had it been supervised.

There aren't many other creative activities like that - hardware hacking
requires 1) driving to stores to 2) buy parts 3) with money or 4) owning a
credit card to order things online. Music requires 1) paying 2) an adult
teacher and 3) driving you to lessons. Sports, again, requires money,
equipment, and driving. As long as there's a computer and an internet
connection, you can teach yourself to program all you want.

(As an aside, Cory Doctorow has a part in Little Brother where he talks about
why programming is so amazing - there's really nowhere else where you can make
living, acting things with just your thoughts.)

>violent videos

So what? Anyone who's slightly informed about the news sees violence all the
time. It's part of living in this world. I watched Saddam Hussein hang on
CNN.com and I'm not any different because of it.

>social networks with all kinds of shady types hanging around

You might be shady for all I know, but _it doesn 't matter_ unless we meet in
person. Where your child is going and who he's letting into the house _are_
perfectly legitimate things to supervise and even I wanted to walk into the
arms of a predator, it would have been pretty difficult.

As far as Facebook, the shady characters are _exactly_ the same shady
characters at school.

>Didn't stop me from learning C and writing games on my TI calculator.

These were the dominant media for a while, but your CLI program in 2014 isn't
very interesting to anyone else. Web and iOS applications are, and the web is
pretty important if you're going to target these media.

~~~
mattmanser
I almost posted exactly the same post as simias earlier, your post worries me
a bit as you don't seem to understand there's been generations of hackers who
had no internet access.

I learnt programming on my school computers in lunch times and on a graphical
calculator. I really didn't have much interest in programming at home.

It almost feels like you didn't read the article, the author talks about more
generic problem solving, fixing a bit of tech, building with Lego. They're the
core of hacking, that's what we need to stop labeling 'boy' in children's
minds.

A hacker needs to be encouraged to tinker. They honestly don't need private
web access to do that. Most of my time near computers was supervized, though I
didn't think of it that way at the time.

And there are a lot of people who _are_ affected by watching people hang. I
doubt _any_ parent would allow their 12 yo access to that.

~~~
vinceguidry
> I learnt programming on my school computers in lunch times and on a
> graphical calculator. I really didn't have much interest in programming at
> home.

I did the same. My interest in programming actually started to _decrease_ as
my access to the internet increased. This was, however, in the mid-90s, when
there weren't the big online communities that there are now.

~~~
S4M
Exactly the same for me. Internet can act as a big distractor sometimes.

------
krstck
Oooh, this was an icy stab right at the core. She's completely right:

>Dump her in a situation that operates on different social scripts than she's
accustomed to, full of people talking about a subject she doesn't yet
understand. Then tell her the community is hostile toward women and therefore
doesn't have enough of them, all while showing her off like a prize poodle so
you can feel good about recruiting a females

This explains, better than I ever could, why I've always felt weird about all
of the attention on getting women into programming.

As a kid, I loved programming. When I became a teenager, I got wind that it
wasn't something "cool" and got spooked. For someone as insecure as I was,
having a hobby that I couldn't really "explain" to normal people was
embarrassing. Probably if I had known a single other kid/girl that liked
computers like I did, I might have continued on that path and not been
distracted for about 10 years.

~~~
jseliger
_When I became a teenager, I got wind that it wasn 't something "cool" and got
spooked. For someone as insecure as I was, having a hobby that I couldn't
really "explain" to normal people was embarrassing._

When I was a teenager, coding or being technical in general wasn't cool
either, and most of the people who were involved were or at least seemed
insecure and embarrassed. Perhaps the climate in middle / high schools has
changed since, but if not, we could also ask: what makes many _boys_ persist
in their uncool, embarrassing, low-ish status activity?

~~~
tedks
When I was a teenager (which was not long ago), coding or being technical in
general was entirely uncool, but widely acknowledged as powerful. People would
come to me asking if I could "hack" various things ranging from friends
Facebook accounts to banks. Teachers would ask you for help if things broke.
At one point, the principal called me into his office to ask if I could help
him trace a threat posted on the Internet (after notifying proper authorities
and presumably trying every other lead to do his job well and protect his
students).

I'd say the problem is less that being technologically adept is low-status,
and more that the problem is that being technologically
adept/geeky/mathematical/mechanical is considered _unfeminine._

~~~
Crito
I think that being technologically adept _is_ low-status, and I don't think
that being asked for help is much evidence to the contrary.

I mean sure, being a lawyer is a high-status career and you will likely have
people in your personal life constantly asking for your advice or favours, but
car mechanics experience the same thing. Being a car mechanic is respected _in
a way_ , and people certainly understand how those skills are valuable (and
can think of many ways that you might use those skills for their own
advantage), but it's not "high-status".

Actually, I think I'd put car mechanic as _higher status_ than programmer. The
money is not nearly as good, but on the other hand nobody is going to assume
that you are a weirdo, until proven otherwise.

~~~
tedks
That's a very good point, and it makes me reconsider my earlier statement.

------
VonGuard
themade.org teaches free programming classes to kids. We've been doing this
for 2 years now, and most of the time, our ratios are 50/50\. Yesterday, in
fact, we had 3 boys and 6 girls for our scratch class, then had 8 girls and 2
boys for our interactive fiction class, taught in Twine.

Couple things we've learned. First, girls default to pair programming. They
cluster, they work together, when they have a problem, they solve it for one
another before asking the teachers. They work together and don't compete. The
boys compete and try to get way far ahead of the teachers, and end up getting
lost. The girls all move at the same pace except for the ones who were
advanced-class level when they showed up.

Second thing: little girls are not affraid, and not any less able to do this.
It's a societal thing that pushes them away. They see the girls in their
classes interested in other things, so they don't get interested in computers.
Instead, they get interested in facebook, not the computer itself, because
their older siblings use it, their friends use it, and they then learn that
computers are for socializing. Given the proper environment, they can learn
anything a geek would learn, it's just that they don't get spoon fed computer
knowledge, they get spoon fed facebook, Snapchat, Pokemon and Minecraft
knowledge.

Third: Minecraft cuts across all genders. All kids absolutely adore Minecraft,
and about 50% want to learn programming just to make mods for the game.

Finally, girls who come to our classes keep coming back. They have a little
social group with the other girls, and they welcome in other girls. The boys
are left out, mostly, but that's fine as they're not having trouble learning
or keeping up. The girls in our classes are their own support mechanism, and
they tend to become friends outside of classes.

So, learn from this what you will.

~~~
gruseom
How do you get kids modding Minecraft? I suggested this a little while ago for
a kid in my brother-in-law's Grade 8 class, but then regretted it because the
tools for doing it seemed inaccessible to beginners.

~~~
VonGuard
You don't. It's Java. It's like a kid asking you to build a car engine from
scratch day one. We kindly point them to our Scratch class as a way to learn
how to program.

~~~
gruseom
Well, I'm glad I didn't come to the wrong conclusion. It's too bad, though,
because Minecraft modding got this kid really excited, and there are many
(maybe millions) like him. It seems like it could be a really fruitful area
for work.

Actually, when I was looking through stuff for him, I found a project that
implemented Minecraft bindings for JavaScript with the aim of creating a
friendly environment for kids. The author was an HNer and had posted it here a
year or two ago. But the project had languished since then, and it struck me
(perhaps unfairly) that it probably wouldn't work out of the box in all
configurations. The last thing one should put in front of a kid is something
that immediately frustrates them by failing in strange ways. Tools like that
need to be really, really well-hammered. Which is one of the advantages of
Scratch.

~~~
DanBC
It is a shame that Minecraft modding is so horrific because, as you say, it
would be a very powerful motivator to get young people involved in
programming.

Even the RPi Minecraft appears to lack information about modding:

[http://pi.minecraft.net/](http://pi.minecraft.net/)

~~~
VonGuard
If someone wants to teach it for free, they can offer a class in this at the
MADE. I have yet to find someone who can teach it, though.

------
mistakoala
I groaned at what sounded like another SJW article on 'teh evil patriarchy of
technology'.

I'm glad I read on for an interesting and original viewpoint.

More Susan Sons' and fewer Adria Richards', please. The former have meaningful
and constructive contributions to make while the latter just make political
hay for their own self-interest. As a learner, the perception of an increased
emphasis on identity politics is off-putting to me. Not because I secretly
want to have a career and interest in tech to further my patriarchal
tendencies, but because it's shifting attention away from the interesting
stuff - the stuff that makes tech fun and interesting in the first place.

~~~
forgottenpass
While I don't agree 100% with what you say here, you more or less drive at why
I posted it. There are some conversations about gender and tech that, while
useful in their own right, also become exclusionary of other possible framing
and interpretation of issues and events at hand.

"SJW", while neither an apt nor particularly nice monicker, does (to some)
refer to a practicing particular brands of off-putting rhetoric that are
uncompromising to a fault. I see people largely in agreement talk past each
other because one person's mind is already made up in a way incompatible with
someone else's experiences.

A HN commenter once suggested that agreement has become a form of social
signaling. I don't know if I believe that, but it would be dangerous and
counterproductive because arguments need iteration. If you can't make your
case in a way that convinces people with your same goals, you're not going to
convince people that don't yet share your goals.

~~~
mistakoala
I recognise that tech has its politics and is rooted in it to an extent
(Cypherpunks etc). I'm not particularly against that or blind to it.

What I dislike is the braiding of tech with identity politics issues by people
who are unaccommodating, and hostile in their language and behaviour, if not
their motives. Here, I feel that SJW is an apt description for people whose
interests are primarily identity politics. It's not a term that I apply
universally.

Sons made her point in a thoughtful way. She was not hostile (explicitly or
implicitly). If there are issues regarding identity politics and tech, I'd
rather hear about it from people like her. The pity is (in an awkwardly
expressed way), because of her position, she doesn't necessarily want a
platform from which to say things on these matters because she doesn't frame
her experience in terms of gender (and that seems to carry through into the
comments).

------
timr
I'm torn. I think she makes some really good points -- particularly about
discouraging young girls and the futility of shoving adult humans into foreign
social situations -- but I also think she might be rather narrowly defining
the personality type of a "hacker", and dismissing behaviors that she doesn't
find valuable (in her words: _" ephemera -- popularity, beauty and fitting
in"_).

Maybe it's possible that there are plenty of people out there who care about
"ephemera", and yet are _also_ capable of programming a computer or soldering
things together? I think it's possible. And when I read stuff like this:

 _" Sometimes I want to shout 'you're not a programmer, what are you doing
here?!'"_

it makes me think: this might be a problem. Is it harder to be a hacker if you
also have an interest in social media and graphic design and popularity and
friendships? Are we _defining_ "hacker" to include only people with bad social
skills and no interest outside of technology? I hope not.

~~~
bitwize
For the longest time I harbored the biggest crush on a girl from my high
school. The thing that made me fall in love with her (and it was love -- as
much love as a 14-year-old could feel) wasn't that she was pretty or cute or
popular -- though she was all these things. (Head cheerleader. Literally.
Dated a football player and everything.)

It was that I had the good fortune to peek over her shoulder at some BASIC
code she'd written in our completely noddy, intro-to-computers class. She
wasn't going to put Grace Hopper to shame, but it was surprisingly well-
structured and showed she knew how to reason about causes and effects within
the machine. Which is, like, the first skill that you need to be a decent
programmer.

But the thing about pretty girls is that they often find it is more
immediately profitable to be pretty than to be bright. And staying pretty and
popular -- keeping that limelight on you -- is a lot of work. It's a full-time
job with potentially ruinous consequences without some sort of balance (look
at Miley Cyrus). So she eventually forgot about coding and went on to become a
television personality.

My point here is that you become what you invest time in becoming. If you want
to ascend to elite-level hackerdom, then you almost _have_ to put things like
attractiveness and popularity on the back burner. You don't have to have poor
social skills to be a hacker. But the people who are best at being popular and
fitting in are the people who invested time and effort into doing just that,
just like the best programmers are the ones who invested time and effort into
programming. And we only have so much time to give, so yes, you kinda gotta
pick and choose.

~~~
timr
_" My point here is that you become what you invest time in becoming. If you
want to ascend to elite-level hackerdom, then you almost have to put things
like attractiveness and popularity on the back burner."_

No, you really don't. You believe this because it's what you've seen around
you, but that's a selection bias. Someone else on this thread pointed out that
Von Neumann was an exceptionally stylish guy, but he's far from the only
example. Only in the peculiar little world of computer programming do we seem
to equate slovenly behavior with competence.

One of the great qualities of smart, capable people is that smart, capable
people tend to have a lot of different interests. There's no reason that you
can't be attractive _and_ smart.

 _" Specialization is for insects."_ \-- Heinlein

~~~
gwern
> Someone else on this thread pointed out that Von Neumann was an
> exceptionally stylish guy, but he's far from the only example.

So your solution is to suggest everyone be as smart as _John von Neumann_ so
they can master subjects while still being a snappy dresser? Does this seem
like something people can do?

The proverbial 10k hours of practice have to come from _somewhere_. Time is
limited, activities are zero-sum.

~~~
arrrg
I don’t think anyone was suggesting that.

Many hackers I know do have other hobbies besides hacking and they devote lots
of time to those hobbies. Beer brewing, coffee making, writing poetry, music,
languages, …

What if one of those hobbies is dressing fashionably? Or makeup? Or whatever?

Beyond a certain point activities are zero sum but do you seriously suggest
that to be a proper hacker you have no time at all for anything beside that?

I don’t think anyone should ever feel obligated to be into dressing
fashionably or makeup or even just feel obligated to dress a certain way.
That’s awful. (I especially hate gender policing.) But telling someone they
can only be part of the group if they aren’t into makeup isn’t all that much
better than telling someone they should wear makeup to represent women better.

It’s a heuristic for identifying in-group people that makes no sense and to me
seems highly destructive.

~~~
nitrogen
_It’s a heuristic for identifying in-group people that makes no sense and to
me seems highly destructive._

I suspect this heuristic started out as a way for the outcast, socially
unwelcome hackers to finally find a group to which they could belong, an
activity that didn't judge them for their intellect or their appearance.

I further suspect that some of the pushback against lifting this heuristic
comes from those same people, who feel that _they will lose the only thing
that gave them a reason to feel good about themselves in the face of total
rejection by their peers_. It would be just as tragic to force these people
out of programming as it is tragic to prevent others from coming into
programming.

~~~
arrrg
Oh man, even more zero sum thinking.

Outcasts making others outcasts, bullied becoming bullies. Nice.

The general point is this: rejection because of the way you dress (no matter
how) or look (no matter how) is not cool. The direction doesn’t really matter.
But this groupthink is pretty disgustingly exclusionary.

~~~
nitrogen
From the article:

 _Most of all, I 'm disappointed. I had a haven, a place where no one cared
what I looked like, what my body was like or about any ephemera—they cared
about what I could do—and this culture shift has robbed me of my haven. At
least I had that haven. The girls who follow me missed out on it._

You know what's disgusting? People getting disgusted over issues that don't
warrant disgust.

~~~
arrrg
I’m not sure how exclusionary rhetoric follows from that. It just doesn’t make
any sense to me.

Also, I think that statement is just outright wrong and misleading.

~~~
nitrogen
I wrote my first comment before reading the article, and later found that
paragraph in which the article's author seemed to share my sentiments.

In my first comment I may have been speculating on the motivations of others,
but I did so by drawing in part on my own experiences. Programming, computers,
BBSes/online services/Internet, etc. gave me something I could do as a grade
school child that didn't depend on other people's approval of my social
identity. My point was and is that it would be _just as tragic_ to drive off
the social misfits as it would be _tragic to exclude_ the socially adept.

Sadly, sometimes it seems the mainstream have seen how much money can be made
by former and present misfits as hackers and want to take ownership of it for
themselves.

 _Edited to add:_ After rereading the thread, it seems you may have been
commenting specifically on the sentence that I quoted. I don't intend to
_justify_ the heuristic that leads some to assume non-social-outcasts are non-
hackers, only to _explain_ it, and perhaps find a way of bridging the gap
between those who use that heuristic, and those who are harmed by it.

------
forgottenpass
I resubmitted this because it seems like an viewpoint that's important in the
larger gender in tech conversation, but the author seems to be outside the
mainstream conversation (or at lest what I see of it on Hacker News).

Sadly it looks like this submission is dying an even more uneventful death
than the first time it was posted.

~~~
mtrimpe

      Start with a young woman who's already formed her identity. 
      Dump her in a situation that operates on different social 
      scripts than she's accustomed to, full of people talking 
      about a subject she doesn't yet understand. Then tell her 
      the community is hostile toward women and therefore doesn't 
      have enough of them, all while showing her off like a prize 
      poodle so you can feel good about recruiting a female. 
      This is a recipe for failure.
    

Brilliant writing. I for one am loving it. The article does have me somewhat
torn though.

On the one hand the stream-of-consciousness rantyness so accurately describes
what's _actually_ going on and it's beautiful to see it written down so
poignantly.

On the other hand it has a pretty strong "I got mine" component to it, where
she laments the negative effects these changes have had on her personally but
doesn't acknowledge that while _she_ 's in a position she likes that doesn't
at all mean it is, or would be, like that for many others.

The risk here is that sexism often manifests itself as 'all good until it's
not,' in that the small things are always easily brushed off and if you're
lucky to run in circles where you don't experience the bad stuff you tend to
think it's all way overblown... until you get to a point where something
happens that can't be brushed off and you realize you aren't actually as
supported as you thought you were, at which point all minor transgressions are
no longer just brushed off but are rather interpreted as 'still a
transgression, even if only minor.'

~~~
pdonis
Your quote is a good one, but I like this one even better:

 _I came to the Open Source world because I liked being part of a community
where my ideas, my skills and my experience mattered, not my boobs. That 's
changed, and it's changed at the hands of the people who say they want a
community where ideas, skills and experience matter more than boobs._

I don't at all see her failing to acknowledge that she was fortunate--she
_had_ that community, at least for a while, and she explicitly says that
others who came later did not. And she makes a number of good practical
suggestions for improving the situation.

~~~
mtrimpe
The thing is though that she is in a very rare, privileged position. She liked
her community, fit in well, felt protected and cared for, wasn't troubled by
the gender ratio and all in all was just happy with her situation.

For a very large amount of women that is unfortunately not the case nowadays
and unfortunately her situation is not typical in the slightest and I didn't
see much _actionable_ advice to improve on that.

It's also important to note that it seems the people she respected are
separated from today's youth by almost _two_ generations:

    
    
      I've never had a problem with old-school hackers. These guys 
      treat me like one of them, rather than "the woman in the group", 
      and many are old enough to remember when they worked on teams 
      that were about one third women, and no one thought that strange. 
      Of course, the key word here is "old" (sorry guys). Most of the 
      programmers I like are closer to my father's age than mine.
    

Ever since that generation the gender gap has been widening and she's now
witnessing attempts to correct that and she doesn't like what she sees. She
doesn't like the exclusion of her son, the message it sends to him about women
in tech (and thus herself) and most of all the fact that gender has now become
a 'thing.' And I can totally relate that for her it must be painful indeed and
that is _her_ voice and she totally deserves it.

Where we would go wrong is if we took this as the _right_ approach, if we
started basing _best practices_ from this or worse: if we would use it to
belittle the work of everyone who is trying to improve the situation.

~~~
pdonis
_nowadays_

Exactly: it isn't the case _now_ , but it _was_ the case before. Why is that?

 _if we would use it to belittle the work of everyone who is trying to improve
the situation_

But the whole point is that "trying to improve the situation" by making a huge
fuss about "women in tech" is _counterproductive_ ; it makes the situation
_worse_ , not better.

To the extent that there is a "right" approach, IMO it is to not fuss about
_anything_ except what each individual child is interested in. The moment you
start thinking "I want more girls to do X" or "I think more boys should do Y",
you've already gone wrong. Thinking of people as members of groups instead of
unique individuals is what caused the problem in the first place; that kind of
thinking is not going to fix it.

~~~
mtrimpe
> Exactly: it isn't the case now, but it was the case before. Why is that?

I don't know; but I do know it's been like that way before the recent fuss
about women in tech got started.

> To the extent that there is a "right" approach .. what each individual child
> is interested in.

Practically speaking then, do you think we would improve the situation in tech
if we told everyone who's organizing these events which do explicitly mention
gender to stop doing so?

From an idealistic perspective I'm also against women-only events and would
prefer them to be perfectly inclusive.

In practice that's a very hard thing to achieve though and if supplanting
existing classes with predominantly boys with an explicit girls-only class
helps to get some of these girls interested in tech then I'm not one to rain
on their parade.

------
marquis
>Young women don't magically become technologists at 22

I did exactly that. I have a degree in the arts, but always loved physics and
pursued that secondarily. I failed physics because I had taken arts instead of
mathematics but found that that didn't stop me learning C and building all the
arts programs I ever wanted. Quite some years ago now and I was an outlier but
it's not too uncommon.

Good schools are now getting girls into robotics and coding before puberty.
That's when you get exited. I loved messing with radios and old VHS players
when I was a kid, and probably MOST importantly my father was a technologist:
exposure at a young age is everything.

~~~
HedgeMage
Ahh, but it wasn't magic...as you go on to say, the seeds were planted when
you were young. "messing with radios and old VHS players" is a precursor to
becoming a good technologist. It's not about what you played with, it's about
early experiences of problem solving, of making and/or fixing and/or tinkering
in any context.

~~~
marquis
>but it wasn't magic

No. I'm also not an world-class tennis player even though I played tennis
since I was able to hold a racket and had good teachers. I just happen to be
good at problem solving, making and fixing and tinkering. Most of friends who
were at school who liked to build things also went on to have technical
careers, just not with computer programming. So, I think that we are only
starting to see a new generation coming up for whom computers aren't something
they met when they were older, so there will start to be a lot more natural
female programmers among them. In my generation it was rare for a father to
take interest in a girl's technical inclinations, and I think I'm really lucky
for that early experience. My point is that I just think this is a phase and a
generation not far away won't face this gender discrepancy.

~~~
mitochondrion
I'd just like to throw it out there that perhaps your problem solving ability
developed in lockstep with your tinkering.

------
dev1n
Growing up watching shows like "Dexter's Laboratory" and "Jimmy Neutron Boy
Genius" definitely shaped me as a child into the tech freak I am today. Girls
getting barbies thrown at them when they are 12 does not help put girls into
the tech sector. We need television shows like "Diane's Laboratory" or
"Jennifer Neutron Girl Genius" to get girls interested in tech. Hit 'em when
they're young.

~~~
HedgeMage
For my son, it was "Johnny Test" and "Phineas and Ferb", the latter being one
of the most well-done bits of hacker/maker propaganda I've ever come across.
Amusingly, all the scientists/engineers in Johnny Test that aren't creepy
villains are girls (Johnny's twin sisters and occasionally friends). My son
had no problem looking up to them anyway.

I got a certain amount of crap from others for "letting" him be so into a girl
thing, and I remember getting crap as a kid because most of the figures I
looked up to are men. Is it hypocritical of me to be both frustrated by the
lack of stuff about girl techies _and_ irritated that our society pushes kids
to pick such things only from same-gendered examples?

~~~
dev1n
Phineas and Ferb is awesome. I'm 22 and I watch that show.

Your frustration is justified IMO. Among the other interests I had growing up
were movies like Johnny Tsunami and Brink where I wanted to get out and be a
cool extreme sports athlete like the main characters in those movies. The fact
that I picked the tech industry IMO shows that society doesn't always push
kids to pick things up from examples, but providing the option to discover
interests via same-gendered examples is imperative in my opinion. I really
have no data for this other than my own personal experiences, however I did
read a blog post maybe a year ago on the effects of television and career path
choice which I thought was interesting.

------
Fuxy
She will probably be glad to hear there's still young hackers out there who
don't give a shit about this feminist propaganda.

I for one don't care what gender you are the rules are the same regardless of
gender.

If i happen to have a complaint about your code or anything else for that
matter and you happen to be a girl ...well what do i care?

On the other hand every girl in STEM that constantly complains about how
awkward the guys are just outed them selves as not a hacker gir.

A real hacker girl knows that the guys are awkward but it's not intentional
the just never bothered with social skills.

A real hacker girl also puts as much value into fasion and the likes like any
other hacker which is to say very little at all.

So that well dressed and social girl in IT is most likely not really a hacker
then again this is just a generalization and would gladly be proven wrong.

Hell if you happen to know someone like that i would love meet her that is
quite rare.

The reality of people like us with a curious nature is the we never find time
to learn social skills and fasion we're just too busy satisfying our
curiosity.

I personally would love to have a better fasion sense but i really need to get
that arch install working perfectly :)

------
e12e
Many good points in this article, but I think it falls short in analysing
what's changed (or what's wrong).

> Most of all, I'm disappointed. I had a haven, a place where no one cared
> what I looked like, what my body was like or about any ephemera—they cared
> about what I could do—and this culture shift has robbed me of my haven. At
> least I had that haven. The girls who follow me missed out on it.

Well, yes. Computing and programming has become (more) mainstream -- it's no
longer a tiny sub-culture free of mainstream bias. I'm sure there are
disappointed skaters, surfers and punks out there too.

I don't think the best way forward is to throw out years of feminist research,
or think that "if we could all just get along like before, the problem would
go away". It's not that it wouldn't go away, it's just that we need to make an
effort to get there. One way to do that is to have sex-segregated introduction
classes. They shouldn't _all_ be segregated, nor is it the only thing that we
should be doing -- but that is _one_ way of creating a safe and rewarding
environment. If we have tutors managing to get mixed classes going, in a way
that works well, then that's great too (see VonGuard's comment for example).
Generally if you can grab kids before they've been hammered into groupthink
about toys, fun and gender roles (which is harder and harder to do with
increasing tv commercials, product placement etc) -- then kids don't need to
be "de-programmed" \-- they can just be allowed to be kids. And they'll play
and learn by themselves. But the later you start, the more likely you'll need
to have a plan of attack if you want everyone to get a fair shake, and similar
participation.

I do think she's right in calling out a lot of the crap that people do in the
name of "political correctness" \-- without much thought about how or why,
though. Being righteous isn't enough; if you're not _right_ , you're probably
just making things worse.

[edit: I don't usually comment down-votes -- but I'd like to see a comment.
The general idea is to down vote submissions that don't contribute to the
discussion -- while I certainly expect many to dis-agree I certainly hope this
post isn't perceived as vapid?]

~~~
belorn
> I don't think the best way forward is to throw out years of feminist
> research.

That sentence gave me a nice smile. feminist research is poor at best, non-
existent at worse.

Take affirmative action in education. Give me a single study that shows that
it a) produce long-term professionals, b) is better than the base line, and c)
if it has any of the negative and well documented long term effects inherent
of single-sex education.

There are plenty of feminist research that shows there exist an gender
imbalance in STEM, and most studies gives one or other kind of theory around
the _why_. The theories are however rarely if ever tested. The "years of
feminist research" has not gotten to that part yet, and won't until we demand
more from researchers than summery of latest census data.

~~~
tedks
>There are plenty of feminist research that shows there exist an gender
imbalance in STEM, and most studies gives one or other kind of theory around
the why. The theories are however rarely if ever tested. The "years of
feminist research" has not gotten to that part yet, and won't until we demand
more from researchers than summery of latest census data.

Could you give specific examples? Please limit yourself to peer-reviewed
journals in psychology and sociology.

There's a long tradition of feminist research in psychology relevant in this
problem space; it's incorrect as a matter of simple fact to claim that it
doesn't exist.

~~~
phazmatis
Could you give specific examples? Please limit yourself to peer-reviewed
journals in psychology and sociology.

~~~
belorn
While I too would really like to see such peer-reviwed journals, I can go
first so tedks can post afterward.

[http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/gender-
societ...](http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/gender-
society/occupational-gender-segregation-pay-differences) (2012 study published
in _Sociology_ )

That study do reference a bunch of other study, some which did also polls
rather than just census data. However, note the mass use of the words "could
be", "potentially", "suggests" and so on. I choose to interpret those words as
"further study is needed" each time they are used, limiting the article to
only what has the word "finding" on it.

------
tragic
Very interesting article.

The problem I have with the particular form the tech-feminist crusades have
taken is that it seems to me to be diversionary at a fundamental level. Women
are not just under-represented in tech, but in the majority of the most
lucrative professions as a whole. So, unless we accept the bogus argument that
women are just naturally worse at stuff other than babies, we must assume that
this is a problem with society as a whole (the dolls-versus-lego thing is a
part of that, but not the only one).

Women-only classes and so on may or may not help the particular women involved
into the industry - I don't know. Presumably that can be empirically studied
by people with the time and resources to do so. But the underlying problem is
a matter for 'concerned citizens', not the tech industry _as the tech
industry_.

Crusading, say, for 'codes of conduct' at conferences has the seductive appeal
of a modest and realisable goal; unfortunately, there is no nice, pat answer
to gender inequality in society, as the last three centuries of 'concerned
citizens' have learned. To put it bluntly, it's not dick jokes at PyCon
keeping women out, any more than it's dick jokes at law school that produces
the gender gap in law firms.

~~~
lexcorvus
_Women are not just under-represented in tech, but in the majority of the most
lucrative professions as a whole. So, unless we accept the bogus argument that
women are just naturally worse at stuff other than babies, we must assume that
this is a problem with society as a whole (the dolls-versus-lego thing is a
part of that, but not the only one)._

What about the possibility that men and women are different, and in particular
that men are more naturally inclined to do things like sacrifice time and
flexibility in order to make more money? There's no reason to expect _a
priori_ that men and women are identical in this regard. Indeed, evaluating
_Homo sapiens_ as a sexually dimorphic bipedal ape whose sexes have different
reproductive incentives, it would be very surprising to find otherwise.

------
Wintamute
Blimey this piece is spot on. It manages to basically sum up many of the
wordless, un-expressed proto-opinions I have on on the matter into one
incredibly coherent package. Lucid, rational and heart felt - great discourse.

------
jt2190
I'm not sure I understand what the definition of "hacker" is in this article:

    
    
      > Young women don't magically become technologists at 22. 
      > Neither do young men. Hackers are born in childhood, 
      > because that's when the addiction to solving the 
      > puzzle or building something kicks in to those who've 
      > experienced that "victory!" moment like I had when I 
      > imposed my will on a couple electronic primates.
    

It seems to imply that people who simply make their living programming
computers, and who came to programming when they were older, aren't "hackers".
Am I missing something?

(Edit: Given that programming careers can be quite lucrative, and that careers
in general are now quite long, it makes economic sense that people would want
to join in later in their lives. Short of building a time machine to correct
past parenting, must these people be permanently excluded from the industry?)

~~~
gruseom
Seems to me the author vividly conveys what she means by "hacker" in the very
paragraph you quoted:

    
    
      technologist
      addiction
      solving puzzles
      building things
      "victory!" moment
      impose will on electronics
    

These things are done and felt for their own sake and not as a means to an
end, like a paycheck. Perhaps that's the main difference.

~~~
scott_s
I think she also implied that this behavior will be exhibited at a very young
age, or not at all. (Which jt2190 also points out below.) She's not the only
one to imply this - or outright say it.

That always gives me pause, because it does not describe me. My family did not
have a computer until I was 16. I figured out HTML on my own, but no
programming. I took a programming course in high school, but it was
rudimentary, and I did not seek out anymore at home. I don't think it ever
occurred to me to try programming at home.

I actually am the hacker that I've read others say does not exist: I did not
start programming until college.

Sure, I can look backwards before I started to program, or even before my
family had a computer, and point out behaviors that align with being a
"hacker." Despite not being a programmer at all, I was comfortable with
computers after my family got one, and could figure out problems me and others
had; I got a thrill out of making webpages, much the same kind of thrill I got
when I first started to learn how to program. But despite these behaviors, I
was not "hacking" until college.

I remember freshmen year, all of us computer science majors had a wide variety
of experience in programming. A lot of kids had been programming since early
teens. By junior year, I did not feel like there was a significant difference
between me and them.

~~~
gruseom
> this behavior will be exhibited at a very young age, or not at all

That's so obviously false that I doubt she's saying it. I suspect it's more
like: these qualities tend to come up in childhood, so if we want to see more
of them, that's where we should focus.

Everything about your comment ("I figured out HTML on my own") makes me bet
you that had these qualities in spades as a kid long before you had a
computer. All this existed before computers, after all. I remember Jerry
Weinberg saying that he knew he wanted to devote his life to computers from
the day Time Magazine ran a futuristic cover story about them in the late
1930s. Another farm kid, as it happens. He went to college to study computers
and found they didn't exist yet, so he majored in physics and bided his time
until programming became a thing.

I wonder sometimes whether any of this is about childhood per se or the fact
that children are more likely to do things out of play, to figure stuff out,
see what will happen, and so on. If that's it, then we can dispose of the
controversy by agreeing that people who come to programming purely as a career
or (god forbid) for status will do worse not if they're too old, but if
they're too uncurious.

~~~
scott_s
What I'm trying to describe is the "by 20, it's too late to make a hacker"
sentiment, which I do hear people say. So if I _did_ have these qualities, and
we're going to identify them _after_ we've already established that I am a
hacker, then it must be true that lots of other people also have these
qualities, but did not become hackers.

My point: the notion that good hackers must be hacking on, and tinkering with,
computers at a young age is probably too simplistic.

~~~
HedgeMage
Actually, I made it a point to explain that it doesn't _have_ to be
computers...

"Even if they lacked computers, they were taking apart alarm clocks, repairing
pencil sharpeners or tinkering with ham radios. Some of them built pumpkin
launchers or LEGO trains."

There are many early maker/hacker experiences that don't require access to or
interest in computers. The point was that, at some point early on, every
hacker (maybe there's an outlier or three, but I'd be shocked if there were
twenty) had some experience digging in and building or fixing or changing
_something_.

For me, it started a long time before my exposure to computers. I grew up in a
rural area. As early as toddlerhood, I was learning to cook, sew, make
candles, weave on a loom, etc. I was _making_ as early as I could hold things
and be relied on to keep them out of my mouth. It never occurred to me to
throw something away without trying to fix it first, because if something
broke, my parents would fix it, and I'd watch or help.

It's not about computers and youth, it's about making/fixing/tinkering and
youth.

~~~
Dewie
I don't think I ever fixed, made or was curious about such things when I was a
child. So I guess I'll just have to accept my fate of becoming a corporate
programming drone that _hackers_ will secretly or not so snicker at for being
so clueless and unproductive, and to become unemployable or change careers at
40 because of my relative lack of passion for the craft. At least I've been
warned.

~~~
aaronem
Well, you could take everything incredibly personally for no obvious reason,
or you could consider that no one is actually saying you have to be a "hacker"
so-called to participate in the industry.

~~~
Dewie
I think you misunderstand me. I said that I would end up as a "corporate
programming drone" \- clearly a programming drone is part of the industry.
What I'm saying is that, while I could probably get into the industry (if I
could stay there for my whole professional life I'm a little uncertain about -
see my OP), it seems that I would forever be an inferior programmer because I
don't have the necessary passion to become a great programmer (or "great
hacker" \- and I realize that they are not necessarily the exact same thing),
as implied by the OP of this post and some/many others. But I want to devote
my professional life to something that I'm sufficiently passionate about and
where I can make a positive impact, not just be another worker bee that is
kind of doing an okay job but is vastly inferior to a lot of the _truly
passionate programmers_ , who occasionally look down the nose at me for not
being devoted or skilled enough. Is this so ambitious? I don't think so - I
think many people deep down want to make an impact. I don't have ambitions of
being the best, or require it. I don't even require that I have to be more
than average. But I want to make a tangible impact, I want to feel a purpose.
I don't want to wake up in 10 years and realize that my passion was simply not
sufficient, that most or many of my peers are far surpassing me in my craft,
and I simply have to accept a lifetime of inferiority, or to maybe have to
change my career entirely.

I'm not out of university yet, and I think that I've found something that I
can devote my career to. But then I read about these people that make me
question my passion, because really, it can be hard to gauge how _passionate_
you are compared to most other people. And if it turns out that they're
insinuations are correct - that I really don't have the sufficient drive and
passion to make a satisfying career out of this - maybe I'll need to get out
now...

It's a kind of existential question: _who am I and where do I belong?_ But if
you want to dismiss this as just being overly sensitive, that's fine.

~~~
scott_s
If you have a drive to make an impact and to feel a purpose, then I think
you'll be fine. I think those traits go a long way.

------
shurcooL
This... sounds so very spot on. I really enjoyed the article and think it's
quite excellent.

------
vezzy-fnord
Good to see this article getting the attention it deserves, after it was
unfairly overlooked the first time.

------
shiven
Can't upvote this enough. This article should be required reading for _every_
HN reader.

------
donaq
"Young women don't magically become technologists at 22. Neither do young men.
Hackers are born in childhood..."

Nitpick: I actually only started learning to program in university as an
undergraduate (I was ~21). I have a female friend who had a similar start, so
you don't necessarily have to start as a child. It's not gymnastics. The
thrill of solving puzzles can be experienced at any time in your life, I
think.

Otherwise, great article.

~~~
auggierose
I don't like solving puzzles. Something that was put together by somebody
else, for the sole purpose of you trying to figure out what it was. How
stupid. It's for people who believe in god.

------
skybrian
It's a good rant. There are concrete suggestions for improvement, and also
concrete examples of where some people went a little too far.

I'm less happy about excluding people who are coming into computing late,
though.

~~~
Crake
>I'm less happy about excluding people who are coming into computing late,
though.

I don't think she's doing that. Note that she doesn't say that you haven to
have been programming since age 2, just that you have to have a natural
interest in "solving the puzzle or building something." I came late to
programming since I didn't have access to computers I could tinker with, but I
was still putzing around with k'nex and getting yelled at for taking household
appliances apart from a very young age.

~~~
jkrems
I think it's also important that she points to reasons why women stopped
coming to CS early (the Barbie-beauty culture) and mentions the often
forgotten "old enough to remember when they worked on teams that were about
one third women". I don't think she wants to say that you have to be a bad
developer because you start late, but rather that we won't get back to a
decent percentage of female developers without a shift in how we treat young
girls.

------
overgard
Funny the lack of social justice warriors in this thread to save her from
herself. (Which is to say: fantastic article, thanks).

------
piokuc
Great text by Susan on very important issue. I'm a male software engineer and
the predominance of male pears has been the only major downside of being in
the business for me ever since i started studying CS almost 20 yrs ago. It
should be understood and fixed for the sake of future generations.

------
jami
It's great that this author's upbringing was such that a robotics class for
girls wasn't needed. My mom also taught her daughters that we're people, so of
course I wanted a computer like the other smart kids at school (in the '80s).

But some children are raised to think of things as "for boys" and "for girls",
and for those kids, a class for girls is absolutely useful. It isn't that
those kids aren't naturally smart enough; it's that everything in their lives
is telling them that robots are for boys. It's a shame that someone botched
the explanation of the robotics class to her son.

------
loladesoto
i am one of 10 children (7 girls including myself and 3 boys). 100% of us went
into STEM. what's more, we are Latino so growing up in a thoroughly geeky
environment was, well, unique.

in high school i found safety in geeky societies like Academic Decathlon. i
went to a science/engineering university and dropped out to work in tech. and
as much as i love my work, i have always been aware (sometimes acutely) of
being one of the only women in the room.

i'd be lying if it didn't chap my hide sometimes. i have skills commonly found
among the male population (i am an entrepreneur, i know how to code) but it's
a lonely existence. i still look like a woman, wear heels and makeup for the
fun of it when _i_ want to, and am relatively short! my point is, i stand out
from the norm and people are constantly being surprised by me/my abilities.
which means i have to do a lot of explaining and seeking out of mentors,
rather than spending that time thriving in the simple assumption that i am
precisely where i am supposed to be.

men have that. the really self-reflective ones realize that.

the awesome thing is, the women in my family have not only been fighting the
good fight in STEM, they are passing the baton. each one of my nieces--all 8
of them--is encouraged to build, tear apart, and reconstruct stuff. these kids
have to be torn away from Minecraft, unglued from their laptops and iPads. i
teach girls how to code and do graphic design in my free time, and one of my
favorite questions is: "When is the Maker Faire? When is the Maker Faire!"
with sparkly eyes.

my experience in tech hasn't been like @HedgeMage's. although i didn't start
coding until later in my career, i have always been a hacker and the dirty
little secret is that girls just aren't encouraged to hack.

some of us are born that way, however. and that's a pretty amazing way to be
on the inside, regardless of how we look or are treated on the outside.

------
lukasm
I remember when I was 10 my dad set BIOS password so I could only play for 2
hours a day max. I manage to guess the password. It was "dad" :). When he was
coming back from work I quickly turn off the PC. After 3rd time he noticed
that PC was hot.

------
sdegutis
Wow. Susan Sons at 12 years old was way better at open source software than I
am today! We need more children like Susan Sons in the world, and we need to
give them unlimited, supervised computer/internet access.

------
beauzero
Awesome article. As a father of two daughters I appreciate some of the
anecdotes that you put forward.

------
surana90
Very well written! It points out correctly what has gone wrong with feminism
movement in recent years.

------
stefantalpalaru
> Last year, his school offered a robotics class for girls only. When my son
> asked why he couldn't join, it was explained to him that girls need special
> help to become interested in technology, and that if there are boys around,
> the girls will be too scared to try.

And that's why we can't use sexism to fight sexism (or mistakenly enforce the
same composition of the general population on self-selected subsets).

~~~
ucarion
I disagree. As a high schooler, I know many intelligent and creative young
women who don't want to do robotics or programming because of the people in
those fields.

High school boys in tech are much more likely to be misogynistic and socially
inept than other high schoolers are. They make girls uncomfortable (they make
me uncomfortable too, and I'm not event the subject of their creepiness), and
this discourages girls from trying to program or build things.

There are women who can handle this quite well (the author of the piece is an
example), but there are also many women who don't deal with this so easily.
Those who can deal with the male-dominated environment will always be free to
join mixed-gender events and groups, but girls' robotics classes target those
who could gain a lot from having friends of the same gender who share similar
interests.

Women aren't self-selecting themselves into tech, but there's no reason they
couldn't. Women-in-tech events aren't fighting sexism with sexism, they're
providing counterexamples to the misconception that programming is only for
men.

~~~
Crito
When I was in highschool, I was in a model rocket club, and the science
olympiad club. The gender ratios for both were roughly 50:50 (3-4 female-male
for the rocket club, I forget the exact numbers for the science olympiad club,
somewhere around 10-10). Both clubs operated very smoothly.

I think that you give highschoolers too little credit.

Rocketry and science competitions are not really any different from robotics
and programming. None of them are exactly football team, if you know what I
mean. The only real differences between "model rockets nerdy" and "programming
nerdy" are a result of how the adults treat the participants.

------
guard-of-terra
There is a broader point that we no longer have the open source community we
once had.

It was about filling every thing with good open source software - be it
desktop, server, embedded. On desktop there was a variety of DEs,
distributions, software and all that stuff. There was hope that open source
will win.

But nowdays I see open source largely as a server side movement powering large
proprietary platforms. Everybody is using these platforms without questioning.
There is no longer anything to win. Plus proliferation of walled gardens.

What will new open source hackers work on? Ruby test framework? No they won't.
Maybe they will be hacking mobile dev, but that makes you conformist nimble
enough to crawl into walled garden.

The politics regarding gender are just a part of politics out there.

~~~
nitrogen
_There is a broader point that we no longer have the open source community we
once had._

I think this may be one of the more tragic results of the 2000-2010 decade.
Where have the developers gone, and how could we get them back?

~~~
guard-of-terra
Well, they lead a "normal" life inside a corporate monster, but hey, they have
their iPhone!

------
arrrg
Nice, complete misunderstanding of feminism and what most people argue for.
Nice attacking of straw men. Nice rant for the status quo.

I’m sad now.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Please elaborate.

There's no such thing as a "misunderstanding of feminism". Feminism hasn't
been a coherent movement in decades. It's a highly stratified network of
ideologies and schools, some of which are only vaguely united under the
pretext of social justice, but which have radically different views. Some are
even openly and proudly transphobic.

I'd like it if we stopped pretending feminism is some zenith of civil rights.
It did help in the past, but it is now worn out and has long been a parody.

~~~
arrrg
Feminist thought is diverse, sure, but there are certain schools of thought
that are by far more widespread. This article misrepresents those.

I do not know any feminist, for example, who would ever think of telling a
woman to dress more gender-appropriate. Such gender policing is abhorred and
practically unheard of. It’s just so weird to read about that as some sort of
feminist idea.

Also, feminism is super-rad. Proud feminist!

~~~
vezzy-fnord
The most widespread one at the moment is postmodern feminism, which is a
complete joke.

I don't know what exactly do you mean by "gender-appropriate", but there are
feminist movements which embrace traditional ideas of femininity:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipstick_feminism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipstick_feminism)

I'm assuming by "super-rad" you're trying to say you're a super radical
feminist. Good to see you're proud of your little ideology.

~~~
arrrg
Holy shit. Please stop seeing demons everywhere. And work on improving your
view of reality. It’s severely distorted and makes little sense.

Also, deliberate obtuseness is not very cool.

