
We can teach women to code, but that just creates another problem - ctoth
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/14/tech-women-code-workshops-developer-jobs
======
bfrydl
I think this article really misses the mark by trying to claim that the divide
between front-end and back-end development is based on gender, that it only
exists now where it did not before because of women entering the field. By my
observation, there simply was no such thing as a “front-end developer” until
recently, as more and more logic as pushed to the front-end over time.

Many people in the industry do view front-end development as less prestigious
than back-end development, but that's because it exists on a spectrum between
design and engineering with the majority of the work closer to the former
side. While many front-end development jobs are on the same level of
engineering as back-end development jobs, these are not the jobs being done by
“self-taught coders and designers” as the author describes them, and require a
lot more than learning HTML and CSS.

While it is most likely true that women face gender discrimination when
looking for back-end work, the author doesn't really seem to be talking about
those women. Instead, the focus is on women who apparently only have web
design skills, which aren't enough to earn either gender prestigious
engineering positions.

~~~
fumplethumb
I agree that the author seems to be conflating front-end development with web
design, two different fields requiring two different skillsets.

~~~
curtis
I think many of the people coming into the software engineering field by
unconventional paths often start out as web designers and then move on to web
development. One reason these people may be making less money than software
engineers working on the back end is that they have far less experience. I
started programming at 13, spent 5 years getting a computer science degree,
and now I've spent my entire career doing software development. If you
consider my level of experience at say 28 vs someone who first learned to
program only in their mid-to-late-20s, there's a big difference.

Also many people who move from web design to web development may stay there,
not because they're stuck, but because it already pays pretty well and they
like it.

------
retox
Couldn't it just be explained by saying that as more women enter a field
typically dominated by men, the pool of potential employees expands and so the
expected income from one of those positions decreases.

I'd say it's also true that as time goes on there are an increasing numbers of
businesses 'going digital', which more often than not means getting a
wordpress site and an e-commerce package set up. These are relatively simple,
and don't require as much experience as a back-end position, and thus don't
demand a high salary. You might have 50 businesses 'go digital', which employs
50 different web design shops, but they could all be hosted on the hardware
from less than 5 hosts.

Just off-the-top-of-my-head thoughts, feel free to flame.

~~~
orionblastar
In the 1950s and 1960s most programmers were women.

Somehow during the civil rights era they stopped taking STEM courses and took
the arts etc.

It is claimed that boys who got 8 bit computers had replaced them, but I am a
bit skeptical.

Females and other genders should be able to learn how to program like makes,
as gender does not matter for one to become a programmer.

------
zwaps
Not to pile on, but publishing low quality pieces such as this really doesn't
do "the cause" any favors.

The obvious question the article avoids is "why then are there so few women
back-end devs?". That is really the crux of the whole matter.

The article seems to suggest that women, for whatever unrelated reason,
uniformly decided to go into front-end development, saw a wage and prestige
drop and therefore decided to stop there since "men".

As has been pointed out, less scarcity of skilled labour in any field will
reduce wages eventually, so this wouldn't even be surprising in a gender-blind
world.

The problem I have with articles like this is the obvious omission of facts
that explain the situation. Front-end dev is often a natural path from, or,
even part of traditional design work. Traditional design work (among other
things working with html), is not at all men dominated. It doesn't matter at
all why this is the case, rather, it explains what happens in front vs. back-
end development.

It is not that women somehow do not react to monetary incentives or are driven
out by men. Front-end development is just simply the natural extension and
career path for many women somehow involved in the technology sector. The same
can not be said for back-end development.

The fact of the matter is however, and this is unrelated to the above, that
front-end development requires (generally) far less specialized skills and has
a far tougher labor market than back-end development. Hence, front-end devs
earn less.

The real question, and crux of the discussion, is therefore if women can be
successful as skilled back-end engineers and earn their fair share there. Up
until that situation, there isn't even any reason to debate some sort of male
fault and this is so obvious that shoehorning a gender debate into this matter
is simply bad journalism.

I think the equal pay movement can really "thank" journalists for producing
such garbage articles because it truly calls into question the validity of the
whole deal.

~~~
zwaps
The whole article is also interesting in that it is what happens when someone
thinks only in "sociological" concepts such as role, class and distinction.
For most, economic factors (so, scarcity) would be a very obvious explanation,
but it does not even occur for the author. This is of course since such
factors do not and can not occur in pure models of sociological structures.

This delightful dialectic confusion, if you will, shows well how badly, or
misleading, the proponents of general "facts" argue in the gender debate.

------
xt00
Women getting into an area doesn’t bring down value as the title implies.. but
one thing in the article I think is true that areas that are more accessible
to get into with fewer years of training such as from code camp graduates,
then the people in that field will try to differentiate themselves by saying
they are back end engineers. It truly does take way more time, effort and a
level of persistence to be able to glue together the Linux kernel, various
internet services, cloud, etc compared to building UIs for the web. The main
issue I think is the quantity of people available to do the backend.. so
commands a higher price. I think if there were no women in the front end side
the wage would still be lower for those people since it would have more people
available to do it in the job market. I also think many men assume they will
not be good at UI development and just don’t even try to do front end stuff.
So that lowers the quantity of men going that direction.

------
ikeyany
"Hard" engineering is lucrative. As word gets out, more people enter the
field, and the field becomes less lucrative. Women just happen to finally be
entering the field, so it appears that feminity is the reason why hard
engineering's lucrativity is decreasing.

What we need to do is encourage "non-traditional" students to enter fields not
because they are lucrative, and not because they will gain you a status bump
in our society, but because those subjects are interesting in and of
themselves.

------
horsecaptin
After vilifying men for about fifty years, perhaps it is time to begin
surveying the effect on American society the gender wars have had.

------
paulddraper
tl;dr More women in technology causes stratification to happen, namely women
being typecast for perspectibly mushy front end jobs. This effect devalues
these jobs because women are chronically undervalued in any field.

I'm skeptical to say the least, but that's the gist of the article.

------
mesozoic
More progressive garbage vilifying innocent people in order to self promote a
magazine... no thanks.

------
rayascott
Terrible article. A lot of sweeping generalizations with absolutely no facts
to back them up.

