
Why are there so few woman developers? - raghuHack
http://blog.hackerearth.com/2013/12/women-programmers.html
======
marquis
>number of intelligent women coders

As opposed to middling intelligence? I'll assume this is a language
miscommunication.

>most of them quit half way >Male dominated workplaces seem to be a
contributing factor to this.

Chicken and egg problem: speaking from experience it's really hard, for your
entire career, to be around men and more men all day long. Hiring women is
hard. Getting women into programming via Dev Bootcamps has been the best
attack on this I've seen, and it's a fun way to do it.

>I think it’s coded into a woman’s DNA to not take their careers as seriously
as a man and the change of that mindset starts at home.

Stop right there! Cultural assumptions abound!

>If there is any hope for an equal representation of genders in IT, it has got
to change from the grass roots level.

Correct. More dev bootcamps please.

>what difference will women bring to technology. Well, I don’t know about
difference

What did women entering law, politics and medical fields do? Maybe nothing
immediately obvious but the social ramifications these last hundred years or
so have been massive, if nothing else I got to grow up having role models.

Edit: links for related dev bootcamps or intro classes:

[http://railsgirls.com](http://railsgirls.com)

[http://hackbrightacademy.com](http://hackbrightacademy.com)

[http://women2.com/tag/dev-bootcamp](http://women2.com/tag/dev-bootcamp)

~~~
taude
And PyLadies: [http://www.pyladies.com/](http://www.pyladies.com/)

Boston specific meetup: [http://www.meetup.com/PyLadies-
Boston/](http://www.meetup.com/PyLadies-Boston/)

------
timje1
I'd like to see someone explore the link between autism spectrum disorders and
computer science. I remember seeing a study of majors in the states (does this
ring a bell? I can't find it) that put the average CompSci major actually on
the spectrum, where the other majors didn't come close to this prevalence.

Throw in that boys are overrepresented in high-functioning autism / aspergers
numbers by a 7:1 ratio, and you've got a possible biological explanation for
at least some of the gender bias in the field.[0] The linked study has a 12:1
ratio for aspergers!

This is just a hypothesis but I'd love to see it studied further. There might
be some biological bias at work here, instead of making it a purely cultural
thing (and without bringing in the evo-psych malarky).

[0] [http://www.la-press.com/gender-ratios-in-autism-asperger-
syn...](http://www.la-press.com/gender-ratios-in-autism-asperger-syndrome-and-
autism-spectrum-disorder-article-a1900)

~~~
moron4hire
can we please not do that? we finally got past the last set of assholes
crooning about how "autistic, _therefore_ good at programming" they were.

~~~
bowlofpetunias
I don't think it's a good idea to ignore facts just because they are
inconvenient and/or some assholes try to abuse them.

~~~
moron4hire
<sarcasm>I'm good with ignoring this one if it means we don't have to sit
through another watercooler session of Aspberger's self-diagnosis.</sarcasm>

There is still a lot of disagreement about what Aspberger's and autism
actually mean. There is a growing body of study that says it's not an
inability to empathize with others, but more likely a hypersensitivity to
stimulus. Regardless of whether or not that is true, with such a drastic
difference in opinion on the nature of the disease, it seems unlikely that
studies on the occurrence of the disease would yield meaningful results.

I have a few problems with the study you linked to. It looks like they are
basing the data off of interviews of parents who brought their kids in for
testing, comparing the diagnosis rates for these kids. Wouldn't this more
likely show that "boys with disruptive behavioral issues are 12 times more
likely to have it blamed on autism than girls of the same age", not that "boys
are more likely to be autistic"? They collected data over an 8 year span for a
20 year span of birth-years, but never indicate the age of the subject _at the
time of diagnosis_. Given that the test is almost completely behavioral in
nature, wouldn't it stand to reason that age is a significant factor in
behavioral development, and thus the likelihood of being diagnosed with
behavioral issues?

I remember the other study you mentioned, it was in the early 2000s. I
remember because one of my professors conducted our university's part of the
study and made his students fill out the questionnaire during class. They
asked questions on the narcissistic personality disorder spectrum on the
hypothesis that lack of empathy correlated to Aspberger's syndrome. From
there, finding a statistically significant skewing of the data supporting the
idea that computer science students lack empathy, they then concluded that
Aspberger's-afflicted people are attracted to the pure, analytical nature of
programming.

Talk about leaping lizards of logic, Batman.

Without an associated correlation of lack of empathy in other analytical
fields, I just think the far more likely answer is that, as a culture, we
tolerate dickish behavior out of programmers more than any other analytical
field, and thus people either learn dickishness or people who are prone to
dickishness find a certain degree of survivability in programming. My
experiences online with communities such as YouTube and 4chan indicate that
dickishness is extremely easily learned behavior.

------
nakedrobot2
I'm tired about all these "Why aren't there so many female engineers?"
articles. What is the mystery? The answer is very clear.

Girls, from birth, are subject to absolutely enormous pressure (even if it's
subconscious) on the part of nearly everyone they ever come into contact with,
to be "girls" and not "men".

If you haven't noticed it before, try having a daughter, and realize that you
do it too. I don't care who you are. _You_ do it too.

In a sense, it's hard to consider this as something strange - of course,
people talk to each other differently, dependong on who they are. You talk to
children differently than you talk to adults, for example. What is difficult
is to adjust to the idea that women on men, on certain levels, should be
addressed in the same way, and on other levels, addressed in different ways.

~~~
hedgew
That pressure is not only external - it's also internal[1]. Often it's a
wasted effort to try and treat your children in gender-neutral ways, they
simply prefer to play with dolls and robots, and then you're just forcing your
preferences on your children. Work with children and the extent to which our
preferences are coded into our genes becomes even more evident.

An alternative conclusion we can draw from the statistics described in the
article is that women are just as capable of pursuing careers in computer
science if they so choose. The fact that there is a skewed gender distribution
may not necessarily be a problem, but merely a difference in preferences. As
long as we have no law or other system that discriminates against women or
men, there may be no one but our biology to blame for such skewness.

[1] Behavioural gender differences become evident at very early ages, before
any external pressure is exerted upon children. This is a widely studied
issue, see for example:

Alexander, G. M., & Hines, M. (2002). Sex differences in response to
children's toys in nonhuman primates (Cercopithecus aethiops sabaeus).
Evolution and Human Behavior, 23, 467–469.

Bailey, J. M., & Zucker, K. J. (1995). Childhood sex-typed behavior and sexual
orientation: A conceptual analysis and quantitative review. Developmental
Psychology, 31, 43–55.

Bauer, J. A., Shimojo, S., Gwizada, J., & Held, R. (1986). Sex differences in
the development of human infants. Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual
Sciences, 27, 265–273.

Berenbaum, S. A., & Hines, M. (1992). Early androgens are related to childhood
sex-typed toy preferences. Psychological Science, 3, 203–206.

Liss, M. B. (1981). Patterns of toy play: An analysis of sex differences. Sex
Roles, 7, 1143–1150.

~~~
timje1
Interestingly, when mothers learn the gender of their child, they talk to
their daughters in the womb more than they talk to their sons.

There was another study published recently that suggested that male and female
babies might get subtly different breast milk.

Basically it's extremely difficult to separate what's genes and what's
environment/culture. Because a baby is treated differently, fed differently
and spoken to differently, based on gender, their entire lives (and before,
depending on your definition of life).

------
bluedino
Another question: Why are there so few African-American developers? Diversity
at a developer meetup is a bunch of white guys along with a splash of Indian
and East Asians.

------
evadne
5-hour-old Google mirror:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:m91Zysh...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:m91ZyshTAdUJ:blog.hackerearth.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk)

------
ds9
The actual title is "Why do we not have enough women programmers?". And I
question the premise. The writer does not directly address this point, but an
implicit premise is that if the proportion differs much from 50% we should
look for something wrong.

Well, that's somewhat reasonable so far - certainly there are cultural factors
impeding what would occur in different conditions, and maybe causing societies
to miss some talent and individuals to fail to realize their potential. But
the goal should be only to attain whatever percentage naturally results when
any undesirable interferences are removed, and that condition is so poorly
defined that we can't say that near 50% would be the outcome.

The correct approach, IMHO, is to attack any problems that are found in
upbringing, education system and workplace culture - not with a goal of
increasing representation of any group, but instead to remove any unfair
treatment, sexism, loss of valuable contributions and so on - just because
those things are undesirable - and then whatever results will be OK.

------
timje1
It's down, does anyone have a mirror or copy?

 _edit_ : managed to get in long enough to grab the text, it's up on
[http://pastebin.com/5eQnCXkX](http://pastebin.com/5eQnCXkX) with links put
back in. Apologies to the author for denying them ad revenue, but your site
seems to be creaking under the HN strain.

~~~
saching90
Check, its up again.

------
merrua
There are a lot of woman developers. Whenever I hear people asking this
question, I automatically think, What you mean is "Why am I ignoring all the
woman developers?". Where developers can be replaced by authors/bloggers/ceo's
etc. There isn't 50/50 but there is a lot of them out there.

------
big_maybe
In my last job I led a dev team made up of 8 women and 1 man (we did internal
front-ends). The rest of the programmers in the company, including web,
platform, DBA, IT, QA, devices etc. had plenty of excellent women working
there.

I don't know why this particular company didn't suffer from gender imbalance
in their computer science depts. There was no "affirmative action" directive
coming from above; we hired the best human for the job.

It's possible that success breeds success. The more women worked there, the
more women were comfortable there. Many programmers had migrated from the
business side of the company (which needed to be pretty technical) so that may
have been a factor.

------
geebee
This is a tough one for me. I hope I don't have to say that I am very opposed
to discrimination against women, and I think we should take this problem
seriously.

However, I also have to wonder if the scarcity of women in software is simply
the result of better career decision making among women.

The sf chronicle (sfgate.com) recently released a list of jobs and what they
pay in SF. RNs (registered nurses) earn an average salary of about $112,000 a
year. Application developers, on the other hand, earn about $111,000 a year.

[http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2013/12/17/what-the-most-
co...](http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2013/12/17/what-the-most-common-jobs-
in-san-francisco-pay/#18915101=0)

Interestingly, physicians and pharmacists aren't listed (perhaps there aren't
enough of them to make the list). Laywers, in spite of recent issues in the
legal world, are still listed as having an average salary of $166,000 a year
in San Francisco.

Nursing is 90% women. Pharmacy is about 56% women. At UCSF, the entering
medical school class is 58% women. At Boalt law school (UC Berkeley), the
entering class is 54% women.

Average don't tell the whole story. There's good and bad in everything. Many
lawyers give up, so there is some survivor bias here (though you could
certainly say the same thing about developers - many people believe firmly
that there is bad age bias after age 40, something that doesn't appear to
happen in health fields).

In terms of career stability and earnings, long term, I actually think that
all of the fields (except perhaps law) listed above are probably better
choices for academically talented students.

I post this a lot, but here it is again - the RAND institute concluded that
the american aversion to graduate degrees in STEM fields is rational and
market driven, a response to poor prospects and pay _relative_ to the options
available high achieving students in other fields.

[http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html](http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html)

We should at least consider the possibility that avoidance of STEM degrees and
software development careers may actually reflect better career decision
making. We say that young women are generally outperforming young men
academically, _but_ not in STEM. Well, maybe avoidance of STEM is just another
manifestation of how women are making better choices in life than men are.

------
moron4hire
Our culture bludgeons us over the head with the concepts that A) women are
supposed to be social creatures, more-so than men, and B) programmers are
supposed to be anti-social, but we put up with it because "aint nobody got
time to understand what they do, amiright, yuck yuck yuck". So, when people
internalize those messages, it isn't difficult to figure out the result. At
least in America, programmers tend to act like anti-social assholes and women
tend to have a lower tolerance for anti-social behavior.

------
raghuHack
Openshift has failed us :(

Thanks for putting up the mirrors. Do read and tell us what you think :)

------
KrisAndrew
A lack of women in a given profession usually means there's no work-life
balance there.

------
tiredofthis
Why are there so few man nurses? Innate preferences in the sexes, that's why.
Deal with it already, I'm tired of this gender theory bullshit being pushed on
HN.

~~~
moron4hire
I'm assuming you understand just how completely unlikely your statement is to
find any sympathy, considering you made this account to make this statement.

------
xname
Why are there so few male nurses? Why are there so few male elementary
teachers? Why are there so many male soldiers?

Why man and woman? Why homo sapiens cannot asexual reproduction? Is this where
the evolution fails?

