
Women in tech - Stop talking, start coding - twampss
http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/stop-talking-start-coding/
======
jcnnghm
This whole premise is stupid. We don't seem to have a problem with the lack of
female linesmen, plumbers, construction workers, electricians, HVAC
specialists, or garbage men. There isn't a pest control or sewage treatment
Barbie. There also isn't a problem when 57% of college graduates are female.

If women want to work in tech, nothing is stopping them. They can learn to
program, and write code. This is something that you can teach yourself, you
don't need to deal with or rely upon anyone else. It seems that the problem
is, at least as described by the New York Times, that women don't want to log
the hours, and they want to do something that's more social. That's fine,
there is nothing wrong with that. But they may be better off doing something
other than writing code if that's the case.

Women log fewer hours in other areas as well. Female doctors see fewer
patients than male doctors, and female lawyers are much less likely to make
partner because they log far fewer hours than male lawyers. There is nothing
wrong with this. Men and women are different. This isn't inherently bad or
wrong.

Disclaimer: My staff is 80% female. We received more qualified female
applicants than male applicants, so that's who we hired.

~~~
vog
The fact that most women don't want to engage in programming is not a natural
phenomenon - it's a big part of the problem. Far too many girls don't even
_consider_ trying to program, and regret that later in their lives.

The first programmers (in a certain sense, wiring the first calculation
machines in certain ways to achieve certain results) in fact _were_ women, but
something badly changed since then.

So the missing women in computer science and programming can't be explained
that way. This phenomenon is far more likely to be a problem (and also a
shame) of our society. We'll have to work hard to fix it.

However, fixing a problem is only possible if you don't deny it.

~~~
potatolicious
> _"The first programmers (in a certain sense, wiring the first calculation
> machines in certain ways to achieve certain results) in fact were women"_

I'd argue that "programming" in Ada Lovelace's age is more closely related to
modern-day science than computer-science. Note also that scientific fields
today are in no real shortage of women.

I think the possibility needs to be raised that there's something
fundamentally wrong with _our field_ , or at least the people in it - an
uncomfortable thought to be sure, but the sheer number of women (growing at
that) in every "geeky" field but CS should be an indicator of something.

This reminds me of a conversation I had yesterday...

I'm just going to throw something out there: I know a lot of CS majors, and a
lot of science majors. The science majors are a geeky bunch, but are _normal,
functioning_ people for the most part. They will just as easily gab all day
about some biological principle as they will the latest pop sensation. Their
geekiness complements their personality.

Contrast this with the CS majors I know, where their geekiness _is_ their
personality. It's almost as if we try too hard to _be_ the stereotype that it
is, in the end, all that's left. Not to say all CS majors are like this, but
the loudest, most visible ones certainly are, at least where I came from. I
know it's a turnoff for me (and I'm a guy), I can't imagine how annoying
that'd be for women.

~~~
patio11
Is there an objective standard for "normal, functioning people" or is this a
slightly more sophisticated High School 2.0 way of partitioning hobbies or
personality quirks into ones which are socially acceptable and ones which are
not?

~~~
hugh3
Hmm, I'd say that the best standard is whether the vast majority of people
would accept you as being a normal, functioning person. The best standard for
hobbies is whether they make you a broader and more interesting person or a
narrower and less interesting person.

The best hobbies, I think, are the ones where you're creating something,
exploring the world, making yourself a better person, or at least getting some
exercise. The worst hobbies, I think, are the ones which involve immersing
yourself in a narrow stream of entertainment which somebody else has created
for you; Star Trek, Firefly, World of Warcraft, LotR, professional baseball.
Nothing wrong with any of these in moderation, but when you elevate the
consumption of entertainment to the level of a hobby it becomes just plain
sad.

(No, writing Firefly fan fiction doesn't make it any better. That may be
"creative" but you're still unhealthily immersed in somebody else's narrow
world.)

~~~
philwelch
Ironically, the stereotypical female Firefly fan fiction writer is _female_.
Stereotypically masculine and "geeky" interests like science fiction actually
seem to have proportionally more female interest than programming.

~~~
philwelch
Should read "the stereotypical Firefly fan fiction writer". I hate when my
brain outruns my typing fingers.

------
yason
Most men have not ever considered becoming a cosmetologist. How is that _not_
a problem? And why is it somehow a problem that women don't consider becoming
a programmer?

Both sexes _could_ make those choices and that's far more important than
whether they actually do it.

~~~
whyenot
_Most men have not ever considered becoming a cosmetologist._

I suspect that has something to do with many men avoiding jobs that they think
might call their sexual orientation into question. Many men have gone into
cosmetology and done quite well. The reasons so few women go into CS has
little to do with worries about their perceived orientation. You are comparing
apples to oranges.

~~~
hugh3
You don't think it has more to do with the fact that most men have little
interest in womens' makeup?

I find it hard to believe there are many men out there who'd really _like_ to
be cosmetologists but are afraid of being seen as gay. But if you're out
there, feel free to reply!

~~~
dgabriel
They're probably on cosmetology message boards, not HN.

~~~
hugh3
I like the idea that the cosmetology boards are filled with male programmers
who really wanted to be cosmetologists, and HN is filled with female
cosmetologits who really wanted to be programmers.

------
eplanit
Articles like these always make the same inference, and then lead to a similar
conclusion: If a woman CEO gets rejected over and over, then it _must_ be
sexism (and/or racism); and, then a gender- (or race-) biased investment firm
steps in to promote business based on the gender of the CEOS/Founders, and a
moral transgression is set straight.

The article asserts that the recession somehow makes investors stupid and
frightened, wherein they think via 'templates' or some archetypal response. I
think the word they apply is something more like 'scrutiny' -- at least I sure
hope so.

It's 2010 -- let's start focusing on merit. I don't care what letters the
woman carries from name-brand institutions. It just might be possible that her
business ideas don't attract investment. Has that been considered? How many
males from these fine institutions also fail in business? I know the number
isn't zero.

~~~
hassenben
Did you just copy paste your comment from
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1273711>?

~~~
hugh3
Maybe he recomposed it, word by word, in a slightly different context. Pierre
Menard, author of the Quixote, would be proud.

------
nihilocrat
Every time my wife says something about biology or chemistry I realize how
easy I have it because I only ever studied and worked with shifting bits
around to create an imaginary world. Actually having to deal with physical
limitations at every step, as well as understanding processes outside of the
control of human beings must be hard as hell to understand, meaning it's even
harder to learn and apply.

So yes, that original paragraph quoted really is bullshit.

------
moron4hire
You might want to edit the title, because when I first read it, it seemed as
if it were a statement "Stop talking, start coding" directed at "[the] women
in tech". I was immediately reminded of a particularly misogynistic line:
"quit all your bitchin', get back in the kitchen", so pretty anathema to the
purpose of the article.

Back to the topic:

I don't think it's an issue of just lacking women in the tech industry. We
lack men too. When I was going through college, computer science enrollment
and matriculation were at all-time lows; it's going to take years to see the
full effects of not being able to replace the first major wave of retiring
programmers with enough people of high enough quality.

I've had non-programmer coworkers, including managers, call me names like
"nerd" and shoot down my ideas without really listening because they assumed I
was proposing something "too technical, not practical", and it all really came
down to a lack of respect from my coworkers. How can we have people graduating
with four-year degrees studying one of the most difficult human endeavors in
history entering the workplace in positions that are treated barely better
than burger-flipper?

In my mind, the issue is not just women not getting the respect and support
they deserve in IT, but _everyone_ not getting the respect and support they
deserve. And I think the problem is largely cultural, and in part to blame on
programmers themselves. The culture of programmers, especially the idealized
startup culture that tries to differentiate itself from standard corporate
imagery, is defined by people with the emotional maturity level of children.
The pinball-machines-in-the-break-room, jeans-and-snarky-t-shirts environment
is conducive to attracting geeks and only geeks. Most people in general don't
want to be associated with this environment, there just happens to be slightly
more men than women who fall into that minority of SciFi-and-comic-books
fanatics.

I have struggled for years to find the level of respect for my work that I
feel I deserve, rather than being "just a code monkey." The epiphany for me
was to realize that, if I wanted to be treated like a professional, I needed
to act like one. I haven't worn a printed t-shirt to work since. Some days I
even wear a suit. There's nothing wrong with wearing a suit to work. I even
_like_ wearing a suit now, as I realized that I look much better than just
jeans-and-t-shirt. Maybe it's just confirmation bias, but I definitely feel
like my voice is heard more often and other, "non-technical" coworkers
approach me more freely now.

Everyone wants a work environment based on mutual respect. Somehow, slightly
more men are just capable of putting up with being treated like crap. This is
not in any way a good thing.

~~~
hmason
I didn't intend the title to reference anything in particular, thanks for the
comment.

I'm sorry that you've found our field to be so inhospitable. That hasn't been
my experience at all, though I appreciate your point about making technology
hospitable to everyone.

------
JCThoughtscream
In response to some of the comments made in this page, doesn't the very fact
that some jobs seem more "natural" to one gender or another actually only
serve to magnify the problem here?

Why are plumbers and programmers alike seen more as a male profession, and
cosmetology a female one? There's no evolutionary basis for it - feats of
strength and endurance kind of go out of the window when we're all utilizing
tools to minimize the job's physical impact. Lawyers certainly aren't reliant
on any gender-specific genetic traits to perform their job.

It seems as if most readers here seem to be missing the picture: much of these
biases, and they are biases, are entirely cultural, not sex-specific. There is
a /cultural/ problem with programming that causes the field to innately repel
most potential female programmers.

Saying that there's some things women do and some thing men do, and never the
two shall meet, isn't just an obsolete 1950s attitude - it's like a bunch of
schoolchildren whining about cooties. Asserting that the field /shouldn't/ try
and attract a more diverse workforce has all sorts of nasty underlying
implications that I'm sure most of you don't mean. The tech industry isn't and
shouldn't be a boys-only club - it should be an industry that prizes
intelligence and capability above all other factors, especially gender.

~~~
hugh3
_Why are plumbers and programmers alike seen more as a male profession, and
cosmetology a female one? There's no evolutionary basis for it_

How do you know that? Male and female minds are certainly constructed
differently, and appear to be interested in different things. Cosmetology, for
instance: most girls and most women are fascinated by makeup, and the
opportunities it provides to look marginally prettier. Men care much less...
of course men don't wear makeup, but for the most part they don't even care
much whether their women do. Just ask any man who has spent twenty minutes
waiting for a woman to put on her face, only to find that she looks hardly
different when she comes out from the bathroom than she did when she went in.
(Protip: don't tell her this).

As for plumbing, well, I don't think anyone is _really_ interested in
plumbing, but men are much less deterred by the prospect of getting their
hands dirty than women are.

Are these differences cultural? They might be, but there's pretty good reasons
to think they're innate. It makes evolutionary sense for women to invest
heavily in being good-looking and men to invest heavily in, y'know,
accomplishing actual stuff.

~~~
DrSprout
>It makes evolutionary sense for women to invest heavily in being good-looking
and men to invest heavily in, y'know, accomplishing actual stuff.

You really have no understanding of what housekeeping entailed before the
washing machine, dryer, running water, the supermarket, etc. These were
fundamentally hard tasks. Women had to get their hands dirty just as much, if
not more than men. This historic role of women has disappeared because it is
no longer an accomplishment to say "I did the laundry." The idea that a
woman's ability to reproduce is a function of looks is a product of the past
century, during which society's gender roles have not kept pace with the
obsolescence of formerly 'feminine' tasks. All of the tasks once reserved for
women due to their difficulty (and possibly innate ability) have become
trivial tasks. As such the only thing that influences reproduction is looks.

At least, unless we can start using that wasted human power to, y'know,
accomplish actual stuff.

~~~
hugh3
In the conditions under which humans evolved I'm pretty sure there was no such
thing as "doing the laundry. I do concede, though, that I was overly facetious
in describing what men do as "actual stuff".

Still, men and women are under greatly different selection pressures. Men
place a greater emphasis on appearance when choosing their mates, women place
a greater emphasis on power and status.

Perhaps this is because traditionally-female skills are such that there's not
a great deal of benefit in being especially good at them. A man gains a small
benefit from having as a wife the best basket-weaver in the tribe, but a woman
and her children gain a huge benefit from having as a husband the tribe's
chief or its best hunter.

~~~
bct
> I do concede, though, that I was overly facetious in describing what men do
> as "actual stuff".

1\. It's not funny. 2. People actually believe that (even if you don't). 3.
That's the problem!

------
DuncanIdaho
I don't know if anybody already made the remark. But I find this issue very
similar to the issue of women in science, here is an out of box article:
<http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science>

The general theme is, what if women avoid (computer)science because that kind
of career sucks?

The question to ask is... why would women want to work 80+ hour workweeks with
unpaid overtime - effectively getting a similar salary to a maid (yes I
exaggerate a bit!) - they can just go working as maids with less stress.

Lets face it. Most of CS companies ain't no Google or Microsoft. And most of
CS people don't stand any chance of gaining access to that kind of company -
ever. Most of computer people work for retarded PHB's. Any sane person can see
that it's much better to be a PHB than Dilbert.

------
rythie
I don't think that the deepest technical roles in computing, including
programming are social enough for most women. Programming requires you to work
without talking to anyone and even when you've finished many non-tech people
won't understand what you did, so you can't even talk about it then.

There are clearly lots of benefits to having women in the tech industury, but
if they don't want to program that cuts the number at least in half on that
point alone.

------
mdasen
I think I'm going to cut against the grain here a little, but bare with me.

A lack of women can still be a problem even if no one in computer science is
creating the problem. For a small theoretical basis, let's assume that people
are a product of their genes and their upbringing/social context. So, some
people are genetically smarter and will grok computer science better on an
inherent level. Likewise, some people will have a parent who is a computer
programmer or fall in with a nerdy friend group and that social context will
get them more familiar with computer science and get them headed in that
direction.

The problem can occur if society is telling women that they shouldn't do
computer science. Then we're missing out on people who are inherently gifted
computer scientists who have been learned from their social context that they
should pursue something else. That's a problem. When people put themselves
into sub-optimal careers because of what society tells them they should be
like, that's bad.

Think about it: what if Einstein had continued just working as a patent clerk?
Our world would be worse for it. The inventor of the birth control pill
(Gregory Goodwin Pincus) was a Jew born in Russia. His career path would have
never happened due to institutional barriers. Heck, Sergey Brin's father saw
that his family wouldn't have such advancement there and left for the US
because of it - and now we have Google.

But what we're talking about aren't institutional barriers - in fact, I'd say
most of us probably welcome women. We would _like_ more women in computer
science and are hugely open to it within the computer science community. But
greater society is often telling girls (and boys) to pursue certain things
from a young age. Girls are potentially being socialized away from computer
science. That's a problem. Even without institutional barriers, there can
still be social barriers imposed by our society.

And, while I respect jcnnghm's position
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1276946>), I have to disagree. The fact
that 57% of college graduates are female could point to a problem. If males
are being socialized against learning, that's problematic.

The problem is figuring out whether something is inherent or socialized. If
something is inherent, fine - life isn't fair or equal. However, socialization
matters a lot. Many people overcome socialization. Many others do not. If
society has organized itself in such a way that brilliant female potential
computer programmers are choosing a different path because they feel it isn't
for them, that's a problem. If society has organized itself in such a way that
brilliant male potential interior designers are choosing a different path,
that's a problem. And our world is socially gendered - we're encouraged to act
in certain patterns based on our sex. If society is losing out on brilliant
people because they're in positions that aren't their optimal positions due to
being socialized not to pursue that position, that's bad for all of us.

 _Just think if Marie Curie had listened to people telling her "what girls
should do" and hadn't pursued physics and chemistry. Then think about all the
women who did and the knowledge we all lost out on._

~~~
hugh3
Right, so we should concentrate on making sure that talented female potential
CS types are not deterred from going into CS. But what we can't do is use the
fact that few CS types are women as evidence that such deterrence exists.

Actually there are features of the CS culture which discourage not only most
women but many men from wanting to become programmers. It would be worth
fixing these anyway. So guys, go have a shower and find something other than
Battlestar Galactica to talk about.

~~~
krakensden
Aaand you're a part of the problem. I could reply with anecdotes about which
majors seem to have the most neckbeards, but you know what? It wouldn't
matter.

Go away.

------
asimjalis
Interesting counterpoint to the recently submitted NYT article,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1273711>

~~~
DrSprout
Doesn't seem like a real counterpoint. The NYT article was a news piece, as
such it was descriptive, not prescriptive.

