
Confessions of a Failed Female Coder - Caveman_Coder
https://hackernoon.com/confessions-of-a-failed-female-coder-956cbe138c69
======
maxxxxx
I am more the lone wolf type myself. I am fine with collaborating, actually
enjoy it when needed, but I prefer doing the majority of my work alone or with
a small team and banging my/our head against a problem until I/we have figured
it out.

What's starting to bother me is that there is a trend where extroverted people
(like her I assume) try to change education and workplaces to suit their style
but introverted people get pushed aside. A ton of people sitting in a room and
talking is good, working alone is bad, not inclusive and biased.

Am I the only one who actually enjoys working alone and is this a bad thing?
Do we have to accommodate extroverts everywhere and always? I don't complain
about HR and marketing not being inclusive towards shy introverts. Sometimes I
am starting to feel like a small minority although I am a white middle aged
male.

~~~
kwipkwip
I am a female software engineer who is an introvert too. It's wrong to assume
that men want to work alone and women want to work with people... it ignores a
lot individuals like me. I currently work in an open office environment and
find it very hard to concentrate with people around me. I don't want people to
assume that bc I'm female I want to work with people. I really really don't.
People should stop trying to force women as a category into computer science,
and just focus on the individual.

~~~
anifit01
>People should stop trying to force women as a category into computer science,
and just focus on the individual.

That would be ideal. I think the reason they have to "force" anything is
because of the gender gaps that get reported. But yes, any manager shouldn't
make assumptions about how someone wants to work, or will excel at work, based
on gender.

Separately, I hope the gender gaps in computer science or math etc. can be
corrected by exposing boys and girls to education and career choices in a
gender neutral manner, which I don't think happens enough.

Edit to clarify.

~~~
maxxxxx
But then you should also expose people to education and career choices in a
personality type neutral manner. School was a pretty tough ride for me because
I am shy and introvert although I am a white male. Gender and race are not the
only dimensions along which people can get discriminated. There are also
looks, being outgoing or not, athletic skills, fashion tastes and many others.

~~~
didibus
Our taxonomies for personality traits and human grouping is quite primitive.
Our ability to categorise people in useful ways is really atrocious. So often
we force that category on people, because that's easier then improving our
categorization.

Hopefully, this improves in the future, starting with medicine amd nutrition,
there's more discourse happening about the individual characteristics. But I'm
afraid its a hard problem, accurate genes and gut microbiome measurements
could maybe improve things. But then correlating these with behaviourial
traits and emotional well being is incredibly hard.

------
anifit01
I fail to understand how this is a men VS women issue, as comments here are
interpreting this. As evidenced by this part in the article, it is more a this
person issue. Or their learning style, as one comment has already pointed out.

>It wasn’t my teacher’s fault; she tried hard to engage me and figure out why
I wasn’t connecting well with the work. Nor was I facing discrimination or
isolation based on my gender — it was an all-girls school, and every single
other woman who took that computer science class that year became an engineer
or scientist.

I felt compelled to make a comment myself because I am a woman, and I am kind
of tired of broad, sweeping generalizations about women and how they learn or
want to work.

I think there's something to note here, though, and that she was driven
towards a particular field because of her childhood experiences. She sounds
like someone who would have benefitted from guidance at that age. Human
experiences are complex, and not only because of the number of varying factors
that can shape and impact them. I don't think its simply about sex
differences.

~~~
nerdponx
I didn't understand this either. What exactly does it mean to "learn like a
girl"?

------
politician
> The ’80s were also the era of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the rise of the
> archetype of the lone, antisocial hacker in a garage spending all-nighters
> building machines that were at many times ambiguous and without a clear path
> to success. Without going into too much more detail because this essay is
> already longer than it needs to be, this can be seen as the linchpin in
> which computer science took a hard turn toward learning and work
> environments that either pushed many women away entirely or resulted in them
> feeling like misfit puzzle pieces when they did take on coding.

I would appreciate if someone clarified the argument that the author is making
above, because as it reads, she's implying that women don't excel when tasked
with individual work involving "ambigious and unclear paths to success". That
certainly isn't how she meant it to be interpreted, right?

~~~
Animats
What's strange here is that the 1980s and 1990s were the period of the "lone
coder". This was when Microsoft advertised in recruiting that every programmer
got a private office with a door they could close. That's in the past.
Facebook now has one of the largest bullpens on the planet in Menlo Park, so
people can collaborate. Between office layout, "agile", Slack, Github, and
StackExchange, programming is more of a social activity than ever.

So why isn't female participation coming back up? It was higher in the 1970s
and 1980s than it is now.

~~~
dnautics
maybe the 'women are social and men are loners' trope is the wrong mechanistic
explanation for gender disparity among coders. FWIW/anecdata: I know way more
women than men who are self-claimed 'introverts' that would stay at home if
they could get away with not working, so I would not be in the least surprised
if this explanation were a dud.

~~~
mjevans
I'm going to read your intent as: 'get away with not going to an office'.

Based on that, I'll say that measuring actual work in cognitively focused
fields is difficult if not impossible.

The entire premise of compensation based on or a requirement built around a
given minimum or maximum hours of work is crazy when the actual work that
happens is mostly cognitive and not literally constructive. A job of that type
practically demands a salaried payout and advancement based on overall project
success/contributions (which might be incredibly fuzzy to measure and
difficult to prove or compare as facts).

~~~
dnautics
no, I meant, get away with not working at all.

------
_nothing
I agree with others that the author's experience may not be as significant to
the wider discussion of female programmers as she thinks it is.

I'm a developer now; I could not have made it through a Computer Science major
in college. I'd always been drawn to technology and my dad highly encouraged
me to pursue IT, but I just didn't find CS itself interesting to me. I was
highly, highly averse to the idea of "lone work on exercises that seemed to
have little application to the real world, the expectation that coursework
required coding and debugging for hours after school threatened my ability to
excel in other classes or in varsity sports".

Maybe it is in fact a particularly "male" engineer thing to want to focus only
on excelling at one's trade while neglecting everything else in one's life. I
was not like that.

So I studied Neuroscience and Psychology because they felt more applicable and
"hands-on". I dissected cadavers, ran behavioral tests on rats, crunched data.

Then later I discovered that I really did enjoy programming itself; I realized
I loved building things. Now I feel like I could sit through dry lectures on
fundamental and complex CS topics that my younger self would find boring. It
sounds like the author liked building things too. Maybe if her program had
been focused on that instead of other things, she would have felt more
motivated.

To me, this seems like a classic case of someone deciding that they're simply
not good at math because they were taught it the wrong way or weren't shown
why it was relevant.

------
jansho
There seems to be a bit of a contradiction in her post:

> _Despite the cargo shorts and the loner attitude, I learned like a girl._

And:

> _it was an all-girls school, and every single other woman who took that
> computer science class that year became an engineer or scientist._

Hmm, it sounds more like she has a different learning style, which is not
necessarily down to her femaleness.

That said, I think that at a fundamental level, there are differences in how
men and women think. But none are better than the other, we know that we gain
richer insights when we take both into account. But in this current political
climate, it's unwise to go too deep about this, because it can so easily slip
into the really nasty domains. Remember the time when phrenology was used to
justify gender and race discrimination?

This is why I dislike Damore. I don't care what his manifesto says, but I bet
that he knew exactly what he was doing. Playing games is pathetic, dude.

I can sympathise with the writer as I have a similar story too. I'm
permanently put off from going into engineering, but I've accepted that and
moved on. (Incidentally it's education and design, to better design learning
experiences for everyone!) And that's OK, the burden of guilt of "letting down
your kind" is also terrible. Life's too short and there are so many other
interesting, under-explored areas ... and you can still get involved in tech.
The best bit about tech? It's just a tool.

~~~
dxhdr
> at a fundamental level, there are differences in how men and women think

It's undeniable there are biological differences between men and women, but
this seems far fetched. Biological differences don't manifest themselves in an
intuitive way; for example, there is no difference between men and women's
hair. However we perceive a large difference entirely due to environmental
training.

~~~
33a
Not that I disagree with the sentiment, but hair is a bad example. Men go bald
and get beards, while women don't.

~~~
ztjio
You must be young or not know very many women. Nearly every woman eventually
starts growing facial hair. Many remove it every day. And some women do lose
their hair, though admittedly it's much less common.

~~~
skinnymuch
Sure technically both genders grow facial hair. But still, men can grow much
more hair on average than women, especially facial hair, no? South Asian
females as an example sometimes can have more hair than average in many spots,
but then you have many men with forest levels of hair around their body.

------
zvrba
> Rather, I was frustrated because the course consisted of lone work on
> exercises that seemed to have little application to the real world

From my personal experience, exactly such courses have proven to have the most
long-term value to me.

~~~
sidlls
That's an interesting way to underscore the point that these courses reinforce
a kind of bias.

~~~
skinnymuch
Definitely. Though not necessarily a bias between male and female. Just a bias
for people who can work well [enough] with that sort of learning.

~~~
ghaff
And it's not just courses.

 _Many_ types of work bias toward people who are _just fine_ with locking
themselves in a room/the library stacks/a lab for a week to work through some
problem. It's a completely different mindset from someone who likes doing
sales or PR work.

It's not that there aren't people who can do a good job with both. But some
things certainly come more naturally to some people than they do to others.

~~~
skinnymuch
100% agree with your entire comment. People are just different.

I recently learned guitar for the first time using one of those Guitar Hero
games but you play with a real electric guitar. Two friends commented how if I
haven't gotten to learning it after multiple attempts, gamification won't
work. But it did. This isn't the first time gamification has worked on me. For
whatever reason, gamification [and accountability] work[s] great for me.

~~~
ghaff
I'm of the school of thought that the tech industry should absolutely take
affirmative steps to encourage and make it possible for people with a wider
set of skills and backgrounds to enter and do well in tech. At the same time
we have to accept that people and roles are different. I work with a lot of
engineers. I also work with a lot of PR people and, especially at agencies,
they conform to at least as much of a demographic/behavioral stereotype as
software developers do.

~~~
skinnymuch
Nice response. Definitely agree. Cool that you know first hand that other
industries are just as bad. Which isn't surprising.

If you ever want to chat or network, my email is in my profile, hit me up!

------
bartread
I don't know that you can call yourself a "failed coder" when, let's be
honest, it could be argued you didn't try that hard to _be_ a coder in the
first place - it wasn't that you made your living do it but realised in doing
so that you were bad at it. I'm not sure bailing out on a high school
computing course, because it sucked (I'm not sure being a boy would have made
any difference here), is nearly enough qualification to label oneself a
"failed coder".

I will share this from my own experience of computing courses at school
though, and this is admittedly going back to the late 80s/early 90s: they
sucked. They were boring as hell. I had a year of IT classes in year 9 and I
got crap grades throughout because I was totally unengaged and, frankly,
already operating at a considerably more sophisticated level than the course
material. I wanted to solve real problems and write video games, not bugger
around with word processing and spreadsheets and deeply basic (no pun
intended) programming "problems".

And that's not (just) being arrogant: it applied to plenty of the other card-
carrying nerds in the room, although some of them were definitely better at
playing the game and being willing to jump through the hoops. This was in a
boys' school, btw.

I actually diverged from Comp Sci for quite a while: going into 6th form the
schools merged and I realised there was no chance of me getting a girlfriend
if I was into computers. Bad decision and, ironically, made no difference in
that direction anyway. What it did do was ensure that I didn't even consider
CompSci as an undergrad degree. Another bad decision, later corrected with a
post-grad conversion course.

And so I finally ended up working as a programmer, which is what I'd always
wanted to do, despite my best efforts in other directions.

Anyway, a roundabout way of getting to the point: clearly there's a lot the
industry can do to make itself more attractive to females. I've worked with
precious few female engineers over the years but enough to know the good ones
are as good as any man I've worked with, and I'm sure a similar distribution
of skill applies for women as for men. And this is the thing: as well as
making the industry a more pleasant place for women to work, we need more
women at the top of the funnel. For whatever reason or set of reasons - which
I don't pretend to understand - girls are much more likely to either choose
not to study, or drop out of studying, Computer Science. If we don't fix that
we are always going to have a gender imbalance: I'd argue that one way to
normalise women as engineers is to ensure there are more women doing
engineering.

~~~
nullc
> and I got crap grades throughout

She was not willing to do that and specifically cited it as a reason that she
gave up.

~~~
bartread
Indeed, and I ditched it as soon as I had a choice as well.

------
dnautics
I think beyond just "educational style" something we should consider is the
way we _socialize reward_ in young men and young women. This is a gross
generalization (but when your metrics are bulk - as opposed to individual -
results, as in number of entrants or number of employees, generalizations
matter), but socially and educationally we train boys seek reward for building
or doing things and train girls to seek reward for being something. By the
very nature of the software industry, in particular, the rapid engineering
cycle, will skew towards building and doing over a state of being.

I am not suggesting that these socializations are an inherent part of being
male or female (and I would emphasize that you've got a serious problem if
you're stereotyping an individual based on the bulk socialization), but I
_would_ suggest that if bulk gender parity is important, then forcing it
without changing, or at the very least identifying/recognizing/selecting
individuals who have deviated from, the pervasive gendered socialization is
likely to cause serious problems.

As a side note, I personally find the consequences of this early socialization
are also highly reflected in the very way that the gender debate manifests
itself.

------
rocqua
> girls and women prefer collaborative rather than solo work, that they are
> more engaged in “things” if they can see the “people” aspect to it, and that
> they are prone to perfectionism and a fear of failure.

This does not quite jive with enrollment at my university. I am thinking
specifically of maths as compared to other STEM fields. Of all seriously
theoretical courses, maths has the most women, last time I checked, it was
pretty close to 50/50.

Yet, math is much less collaborative than physics, that is the understanding
has to be your own. If there is a people part to either, I'd argue its physics
because it is closer to an application. I suppose one might say that maths has
more of a people part, because much of math in practice is communication. That
feels like stretching a definition though.

When looking at the enrollment numbers, what is most striking is the
difference between CS and maths. Whereas maths is about 50/50, CS seems to be
below 10% female. As far as subject manner is concerned, I'd say these two
studies are very close. And yet, maths is way more popular.

Based on this, I'd argue that the low enrollment in CS has nothing to do with
the subject matter, and much more to do with how comfortable women feel in
either group.

~~~
searealist
Most math majors are there to become math teachers, which is very people
oriented. If you consider only PhD programs for math then it becomes very male
dominated.

~~~
michaelt
If the near-50-50 gender ratio in math is explained by math teachers, wouldn't
we expect a similar ratio in physics?

~~~
cocoablazing
Think about the market for those teachers. Anecdotally, I took one physics
course in my secondary education, and about eight math courses.

------
zengid
> "Rather, I was frustrated because the course consisted of lone work on
> exercises that seemed to have little application to the real world, the
> expectation that coursework required coding and debugging for hours after
> school threatened my ability to excel in other classes or in varsity sports"

Just taking this at face value, I think she failed because she was afraid of
failing. I've always learned better from having to struggle with something
than having someone explain to me how to do it. Its that torturous process of
trial and error that unconsciously guides someone towards a solution. Being
able to do that on your own is ultimately the hallmark of a professional.

That being said, I _am_ a man, and if what she is claiming is true (men learn
more through lone-wolf trial/error, women learn better through collaborative
team-work) then I can't say much about why trial/error is so important. Maybe
its just more important _to me_ and my context.

I think she has a really interesting point about the importance of putting the
'person' into the equation. I really prefer to watch a tech-talk over a blog
post because hearing someone talk about something in a informal language gives
a lot of life to whatever they're talking about. Their body language and tone
conveys a lot of information about the technology: are they holding
'religious' assumptions?; is it a hard-learned lesson to avoid some pitfall?;
are they avoiding talking about negatives to try and sell something?..

Watching the Q&A portion of a talk can be especially enlightening. You really
get to see whether they're full of shit or legitimate based on how they react
to critical questions.

~~~
taysic
Well I'm a woman and I learned coding by myself in exactly the way you
describe. I personally don't think it has anything to do with gender. I didn't
find many study partners within my major that I could relate to so I just
studied by myself. This continued to lay the groundwork for a continuing self-
education after college. I don't think this is so weird, but certainly it's
nice whenever you have a supportive group around yourself. I wouldn't
discourage anyone from seeking that out but I can't say I needed it either. If
anything, I came to prefer the independence of working on my own much more.

~~~
zengid
I agree with you. I asked my wife what she thought of gender affecting
learning, and what she said was quite convincing: _individuals_ have different
ways of learning, and gender isn't the only determining factor.

------
Santosh83
I suspect its more a cultural/historical thing. Comparatively fewer women go
for computer science because they have far lesser role models and mentors and
icons of their own sex to look upon. Just like how only few men manage to dig
into women dominated occupations. Rather than anything inherent in women that
puts them at a disadvantage vis-a-vis men with regards to computer science or
"hard" science in general.

~~~
fsociety
Yes I think that’s a large part of it too. Our brains are so adaptable to
whatever environment we live in. You know I’m still waiting for an Aaron
Sorkin film on Ada Lovelace. Aaron, if you’re reading this, can you just go
ahead and make that film already?

------
psyc
The article makes numerous assertions that school/work do not cater to the
ways women learn/work best. I was on the edge of my seat expecting the author
to hint at the ways women _do_ learn/work best, but it never arrived. Was I
just not reading closely enough?

Edit: I wasn't reading closely enough.

So my next question is, what would it take to have more women _teaching_ CS
and software development?

~~~
rbatty
She does say:

    
    
      that girls and women prefer collaborative rather than solo work, that they are more engaged in “things” if they can see the “people” aspect to it, and that they are prone to perfectionism and a fear of failure
    

although I suppose you have to imagine what a tech classroom/work environment
would look like if it supported folks with such learning preferences since she
doesn't fully spell that out.

*editted formatting

~~~
grzm
Please don't use code blocks (indentation) to quote text. it causes side-
scrolling in browsers, making it difficult to read on desktop machines and
nigh impossible on mobile devices.

A common method of quoting text on HN is prefixing the line with a ">". I
personally like also wrapping it in asterisks to italicize the quote.

------
erik_seaberg
> The result of this is that STEM education is taught in a way that gives
> girls an opportunity to collaborate, as well as allow them to access the
> broader ideas, people, and goals that bring coding off the screen and into
> the real world.

Contrast this with "Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical
results, but that's not why we do it." I think there's a big difference
between nerdy obsession and grudgingly making something valuable. If nobody
hired coders, it would still be my hobby.

------
skinnymuch
Isn't the title pretty clickbaity? I had to cheat my way through 2.5 years of
comp sci in HS before I dropped AP Comp Sci BC. I never programmed a thing in
all that time. I either copied from others or had a friend write any code for
me. During the AP test I spent maybe 15 min on the written programming parts
just writing the basics of Java and inserting BS in hopes of getting some
points. Calling me a failed coder would be weird at that point. I was never a
coder really. Just like if I got bad grades in science classes I wouldnt be a
failed scientist.

I myself ended up trying to code PHP a couple more times. I didn't even think
I knew the hang of HTML for years (I know there's not much to get). Until I
did finally get the hang of basic coding then intermediate coding and so on, I
never considered myself a failed coder before I got the hang of it.

I had my own reasons for "failing" at my high school coding (technically I got
As but I knew nothing), just dividing things up by how genders might function
or learn wouldn't have helped me. For example I personally had massive anxiety
and confidence issues.

Not to dismiss issues with females not being in programming enough. We
definitely need to get more women into STEM and programming.

~~~
reboog711
You sound like Manager material. Or maybe Entrepreneur.

In the real world it is perfectly legitimate to 'hire someone' to do your work
for you and claim it as your own.

~~~
skinnymuch
Maybe my verbosity got the better of me. I'm a programmer now. I'm not the
best. But for web dev and certain crawling and automation I focus on, I can
more than handle myself.

Programming isn't my only hat, but that is part of what I do now. And for some
time I exclusively freelanced as a programmer.

------
cpt1138
I would be very surprised if there truly were any normative studies showing
differences in the way women vs men learn. Maybe individually for this woman
it didn’t suit her style. Personally I think everyone deserves individualized
instruction but in the US at least we don’t value education that much.

------
TACIXAT
I am curious what approaches can be taken to make education more approachable
for people who learn collaboratively and have a social focus. If anyone has
example curricula changes or teaching approaches that they could share it
would be greatly appreciated.

------
chillingeffect
Nuance is the most amazing thing. It's in abundance in this article.

------
ctoth
I donated to the Mouse program[0] she mentioned in the article, it looks like
a pretty good idea.

[0] [https://mouse.org/](https://mouse.org/)

------
purplezooey
Instantly I stop reading anything that mentions Damore's memo, because the
whole thing is pointless pot stirring.

------
TimTheTinker
This was an excellent article and a nuanced, well-articulated perspective.

Too bad it got modded down almost immediately.

