> The underrepresentation of women in open-source software is frequently attributed to women’s lack of innate aptitude compared to men: natural gender differences in technical ability
Maybe I'm just of a younger generation, but I've literally never heard this in my life. The assumption among people my age has always been that women just generally aren't interested in software development at the same rate that men are; not that they're naturally worse at it!
This would also require there have to been some enormous _shift_ in these 'innate aptitudes' in the 1980s or so; there were lots of female programmers in the 50s and 60s.
But yeah, I'm 39 and have never heard anyone serious claim that the gender imbalance is due to innate ability.
That was, well, one weirdo and a bunch of laypeople (who were, one suspects, into the idea for political/ideological reasons), though; I don't think many _programmers_ ever believed this.
Are you certain that memo was making an argument that "women lack innate aptitude compared to men"? It's been a while since I read it, but it seemed to me that it was arguing that differences in gender representation may be mostly attributable to differences in the degree to which men and women were attracted to high-pressure jobs at Google, rather than because of discrimination in hiring or promotions, and that the gap would be better addressed by making those jobs intrinsically more attractive to women, rather than by hiring quotas.
That assumption is also wrong, and while less insulting on a surface level, I’m not sure it’s any less harmful. Women are interested in all STEM fields but have historically not been treated as capable because they’re women. We have tons of data on that, including experiments where using a feminine or masculine name changes how contributions are received.
If we change that from "women just generally aren't interested in software development at the same rate that men are" to "women aren't as interested in software development as a career at the same rate as men" then it might not be so wrong.
I remember reading about a large study of pre-college students in OECD countries that found that while the top students in STEM fields were about equally split between boys and girls, for the boys it was more likely that they were only top in a STEM field. The girls were more likely to be top students in multiple fields.
Students tend to go on to the field they are best in. For the top boy STEM students that tends to be STEM. For the top girl STEM students the field they are best in often turns out to be one of the non-STEM fields they are also top in.
It might not just be people assuming they're inferior; it could also be that they have an unwelcoming or uncomfortable culture. For instance, if it's dominated by men who have eccentric interests that the women don't share, that might not seem to be an appealing group to get into. Worse, if it's dominated by men who are all interested in them romantically/sexually to the point where it feels like harassment, that wouldn't be appealing either.
Whenever I see those arguments about unwelcoming culture of programming, I’m thinking back on how I myself got into it. It was mostly a solitary activity with a lot of reading of manuals and tinkering and whatnot. There was not really a “culture” to not “welcome” me. Is everyone else just way more social about their programming activities? Like you show up to a club and feel shunned?
First, it's well-known that women are generally more social (or at least, better trained for socialization) then men. So yes, they're naturally going to worry more about a welcoming culture.
Second, maybe you got into it as a solitary activity as a child (I did too, long ago), but unless you work at a very, very unusual job, it's not at all a solitary activity these days at any normal company.
I think we're long past the point where this is a realistic scenario at least in 99% of situations, what does actually still happen though is coming across articles that fearmonger such for profit whether or not it's true. Those articles tell newcomers they are inferior and do not belong while pretending to be on the newcoming reader's side, despite exploiting them.
Nearly every woman I know in the sciences or engineering has a large number of stories of aggressive and inappropriate sexual advances, and in many cases outright sexual assault or rape in the workplace- typically from people in positions of power over them where they felt their careers were at risk simply from refusing the advances. Moreover, in most cases if they tried to report it or ask for help, even through official organization channels they were told there would be additional consequences if they didn’t keep quiet.
My workplace even had a sexual assault in the workplace training course where they coached us to stop co-workers from speaking if they started to disclose being victimized at work, I assume to avoid being legally responsible to respond appropriately.
It could also be that women value work/life balance more than men, while the tech industry is rather infamous for poor work/life balance. The fact that most tech jobs are exempt from overtime in the US doesn't help.
Often it's the opposite. When you aren't very good at something, you have to work twice as hard. I've met plenty of men who thought that programming was cool so they became obsessed with learning how to code without having the innate skills. It mostly doesn't work out, but during that period of time, they were more interested in learning to code than a lot of programmers. And many do try open source. That's why there are a lot of junk pull requests on Hacktoberfest.
> First, I infer the gender of users from their usernames and the information provided on their profiles, labeling users as feminine, masculine, ambiguous, and anonymous.
This isn't going to give accurate results. It's common for those who are female to conceal this fact, with neutral usernames and profiles, to avoid harassment from predatory males.
Similiarly, there are many males who present with a feminine username and profile for various reasons, such as a desire to be female.
>Similiarly, there are many males who present with a feminine username and profile for various reasons, such as a desire to be female.
If you could actually get accurate data identifying which programmers are actually male or female, and which male programmers desire to be female, I wonder if you'd see a quantifiable difference in their code compared to regular males.
The premise is that "Women code differently, but no worse .."
ie. Stylistic differences likely arising from in-group dynamics, cross reading, pair programming, etc.
As such there's likely no implicity { transgender, male, female } style, more various styles that are more pronounced in groups that cluster, be that male programmers, female coders, transgender hackers, google devs, etc.
...or more often to capitalize on the short term, early benefits (attention, leniency, opportunity, etc) often offered to women. This (males using a female name + character) is a common practice in multiplayer games.
While transgenderism is by no means common, it is unusually
frequent in programmers, and by my observation even more so in more productive programmers who are more likely to be selected if selecting people from code written. The ‘programmer socks’ meme does appear to have some merit.
This sounds like complete anecdata. Just because jart is skilled at coding doesn't mean there is a statistically high proportion of trans people in the "skilled coders" demographic.
Definitely anecdata but I can +1 that all sorts of people outside the mainstream enjoy safety in online communities because of the anonymity. This has always been a draw since the early internet up through now. You can rise through the ranks of open source using only your words and your code.
>There is an elevated co-occurrence of autism in trans individuals, with recent meta-analyses suggesting that 11% of trans individuals are autistic. The presence of autism in trans young people can create clinical challenges by adding complexity to the presentation, assessment and management of those presenting to gender clinics. Although many trans young people display traits of autism, how these traits relate to the nature of their gender diversity is unclear.
>Despite the study’s limitations, the initial pilot data gives reason for additional research to be
conducted. Similar to Wei, Christiano, Yu, Blackorby, Shattuck, and Newman’s 9 findings, this
study also supports the commonly accepted assumption that individuals with ASD are very likely
to major in Computer Science.
---
And to clarify, I did not vet these, it was a very lazy google search.
That fits with the common observation that men who identify as women typically understand women even less than other men, and often have some oddly inflexible and sexist ideals of womanhood - because their ASD traits make it difficult to understand people generally and can lead to underinformed mental models of the world around them, including human behavior.
That sounds like some kind of bias. First of all transgenderism does not seem to me to be more frequent in programmers. I've seen a handful out of like hundreds in the past few years. There might be more of a tendency to seek attention among trans people, or perhaps people like that stand out in your mind as memorable.
If you see lots of trans people where you work, they may very well be hiring or at least referring each other. I've seen that phenomenon with gay people too. Once in a while you'll run across a business with a lot of one kind of person.
I am to take your handful as 5 and hundreds as say 200, that is 2.5%. Which is far more than 0.5% for the general population so it appears on that point we agree.
My cohort is the category theorists / functional programming crowd which indeed has a higher percentage of trans people in it than even other programming cohorts. But this is not due to a hiring ring, they lack the numbers.
Territoriality in code has been a very male pattern that seems bizarre, given the type of work we do. In purely anecdotal experience: A small team hires its first female developer in a team of several. The senior developer on the team recommends against hiring her, but management prevails. In their separate projects everyone in the team is a top performer - they finish the work for a fraction of the estimated time, the female developer knows the languages they work with so well she can identify bugs and future browser quirks even when reading code on paper. Everyone is detail oriented and keep their code meticulous. The team clocks extra hours regularly without complaint.
The senior developer is made manager on the team. He begins to require all javascript code to have C-style curly brackets. (the opening bracket goes below the function declaration, not right next to it). The reason for it: he is the only one on the team with a C background and prefers to read everyone’s code that way. Overnight he goes into all repositories for multiple customer projects that have nothing to do with each other and changes the code to his preference. The next day the individual developers who work on each project, lose hours sifting between meaningful changes and style preferences and adjust their code. The next night he changes everyone’s code again. Control and desire for dominance over the code base when the code is essentially multiple consulting projects for multiple different customers done by multiple developers at the same tech consulting firm. His treatment and outbursts were worst against the female developer. The female developer among others on the team left for more senior roles elsewhere soon after.
The female software engineers I have worked with have been diligent and thoughtful and often more skilled than male peers, but the treatment of them has always been different in one way or another. I am not surprised if most hide the fact that they are female in open source code contributions. One of the perks of crafting software is you don’t need permission to make stuff, and you certainly don’t need to tolerate bad behavior distracting from the work. The easiest way for teams to lose female developers is to let an insecure bully chase them out.
I confess I find it surprising that they code differently. That is, my prior would be that there is no real difference based solely on sex. Their may be differences based on education. But why sex?
Why not sex? You only have to meet a few men and a few women to observe different preferrences for different strategies to the same problems. Even different perception of problems at all in the first place.
You can't imagine how that can result in different code?
It's the least remarkable claim imaginable. Though I'm not sure this study quite proves it.
The first is that the measure of quality doesn't actually capture quality. It's like measuring the quality of a writer by looking at only their grammar and spelling.
The second is that it implicitly makes causal claims, but the design makes it impossible to infer any causal relationship between sex and code.
Curious what others' take is on just the empirics of the paper itself.
> The first algorithm intended to be executed by a computer was designed by Ada Lovelace who was a pioneer in the field. Grace Hopper was the first person to design a compiler for a programming language. [0] Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, and up to World War II, programming was predominantly done by women; significant examples include the Harvard Computers, codebreaking at Bletchley Park and engineering at NASA. After the 1960s, the computing work that had been dominated by women evolved into modern software, and the importance of women decreased. [1]
What a crazy history, and wiki entry. My supposition is that as soon as it started to become even slightly obvious that software was going to eat the world, the dominant social paradigm prevailed.
[0] WTF, how is she not way more celebrated? She invented the effing compiler!
> The first algorithm intended to be executed by a computer was designed by Ada Lovelace who was a pioneer in the field.
Babbage designed the first programs for the analytical engine.
> Grace Hopper was the first person to design a compiler for a programming language.
Hopper was the first person to use the word "compiler" for a program, but it was not a compiler by the modern meaning; it was a linker, and not the first.
> Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, and up to World War II, programming was predominantly done by women;
Not by the modern meaning; they manually entered programs designed by men.
> After the 1960s, the computing work that had been dominated by women evolved into modern software, and the importance of women decreased.
The design of programs has always been done by men mostly.
Yes. The reference it cites contradicts it: "The first algorithm intended to be executed by a computer was designed by Ada Lovelace" with a link to https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Ada_and_the_First_Comput... which says "Many people, for instance, incorrectly claim that Ada was the first computer programmer. (Babbage, not Ada, wrote the first programs for his Analytical Engine, although most were never published.)"
I guess the thing for me is that my one open source project of note was an accident and from what I gather most male open source founders are similar. For example, Linux is notorious for being Linus's hobby project that hit it big.
So while I can see why a toxic community would stop women from contributing to an existing project, I think the 'starting' a project would be more interesting to look at. Most open source projects start by accident not intent. One would expect women to not have the same probability as men of a project hitting it big presuming they make the code public.
From the first line of the abstract: "The underrepresentation of women in open-source software is frequently attributed to women’s lack of innate aptitude compared to men".
Perhaps I am obtuse, but I've been in FOSS for 15+ years and I have never heard this as a common topic. When it is infrequently mentioned, its almost always shouted down quite quickly in the FOSS community as sexist nonsense.
Over the years my coder colleagues have been about 95% male and 5% female. Of them, I rate about 80% of the males as producers of quality code, and about 95% of the females as such. That's just my experience and my subjective scores.
The minimum number of colleagues you could have had to arrive at those ratios is 400. Assuming you've had 400 colleagues, we can break down your ratios into:
- 380 men
- 19 women producing good code
- 1 woman producing bad code
I think the error bars on that one woman would be quite large, too large to draw any conclusions.
Now if I guessed wrong and you've actually had not 400, but tens of thousands of colleagues who you've been secretly tracking and ranking in your spare time, maybe you'd have enough data to draw a conclusion.
Setting aside the questionable methodology, I expect a lot of gigs are far more accepting of mediocrity from a man than a woman, so women doing software development are much more likely to self-select out if they're not up for it— whether in actuality or due to imposter syndrome.
In any case, I would generally agree with your take but express it a bit differently— the group of programmers who really blow me away with their ingenuity and commitment to excellence has significantly more women in it than the larger population ratio suggests should be expected.
In my experience the average female coder is significantly worse than the average male coder, but the ones that are good, are usually very good. It just seems to me that males have a greater inclination towards logically structured thinking.
Maybe I'm just of a younger generation, but I've literally never heard this in my life. The assumption among people my age has always been that women just generally aren't interested in software development at the same rate that men are; not that they're naturally worse at it!
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