I have an honest question, I hope this doesn't get taken the wrong way. Is it possible that women just aren't as interested in writing software as men are? I don't think that there's some kind of artificial barrier preventing them from getting in to it; I think if anything, most male programmers would love having some women around.
I mean, there are women doctors, lawyers, politicians, executives, accountants, etc etc etc; don't you think it's possible that there aren't many women in this industry just because they're not all that interested in it?
I personally think it's a little intellectually dishonest to insist that both genders have the exact same preferences, wants and needs. We understand the differences in gender in every species in the animal kingdom (including the times when there aren't differences), but we refuse to apply a modicum of critical thought to ourselves.
Definitely not taken the wrong way. As a female compSci student, this really did come up as an issue. I had a friend who was doing great in our program, but after her first internship, she realized compSci was not at all what she was interested in. She didn't want "to sit behind a desk all day dealing with a computer" in the sense of just coming to work writing code. She did not find that interesting after having done it in the context of a workplace, so @icey really does have a good point.
As a woman, I can say a lot of us have a little bit more interest in the people-based aspects of life and for some of us, working with computers all day is off-putting. A lot of women I know who don't understand what I do all day (writing code), oversimplify and only see the computer and tend to think of me as having a job where I don't interface with people much. Just that perception (as false as it often is) is enough to be a turn-off and doesn't garner the field much interest.
Plus, it's often an issue of exposure why a lot of women aren't as interested in software in the first place. Before I got to college, I didn't know any other women who wrote code. My foray into compSci was helped along by an uncle who bought me a programming book for my 15th birthday. (hehe.)
This isn't always the case, but it's difficult to take up something you've never been exposed to. Even brief exposure is enough for some people and I'd argue tons of girls aren't getting that exposure.
I recommend this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5ObAgkqicQ to everyone here. Note she was interested in programming from a young age, but nobody encouraged her to be an engineer.
No one encouraged me to be an engineer either (doctor? yes. lawyer? yes. engineer? no.). I'd wager that many people here were actively discouraged in some way from going down the path of technology or entrepreneurship.
Most nontechnical parents who see their son or daughter spending countless hours on a computer just think that he or she is wasting his or her time.
(That last sentence would be a good place for those mythical gender-neutral English pronouns.)
Your parents aren't the only ones responsible for encouraging you. I'm sure your interest in technology originally came from some inner drive. But a hacker can only get so far without a community of peers, whether it be your colleagues in college or others at meetup groups or friends on IRC or others on Hacker News. These communities become the crux of not only your technical development, but also your motivation. I've seen more than a few girls in college give up on computer science because it was harder for them to make friends in class or join a group to do problem sets with. There is definitely SOME problem here.
> Most nontechnical parents who see their son or daughter spending countless hours on a computer just think that he or she is wasting his or her time.
I definitely encountered that. The same parents who called me lazy for sitting in front of a computer from ages 14-18 are now quite happy with how things turned out--a day job with a high salary and a startup in the works lol. You never know what that kid could really be up to...!
Thank you for that; it definitely provided a perspective that I hadn't thought of previously.
However, I don't know that I agree that if people were encouraged the same that it would somehow make the balance 50/50 or even remotely close to that. Of course, my perspective is limited to personal experience.
I have a lot of geeky girls in my family and I know a lot of women who are geeks, and they've all been interested in other geeky pursuits - medicine, psychology, civil engineering, EE, chemistry; none of them have had a remote interest in software specifically. Why? Because it was too boring for them.
Maybe we should bring it on ourselves to make the work seem more interesting if we really want to try to bring some balance to the gender mix.
I think Fran Allen (the only female interviewee in Coders at Work) made the point that you see more and more women going into Earth Sciences, Biology, Chemistry... Even Engineering and Maths have more balanced gender ratios than CS. Her opinion was that it was because those fields are perceived to be more socially relevant, wheras a lot of people think CS is just about making games.
I don't know if I agree with her totally (I think the negative perception is more a conflation of IT with CS - people think CS is more about using Powerpoint than an intellectual pursuit) - but there is definitly a case for fixing the public perception of Computer Scientists.
It may seem boring to them, but we know that it isn't - at all. To me, chemistry seems boring. It's a problem of perception.
I can easily imagine a society where 90%+ of the programmers are women, where programming is thought of as a typically female profession, requiring skills such as accuracy and conscientiousness.
Comments
I have an honest question, I hope this doesn't get taken the wrong way. Is it possible that women just aren't as interested in writing software as men are? I don't think that there's some kind of artificial barrier preventing them from getting in to it; I think if anything, most male programmers would love having some women around.
I mean, there are women doctors, lawyers, politicians, executives, accountants, etc etc etc; don't you think it's possible that there aren't many women in this industry just because they're not all that interested in it?
I personally think it's a little intellectually dishonest to insist that both genders have the exact same preferences, wants and needs. We understand the differences in gender in every species in the animal kingdom (including the times when there aren't differences), but we refuse to apply a modicum of critical thought to ourselves.
Definitely not taken the wrong way. As a female compSci student, this really did come up as an issue. I had a friend who was doing great in our program, but after her first internship, she realized compSci was not at all what she was interested in. She didn't want "to sit behind a desk all day dealing with a computer" in the sense of just coming to work writing code. She did not find that interesting after having done it in the context of a workplace, so @icey really does have a good point.
As a woman, I can say a lot of us have a little bit more interest in the people-based aspects of life and for some of us, working with computers all day is off-putting. A lot of women I know who don't understand what I do all day (writing code), oversimplify and only see the computer and tend to think of me as having a job where I don't interface with people much. Just that perception (as false as it often is) is enough to be a turn-off and doesn't garner the field much interest.
Plus, it's often an issue of exposure why a lot of women aren't as interested in software in the first place. Before I got to college, I didn't know any other women who wrote code. My foray into compSci was helped along by an uncle who bought me a programming book for my 15th birthday. (hehe.)
This isn't always the case, but it's difficult to take up something you've never been exposed to. Even brief exposure is enough for some people and I'd argue tons of girls aren't getting that exposure.
I recommend this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5ObAgkqicQ to everyone here. Note she was interested in programming from a young age, but nobody encouraged her to be an engineer.
No one encouraged me to be an engineer either (doctor? yes. lawyer? yes. engineer? no.). I'd wager that many people here were actively discouraged in some way from going down the path of technology or entrepreneurship.
Most nontechnical parents who see their son or daughter spending countless hours on a computer just think that he or she is wasting his or her time.
(That last sentence would be a good place for those mythical gender-neutral English pronouns.)
Your parents aren't the only ones responsible for encouraging you. I'm sure your interest in technology originally came from some inner drive. But a hacker can only get so far without a community of peers, whether it be your colleagues in college or others at meetup groups or friends on IRC or others on Hacker News. These communities become the crux of not only your technical development, but also your motivation. I've seen more than a few girls in college give up on computer science because it was harder for them to make friends in class or join a group to do problem sets with. There is definitely SOME problem here.
> Most nontechnical parents who see their son or daughter spending countless hours on a computer just think that he or she is wasting his or her time.
I definitely encountered that. The same parents who called me lazy for sitting in front of a computer from ages 14-18 are now quite happy with how things turned out--a day job with a high salary and a startup in the works lol. You never know what that kid could really be up to...!
Thank you for that; it definitely provided a perspective that I hadn't thought of previously.
However, I don't know that I agree that if people were encouraged the same that it would somehow make the balance 50/50 or even remotely close to that. Of course, my perspective is limited to personal experience.
I have a lot of geeky girls in my family and I know a lot of women who are geeks, and they've all been interested in other geeky pursuits - medicine, psychology, civil engineering, EE, chemistry; none of them have had a remote interest in software specifically. Why? Because it was too boring for them.
Maybe we should bring it on ourselves to make the work seem more interesting if we really want to try to bring some balance to the gender mix.
I think Fran Allen (the only female interviewee in Coders at Work) made the point that you see more and more women going into Earth Sciences, Biology, Chemistry... Even Engineering and Maths have more balanced gender ratios than CS. Her opinion was that it was because those fields are perceived to be more socially relevant, wheras a lot of people think CS is just about making games.
I don't know if I agree with her totally (I think the negative perception is more a conflation of IT with CS - people think CS is more about using Powerpoint than an intellectual pursuit) - but there is definitly a case for fixing the public perception of Computer Scientists.
It may seem boring to them, but we know that it isn't - at all. To me, chemistry seems boring. It's a problem of perception.
I can easily imagine a society where 90%+ of the programmers are women, where programming is thought of as a typically female profession, requiring skills such as accuracy and conscientiousness.
No one encouraged me. Period.