She didn't say "all women", she said "many women." I attend the University of Texas at Austin. I started out as a CS major, still am, but no longer want to work in the field. One of the reasons was the fact that although I'd taken AP CS courses in high school, I still felt looked down upon because I'd first been exposed to and developed an interest in CS "late". This attitude came from my peers, the companies that attended our career fairs, and even from my first exposure to the online tech press/blogosphere- I remember reading an essay by Paul Graham wherein he essentially implied that if a woman hasn't started coding by 13 all hope is lost for her. The only people I didn't get that impression from were (most of) my instructors, but that wasn't really enough, especially in the 500+ person intro classes I was in at the time.

Incidentally, like many women in CS, I was encouraged to look for role models among other women in my department and in the broader tech world. Dear other technical college women, if you're reading this: Don't. In my personal experience, successful women in the field are much, much more likely to have had parents who were programmers and to have started earlier. All the women who were pointed out to me as role models had this background. It was only when I started looking to the successful men in my program that I started to find people who had first learned to code in their sophomore years and decided to stay. I have my own theories as to why that imbalance exists, but the simple truth is, I could have learned a lot more about how to "catch up" from those men than the women I was pushed towards.

I understand the feeling of needing to "catch up" to fit in. For the first three years after I started programming I kept my work almost completely private, I felt so far behind. I wrote several hundred projects that I never showed to anybody, and didn't even keep. I still feel the gap a little bit today (five years in), but it seems mostly gone.

I fit the programmer archetype exactly, and it took me three years of near constant engagement before I felt I could even begin to fit in (culturally) with experienced programmers. I can easily imagine the task is considerably harder if you don't fit the archetype.

On the flip-side - the desire to "catch up", and the solitary nature of the challenge lent me considerably more motivation and creativity than I seem to have now that I have "acclimatized".

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I'm very interested to see how it is going to turn out for my sister. She's a very talented programmer, but she doesn't try to immerse herself in the culture of it at all, rather she is treating it as an auxiliary skill to her studies in GIS. I feel some smug satisfaction knowing she is coding circles around most of the guys in her classes, despite not taking on the identity of "I am a programmer".

> I started out as a CS major, still am, but no longer want to work in the field.

Working in the tech field has almost nothing to do with CS. Many/most developers don't study CS in college, and technical ability is only a very small part of what makes a good developer.

> I still felt looked down upon because I'd first been exposed to and developed an interest in CS "late".

Come on, there are assholes everywhere who use this tactic to make themselves feel superior or to get rid of potential competition, men and women alike. This is not exclusive to CS. A lot of people are worried that they put so much time into something and that someone 'fresh' could make them look bad by picking it up quicker. It makes it that much more satisfying when you beat them.

If it was just a small minority of men in my program, I would have agreed with you, but this attitude seemed also prevalent- and I could be wrong about this- in companies and the larger tech world.

One thing I noticed in particular, was that a hell of a lot of "diversity initiatives" (stuff like code camps, scholarships to diversity conferences, etc) set up by companies like Square and Google and nonprofits like Grace Hopper gave their opportunities mostly to minorities who were already very successful, with internships in prestigious companies. If even the programs explicitly meant to increase the percentage of women/minorities in the industry go largely to very experienced people, I thought at the time, then there's really no hope for me at that point.

In any case, none of this is what led to me deciding I didn't want a tech career, it was just a contributing factor. I probably could have pushed through it, but I realized I didn't like tech enough to do so- I liked coding well enough, but I didn't like or value the work most tech companies were doing.

I have to agree that there are a lot of bad programming jobs out there, but there are some really good ones, too--many times in places that aren't obvious. I'm speaking only from my own experience here, but I'm currently working at a big-name company and they pay well but the work is boring as hell and the culture is not to my liking. I've worked at smaller/no-name companies and had a vastly better experience--more diverse work, more opportunities to develop new skills, and a much friendlier culture as well.

If you have any interest in staying in the field--and I hope you do--don't limit your view of potential jobs to just the high-profile companies. Talk to some of the smaller shops around, you might really like what you find.

On your diversity note. I find it amusing, since when I was at collage the diversity push was all for women, so unless you were an exceptional student all of the scholarships went to women. And now it appears to be being pushed to a smaller and smaller subset.

I hope that you've found something you enjoy to go into a career in. I know I studied tech and now work tangentially to it, and sometimes I feel like I made the wrong choice.

I played around with a Franklin PC 8088 when I was a kid for a couple years that we had it. I tried BASIC but never got close to my goal of writing a Tic Tac Toe program. Didn't know how to read input. Didn't even know that the "^" on the "^SAVE" menu item at the bottom meant to hold down CTRL, so my "programs" never survived more than the hour or two I tried (mostly in vain) to get something to work.

No one in my family or peers really knew much about computers and while the Apple IIe at school were much more impressive, that was just playing trivia games and such. Not writing anything ourselves.

It wasn't until I was about 16 that I touched a computer again. Built my own eventually to play DOOM. I didn't know anything "technical" at that point beyond autoexec.bat and... config something. I forget the other one.

It wasn't until I was 21 that I did my first real "programming". Which consisted of reading a book on HTML and being paid $5/hr by my father in law to write some truly bad markup while he did the real work.

I picked up some books on c#, ASP.NET 1.0, MSSQL Server and did my best to absorb what I could. My father-in-law didn't know/work-with most of that (he did help me figure out some SQL basics though) and I didn't have a peer group or support system or anything. About a year later I had a job paying about as well as Home Depot might writing c#.

Almost 20 years later I'm writing Scala and make a good living.

I don't say this as advice exactly. Just saying the "you can't start late" stuff is bullshit. I've often regretted not having access to college so I could answer "write a binary tree on the board" questions. So I didn't feel inadequate in those ways. But it hasn't stopped me getting a job and I'm overall pretty satisfied with my career (well... there was a dark time when I attempted to manage that was pretty cringe worthy) and accomplishments.

I wish I had something more to offer people who think a career in tech is out of their reach because they couldn't afford college, or they started too late. All I really have to offer is this:

Pick up a book. Remember how practically no one actually read a text-book from front to back in grade school? If they had they'd have had a huge advantage right? Pick up a book. Those that say "I learn by doing" will never ever ever be exposed to the same depth or amount of knowledge as you'll get from the condensed, edited brain-on-paper of accomplished authors. Be well read. It's like cheating. And it's cheap. Often even free (Not talking Blogs. Those are mostly only useful for very specific questions/topics; I'm talking about the free Ruby book, or beg for a copy of haskellbook. Or torrent if you must and pay them back for it later).

My 2c.

I guess the idea is to say that, generally speaking, boys will be encourage to tinker with electronics and computers even from an early age without any recrimination. On the other side, girls won't have the same "luxury". Even their toys reflect the kind of life society chooses for them: taking care of babies and taking care of the house.

This isn't to say that your statement isn't true, but I would bet it is just an anecdote.

[edit]grammar and more ideas[/edit]

I think this is the crux of where I started to disagree with her:

> In fact, only 5% of U.S. High schools even offer the Computer Science AP exam in the first place. As a result, many women...

I don't understand why this affects only women. Or more importantly, affects women (and minorities) more than other groups.

There are social stigmas and the like we could examine, but this particular quote as written reads as a non-sequitur to me.

Edit: Just to clarify, I don't want to belittle the very real disparities we are facing in the tech industry. Also worth noting, I thought she was articulate and I appreciated her sources and statistics.

It irks me when I hear that argument too.

People get offended by the idea that "if you find first year COSC courses difficult, then programming is probably not for you" - but in my experience that's completely how it turns out.

All the programmers I know who started at university with no prior experience and went on to happy and successful* have this in common - they found first year COSC courses an absolute breeze, and went way ahead of the coursework in their own time just for the fun of it.

(*includes myself and my sister)

Same here. I didn't even study CS, nor did I own a computer until I was 23.

And this was back before the internet was ubiquitous so if you wanted to program you had to spend real money on books and developer tools. No free/open source resources at your fingertips.

My first real exposure to programming came after I bluffed my way into a temp gig building spreadsheets in Quattro Pro.

Indeed, not all male computer science students have prior exposure to programming[0]. I didn't when I entered college, and I had several male peers who did. That they had that advantage was definitely intimidating. Yet, at the same time they were clearly participants in a hobby and community that I wanted to be a part of, and when I expressed interest they were quite welcoming. I think in large part they were just glad to find other people with whom they could share their passion.

Now, I'm doing quite well as an engineer and I thoroughly enjoy programming.

I have no prescriptions for women; all I'm suggesting is that we do not over-generalize about the experiences that men have in CS.

[0]Well, I did try to teach myself programming a couple different times, but I failed utterly and concluded that I wasn't cut-out for it. If anything that experience put me in a worse starting position. I started out college studying philosophy and literature.

edit: removed formatting issue.

Indeed. The extent of my programming knowledge entering collage was basic HTML/CSS and making and making a form in Visual Basic that swapped the positions of the "Okay" and "Cancel" buttons whenever you moused over one of them.

I knew much less than many of my peers and our school specifically had an introduction to CS class that was geared towards 0 knowledge students. A lot of the CS majors skipped it and went straight to the 2nd class, which I took the following semester.