I've heard this thought expressed a lot, but I have to ask a genuine question: Does anyone here really have any role models that were influential to their interest in the field?

I'm a man, so maybe it is different for women. But I never really had any role models in programming that I looked up to/wanted to emulate. Personally, I was always interested in computers, software, technology for its own sake, and never really paid too much attention to the people behind the scenes. I don't recall any particular person who I saw in programming and thought "I want to be like them", or thought of as a role model.

I suppose this could have happened on a subconscious level, when I was unaware of it. But at least on a conscious level I can't point out any particular individual who I viewed as a role model and inspired me to continue in the field.

Is there anyone else who never had a role-model type relationship with someone? And for those who have experienced it, would you mind sharing a story about a significant role model in programming from your life?

I suspect that having not just role models like yourself, but them also being commonplace can more easily dispel beliefs that your room for growth is limited by gender, ethnicity, etc. Obviously, if your field is already dominated by people like you, this is not a problem that you have to deal with in the first place.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing...

Anecdotally, it had impact on me when I was young. Female detectives in detective stories made the idea of me becoming a cop seem socially acceptable and not a feminist statement. Did not became a cop, but I remember thinking "cool that means me doing that would not be weird" at the time.

With that being said, my mother and father were both engineers. I hedged my bets by studying EE before going pure software. Role models contributed to me signing up for engineering, even if they had different specialities.

As it happens, I 'rediscovered' him on twitter via another hackernews post [1] a while ago, so dropped him a message to say thanks for being an unwitting inspiration :)

[0] This is a relatively simple example, it's hard to find better ones now the site is down - http://web.archive.org/web/20111111050908/https://www.freera...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11691798

I've never had a role model in computing.

This is precisely the reason you would find so many female programmers in south asian and other poor countries.

Its funny to see all the armchair philosophers like Pike come up with some 'Well actually, it's because X' explanations without presenting a single bit of evidence to back it up.

Where exactly? Because frankly, that seems to be highly unlikely.

Poor is obviously relative in this context. Poor relative to western women.

That's probably the wrong question to be asking.

There is a limited supply of people who are interested in technology for its own sake, and prefer computers over people.

In order for software to keep eating everything, the industry needs to attract more and more people who don't care quite that much or even people who DGAF and just want a paycheck.

That means having things that normal people care about (role models, respectability, etc), and not having things they can't stand ("RTFM" culture, socially-incompetent single coworkers, the "nerd" label, etc). Even if those things aren't all that important to us, and only serve to increase the amount of economic competition we face.

What does that even mean, to "prefer computers over people"? I think there are very few people (in tech or any other field) who would prefer to be a hermit and spend all of their time on their interest of choice. You can be interested in technology for its own sake without seeking social isolation. The idea that programmers should be modern day monks that have no families and spend their days programming and in quiet contemplation is completely ridiculous. Sure, there are some lone wolves out there who are successful on their own, but most programmers will have to work/communicate with other programmers, managers, stakeholders, customers, lawyers, and/or domain experts at some point in their lives, and having the social skills to navigate such situations can enable you to create interesting technology.

> That means having things that normal people care about (role models, respectability, etc), and not having things they can't stand ("RTFM" culture, socially-incompetent single coworkers, the "nerd" label, etc). Even if those things aren't all that important to us, and only serve to increase the amount of economic competition we face.

Who is this "us" and "we" you speak of? I have to work with my coworkers, so all other things equal I prefer it when they are socially competent.

I think you are reinforcing a very harmful stereotype, where you have to be a computer-obsessed social pariah to have a successful career in tech. Perhaps you should reflect on those beliefs, and whether they are based on objective facts or perhaps something you tell yourself to avoid feeling inadequate about your interpersonal skills.

I'm not saying they should.

But, I'm sure you've heard the terms "geek syndrome" or "pizza-box coder"? Or the whole nerds vs jocks thing, including the "Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for one." that is usually mis-attributed to a commencement speech that Bill Gates apparently (per Snopes) didn't actually give?

Or the "Unix greybeard" persona, and the big push a few years back to recognize that computer people really don't all look like that?

These things did not come out of nowhere.

Who is this "us" and "we" you speak of? I have to work with my coworkers, so all other things equal I prefer it when they are socially competent.

Yep, same here.

I think you are reinforcing a very harmful stereotype, where you have to be a computer-obsessed social pariah to have a successful career in tech.

No. That used to be a common side-effect or correlate of interest in tech.

I am saying that the people we're trying to attract into the field now (and for the most recent decade or two), are not like the people who voluntarily chose to enter the field in the more distant past.

I am saying that these people are not likely to care about the same incentives.

I am saying that the quantitative change in the field has necessitated a qualitative change in new entrants, which makes "back in my day" a very poor argument for what's appropriate or effective.

Perhaps you should reflect on those beliefs, and whether they are based on objective facts or perhaps something you tell yourself to avoid feeling inadequate about your interpersonal skills.

You mean the beliefs you wrongly claimed I hold, based on your presumption that my claims of what is (or in this case, was) were really just disguised claims of what should be?

And my interpersonal skills are just fine now, thank you. Because I made a point of learning them in my early 20s, after seeing how useful they were to my new coworkers.

When I was younger (before I was into computers) my role models were Albert Einstein, Harry Houdini, and the Wright brothers. This list was very easy to remember, because I did reports on all of them as assignments in elementary school. That basically forced me to pick role models. They're all STEM related except maybe Houdini, but he invented a lot of mechanisms for his tricks.

The answer their brain comes up with to that question is going to play the most important role, even if reason would dictate a different response. This is at the root of the countless biases and heuristics that psychologists go on about (confirmation bias, anchoring heuristic, etc.) How this relates to young women trying decide on a career is obvious.

To share my personal anecdote (I'm male): I graduated college having taken some programming classes but no real drive to be a programmer, nor anything else in particular. A Twitch streamer I watched sometimes called Guardsman Bob occasionally did programming on his stream between video games, and through watching that I grew more and more to realize that that was something that people like me did. Few years later and I am a full-time web developer.

I wouldn't call him a role model (I'm agreeing with you, in other words). But he was integral because watching him affected how I conceived of what a person like me (male, young, video gamer, shut-in) would be doing. Male is only one part of it, but it's undeniably a big part of it. Thus, I agree with those who say we should ensure there are more visible examples of female or minority X programmers-- it will change the lives of people who are like that and make them more likely to follow the path. But I wouldn't say we need more role models, just need to affect the way they think about programming and whether they think it's "the sort of thing I would do."

How does this require a story? For me it's as simple as reading about the exploits of people like Gary Starkweather, John Carmack, Steve Wozniak, or whoever and thinking "I want to do stuff like that." And yeah, if none of those role models were guys, I'm sure I would have been affected by that.

So to take your list of people for example, someone like John Carmack. What I was looking for was what specific exploits were you talking about and why they were so inspirational to you. Maybe it was his work creating the Doom and Quake games, or his bootstrap work building id software from scratch, or his contributions to free software by releasing his engines under gpl, or his quakeworld talks, or his work with rocketry, or his new work with VR, or his general overall attitude about life, programming and everything.

I mean there had to be something special about him for you to want to be like him, and that seems like something that would be worth telling a little story about.

We might have a disagreement about the meaning of "role model," which is fine. I don't really think that's the point at all...

Edit: Thomas's "cognitively available success cases" seems like a good one to me

Yes.

Rob's entire piece is about how a group of women in a highly technical field were influenced by role models. And we're still denying these women's responses?

I have just seen this concept of a role model bandied about before, and that is something that I have never experienced in my own life in computing. In the article, Rob mentions how in the field of astronomy, the women he has talked to consider role models to be important. But he never mentions any people he would consider role models to himself in computing.

So I was just curious if anyone else here had any role models in computing (man or woman), and if so would they mind sharing a little anecdote about that experience. I've often heard talk of the importance of role models, and I felt like I was kind of "missing out" for not having one. So I thought, how about I start a little side discussion on the role that role models in computing had had on others lives and careers on here.

I am NOT trying to imply any of these things: "Women shouldn't need role models because I didn't have one" "Role models are unimportant" "Women should accept men as role models" "Women are liars"

or any other such derogatory statements.

More current role models would include Jess Frazelle, Julia Evans, Sara Chipps, who are all incredibly brilliant, influential, successful people who have achieved really amazing things and I hope will continue in the field and be role models of a future generation.

To me, role model is not just some particular person to follow. If you see that some group of people are common to show some particular behavior and is successful as a result, it gives you a clear signal that 1) you can do the same since you belong to that group 2) this pattern is a proven path to success. Done! No particular person, but a very strong and potentially life changing role model, that many people don't even realize influenced their life path and desisions.

0% of, say, women in some field is a negative role model, because if you are a woman and never seen successful women in this profession, why on earth should you start thinking that it is a great or feasible path? People stick to what is normal around, all their context is a role model of what is likely possible and what is not.

Why the rush to assume malice?

Most discrimination is not malicious. It's a whole bunch of small acts of apathy.

I have to wonder if the chasing away is not to their benefit. Perhaps the ugly is not just a ... social artifact but more of a reflection of the nature of the course of study.

Two things spring to mind:

- the curious economics of program-correctness. ( people quickly abandon all hope and despair - the "fixes" are all very tedious )

This one's weird - I hope I do not try your patience with it...

- the observation that is made by Adam Curtis in "All Cared For" that what we now call the "environmental movement" could be an artifact of computing. The mindset that there is a knowable and optimum equilibrium for complex systems is something I find increasingly puzzling. It just seems to be a bootstrap; I can't really come up with an ...epistemology of it that isn't circular. People 100 years ago just didn't care; they do now; there was propaganda; it's a thing now that used to not be.

Now suppose that there are other, irrational "optima" that people in our field become obsessed with.

Finally, I believe that prior to the 1990s, people used things like punch cards and other madness to filter participants. After 1990, the unemployment rate of GenX led to the abuse of computing to find those kids something to do. That, I think, led to the "alpha geek" phenomenon as it is now - we had "alpha geeks" before but they seemed nicer, somehow. Or something.

I'm increasingly attributing thready employment to Fed policy, as per Dean Baker, and Scott Sumner. That's not a main stream view...

I would submit that the tech industry is definitely moving backwards. Whether this is all part of it is a hard question.

There's a split in environmentalism between the "deep green" who want nature to be left alone and tend to have a spiritualist approach, versus the "bright green" technocratic management of ecosystems. But the deep greens definitely came first, starting with opposition to nuclear testing, the dumping of nuclear waste at sea, whaling, pollution of rivers and acid rain, and the effects of pesticides (Silent Spring was published in 1962)

I am not doing Curtis' thesis justice; you'd have to see the ( freely available, SFAIK ) film. He doesn't just paint environmentalism with this brush. I found the idea bracing; I saw myself in it.

For the curious: "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace"

Economics is one of the last sciences that sadly cling to that notion.

BTW, are geek and nerd synonyms now?

Men also have a similar shape curve, just with everything bigger.

It's most useful is to look at the fraction that are women. That rose steadily until about 1985, reaching about 38%, then over the next four years fell to just under 30%. It then was pretty flat until about 2002, then over the next four years fell to about 20% and then flattened again.

That suggests that something happened in a couple specific relatively short timeframes that changed the chances that a women would go into CS or stay in CS.

There are some nice charts here: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2474991/it-careers/wome...

They drop out partly because, inconvenient though it is to admit this, they tend to get discouraged more easily. There are stats showing that women stop searching for software jobs after X rejections, men after Y (on average), and that Y > X. Google found that women were getting promoted less than men simply because they weren't putting themselves forward for promotion as often. That pattern crops up again and again - women hold back when they could push forward.

The subject of insecurity does come up:

> Throughout college, men and women succeeded equally in the classroom. However, we observed that women started to doubt their problem-solving abilities more than men. [...skipping long illustrating quote]. Women were also much more likely to look to others—teaching assistants, professors, and advisors—to affirm, and reaffirm, their confidence. Men did talk about doubting themselves, but they did not necessarily seek reassurance from others. We found that this search for positive cues carried over into expectations for feedback from supervisors in internships and jobs."

However, it is not at all the only phenomenon at play. More discouraging is the gendered treatment they receive from professors and, more importantly, colleagues.

> For many women engineering students, however, their first encounter with collaboration is to be treated in gender stereotypical ways, mostly by their peers. While some initially described working in teams positively, many more reported negative experiences. When working with male classmates, for example, they often spoke of being relegated to doing routine managerial and secretarial jobs, and of being excluded from the “real” engineering work. Kimberly wrote, “Two girls in a group had been working on the robot we were building in that class for hours, and the guys in their group came back in and within minutes had sentenced them to doing menial tasks while the guys went and had all the fun in the machine shop.”

> There were also descriptions of being treated differently by professors. Rachel described when her team (the only all-girl team) won second place in a design competition: “Our professor wanted to get a picture of our prototype and us. We picked up our prototype and were all smiling and looking all professional; then he said: ‘You guys look like professional catalog models; this picture could go in a catalog and you could sell big time.’”

> Men, on the other hand, described mandatory group design projects as exciting turning points, where theory and practice come together. “I made a pretty big stroke of progress last week,” one student wrote in his semi-monthly diary, “I ended up proving the professor wrong on something she had done last year, which actually helped us find better results (well, also more correct results)… It’s really a blast working on something like that.”

Anyway, there are more quotes available, if you want to look at it yourself.

Note also that there is one other factor they address that isn't related to sexism in the field (but perhaps to broader sexist acculturation in society) - women are more likely to want to work somewhere that is "contributing to society". Part of what's going on here is that it's not considered quite as socially acceptable for women to be ambitious for ambition's sake, at least not in the way that it is for men. But I don't think that's something that the engineering culture enforces, I think that's something that's internalized.

So some women felt like they got assigned sucky roles in group projects. But so what? Men get assigned sucky roles in group projects too. Every group project has that problem: some roles will be perceived as more desirable than others. There was an assumption there that the girls "sentenced" (gosh, what emotive language) to some other role simply because they were girls, and not because they were simply less pushy personalities in general. But no evidence is provided either way - they never asked the men why they did that, or if they even perceived the women as upset. Maybe an assertive woman would have steamrollered shy men in the group, I've seen that happen. Sexism is asserted as the cause and, as is always the case, that lazy assumption passes unchallenged.

In another case, the women were complimented on their appearance by a man, something that happens in every work environment and every job around the world. This is related to gender ratios in programming specifically, how?

The last quote - I'm not even sure how that's related to sexism. It appears to show a man enjoying the studies.

I guess if women perceive things like the internet as not "contributing to society" that would be one of the non-sexism related problems women cause themselves. OK, sure, if they believe that, that'd explain some of the gender disparity, but again - so what? Lots of men believe the opposite. If true, it's a self-imposed handicap that women can discard anytime they like. Besides, I'd much rather work with people who believe their work has a higher purpose than people who are simply ambitious!

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

A good NPR story on this topic : http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/07/22/487069271/episo...

TL;DR: It was the rise of the personal computer. Boys got more access to personal computers thereby allowing them to get farther in the field.

>"Because if you're in a culture that is so infused with this belief that men are just better at this and they fit in better, a lot can shake your confidence." (Margolis, ibid) //

Hang on though, the main premise of the piece was that women were most dominant in the field and excelled [beyond the men?].

From personal experience I don't buy the narrative of computers being chosen to be "boys toys" as a move to exclude women, instead it strikes me boys chose computers, instead say of other things - like a social life. But that's maybe because the [apparent] anecdata they have contradicts my own experience, that my mother bought our computer, that it was in a common room and that my sister completely ignored it. At primary school (UK, 1980s) all the kids were given equal time on the BBC microcomputer during lessons, but it was primarily the boys who chose to stay in at break times and after school to use it. At high-school I was inspired by our IT teacher [female] as were others but AFAIR 90% of those staying to use the computers outside directed lessons were still boys.

That link actual goes as far as promoting the idea that boys were given computers and girls were physically restrained from accessing them [based on an anecdote]; to me that sounds like a misconstrual of the situation where boys asked for computers as gifts and so had them in their bedrooms - I can only assume that happened for some girls too.

If I'm wrong then nonetheless I don't think you can argue any similar narrative now, for the Western working and middle classes at least - if you have access to a smart-phone or a school/library computer you have all you need to excel at computer science; that surely eliminates any element of exclusion by sex from the field.

[+] In this connected digital world where no-one knows online if you're even human [woof!] the premise of male suppression in the proposed narrative would be defeated and a massive up-tick would be expected, but instead the graph shows a fall [in percentages] as the web has grown.

In short I don't buy that the ratio of the sexes in computing and tech is skewed by a global male conspiracy to suppress women as a realistic explanation.

[Aside, do you know of the study that they refer to in your citation, the results and anecdotes are mentioned but without citation?]

tl;dr see [+]

Obviously, there could be a number of different reasons why a field could be unfairly skewed against women, many of which require very little intentionality.

The profession does not conduct exit interviews, but fortunately every few weeks someone will write a blog post on why they (a women) left computer science. These articles may be posted to HN, where they often get a skeptical to hostile reception.

Harrasment is the big one in the news (Uber passim), but there are all sorts of lessor problems which result in women's contributions being ignored or misattributed to men who are louder.

(Astronomy is not immune to this problem, even if it might be better: http://www.nature.com/news/astronomy-roiled-again-by-sexual-... )

For sure men are unhappy with their companies. Otherwise nobody would ever switch jobs.

Also it should be considered that women have more career options than men. Since they spread out over more professions (including fulltime mum), it is to be expected that they are not 50% of people in all professions.

All you have to do is look at incoming CS major undergrads vs finished degree CS undergrads, or you can look at any statistic at all along a women's career.

Women are leaving in droves. We do not have a pipeline problem. We do not need to get more women in kindergarden interested in math.

We have a toxic pipeline problem, when women are driven out of the industry.

Why? What's the (supposed) benefit?

I'd rather see general improvement on math lessons in school. Most of these lessons are boring, given by boring teacher. I'd be happy if people went out of school simply not hating math (they don't have to like) it. I find this to be much worthwile instead of pushing girls into math even though they might not be inherently interested in it.

The problems in STEM (and science in general) won't be solved by quantity but by quality. (They definitely won't be solved by gender.)

TLDR: Stop focusing on Kindergarden. Focus on the women who have already spent years of their life in tech, and are being driven out. Help these women, by fixing tech culture, so they are not driven out.

"the problems in STEM (and science in general) won't be solved by quantity but by quality. "

I agree. Quality. We need to stop driving the quality, talented women out of the industry.

As I've asserted a few comments over, there's an ample body of detailed, firsthand observation available to men who are sincerely interested in the problem. It's also possible for us to talk to women who work in the field and listen as they describe their experiences. The existing gender imbalance, routine discrimination in hiring and promotion, rampant harassment, and profoundly toxic social dynamics are all recurring themes.

I don't seem to meet a lot of women who feel that there is a dearth of evidence about any of this.

Meanwhile: This embarrassing trainwreck of a thread, ad infinitum.

When men and boys try to describe experiences—such as watching every girl in their high school computer science class receive amazing internships before any of the boys, regardless of their skill level—they're shamed and ridiculed. They certainly aren't given platforms by influential journalists and CEOs.

We can't give much weight to "experiences" while there are such uneven power dynamics in place regarding sharing them.

I virtually never downvote on this site, but I did in your case because you're simply trying to make an entire area of discussion taboo, by writing off any views you disagree with as "embarrassing" and a "trainwreck". This is the school of thought that gave the world Trump; telling people their own experiences are wrong and that if they disagree they're just horrible people.

My experience of tech hiring, as someone who has been a tech interviewer hundreds of times, is that discrimination in favour of women is rampant. Invariably recruiters and HR would claim it wasn't illegal as the final decision was unbiased, and there was certainly a lot of truth to that, but they did everything they could to give women a push along the way. Scheduling the most experienced interviewers to women (so reducing the chance of hiring mistakes), systematically allowing women onto the next interview stage even if they failed the previous stages, setting up massive scholarship programmes closed to boys etc. And of course the difficulty in firing women.

I don't need to listen to women to know about these things - I've seen it with my own eyes. It's driven by attitudes like Rob Pike's and eventually it hurts both men and women.

And yet: I don't have the sense that I'm going to get anywhere by acknowledging the problematics of the thing. There's just too much committed misogyny embedded in this community as a whole. It feels like a safe bet that "I don't need to listen to women" may as well be the entirety of this particular comment, and many of the others in this thread.

I've been feeling conflicted about participating in comment threads on HN. This one is enough to convince me that I should stop investing the energy.

In your case, you chopped off half my sentence which modified the meaning to make me fit your preconceived expectations, and then wrote off the rest of my comment. I might suggest that if that's your approach to debate, committing the energy is indeed worthless. You'll never understand the people who disagree with you like that, so why bother trying? Go back to believing anyone who isn't a feminist is a misogynist, it's wrong but at least it's easily packaged.

At GCSE level (roughly aged 15/16) there's an equal split across STEM subjects. For A levels, there's more men than women in every STEM subject bar biology, and women achieve higher grades on average.

At university level, men dominate in most of the subjects (engineering is 86% male and CS is 83% male). The problem stems far deeper than the workplace, and is definitely present in Educatikn.

[0] https://www.wisecampaign.org.uk/uploads/wise/files/WISE_UK_S...

It's not 'better' if some people are more interested in one field vs. others.

You have to ignore biology to take your position of certainty. It's delutional. There's no certainty, even with something which is true.

Most people prefer to hold on to an ideology or what sounds nice rather than taking ideas to their conclusion. All the long words you can muster don't save you from philosophical suicide.

Why take the time to learn biases & logic if you're going to be an intellectual coward?

Second, you're still just avoiding the question. The idea that there is an intrinsic gender difference driving gender disparity in tech has a huge hurdle to clear, which is that the same disparity does not exist in other STEM fields. Even the STEM fields that have gender parity problems don't have it as bad as CS does.

In order to compose a persuasive argument that gender disparity is due simply to benign preference that is intrinsic to the field of technology, you have to identify attributes of technology that serve as evidence for those preferences. None have been provided anywhere on this thread, just the vague idea that women don't like computers but do like actuarial science, molecular biology, and abstract algebra.

It explains your position. Being meta isn't name-calling. Or if it is it's on the same level of Nietzsche saying philosophers derive philosophy from who they are.

2) You've listed three such subjects yourself: CS, engineering, physics. Not such a high hurdle when there are multiple elements in the set. Which you left out. Strawman. Or is it OK to be dishonest in your arguments, and then claim I have a lack of rigour?

> you have to identify attributes of technology that serve as evidence for those preferences

No I don't.

I can say males & females have preferences for different activities, therefore it's plausible that they have a preference for one job over another.

I could point to Sweden and say a country with the least inequality has the largest differences in occupation.

There's no way to be more definitive without additional information. Thus, my position is, it's unclear what's creating the differences in a number of fields. It could be biological, or it could be systematic discrimination (which is falsified somewhat by Sweden). So, I lean towards biological differences.

I understand your position as:

There are no preference differences in most 'high-status' jobs, therefore there are no preference differences universally.

That doesn't jive with Sweden. And isn't self-evident.

You demand proof that a number of fields are different in a way which is unattractive to women. How about you supply proof that they're the same?!

"Computers are different from all the rest of science. That's why there's so few women in the field."

How are computers different from the rest of science?

"They just are!"

That's not an argument.

"You're a dishonest jerk!"

I think I understand where you're coming from now.

I'm genuinely interested in integrating ideas. It may get rough. But that's the war of ideas.

I've laid out my logic. If you don't understand any of it, I can expand. If you're unwilling to understand it, that's on you.

You've addressed none of my points. And made no attempt to rephrase my actual position.

If you don't like me saying you are dishonest in your arguments don't be dishonest in your arguments—or explain how you weren't being dishonest.

> I think I understand where you're coming from now.

Do you? I want to critique your arguments, your epistemology, and the way you argue.

You've tried to make it look like I'm making untenable claims, can't justify what I've said, and then an insult for a cherry on top.

Critique what I've said, not some strawman dialogue.

All that one really needs to do to understand why the field is unwelcoming to women is to start listening to women.

I imagine that is part of it.

Trivialization of women's issues is a different monster.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1soIYek-YEIvqtu9brv3ecdPb...

Which makes sense to me.

As status has risen, it's become more status-ey. Surprise!