Stop trying to make them feel like something is wrong if they don't have this inclination. Males and females have different preferences on average, some as early as birth[1]. This is not a bad thing.
For the ones that want to program all day, obviously they should be welcomed and any company that doesn't is doing themselves a huge disservice. In fact the best programmer I've ever worked with is a woman.
1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222673203_Sex_Diffe...
My girl child likes trucks, not Frozen, and the pressure from other adults to get her to conform and play with Disney-branded dolls is non-trivial and unrelenting. Ugh.
That's true. But if you ask 1000 men and 1000 women if they want to program all day, you'll get a much higher % of men.
> My girl child likes trucks, not Frozen, and the pressure from other adults to get her to conform and play with Disney-branded dolls is non-trivial and unrelenting. Ugh.
I largely agree, Disney is overwhelming. Though no one has pressured or tried to make my daughter conform, other adults do mostly buy her girl typical things. Her cars, trains, dinosaurs, legos and the like mostly came from us (didn't buy any dolls, she got those from others). She likes trucks and Frozen. But mostly Paw Patrol. It's amazing, everything else is a distant 2nd to those pups!
Throw them out, seriously. I did when they got to be too large a portion of the toys.
He also had a daughter. Similar age. He was not doing the same for her.
Perhaps these children had such a strong idea of what they wanted at a very very early age and the father was responding to that. But I find it more likely that the father held an implicit bias about what jobs his son and daughter should have and was providing support to push his son into tech.
When these two people graduate college and the son becomes a software engineer and the daughter doesn't it will be their choice. But it is not clear to me that it wasn't sexism that produced the circumstances for that choice.
I feel like this is a “??? Profit!” argument. Accepting that girl infants prefer faces and boy infants prefer trucks—what does that have to do with programming? Even within the context of traditional stereotypes about male/female preferences, what makes programming a “male” thing? The analogy that programmers “build things” is just that—your typical programmer is certainly not cut out to be a construction worker.
Building things is not just construction though. I mean, your average clock maker is not qualified to plumb a bathroom, but that doesn't mean he's not making things.
I don't have an opinion on this, but the idea that programmers aren't building something is a bit silly.
Construction worker may do even less engineering design work than garment-makers do.
Programming jobs often involve extremely minimal face to face interactions
Deep contemplation of technical problems while staring at a screen and talking to computers for hours on end often made talking to people after work exceedingly difficult
And some of us like it that way.
Also, if programming is solitary as you suggest, why do tech companies discourage remote work and insist on culture fit, team building, collaborative work spaces, etc.? Much more so than law firms.
I've heard the argument that somehow "actual coding is a relatively small part of being a software engineer," but unless you're a manager (of which there are many more women), the thing you're being trained for, the thing you spend most of your time doing, and the basis of how people perceive the profession, is sitting in front of a computer coding. You can describe any profession as people-oriented on the basis that one needs to work with others, but the key question is whether the basic activity of the job is a social one.
Regardless of whether the people-vs-thing distinction is significant or not, it seems inaccurate in a big-picture way to describe programming as people-oriented. Like, that's not what people mean when they draw that distinction.
[1]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/taking-...
I don't even know if the data is ready for us to draw any conclusions, but at the very least it seems to me we should find this to be an extremely interesting pattern, and use it to motivate hypotheses.
Sure, but it seems more than a little convenient that the male-chosen professions seem to generally pay significantly more, on average, than the female-chosen ones. Haven't there been studies that showed that women moving into a profession was actually associated with pay dropping?
Programmers are paid relatively well because
1. Software is "eating the world", so a lot of software is being written leading to demand for programmers. 2. Programming scales really well. Software has zero reproduction cost and can reach a global audience almost instantaneously. So software companies can make a lot of money with relatively few employees.
What would be the mechanism for pay dropping when women enter a profession?
Some global masterminds reducing pay across multiple corporations across the board when they find out women are being hired in that industry?
Maybe it's just a matter of a sudden increase of supply of workers as women enter a field to meet the existing demand, driving wages down?
Is it because the women are being paid less, while the men are being paid the same as before?
No coordination is necessary. People will simply start to view the role as less valuable or skilled due to more women being in it.
Men hit the extremes more often and as a result occupy more of the outlier positions. They're also over represented at the bottom of the ladder. i.e., the homeless and prison populations. But I don't see anyone claiming it's a conspiracy that men over represent this end of the spectrum.
It’s not a coincidence at all. Men place a higher priority on pay to the exclusion of all else, when choosing a career, than do women. Women are much more likely to choose careers with flexible working hours, benefits, and the potential to help other people (positive externalities).
When you look at it this way, it makes more sense that you’ll find men occupying all these different high paying positions. It makes a lot less sense that every employer deliberately pays less for women-dominated positions just because there are women there.
Because, on average, men are given a lot less social pressure to "be there", they can more often take high-pressure jobs. Then the high pressure becomes a status symbol, and a gate to keep people with higher social obligations out.
As this phenomenon also causes a ton of burnout and is a cause for men's shorter lifespans, the whole thing needs to be actively taken down.
And as for high-powered careers being a status symbol, I would offer that a man's socioeconomic status is a major component in attraction for women. The reverse is true to far less of an extent. The stats on dating apps bear this out.
Isn't there a study that said women ask for pay raises at the same rate as men, but they are granted them less often?
> In four studies, Bowles and collaborators from Carnegie Mellon found that people penalized women who initiated negotiations for higher compensation more than they did men. The effect held whether they saw the negotiation on video or read about it on paper, whether they viewed it from a disinterested third-party perspective or imagined themselves as senior managers in a corporation evaluating an internal candidate. Even women penalized the women who initiated the conversation, though they also penalized the men who did so. They just didn’t seem to like seeing someone ask for more money.
Some things can only really be tested in artificial environments.
What exactly do you think will be tested in that artificial environment when the environment itself (with what I'd hazard to guess quite a list of specifics, many of the "subtle and implicit, but influential" kind) is a central variable of the test?
If an observational study of this kind is deemed hard/improbable/impossible to set up - how hard do you think it is to get the artificial setup right? To account for - or even identify - all variables and preconditions? This is so easy to mess up and end up with basically meaningless data. (Yeah, I know - that doesn't mean it won't be published. Everybody raise your hands and shout "Replication Crisis"! :) )
1. More people (women in this case) enter the profession.
2. Due to increased labor supply, pay starts to drop.
3. Men, placing a relatively higher priority on high pay, begin to avoid the profession.
That last point is sort of interesting. Men are strongly associated with their careers and level of pay. This is most of their status. It has a tremendous impact in the dating market. It is a key factor in the likelihood of divorce. Men follow the money; they don't get randomly assigned careers and they don't just follow their dreams. Men strongly seek the status of a high-paid job. To marry and start a family, that job is almost required. Women have no such trouble, so they don't need to prioritize earnings. Women can pick careers they actually enjoy.
While this is plausible, the data on this isn't consistent. In fact, some professions that saw a large influx of women also saw wage increases. There are many variables at play.
They don't. Most men have to work in order to earn money and attract a partner. You think all of us love sitting in open offices, following our Scrum Master? Of course not, we just don't have the luxury, as do women, to follow our 'passions' in lower paying jobs. We can't marry a breadwinner too easily. We don't receive subsidies from the state, unlike women who are a net tax loss. We aren't able to attract a mate simply by being young, as can women, due to biological differences between genders.
In Scandinavia, where salaries are progressively taxed and women have tons of opportunity to do what they want, women still choose not to sit in front of computers all day. Why the hell would they if everyone's salary is essentially equalized, regardless of whether you're a part-time teacher, social worker or a talented computer engineer working 60/hours a week. All salaries are taxed down to a median $75K / year, with the same health insurance, subsidized parental leave, etc.
Thus, Scandinavian women follow their 'passions' which is what most Western women do, as we see from their choices in college majors, all of which are unarguably 'easier' but pay less. If society were to equalize my salary at $75K year whether I coded all day or worked for a charity or NGO or a music teacher or artist or actor, I'd dump my programming job as fast as I could.
Look at India or China where far more women are into computers - they don't have the luxury of following their passion in dance or writing, because they don't have as much PRIVILEGE in their societies as do women in the West.
* http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students...
Source for this? I've never heard this claim before and on the surface it makes no sense. I'm a woman and I don't get any kind of special tax exemptions for it...
The tax revenue point can be proven by the same 'wage gap' arguments which are true in the sense that men work more and are paid higher, in aggregate, so pay more income taxes.
Second idea is that most federal and state benefits that are direct subsidies go to women: TANF, WIC, SNAP, Section 8, etc. Most people (i.e. women) who receive these benefits have children.
The biggest difference, can't remember where I saw it, is as our population shifts towards a higher median age, health care (and social security and other things like government pensions) become a larger share of net pay outs. Women live longer and spend more on health care.d.
But responding to your own question, no I don't think there are any special exemptions for working women, though it is creeping into US law in many states and soon Federally. Expenses like parental leave will be paid for by all taxpayers but be distributed mostly to women.
Obviously, some of these discrepancies are due to child care being a non-paid job, but it isn't the only difference.
I think this though itself is an artefact of a male dominated profession. The fact that working with software is "programming a computer all day" reflects a male preference and value system, and many people open acknowledge that it's quite harmful and often creates quite dysfunctional teams. We need better requirements, better communication, better documentation, more human approach to the whole process. I've talked to great women working in software development who say "I don't really care about the programming itself and I would never go home and do it for fun - but I love the other aspects of the job". Perhaps the nature of the job itself needs to change a bit for the preferences to adjust.
Isn't there a place for people good at thinking deeply about difficult problems on their own and coming up with effective solutions?
Yes, everyone needs to be able to communicate well to be part of an effective team. But there is also a role for deep thinking and introspection.
By the way, introverted women exist, too.
You can't possibly think that this is what the person you are replying to is saying. But anyway, the point is that the conception of programming as a task suited to people who like to work in isolation is incorrect and harmful. One of the most common pitfalls of software development is writing software that no-one wants or needs. The solution to that problem lies in better communication. Of course, there are some kinds of programming problems that are suited to intense work in isolation. But most programmers probably need to spend more time talking to their non-programmer colleagues.
I do think that.
I think programming selects for people high in introversion and maybe even on the autistic spectrum.
I think some extroverted people find those people deficient and don't like working with them, and would like to change the working environment to be less comfortable for the introverts and more comfortable for the extroverts.
If you're employed as a programmer, you're most likely being paid to solve other people's problems by writing code. If you can't communicate with those people, you'll never be able to do that successfully.
It's no conspiracy. A socially clueless introvert who's being paid a lot of money to do nothing useful doesn't have much to offer.
There are also a lot of tasks where thinking deeply without distractions or interruptions for an extended period of time is the best way to come up with good solutions.
And even a lot of the best communication comes from taking time in quiet and deeply thinking about what you want to say and writing a good, convincing argument.
Thinking introverts have nothing productive to offer is just bigotry, and really makes you come across as a complete ass.
???
I don't say that they're deficient as people, or that working in isolation is bad per se. I'm just saying that people who like to work in isolation are unlikely to make good programmers (in the context of a typical programming job).
Personally, I switched to programming from academia, where I really did work in isolation on challenging problems. Now I spend most of my time talking to my colleagues to figure out exactly which not very challenging problem I should be spending my limited time on solving.
Now it makes sense.
I'm sure you're right.
Why is it that two professions that you'd naively expect to be just as sexist, if not far more sexist than STEM (Higher status, more of an "old boys club", established hierarchy that has positions like nurses for women, etc) have achieved gender parity, while STEM hasn't?
That’s the result of decades of work, which started with affirmative efforts by law schools to achieve gender parity at the beginning of the pipeline. (Those efforts proved self sustaining. Once women didn’t have to swim upstream to choose law school—facing years of being in a small minority at the outset of their careers—efforts to recruit them specifically became unnecessary.) There is a ways to go yet before we hit parity, but I feel like in STEM folks are still litigating the issue of whether numeric parity should even be the goal. That question was settled in the legal field a long time ago.
I think most tech companies would go into a full-blown panic if you imposed a quota of non-asians (who are something like 5% of the U.S. population) for technical positions.
But did they have this back in the 60's and 70's when representation started going up? What caused it back then, that didn't apply to engineering?
Be specific, because this could mean different things. Were the genders balanced because the applicant pool itself had become balanced, or because law schools started enforcing balance in admission, or a mix of both?
> In the 1970s and 1980s there was a series of lawsuits as a result of which law firms began to hire gender balanced classes of entry level lawyers
And what were the graduate pools like at the time, re: gender balance? Do you have sources that talk about these points, because it sounds interesting.
Part of the issue for tech companies is that there are fewer women with CS degrees, something they don't directly control, and have only modest at best influence over. And then at the university level, they've had issues getting more women to sign up, though I understand some schools have had more success than others.
What I said was that recent progress is the result of work that started decades ago. Harvard law graduated its first women in 1953. But back then top women law graduates were still getting offers to be secretaries. (Justice Ginsberg’s story was not at all atypical for her cohort.) That, along with the prospect of joining a 90%+ male class in and of itself dissuaded women from pursing law. Law schools fixed that by making 50-50 classes an express goal, and then achieving that goal. Then law firms made 50-50 classes of incoming associates an express goal, and achieved that goal. Gender parity was achieved not simply by accepting women to law schools, but by actively seeking to admit gender balanced classes. But once that happened, the new ratio became self-perpetuating. When being a woman lawyer no longer meant being part of a tiny minority in law school, a firm, etc., women self-selected into it when previously they had opted out.
I strongly suspect the same factors are in play in STEM: women who would be good programmers self-select out of the field because they don’t want to be the 1-2 women in a class of 20 men, or the 1-2 women programmers on a team of 20 men.
Wait, what? Is this an argument that men are inherently unsuited to be Supreme Court Justices?
My guess is this means having 9 women on the Supreme Court is to make up for all the years there were 9 men on the Supreme Court.
I find this dangerous logic. Seeking to alternate oppression of one group versus another doesn't seem like a good long term solution, in my opinion.
By the way, thanks for your analysis about the progression of gender equality in the legal profession. That's something I didn't know about.
> Wait, what? Is this an argument that men are inherently unsuited to be Supreme Court Justices?
It just means that if gender is not considered, we should see an all women's court once every 2^9 = 512 time.
If the number never goes above the mean, gender must still be a factor.
I took that to mean "just as it was unremarkable in the very recent past for the SC to be 100% male, it should be unremarkable if in the future it became 100% female (on merit)".
I do remember in my first CS class: about 70% of the men, and all but one or two women dropped the week after pointers were introduced.
There's this hypothesis that men statistically tend to pick jobs involving working with and treating patients as things, and women tend to pick jobs involving people and socializing. Medicine as a field is full of high-status jobs of both kind, so - under this hypothesis - gender parity of the overarching field is entirely unsurprising. And, as predicted, individual specializations tend to show strong gender skew.
Law is also a very large field, so I suspect the profession probably shows a similar dynamic.
Viewed through this lens, our industry is less like "medicine", and more like "radiology". And I suspect - but didn't check - that if you expand the definition of "software" to include supporting fields like design, UX and testing, the overall gender ratio will be much closer to 1:1.
Could also look at careers like "developer evangelist" and "solutions engineer", both of which are technical but much more people-oriented than being a regular software engineer.
The evangelists also have to deal with not just the environment at Microsoft, but also the partners we were helping architect solutions for. On more than one occasion I know women had problems delivering solutions to a partner because that partner had blatantly sexist stakeholders who would constantly try to question or circumvent them in ways that didn't happen for men. One of the college hires I was mentoring was the point person on a project, yet every single question was sent my way and I had to keep redirecting them to the woman who was perfectly capable of answering the question and was actually in charge of the account.
So yes, there were a lot more face to face interactions, but the women still didn't stick around for these roles. Some had much better experiences actually writing code on the product teams. Some moved into project management or research.
Data to support this hypothesis here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge...
ObGyns are 85% female, Pediatrics 75%, while radiology is 72% male and anesthesiology 63%.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
Even straight white men hate medicine and can't leave because of debt... so it's not a great comparison.
Googling around seems that it's contentious, and that a lot of people consider nurses, physicians etc to be STEM careers under the 'science' heading. But this doesn't seem all that core to me. (And you have to draw the line somewhere - are psychiatrists STEM? How about psychologists?)
Many people who go on to go to medical school will major in a STEM subject in undergrad (like biology or something)
This is a US-centric view - most people do in fact study medicine right out of school. It is interesting though that the definition of what constitutes a field vary quite greaty around the globe.
The M is not for Medicine
Actually, I am unsure how country specific this is and where to put medicine with respect to hard sciences, soft sciences, social sciences etc.
It is kind of hilarious how different this works in a lot of countries. For example in German, the translation of science is 'Wissenschaft'. It would literally translate to "the thing you do to make knowledge". Humanities are called 'Geistes'wissenschaft and Law is called 'Rechts'wissenschaft'. Math is generally considered to be part of the humanities, and CS is usually either part of the math-department or very closely settled to the engineering department.
There's many more differences between the german and anglo academic culture, let alone all the other ones out there.
Hm, not always. In my experience it was a B.Sc., M. Sc. and Dr. rer. nat. and in the math-nat department, but it can also be associated with philosophy and of course there is no scientific method in math.
For medicine you also have the (again country specific?) question whether a medical doctorate is comparable to a hard science one, e.g. for the purpose of grants in medical research.
Just because there are other skills needed besides science based ones doesn't mean it isn't a science field.
People differ in whether they think medicine and the other applied sciences fall under the 'science' umbrella or not. Try searching around and you'll see a lot of mixed opinions on the subject.
How can anyone get a qualifying score on the MCAT without significant exposure to science?
Disclaimer: I'm definitely coming at this from a U.S. point of view which someone mentioned in another comment effectively (not always but definitely in the overwhelming majority of cases) requires STEM undergrad degrees to get into medicine.
So people tend to disagree about where to put medicine. But overall, most major public institutions in the US don't include medicine in STEM:
* US Department of Labor (Bureau of Labor Statistics) -- No. (https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2007/spring/art04.pdf)
* US Department of Commerce (Economics and Statistics Administration) -- No. (https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED522129.pdf)
* NSF -- No. "The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering."
Medicine-aligned subjects do a lot to improve the gender ratio, if one wants to improve the gender equality figures...
This would be an amazing survey. I look forward to its publishing. I wouldn't be surprised if someone is doing it as we speak. It shouldn't be too hard or cost that much.
Though, I do have to say, your sample of one is not sufficiently convincing to me.
> women in America are "organically" picking non-STEM jobs, but that is because the jobs suck, the environments suck and people are assholes at these jobs
Very general assessment without any supporting evidence.
Your sister is not sufficient evidence to make this kind of assessment. Neither is "Ask Women".
By the way, I will be very surprised to hear women in general are treated better in India than in America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_inequality_in_India
Preferential treatment (positive discrimination) in hard science not only makes the mistake of treating women as handicapped (they're surely not), but also makes the situation worse by skewing meritocracy.
This sort of job for women is basically a continuation of the days when women were human computers, hired to do loads of calculations for mathematicians and scientists. The fact that women took these jobs has more to do with their limited opportunities elsewhere than anything else.
First of all, the peak of women's representation in computing was ~35% - not all that much different from today's 20-25%. Second, even if we accept that social changes are what prompted the change in women's representation (and I would agree) it is erroneous to assume that this was due to exclusionary culture in technology. In fact, the data suggests the opposite - reductions in sexism result in reductions in the share of women in tech.
This is likely what played out in the united states. Women were displayed into computing due to sexism in other fields. Several of the women interviewed in Clive Thompson's book Coders, explained that they chose to study computer science because law firms told them explicitly that they would not let women be trial lawyers. The reduction in the share of women in computing was due to the opening of opportunities in other fields like law and medicine, which in turn meant that women who would have been displaced into computing now have the opportunity to study the field of their choice.
I am going to take your point about a reduction in sexism in other fields at face value since it seems you are more read up on that than I am. I'm not sure if this is a rebuttal to my argument though. A reduction in sexism in other fields would in fact complement an increase in sexism in computer science. I'm not sure if it is possible to distinguish the effects of each, especially if they compound on top of each other. It might be a little ironic to choose trial lawyers as an example since I don't think they have that much better of a percentage. I would also like to point out that your conclusion of "field of their choice", in my eyes, is heavily influenced by social factors.
Yes, these figures are from degrees earned.
I searched for sources that claim that the majority of computer programmers were women prior to the 70s. The only one I found is very poorly sources. The only one I found was from this page [1] which links to a Guardian article [2], which does not actually provide any data on the workforce composition of computing industries nor how they define what is and isn't a computing job.
> One of the questions I think is important is why were cs degrees so male dominated in something that was previously a female dominated field?
The question cannot be answered because it is based on an incorrect assertion: women never were dominant in programming or computer science - at least computer science as we understand it today.
To be more specific, in order find a time period during which computing was female dominated one has to take a very broad view of what it means to work in "computing". Women dominated computing back when "computer" was a job title [1]. Well into the 20th century, computation was mostly performed by humans and assisted with mechanical calculators [2] and slide rules. This is computing in a very raw sense, but it is not programming. The workers were not creating programs, they were executing programs. This changed during the 1960s and 70s as computers capable of storing and executing programs became cheaper and replaced human computers. To answer your question, women ceased to dominate computing when "computer" no longer referred to people and instead referred to machines and the work involved changed from personally performing computations to programming a computer to perform computations.
Personally, I don't think a human computer has very much to do with computer programming and I think it's a big stretch to try and put the two under the same banner.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(job_description)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_calculator#1900s_to...
> I am going to take your point about a reduction in sexism in other fields at face value since it seems you are more read up on that than I am. I'm not sure if this is a rebuttal to my argument though. A reduction in sexism in other fields would in fact complement an increase in sexism in computer science.
I'm not sure I follow. Why would a reduction in sexism in other fields have any effect on sexism in computer science?
> I'm not sure if it is possible to distinguish the effects of each, especially if they compound on top of each other. It might be a little ironic to choose trial lawyers as an example since I don't think they have that much better of a percentage. I would also like to point out that your conclusion of "field of their choice", in my eyes, is heavily influenced by social factors.
Women exceeded 40% representation in law schools in 1985, and have been at roughly parity since the 1990s. Representation of women in law is unambiguously higher than in computing, and it has been for decades. While the stories of women shared by Clive Thompson specifically wanted to become trial lawyers, their stories were representative of the field of law opening up to women more broadly. The point is, we observe a reduction of women in computing occurring at the time time that fields previously closed to women open up. The result is that women who would have been displaced into computing due to their field of choice being inaccessible now have the opportunity to study their field of choice. This would result in a reduction in women in computing even as computing remained as welcoming as it was before. This is consistent with the data presented by the original post, which observed a negative correlation between gender equality and women's representation in technology fields.
In absolute numbers, the number of men entering computer science just grew faster, than the number of women. Don't forget that 50 years ago, there were fewer people in CS or programming than today.
My father was a postal worker and described to me the process that the USPS used to improve their culture, and it involved new policies, procedures, and training for all employees.
She did? Where did she find these writers with safe, high status jobs? Maybe PR?
tl;dr: Ask Men and Women.
My sister was a STEM worker in India. When she moved to America, she looked around to see writers with relatively safe, high-status job and switched out immediately.
Yes, women in America are "organically" picking non-STEM jobs, but that is because the jobs suck, the environments suck and people are assholes at these jobs. My sister loved the core STEM aspects of her job, but hated the culture of the companies she was stuck working with. This is not "equality", its hostile corporate culture.
tl;dr: Ask Women.