I'm a male software engineer and I'm marrying a male software engineer, that may account for some the data too.

A bit off-topic, but I'm wondering if the homosexual dating pool among software developers is bigger than the heterosexual dating pool.

edit just to clarify, for men. Dating pool for homosexual/heterosexual men.

I've been on HN for almost 10 years, and from what I've read I'm pretty sure they do actually.

Maybe most straight male software engineers never get married?

(M)y SO is a female QA engineer. I dont know why but there is a lot of girl there. On the SWE side we really need to alter the industry to improve diversity.

Of course there are, someone needs to be there to nag about being no good and constantly correcting people. ;)

Congrats!

That's what i thought as well, from anecdata it seems to me the overwhelming majority of females and gay males in software development or IT live with males or females from the same industry.

I wonder if one day the industry is more evenly distributed if we'd see a similar percentage as for lawyers.

> Makes me sorta want to see a breakdown by sex.

Feast your eyes on this! https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries-whom/

For example it says that while lesbian software developers often marry each other, gay male software developers often marry "recreation and fitness workers". Straight male software engineers often marry within the profession, but also marry nurses, teachers and accountants.

I did not expect that for female Software Developers, after male Software Developers, second biggest group would be female Software Developers.

Nice, but the data here is also lost in the "teachers" and "nurses" top choices for EVERYONE. Would be nice to be able to exclude them.

This is presumably US data given it is from the "American Community Survey". The 90% male ratio is true globally, however in the US, 25% of software developers are female.

I think that's a good point. Another US bias may be that it seems fairly common to date or marry co-workers, which is not the case everywhere.

In some (maybe most) countries in Europe, most people do not move far away from their initial place of birth. Could be for cultural reasons or just because distances are smaller. As such, by the time they are of a dating age, they already have a rich and extended social life. They don't necessarily require the work place as an important source of meeting a partner. In a way, this affords the luxury of keeping work and social separate.

> Makes me sorta want to see a breakdown by sex. aka "male software developer has a 6% chance of marrying a software developer

But this data is specifically "among married couples". The male software developer's chances of marrying a software developer are much, much higher if we just assume he's married in the first place.

I don't get it. Wouldn't anyone's chances of marrying any group be higher if we assume they are married at all? Because "being married" is a super set of "being married to a person from X group"?

I think an extreme example might help: if there are 100 software developers but 98 are single, and 2 are married to each other, then 100% of software developers(that are married couples) have married software developers, even if only 2% of all software developers are married at all.

Because "being married" is a smaller superset of "being married to a software developer" than "being alive" is.

It's the same reason there's a higher rate of being married to software developers among people who are married to software developers than there is among the general population.

It would suggest a lot of software developers are unmarried.

CS programs at most schools in the US keep getting larger and larger, so that doesn't really surprise me if you assume the age distribution of software engineers resembles a pyramid.

The program I went to tripled in size over the course of my time there.

Or they are married and their partner doesn’t work. Or things are getting combined like product managers into software developers.

Given women almost always marry up (i.e. they marry men who earn more than themselves), if you break this up by sex I am pretty sure the numbers will look very different.

In Sweden highly educated women are marrying down. Just goes to show there's no reason not to break this sort of data analysis up per country and sex, it's not hard to do and will give much more relevant numbers to whomsoever it concerns.

>In Sweden highly educated women are marrying down.

It's certainly happening in Sweden, but it's far from common. An almost universal constant in research of this nature is that women highly value a partner who earns similarly or more than them.

Just a nitpick, but it doesn't matter what you value if you can't find it. Else the data would look quite different, e.g. all incels would be married. So what matters is what women find, not what they value.

> it doesn't matter what you value if you can't find it

Sure does, you just don't marry if you don't find anyone you want to marry. It is that simple.

For example, we can see that even in Sweden women who earn less are more likely to marry and men who earn more are more likely to marry. Women who earn a lot are less likely to find a partner they like as you say.

Do you have a source for this?

I got one: https://theblog.okcupid.com/how-important-college-is-to-mill...

It's the same in germany. It also comes down that people here don't care that much about degrees but value other things more if they have to choose.

Dating and marrying are two hugely different things. Stereotypically, dating unemployed musicians and artists few years before marrying a white collar worker from your own social background is almost a rite of passage.

Sorry, just anecdata from people I know. Perhaps I should not have posted.

My SO and I are both software engineers, so blame me for taking one of the lady devs off the market.

My wife and I are too. Though we had our first child last week. She said earlier in the pregnancy that she would like to keep in the workforce. But as each day passes with the baby it feels more likely she'll decide to be a full-time mom. Either decision is fine in my book :)

Kids need programming too.

Boop the snoot in Morse code!

And Morse code is quite efficient!

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2017/02/08/how-efficient-is-m...

Congrats :-) me and my wife are both software developers too, and well, our 6 month old is sitting right next to me now :-) but I think she will want to go back to work - well, there's another 6 months of maternity leave ahead so plenty of time to decide.

Congrats! My wife went back to work for like 3 weeks after 3 months off with our first. Then she just decided to no longer have a job that gives a paycheck. She works, harder than I, and of more import. She just doesn’t get a paycheck.

Though... she went back to Starbucks and service industry != tech industry by a long shot so....

Congrats on your child!

I can see both sides, but one thing to think about is that coming back to software engineering after 5-10 years away would be brutal. It’s also a place it’s famously easy to coast and take it easy for a while.

But if I went through a pregnancy I would need a big rest and enjoy the rewards afterwards :-)

Congratulations on your first child! That's so cool.

If you don't conflate gender with marriage, there's more opportunity for software developer couples.

definitely true. But same-sex marriages will not change that number pretty much at all

Judging from my social group, the gay male software engineers are more likely to be married than the straight ones (and I don’t think I could say that about any other profession), and also more likely to be married to another engineer. If I’m right about that, and the effect is strong enough, it could affect the numbers.

In my social group nearly all of the software developers I know are married to stay at home moms (self included). So it probably is just your social group.

You live in Seattle or the Bay Area perhaps?

I would suggest that in a field that is mostly male, including same sex couples changes the results disproportionately compared to more mixed industries.

Yes as long as SS couples keep it secret. Anonymous surveys are a great way to say that you have a "committed partner" without going into details.

Even with people keeping their relationships secret, I doubt SS numbers are that high in the software industry.

is there? are the rates of queer people reddit in tech that much higher than other fields?

#15 on the list: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2016/01/18/there-may-...

Interesting. Too bad it doesn't also provide specifics on bisexuals or the gender axis.

Are the rates of failure to marry that much higher?

I would assume it’s partly because software devs tend to work longer hours and do less stuff socially outside of work than average. As an adult I’ve only dated people long term I either met through work or online games.

Do software developers work longer hours? They seem to have the least work hours out of anyone in my upper middle class American peer group.

I feel like both could seem true depending on the lens of the observer. I've had projects where I feel like I'm cruising to the point of boredom and other projects where it does feel like long work hours. I don't know if I agree with the less social part either, a lot of devs I know are quite social in distinct ways(board games, video games, technical groups, etc...)!

Depends on the job and the industry I guess. I’ve normally had to do 50-60 hours on a salary unless I’ve ran out of upward mobility at a company & just want to coast for a few months until I find something else

I can only speak from experience, but I've been on dates with women who openly admit that they've had bad experiences with IT people.

I can only speak from experience, but I'm very likely to have been that IT guy that your dates have had bad experiences with.

I can only speak from experience, but I've been on dates with women who openly admit they have had bad experiences with scientists.

If you think lawyers marry lawyers, you should look up physicians!

It's not all that surprising if you think about it. Let's say you go right to college after HS, and take a year off between college and med school (due to the competitiveness this is becoming very common, maybe even more common than direct admits). You'll enter medical school around age 23 and will be there until around age 27. You'll be a resident until at least 30, but maybe as late as 33 or 34 depending on the specialty - family med is only 3 years but some of the more intense surgical residencies can be 5-6 years. Fellowship is optionally another 1-4 years on top of that. With a few notable exceptions, the most lucrative specialties have you not drawing more than a token paycheck until your late 30's, best case.

Combine that 23ish-30ish age range with the fact that many (probably most) residents will work above the ACGME-mandated 80 hours a week for at least the first half of their residency, and I'm honestly shocked it's only ~21% of physicians that marry other physicians. Not to mention the fact that the income bump is substantial.

My fiancé is a physician and we met when she was a resident, and I'd say about 40% of all the residents I met during her residency who were in relationships were in a relationship with another physician.

It's insane how much worse med school is now. When my dad went in the 70s he got in straight out of undergrad, spent one year in an internship and 3 years in Ophthalmology residency before getting his first real paychecks around 30. Everything I hear about med school today makes me think he would have never made it nowadays.

So basically, if you happen to wonder outside long enough you could (theoretically) meet and marry someone that is not a physician - but you'll still never really get to see them?

I guess the choice is clear.

I'm a sysadmin (though these days I get called a "cloud engineer", or "devops". ugh) married to a doctor.

That said I'm a university dropout, and she did a degree in computer science, before switching to become a physician.

I know a lot of CS people locally who are married to dentists and doctors. There are a lot of encounters between doctors, but my personal experience is that doctors marrying doctors (or other medical specialists) seem to get divorced quite frequently.

Why do you think they get divorced frequently? Could the significant factor be the irregular or long working hours for people in medicine?

Could just be that since you see a lot of physicians marrying physicians, you also see a lot of physicians divorcing physicians. Without actual data, it's probably very hard to quantify the real divorce rate.

My longest relationship so far was with a software developer. She was great.

I think it's just a cool thing to relate too

It may also be because only software developers call themselves that.

If you look up computer programmers or analysts suddenly it's not that lopsided (they are not even the first group).

What is the distinction between Computer programmers and Software developers?

Yeah, I think a relative difference would be more helpful than the absolute number. There are lots of admin people so lots of jobs are likely to end up marrying one.

There's a link on the page to a different chart that does this. A bit less visually clear, but pretty cool to explore as well.

Plenty of female devs on most places I have worked since the .COM wave.

If I am not mistaken, as per last results, most Informatics/Software Engineering degrees in Portugal have about 50% distribution between genders.

50% sounds crazy (and unsustainable). The women I've met in tech tend to, on average, have the same ambitions as their male counterparts - they chose this as a job/career, as opposed to having an actual passion for IT. A far cry from "my group of people" who grew up with BBS's, modems, demoscene, internet in the 90's. And I still try to hire only people who have a generic interest in computing and throw graduate resumes in the bin. Even if you discard the "passionate" ones from the equation you should end up with a ton more men, simply because of generic interest in STEM fields. Perhaps it's due to government incentives or something?

The best coders I had the pleasure to work with, were all females, so there is that.

A mixed coding environment is always one of the points I assess when I get job offers.

Sure, I appreciate a healthy mix as well. Just saying it's unrealistic to expect a 50/50 distribution of anything, in any field, expecially so in software development.

Curious as you mentioned degrees, do you know if the same ratio transfers over to actual work life?

US software developers are 19.4% female. Also, a same profession couple counts twice, so only roughly 1/3 off the female population is required to marry 6% of the female population and get to an aggregate of 12%. Same sex couples complicate this math, but I think the overall proportions would hold true.

If you want a REALLY crazy number, look at physicians marrying physicians, it’s like 45%

I’d imagine around 50% of married software engineers are women, so I guess the takeaway here is that male devs are doomed unless they can find a nice dev to marry?

For me, I convinced my bf to get in to software development specifically because it paid lots of money.

The UX department is your friend.

But then the weird thing is that web developers have software developers as 4th most likely to marry. Behind nurses, teachers, and managers.

Where I work we have about 30% women on my team of devs.

If 10% of developers are female, there's a potential for 20% of all developers to be in male-female marriages. The data shown here had just 12% which could represent 60% of female software developers marrying male software developers (staggeringly high but not mathematically impossible).

I think there's two problems with that premise: (1) a large slice of that marriage number could be male-male or other marriages. (2) the figure "10% of developers are female" is true only if you're looking at global numbers. It's higher in the U.S. where these marriage figures originate.

Also not everyone is married at all.