So i's not marketing.
The answer was that programming was boring and exhausting. From what I understand being code monkey who spends 40 hours a week debugging, writing crap code and checking tests with the most repetitive and non-creative manner doesn't gave them as much sense of an achievement as it gives to some men. Hell, I have doing that kind of job and only push on due to money and fact that 95% jobs in the area looks exactly like that. (And the rest 5% requires you tho know right people.)
I would say that there is relatively little of masochist women who would want to debug that race condition hell in C++/Java. There you have to endure a lot of frustration before reaching a (short) moment of satisfaction. On the other hand in some Rails startups that I know, where effect of your work was immediate and one didn't felt that she was hitting the wall all the time there was a lot more of girl programmers - about a half of the team. But there are very few of such startups in my neighborhood. All in all I've got more men around.
TL;DL - women are less of a masochist when it comes to frustrating jobs.
The article seems to agree, since the underlying reason is attributed to institutionalized sexism in the mainstream culture.
And explanation of why not these many women are in the CS percentage wise today as in 1984? Easy. As CS became very popular instead of being highly scientific niche subordinate to mathematics department, it just became as any other engineering department - overflown with men.
Btw, I studied English language for my Masters. Hihhly recommended : male/female ratio 1 to 7. 😉 And no, there are no articles encouraging men to take foreign languages as their University Major. As we are not objectifying them as feminists are objectifying women. We know that advising agents would be inappropriate. But if you want to spend 4 or 5 years with chicks around you -- go study foreign language. And you can still pick up programming after partying with them for five years 😉
You mean exactly like chemistry sets? Yet chemistry is the most equal major in terms of gender of graduates.
I like Planet Money, but this story is unconvincing.
And chemistry is also taught in high schools, so both male and female students interested in it would've had some experience before attending college. The same is not true for computing.
I got into programming because I couldn't complete a level in a game, and I resorted to cheat-codes and hacks.
First it was the missing-no hack in Pokemon, then getting the console for "sv_cheats 1/god/impulse 101/noclip" for Half-Life and then rules.ini for the Red Alert series.
Hand hacking rules.ini for Red-Alert made a massive impression, any of the game's dynamics could be altered, you could spew out units for $1, bolt a tesla-coil on a tank etc...
Cheats and trainers got me to look into the workings of a computer program, plus the midi music from trainers is addictive :)
While I programmed long before then, that's certainly the reason I started poking at hex editors, and why I remember off the top of my head that 0x63 is 99 and 0x64 is 100.
In the 80s, even the musicians had to hack assembler (Martin Galway, for example)
6. Males are far more likely to enter jobs they're not suitable for
Of all the "programmers" without any aptitude that seem to plague corporate IT departments, virtually none of the ones I've come across have been female. If you take out these frauds when counting programmers, then the gender balance in many IT departments becomes more like the early 1980's. Added: When programming became a perceived status job, the frauds turned up to cheat aptitude tests, lie on their CV about experience and studies, and what not.
While I did get some quasi support from people who thought it might help in a career someday, the much more common response in those days was "who needs a home computer?"
Update: I agree that we should encourage everyone with an aptitude now to go into higher ROI fields (of which CS is one), I do think it is a bit reconstructed history to make TRS-80s actually "cool" and "non-cool kids excluded."
Indeed, the TRS-80 was not even a game machine. PCs as game machines came a bit later, and as price effective ones, much later.
Back before anyone was really marketing computers in any mainstream way, I remember gathering around the few that were available in the school library or in a math teacher's classroom.
The only people interested EVER were boys.
It had nothing to do with marketing.
That hour or two a day of skipping class or eating lunch would have had a different effect if I'd spent all the time playing with computers.
I started making up for it in college as a CS class was required, I couldn't afford my own computer & so discovered the trash and Linux, and there was a badass female sysadmin who demonstrated perfect ease in owning the computer lab.
They couldn't find any data one way or another about if that marketing made sense.
[0]: http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm
[1]: http://hn.algolia.com/#!/story/forever/prefix/0/Is%20There%2...
Oh stop it, those are gender differences and girls also enjoy their differences, even if they're unfortunately imprinted by culture. They're untouchable, they are given what they ask (which is: often dolls), they're social. And the few that are in IT, they don't show up at the Java User Group, even if it's their job, even if it's free, even if it's at the same time as for boys.
They do show up more often at higher-class networking parties where they may make connections with product managers and be promoted, rather than stay programmers like us for a bit longer.
Of course there will be counter-examples, but I see girls in IT getting promoted MUCH faster than boys. In my 14-people office? 4 women-project-managers, 1 woman-architect (who doesn't know GIT), 1 female programmer (with 2 years of experience) and 8 male programmers. Yes, I'm making this observation about my team to imply that women have better jobs, sooner than boys, and it does imply that males don't get promoted as easily as women, at least in the world around me, and I'm saying an IT career is an excellent path for a girl.
Before anyone says "Women get promoted quicker because they're just better at their job", I'd note they turn over this exact argument when it's directed to boys, by suggesting they didn't get the education, incentive, support or opportunity. It's not about anyone being better. It's about how we reach fairness.
I do see that some of the world is different for girls, but unfairness is reported more often than advantages.
Edit: "Why are there less girls at the JUG, is it because they're uncomfortable with 95% men?" > Or that they aren't involved much and reserve their evening time for their social life. The only way to be sure would be to ask them, and they'll probably remark they'll be promoted whether or not they attend the JUG, if you've followed the story of my team.
Women probably get promoted relatively earlier for reasons like token women and the fact that they less commonly have computer experience since early on.
Of course there's the Lego Friends range targetting girls, but it is once again about houses, cooking, flowers and rainbow poneys, and not at all as educative as Lego Technics.
*Such as the Lego City and Lego Creator ranges which must be the legos we encounter the most.
As a sought after developer in a niche area I appreciate the lack of competition.
But then again I am a selfish, cynical bastard.
This is probably partly confirmation basis and partly insufficient data. I doubt every time you meet a fellow developer you ask them how old they were when they first started programming.
I'm 35 and didn't start coding until about four years ago (when I decided to go back to school and switch careers) - there's another dev on my team that started even later, and I know several that never wrote a line of code before college. So yeah we're out there.
- 1. Computers started being sold as consumer products - 2. They were marketed almost exclusively to boys - 3. Boys played with computers and learned about them, while girls were made to feel that computers weren't for them - 3. Men showed up to college with more computer experience - 4. Women felt they must not be "naturally good" at computers, based on how men already knew more
While I think people sometimes exaggerate how much of gender differences come from society, advertising, etc, the facts of women's history in programming are clear, and I think the cause is well-argued here.
We need to fix the perception that women aren't welcome to program. We're missing out on talented developers.