As one of those elusive women in tech... I don't know. I have mixed feelings on the whole issue and usually try to avoid it, mostly because I just don't see it as a big deal. I've never felt like an outcast or that I didn't belong in this field because of my gender, nor have I ever been made to feel like the center of attention because of it (thank goodness). It just is.
Of all the women I know personally, only one other works as a programmer. The others seem to have no interest, and not because of some social pressure or stereotype, or the long hours, or some perceived gender bias, but because the work itself just doesn't interest to them. So I don't see why it should be a big deal that they're not doing something they don't want to do.
I guess the question then becomes could/should the industry be made more appealing to women? Maybe. I have no idea how that could be accomplished, though.
Maybe it's not the industry that's the problem, but the lack of exposure to it. Mothers are big role models for little girls, and with less women in tech to begin with, there aren't as many of them to spark that interest in their daughters. Maybe more encouragement from female teachers and geek dads would do the trick.
I was a perpetual tinkerer as a kid, always building, creating, experimenting, and what have you. My father encouraged it. He kept me in a steady supply of lumber and nails, bought me chemistry sets, erector sets, a telescope, radio kits, helped me build my first computer and bought me programming books. By high school, I was a licensed HAM radio operator who was writing programs, designing circuits, wiring houses, and training search dogs.
I guess I never did fall into the stereotypical gender role I was supposed to, but it was never pushed upon me, either, nor was it discouraged. I simply followed my interests and was encouraged and allowed to do so. I try to do the same with my own daughter and, yeah, she's a bit of a geek in the making.
Anyway, this is getting kind of long and rambling. I'm not sure where the problem lies, but I'm still not convinced it's as big a problem as it's made out to be. It's kind of like asking why there aren't more 20yr olds in the folk music industry. Answer: because they don't want to.
A close friend of mine recently graduated from college. She was quickly offered a couple of programming jobs, but turned them down. After a while, she altogether stopped applying for any programming jobs. Finally, after one year of searching, she found a (non-programming) consulting job that she jumped onto. When I asked her why she avoided programming so much, she said that spending 8+ hours a day interacting with just a computer was close to her personal idea of hell. She likes to interact with people, meet new people etc.
Now granted this is just one data point. But, for me at least, it opens the door to a different hypothesis:
1. Women have a significantly different nature of the work / salary trade-off from men.
2. Reduced interaction with people is a put-off for women.
3. Thus, only half of society is really willing to do the geekiest tech-sector jobs, which puts a premium on the salaries for those jobs.
This sort of thing also tells me that people have an incorrect notion of what our work is really like. As a senior developer, I spend quite a bit of time interacting with people: discussing the problems our customers have; how we can make our product better; how I can make other coworker's jobs easier; how my systems will interact with other components; reviewing proposals, feature requests, and requirement documents and providing feedback to help refine them; reviewing other developers' code and mentoring junior members of the team.
I absolutely _don't_ spend 8 hours just interacting with a computer. I won't argue that there aren't any jobs in the field like that; and, in fact, entry-level positions do tend more towards "just implement this spec". But I think it's misleading to give people the idea that there is no human interaction involved in our jobs.
I wrote a (quite frankly dull and rambly) blog post about my upbringing to try to figure out why it made me an engineer, and it's pretty much the same. I was encouraged to tinker and nothing was ever discouraged. The only discouragement was lack of knowledge from careers and university advisors at school who didn't even tell me computer science was an option (for uni or a career).
I think that kind of upbringing helps, heck it's crucial. However, a lot of social signals can easily curtail it - peer pressure for not being girly and being called names etc (never happened to me, but I know others it did happen to).
Sad, but true. I know my daughter dealt with a bit of this a couple of years ago and we did a lot of bolstering of her self-confidence and talking through various scenarios during that period, until she eventually got to the point where she realized the issue was theirs, not hers. Fortunately, since then, she hasn't let it bother her and hasn't looked back and, really, once the kids involved saw that it didn't bother her, the shut up.
I was actually teased/bullied a lot as a kid, particularly around age 11-12, but it was more about my disability (I'm legally blind) than the stuff I was into. I kept a low profile at school and most of the kids doing the teasing didn't know me well enough to know my geek ways. I come from a long line of stubborn, though, so it didn't really have a lasting impact.
I'm usually wary of this topic, since it's both overplayed and has a very poor signal-to-noise ratio, but Jolie's posts are what it should be like — high on facts, low on melodrama, and coming to an actual, pragmatic conclusion.
This clearly isn't the heart of the article, but are transgendered people really underrepresented in tech? It's anecdotal, but I'd estimate that 90% of the transgendered people I've met have been in tech.
I was thinking the same, every single trans or genderqueer person I know is in tech; but then I found it difficult to think of people I knew of any description who weren't in some way in tech. I guess it's a matter of perspective. Still, I would imagine it is easier to experiment with presenting, gender identity, etc when you are anonymous behind a LiveJournal (for some reason all the trans people I know have one). Heck, I was accidentally presenting as male for 2+ years on usenet because nobody took the time to wonder what gender I was, instead just assuming.
It's important to note that there are also transgendered people the other way (FTM, approximately half of all transgendered people), and they don't have the same 90% tech involvement thing (which is really only true for a certain age group of transwomen in the US, not so much for other countries).
I was similarly curious about that whole sentence. My sense among people I know is that LBGTetc are not particularly underrepresented in tech; and are possibly overrepresented. (Once you correct for the overall underrepresentation of females, that is; lesbians are clearly underrepresented, but not clearly so once you limit only to women in tech.) Like you, my evidence is only based on my personal interactions with people, but I would certainly like to see some numbers supporting the claim.
There was a journal paper about a year ago by Sapna Cheryan called Ambient Belonging: How Stereotypical Cues Impact Gender Participation in Computer Science that you can read here:
John Romero, for those who don't know (or used to know, before his name faded into obscurity over a decade ago), was at one point best known for his work on idSoftware and his creation of several milestone games such as Doom. He then split off to release his own game, Daikatana, a move that garnered a particular amount of hype. The message at the time in 1997 seemed to be, "Video games are cool. So maybe making video games is cool?"
As a young high schooler in 1997, reading about John Romero in the late 1990s basically made me want to be a programmer. He was the proverbial "rock star," right down to the ridiculous hair and outfits (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Romero_3designers.jpg).
By now I've probably jogged your memory and you know the end. Daikatana flopped and Romero ended up with so much egg on his face he pretty much faded into obscurity. The rock star programmer died as a concept (only to be resurrected 8-10 years later in job descriptions for companies wanting brilliant 25 year olds willing to solve all their problems and work for peanuts).
I believe an alternate reality exists, where John Romero succeeded, Daikatana was a smash hit, and the art of programming truly entered pop culture celebrity. Romero's dizzying fame and fortune soon found him in dizzying benders in Vegas. His successors continue on the trail he's blazed, bedding supermodels and entering rehab in six month intervals. Smash hit video game after smash hit video game is released, their programming teams rising in notoriety, and a Hollywood exec glances over a spec script and thinks, "hmm, maybe we should make that show about programmers." The working title is changed to "Turing's Anatomy" and then it's released, featuring Dr. Meredith Turing, who works as the principal engineer for the Seattle Grace Gaming Company, where she heads a team of programmers in solving software problems with unorthodox diagnostic approaches, while struggling to prevent the expectations of her genius grandfather from overwhelming her.
Is that reality better than what we're dealing with now? I have no idea. I do know though, that in that reality, women make up 50% of computer science students.
I highly doubt that the failure of one company caused all women to give up on software development because it wasn't cool any more (Carmack was equally or more of rock star). Especially since working for a game company is one of the most grueling experiences in the software industry. On top of that, as "famous" as he may have seemed, I challenge you to find someone who didn't play computer games that even remotely knows who he is.
I think that, apart from a slightly misleading title, this article is really well done, and gets to the core of the matter.
By and large, I think, society starts conditioning for gender roles very early-girls get dolls, guys get erector sets. (in general)
But it certainly doesn't have to be that way--there's no reason why people can't get more engineering-oriented toys for female children as well, and I'm sure most people who read HN would be more likely to get toys along those lines for their children, regardless of gender.
The issue becomes, then, convincing society at large that this is an issue that needs attention, and that the typical gender roles and toys only reinforce inequality (like representation in tech). That, unfortunately, is difficult, when some (very vocal) people refuse to acknowledge that there is any discrimination in society, and many would think that changing culture around toys is "just being PC."
Such a large change would take a massive effort. While the STEM initiatives going on today, especially those directed at minorities, are a step in the right direction, for them to be effective, I think they'd have to get a lot more mainstream awareness--right now, some people are aware of them, but the majority, in my experience, are not, and even among those that are aware of it, not many a) think it's a good idea and b) care.
Perhaps if a bunch of celebrities got behind it, ads were taken out online and on primetime TV, and politicians started caring? Maybe calling politicians to support STEM initiatives, especially minorities, could help?
I'm not entirely convinced that "society starts conditioning for gender roles very early". You'd have to show me hard data. On the other hand, there is fascinating evidence to prove the reverse:
Case in point is David Reimer, who received the first ever sex re-assignment surgery conducted on a developmentally normal child at age 22 months. David became Brenda.
"At age 2, Brenda angrily tore off her dresses. She refused to play with dolls and would beat up her brother and seize his toy cars and guns."
Hm, that's an interesting story. (Somewhat weird and immoral that they would change someone's biological gender before they have the ability to understand what's going on, much less consent, but we can look at the case.)
I don't think that Reimer's case disproves what I say--I was dealing more with the roles which the genders often play, and the fields to which men vs. women are more likely to enter, while this case deals with gender identity. Gender identity is likely not something which is affected significantly by environmental changes, but it is far more likely (I unfortunately don't have numbers and don't know where to look--does anyone know of a relevant study?) that gender roles could be significantly affected by upbringing.
There's no natural reason why women shouldn't go into tech, other than that it's a male-dominated field and that women are, in modern society, often encouraged to avoid such fields.
As sad as the story is, I find it a bit of a stretch that a boy would "naturally" tear off a dress at age 2 either, since children of both sexes were dressed in such manners for many centuries. It seems much more likely that he'd picked up cues that he was supposed to be male and was rejecting things that his culture told him were female.
It's probably both cultural and biological in this case, I'd imagine. (it could be that he'd learned that dresses were associated with females through cultural conditioning, but he mentally knew on some level [maybe subconscious] that he was male, or something along those lines.)
Man, go try to buy a non-sexist "Congratulations" card for a new-baby. It took me three stores to find a green card without any gender-typed activities on it.
As usual, the truth is somewhere inbetween. Society does start conditioning gender roles early, and there is a difference in inclinations and temperament between the genders, and both of these strengthen and reinforce each other.
With effort you can smoothen the edges, you can encourage communication skills and caring among small boys, and you can encourage risk-taking and outgoing behaviour among small girls, but gender neutrality is an illusion, there will be differences.
The plural of "anecdote" is not — actually, we don't even need a plural here.
That case is interesting, but I'm not sure it proves anything. There are natural-born girls who have a similar aversion to girliness. It's just not the norm. The life story of one person (particularly someone with a family history of mental illness) just doesn't seem like valid grounds for such a broad conclusion.
It certainly proves that gender identity and perceived gender roles are not entirely environmental. If the segregation of of boy toys and girl toys were the only or primary cause of gender personality for boys and girls then it would have been easy to raise Reimer as a girl. As it is, this demonstrates that at least a substantial portion of femininity for girls and masculinity for guys is inborn. That not every girl is feminine and not every guy is masculine, despite upbringing, actually reinforces this point.
I'm not sure this argument stands up to the facts. Women have been pouring into every discipline over the past twenty+ years. That's a significant number because we're now talking people born in the 1990s, which can not be said to be a decade untouched by feminism. Women are graduating with more degrees then men now, women are the majority on campus, and the proportions are rising. Every discipline, engineering and computer science no exception, has been soliciting for women and minorities for decades now.
And yet, as pointed out in the article, the percentage of computer science degrees awarded to women is going down, which I think is an acceptable proxy for the presence of women in tech. Yet numerous other "male" fields have been entered and in some cases dominated by women. The very same women who were raised on Barbies and ponies.
Is the only theory that fits the facts that somehow, virtually uniquely across all the fields into which the women have come streaming in, despite equal if not at times greater solicitation for women to come in to the discipline, computer science has somehow escaped the incredible dominance of political correctness on campuses and managed to create this fantastically and uniquely hostile environment for women, and therefore has some sort of major responsibility for changing itself? The only hypothesis?
What about this one: In an environment where a thousand voices are shouting for the women to come study $X, it doesn't take very much of a natural disinclination towards a certain discipline for it to very, very rarely be the top choice for a woman. It's not as if there aren't disciplines unbalanced every bit as much in favor of women, and for the same reason; it doesn't take much natural disinclination, for whatever the reason, for a field to very, very rarely be the top choice for the man.
Every year that goes by like this, every year that the STEM initiatives get even more strident and better funded, every year that women continue streaming from our very-politically-correct lower schooling systems into our very-politically-correct higher schooling systems and choose not to study computer science, I find the hypothesis that computer science is somehow deficient that much less compelling. If computer science were any more solicitous of women we'd have to draft them.
(Note: For once I do not necessarily mean "politically correct" as a slur. For the purposes of this message, I merely mean that the idea that primary or higher education has been systematically structured against woman for the past twenty years is absurd. The suspicion of sexism in this environment, in this timeframe, is enough to end your career advancement, if not your career itself. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to consider a hypothesis other than the "deck is stacked" hypothesis that we've been using for something like fifty years now and consider just for a moment some other hypotheses, in the interests of science.
I am also confining myself to the question of the education time; even if the workplace is somehow hostile to women today, the ultimate solution to that problem is graduating more women into it; between that and the copious and rather strong laws on this front it'll work itself out after that.)
Well, it's hard to argue with her basic claim, which is that it's not at the college or at the job-recruiting level that we need to focus our attention if we want to be more gender-balanced; it's on the little kids. Speaking as a college educator, I can confirm that the social biases are already set, if perhaps not in stone.
I guess you could claim that gender-balancing the field is undesirable, which is strange, or that it is impossible, which is an interesting claim but I'd need more evidence. But otherwise you'll need to look at the little girls and work from there.
But that's exactly my point; we've already done a lot of work on that front. You can see the results everywhere else. Are we really sure that after decades of work on this matter, work that has obviously come to fruition in field after field after field, that there isn't something other than "social bias" at play? At what point does the field get to stop self-flagellating?
I guess part of what I'm saying is that at this point I reject the idea that the burden of proof is somehow on the field to prove that it is open to women or that girls are somehow being excluded in a special way, after these decades of work. I'd say the burden of proof at this point is on those to demonstrate that somehow computer science has specially somehow failed to solicit woman in a way that the other fields didn't, in an environment in which this stuff was becoming cliche even by the time the women entering college today were being born.
Twenty years from now, are we still going to be having this exact same conversation and making the exact same accusations of entire fields, if it does indeed turn out that women of their own free will don't want to go into computers on average as a career?
What "natural disinclination" do you think women have, exactly? They don't like math? Women received 47% of math undergrad degrees in 2002 and that number has been stable for 20 years. They don't like computers? The physical sciences use computers pretty heavily, and women received 42% of undergraduates degrees in those fields in 2002, compared to 28% in 1983. They don't like the geeky sci-fi image? 42% of astronomy degrees went to women in 2002, compared to 25% in 1983.
Engineering degrees are still male dominated, women only got 20% of those, but that's still 7 points higher than the 1983 number. The percentage of computer science degrees that went to women decreased from 36% in 1983 to 27% in 2002, to 18% in 2008.
At least we can agree that there's something unique about computer science that it goes against the trend.
I think you think you are disproving my point with those numbers, but I think it reinforces it. In what exact manner has the computer field failed to be accepting of women in the way that somehow math and the other physical sciences haven't? In the strongly-politically-correct environment that all women entering college have grown up in (and I reiterate my parenthetical in my first posting for those who may have forgotten), can someone show me exactly what it is that computer science and engineering have somehow failed when the evidence clearly shows that efforts to reach out to women have been very successful on the whole?
Is tarring thousands of people with the charge of rampant sexism really the only hypothesis we can discuss every time this issue comes up?
You ask me what "natural disinclination" I think women have, but you're getting the logic backwards. I'm suggesting that if you look at the data that it may suggest the idea that maybe there is a natural disinclination, not that I axiomatically assert that there is one and therefore it is the explanation. Can we at least consider that hypothesis, rather than implicitly and rather frequently accusing engineering of being somehow the sole holdout of troglodytes and evilly conspiring to hold down the little girls, who have somehow managed to transcend all the other evil conspiracies in all the other fields but just can't seem to shake this one?
I think you misunderstand. Your point is that computer science, as a field, has done many things to attract women and that it has still been unsuccessful. Furthermore, since so much effort has been put forth in this pursuit, the computer science community cannot be held responsible for the gender inequality.
I'm not sure that that is what you are trying to convey, but that is about the clearest argument I can read from what you wrote. If this is indeed your argument, then it sounds like you are in violent agreement with the author of the article. The major difference appears to be that you argue the gender discrepancy is just women's preference whereas the article posits it to be a consequence of gender mores (an admittedly subtle distinction).
If I have misunderstood, I'd be interested in clarification.
Um, I think that jerf is trying to say that your figures can be interpreted another way. For example, maybe back in '83, computer science was comparatively friendlier towards women than other maths-oriented degrees, such as engineering, medecine, and astronomy. But as these other degrees have become less mysogynistic, they have successfully taken women away from maths disciplines that had previously been comparatively friendlier to women. It would be interesting to know how the percentage of women choosing maths-heavy degrees has evolved over the same period.
According to the link above, there were approximately equal amounts of 24-year-old men and women getting bachelor's degrees in 1980, but undergraduating men proportionally outnumbered women in natural sciences and engineering 2.66:1. By 1998, bachelor's degrees had increased by 34% for men and 85% for women, but in NS&E the increases had been 23% and 110%, leaving the proportional gender ratio of NS&E undergraduates at 2.14:1. Notably, engineering degrees for men fell by 21%, which had a larger impact than women entering.
You don't have a hypothesis, you have an unfalsifiable conjecture that maybe women have some mysterious natural disinclination that you leave undefined and then conclude there's no problem.
I only have anecdotal data, but in my experience most women getting a math degree are doing so with the goal of being a math teacher. Also, if you break physical sciences down by field, just under half of women in physical science are in biology (vs one quarter of men).
Here is a possibility: women got into CS in the 80's and 90's for the money. Now that CS is not a path to quick dotcom riches, the women (and men) who were chasing the money have gone back to business.
As for astronomy, there were 276 astronomy majors nationwide. I think if you pick one of the smallest fields and draw conclusions from it, you should at least admit you are cherrypicking.
I have been a professional software developer for 10 years now. Today on my way to work I have realized once again that in all those years, I have not held a single job that was any fun at all. (Not for want of switching - the longest I ever lasted at one company was one year).
Programming is fun, but programming jobs suck. At least the vast majority of them. Save for starting my own business, my hopes are close to zero to find a fun programming job in the future.*
Maybe women are just better than men at figuring such things out and going for jobs that are more fun.
This would also explain the decline of women in tech since the eighties. I suppose cubicles and all that only appeared around that time.
* I would like jobs like Data Mining for Backtype or TheSixtyOne, but jobs like that are rare. I also don't have the required portfolio yet.
I largely agree with the conclusion, but where are all these people who claim that women working non-tech jobs in tech companies magically count as tech jobs? This is the first time I've ever heard the issue framed this way. I've always heard it framed as a problem with the number of women choosing CS and math degrees and making it out to industry.
Why aren't there women in technology today? Probably because they're smart enough to stay away. Technology today, particularly startups, is an ego driven, fad chasing death-march.
What sane person would want to spend their time with emotional children reinventing the wheel and following every fad that comes along? Instead you could work in pr, or management, or even cabinetmaking.
So why don't we have women in tech? Because they have more foresight than us.
I think the implication was that it is sexist to imply that women have better judgment than men, and that this causes them to stay out of tech. It's the first part that's sexist, not the second.
I've heard many stories about people who tried to raise their girls like boys, only to find that eventually they would still crave for pink stuff. Edit: pink == girly, I didn't mean explicitly pink
Those stories may be correct, but they are inevitably misguided. The blue-for-boys and pink-for-girls convention seems to be a 20thC invention: http://histclo.com/gender/color.html
I am sure it is somehow culturally induced, but it might not be in the control of the parents to prevent it? There is other environment besides the parent's home.
I absolutely agree with you that it is cultural influence - that's my point! There is no specific relation between gender and colour, it is entirely culturally-induced.
Parents may say that they have raised their child gender-neutral, but that is to some extent impossible since gender-norms are all around us, often unconsciously so. When they see their child craving gender-specific toys, it's more likely an indicator that they have not been as successful as they would wish to be.
It's not so easy to change culture, though. Also I think at least some parts of culture have evolved because of biological differences between the genders. I don't think women will ever be exactly the same as men - unless we all converge on some new androgynous type.
Of all the women I know personally, only one other works as a programmer. The others seem to have no interest, and not because of some social pressure or stereotype, or the long hours, or some perceived gender bias, but because the work itself just doesn't interest to them. So I don't see why it should be a big deal that they're not doing something they don't want to do.
I guess the question then becomes could/should the industry be made more appealing to women? Maybe. I have no idea how that could be accomplished, though.
Maybe it's not the industry that's the problem, but the lack of exposure to it. Mothers are big role models for little girls, and with less women in tech to begin with, there aren't as many of them to spark that interest in their daughters. Maybe more encouragement from female teachers and geek dads would do the trick.
I was a perpetual tinkerer as a kid, always building, creating, experimenting, and what have you. My father encouraged it. He kept me in a steady supply of lumber and nails, bought me chemistry sets, erector sets, a telescope, radio kits, helped me build my first computer and bought me programming books. By high school, I was a licensed HAM radio operator who was writing programs, designing circuits, wiring houses, and training search dogs.
I guess I never did fall into the stereotypical gender role I was supposed to, but it was never pushed upon me, either, nor was it discouraged. I simply followed my interests and was encouraged and allowed to do so. I try to do the same with my own daughter and, yeah, she's a bit of a geek in the making.
Anyway, this is getting kind of long and rambling. I'm not sure where the problem lies, but I'm still not convinced it's as big a problem as it's made out to be. It's kind of like asking why there aren't more 20yr olds in the folk music industry. Answer: because they don't want to.