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The (un)importance of gender in programming
- klaut 15y agoCompletely agree what the author says.
- klaut 15y agoseriously? down-vote because I agree with the article? .. oh, well.
- icebraining 15y agoI'm pretty sure the downvotes are because your post added nothing to the discussion. If you find the article interesting, you should just upvote it.
- apricot13 15y agofinally an article about female developers that doesn't make me want to strangle my own kind!! Definitely agree
- noodly 15y agoGreat article. Thats the hackers spirit in there :)
- DanBC 15y ago> in a job, it really doesn't matter whether you are a man or a woman, as long as you do good work, that is enough to get you blended in. Try telling this to the women doing the same work as men but being paid less; and not getting promotions; and not even getting the jobs in the first place - all just because they are women. > To not feel like an outsider in a place, is to precisely NOT do what these articles seem to be suggesting - singling yourselves out. Strongly agree with this.
- yummyfajitas 15y agoTry telling this to the women... There is very little evidence suggesting that the problems you describe are a serious problem in coding, so bringing up these hypothetical problems is a bit confusing.
- ontIgnoreRealit 15y agoOf course it's not a serious problem that a group of people are being paid less if you're in the group that's being paid more than them. Maybe it's easier to understand the issue if you replace women with another group of people. Imagine if black people, jewish people or LGBT as a group were paid 90% of their counterparts. Does that make it easier to grasp why this is a serious problem. Lets make it even easier. Would you still feel that it's not a serious problem if white men as a group were discriminated against, were getting less promotions and were paid less than their colleges. Coding and programming is not a vacuum that exists outside of society.
- yummyfajitas 15y agoDoes that make it easier to grasp why this is a serious problem. What would make it easier to grasp that this is a serious problem is if you had evidence it occurred to any significant degree. You are telling me a huge business opportunity exists and no one is exploiting it. If you can find good women being paid less for doing the same job or who find themselves not getting hired, send them my way. I'd love to hire them myself. Until you do (or hire them yourself), I'm lumping you in with all the inefficient market crackpots.
- RyanMcGreal 15y agoIt depends on whether you're considering the problem from the perspective of an individual programmer or from an industry-wide perspective. There are strategies that an individual female programmer can adopt that will mitigate the issue of gender for her, but those actions will not collectively add up to a solution that adequately addresses the system-wide problem.
- gorgoroth666 15y ago"Why do men dominate the fields of science, engineering and mathematics?" "Are intrinsic differences between the sexes responsible for the underrepresentation of women in mathematical and scientific disciplines ?" I think so.
- lorettahe 15y agoThere are many good female scientists/engineers/mathematicians. Back in Cambridge University, to start off with, there are many female mathematics students. Considering achievement by people such as Grace Hopper, I don't think we can blame the domination of men down to sex differences. I would rather girls stand up and bravely join the science community regardless whether these communities are male dominated or not.
- gorgoroth666 15y agoLet's count the heads and the achievements and see how Grace Hopper is irrelevant. But you should have thinked about that by yourself; another example of woman logic I guess.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- hythloday 15y agoFWIW, lorettahe, this is exactly the kind of ad-hominem idiocy/misogyny that women encounter[0] and men never do[1]. There's no one big issue keeping women out of programming, it's just the drip-drip-drip of "you're different from us and we don't want you here" that 50% (then 65%, then 80%, then 95%...) of the candidate pool simply never hear or see unless they make an effort to. [0] This moron got downvoted because downvoting is not socially awkward; how many times do you see a social smack-on-the-wrist in a face-to-face conversation? [1] I'll donate £5 to a charity of your choice for every time someone comes up with an attributed accusation of using "man logic" in a discussion related to programming.
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- gorgoroth666 15y agoI also think women make crappy movies. Do anyone else notice when movies have been directed by a woman ?
- stch 15y agoSO BRAVE
- kahawe 15y ago> They are mostly very nice guys, as far as I've observed. This right here. An overwhelming majority of hackers, geeks and guys working in IT are so absolutely alright and wonderful to deal and hang out with and I cannot reconcile the average hacker with discriminating against women, this simply doesn't fit. On top of that most hackers will be so happy to have a chance to have girls around in an industry that seems to draw more than 90% men... look, it's not like we try to keep you gals out or anything, it's just that so many girls aren't even remotely interested in the strange things we do and of the ones who are interested still quite many don't make it through the programming courses in university then - or at least this has been my experience. The image of the hacker and our profession is definitely changing to the better nowadays, so there is something to look forward to. In my experience the average office full of true hackers is a wonderful place to work, no back-stabbing, friendly positive atmosphere and lots of fun to be had. And I never had the impression that hacker gals actually get paid less for the same position, at least not in the IT industry? Or is it just as common a problem as in other industries?
- calibraxis 15y agoSexists/racists/homophobes are typically perfectly nice people; they just don't notice they're doing anything wrong. Like the guy who calls everything "gay" when he finds something insufficiently male or good. And the last time I invited a female into my workplace, my male coworkers thought it was perfectly normal and funny to put down women's achievements. (And by mainstream standards, I guess it was.) She was fuming afterwards. To be not-quite-so-sexist takes active work, because we are embedded in a sexist society. Being sexist is the neutral default. I think I'm sexist. Maybe every man I've met is.
- kahawe 15y agoNever seen this around any of the true hackers I've met or worked with...
- bermanoid 15y agoAnd I never had the impression that hacker gals actually get paid less for the same position, at least not in the IT industry? Or is it just as common a problem as in other industries? It's better than in most fields, see http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-251007.html http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-251007.html, for instance. From what I remember when I looked into this last, you'll find very different actual numbers from each source, but generally speaking, there is a very real gap (at least amongst older workers), but it's smaller in tech than most places. The absence of a disproportionate pay gap would seem to cast a bit of doubt on the idea that this field is so much more misogynistic than most, though that certainly doesn't mean there's nothing to be concerned about. Those numbers also don't (I think) account for people moving "up and out" of engineering and into management, and I suspect those stats might make things more lopsided.
- georgieporgie 15y agoCan we please stop referring to adult women (in a professional context, no less) as girls?
- lorettahe 15y agoSorry, I'll bear that in mind next time :P
- deathwarmedover 15y agoCould you elaborate on why you are against this? I use boy/girl interchangeably with man/woman and don't attach any meaning beyond stating gender. Do you feel strongly that it belittles adults to refer to them as boys or girls?
- chalst 15y agoIt depends on context, but when we are talking about the competence of people to do a professional's job, then yes, girl might suggest that any competence they have is precocity, they are not mature and well-rounded, and they are not generally what you want the pay grade above where they are. And girl/boy are not quite analogous. "Boy" can be used in a belittling way, but it more often used in phrases like "one of the boys" to mean easy-going and fun: a positive statement about someone's ability to work in groups. It's not an easy point: there's a few women I know who think that not using "girl" means that you think they are too old to be attractive. I think that often holds in both the US and the UK; it used to be true here in Germany, but I think calling a woman "Maedchen" in her workplace today is positively offensive. I advise you not to call female colleagues girls in the office, and be sensitive outside the office. It's a good topic to raise in conversation.
- deathwarmedover 15y agoTo be clearer, I was more taking issue with original comment's blanket rule that adult women can never be called girls. As you said, "It depends on context", and I think the original comment neglects this. I'm totally aware it's not always appropriate to use such terms.
- Volscio 15y agoI'm a student at NYU-ITP and our coding classes have a good mix of males and females learning Open Frameworks, Ruby, Python, etc. We barely ever refer to gender. A future generation of female coders is coming, and they'll be building awesome, important stuff. These blog articles seem pointless in comparison.
- hythloday 15y agoI've never seen a discussion on Hacker News where the substantive point was "ZOMG girls can program" or "we feel out of place because there are so many men around". The discussions tend to be around experiences in the workplace that men don't have and that (some) women do; different treatment during pay negotiations, sexualized presentations at conferences, co-worker passivity about sexual harassment. Please don't argue against the straw-man that women can "blend in" (I'm not going to analyse the language there, but the whole tone of the article was a bit of a red flag) as long as they don't encounter any of this problematic behaviour, because no-one disputes that. Equally it's probably not very helpful if the distillation of your point is "women ('girls'): have you even tried talking to your peers?". Of course they have, it's the most obvious thing to try. To re-iterate, the problem is not that geeky men and women have strong social cues not to interact at all (like some sort of really weird Victorian tea-party), it's that there is a minority of men are actively and aggressively misogynist and the majority of men who aren't refuse to call them on it. Unfortunately there isn't much that women can directly do to change this (hence the perpetuating problem), they can only highlight this behaviour and expect to be treated with professionalism and decency.
- lorettahe 15y agoThere does appear to be something new I learn every day. " it's that there is a minority of men are actively and aggressively misogynist and the majority of men who aren't refuse to call them on it" I really have seen none around, to be honest. As other guys on this post have been saying, they really would rather women bothering to talk to them. Speaking from a personal experience, I have not found any misogynists in the IT industry, but I have however worked with females who simply do not utter a word in the office, and these females have generated comments from my males colleagues to me, including 'She just does not like us'. I'm not trying to make a generalisation here. But I do think, in the IT industry, just like any other industries (such as teaching or even the finance industry), men and women can get along, because at the basics, developer roles and what they do aren't really that different to the other jobs.
- hythloday 15y agoI'm really glad you haven't had those experiences (and I'm glad you wrote a post about that, even though I didn't agree with your points). I do think it's something that's getting less acceptable over time, certainly I've seen it decrease over my decade or so at work, so I have high hopes that it's on the way out. I'm really glad you haven't had those experiences (and I'm glad you wrote a post about that, even though I didn't agree with your points). I do think it's something that's getting less acceptable over time, certainly I've seen it decrease over my decade or so at work, so I have high hopes that it's on the way out. Here's an example of what I mean by misogyny: a previous manager at a company printed out an A3 picture of a woman in hotpants and a bra with the caption "Please update your Jira tickets before you go home". When I came in the next day to replace it with a picture of 4 (clothed but sexualized-I think it was a picture of a male stripper troupe) men, I received a disciplinary action from the company. The same manager, when he introduced me to the team, introduced the male programmers as "he works on ToolName" and the female programmers as "she makes things look pretty". This is reasonable subtle stuff, but I am surprised (though happy) if you've genuinely never encountered it rather than cultivating obliviousness or growing a thick skin.
- aklemm 15y agoHaving once worked in a female-dominated department of a large company and currently spending 9-5 as a stay-at-home dad, I can say it's not ideal to be surrounded almost completely by the opposite sex. Sure, we're adults and we can make it work, but it would be a relief if there were more men around at Li'l Tots French class on Wednesday morning, for example. And it would be more fun parenting during the day and I would advocate it more to other men if more men were already around during the day. If women programmers are surrounded by men all day because 95+ percent of programmers are men, it makes sense that it's not an ideal work environment (not that it's unworkable, just not ideal). Until women reach a certain representation in the field (maybe 20-30 percent?), why not cluster together and make a point of working together? To say, "Being one in a hundred is just fine" seems to leave the problem unsolved.
- mcantor 15y agoExperiences differ. The same solution won't work for everyone.
- thekungfuman 15y agoI like the content well enough but grey text on black? Rather difficult to read.
- lorettahe 15y agoDid notice that. Will get sorted when I have time over the weekend. Sorry :/