Too Few Women in Tech – Am I Responsible?

I think it’s fantastic that you ask the question. So many of the responses to this topic start with the assumption that the responder couldn’t possibly be the problem, and go from there into a set of predictable answers, many of them unfortunate.

The topic is enormous, complicated, and subtle, and there can be no neutral observers. People would rather have an easy answer, especially one that leaves them feeling blameless. But I think the only useful stance is the one you display here: open-mindedness, backed by a desire to make sure things are fair. I hope the comments stick with that!

“The popular image of a programmer as a socially inept young man is not something which appeals to girls”

I don’t understand this sentence. To be a socially inept young man should be something that appeals boys instead?

I know I am going to be blamed for what I am going to write, but why is it so difficult to admit that men’s and women’s brains are different? I am not saying better or worse. Just different.

“To be a socially inept young man should be something that appeals boys instead?” – Mario

It does appeal to boys. Look at film – so many of the male protagonists are socially inept. As a general rule, the male hero in the kind of film young boys like is a loner, doesn’t get on with his colleagues, argues with his boss, does his own thing regardless of the consequences and so on. Social ineptness held up as something to admire.

I think there are a few problems at play. The first is there aren’t enough women entrepreneurs and there aren’t enough of them in tech. Combine the two and you have an already difficult problem trying to find them.

Add in the fact that it’s a rare breed for them to be as aggressive or motivated as their male counterparts, and we got an even smaller percentage to go with. As bias or maybe even discriminating as that may sound, there are several factors that make up a successful entrepreneur and unfortunately there aren’t enough women in tech or entrepreneurship to begin with much less start narrowing that list of traits we’d look for.

No one is purposely (or I hope not) discriminating against women, fact is, as Techcrunch puts it, there isn’t enough of them. And the key thing is looking for quality not quantity as well. Not just any women entrepreneur will do.

“The popular image of a programmer as a socially inept young man is not something which appeals to girls”

I heard that with “The Social Network” Mark Zuckerburg is single-handedly trying to fix this. And now that he has all the girls contact info, he can brag about it to them too

:{)

If 5% of applicants are women, then that’s actually below average of the number of women in programming. That could just mean that you live in a geographic area that has less women in tech. Or it could mean that the requirements of your job opening (or just the way it was phrased) was geared more towards men.

There are some blatantly sexist guys out there, but that’s not most hiring managers. But even most male hiring managers do things that inherently favor men in the recruiting/hiring process and during management without really thinking about it. They don’t intend to make it harder for the women, but they do in much the same way a woman boss will automatically make it harder for men. So it’s not that “men are evil”, it’s just human nature. But it’s a problem because since there are already MORE men in tech, it’s a self-perpetuating thing.

My husband, like most tech managers, has a team of mostly males and one female. He doesn’t want to be sexist, but he finds himself continually singling her out for things that are annoying that might be common in women. For example, she doesn’t answer her phone in the evenings because she’s with her kids, but the other guys on the team do. But then again, the guys can come in late and hung over and they just roll their eyes about it. These are just examples specific to them, each environment and manager will be different.

The point is that you will naturally build a work environment that works best for the majority of people – who also happen to be males. You will build a recruiting and hiring process that works best at filtering the best people most of the time – that is, men.

@Mario: The reason you might get blamed is not the statement itself, but making the statement in a way that could imply other things.

In particular, people who’ve been oppressed by the majority are very sensitive to statements like that because they’ve been used for generations to support oppression.

For example, go read the Cornerstone Speech, or Texas’s declaration of secession:

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_texsec.asp
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech

To the Confederacy, it was clear that slavery was a beneficial solution to what they saw as the natural and obvious difference between the races. The problem wasn’t their noticing that there were biological differences between blacks and whites, but which differences they saw as essential vs societal, their willful ignorance of how convenient it was for them to see blacks as eternally inferior, and their subsequent use of that bad thinking in support of horrific oppression of millions.

So when you start out by saying that men and women are naturally different, you’re at the very least reminding people of a long history of terrible idiocy, and possibly starting down a road that supports some deeply unjust outcomes.

Well, it’s anecdotal, but whenever I encourage female friends leaving university to apply for computer related jobs, I universally get a response that they don’t want to work with computers.

One friend in particular had all the necessary skills for a temp job at Google that needed Flemish (Dutch) language skills and only minor computer skills and paid much, much more than any other potential employment options she had available. She said she didn’t want to sit in front of a computer all day though.

I think computer work has an PR issue.

Well, I think it has also something to do with the different peer groups each gender has.

At school it is actually harder for boys to be accepted as a good pupil: Normally they are regarded as the teacher’s pet or try to find excuses why they were good in a particular exam. But a girl being good in school is just seen as a bright/smart/intelligent person.

When they leave school the situation changes 180°:
It is perfectly usual for guys to brag in their peer group how interesting, challenging and intellectually rewarding their work is and how they love it. But being successfull at work as a woman is nothing which counts in her peer group: If she doesn’t get married and pregnant early, she’s a looser.

I think the current situation at school is as bad as the current situation at work, but I hope that will change over time.

@William Your answer is even worse of my worst expectation. You describe me as a racist and a promoter of the slavery. You won’t be surprised that I am a member of KKK, isn’t it? Oh, please.

Let me reframe my point of view in a more articulated and possibly polite way and also let me ask if you could be a bit more realistic looking only at the facts.

I am italian and I took my degree in computer science there. I remember the first year of university we were about 1200 split in 4 courses. Do you know how many girl there were? 3! I repeat THREE over 1200.

Now I am project manager working in Switzerland from 4 years. I also do the technical interviews when we need to add more people to our development teams. Maybe not so many as Stephan, but a statistically meaningful number anyway. I guess I receive about 50 resumes a year. In 4 years should be about 200 CV. Try to guess how many women there were among them. Zero. I repeat: ZERO.

Should those numbers means something or not?

Be aware that I am not saying that women or not good in all sciences at all. One of the most famous italian nobel prize (in medicine) is Rita Levi Montalcini, a woman. The most important italian astrophysic is Margherita Hack, a woman. I read all her books, and trust me, she is great. I could continue with this list.

In my experience, women are not good (or not interested) in computers. That’s all. They study medicine, astrophysic or whatever else they want. If they desperately want to study computer science could you please explain me which irresistible force doesn’t allow them to realize their dream?

In purely practical terms, my wife stopped working in programming just before our son was born. Now he and my daughter are at school, but it was eight years away from the coal face and EVERYTHING has changed.

Programming is a field where it is very difficult to have a few years in a career break. Most men won’t consider such a break. Many women will either expect such a break or at least consider that they might want/need it.

There are lots of women in IT…

not in “programming”, but in :

- help desk
- system testing
- project management
- business analysis
- user interface design

It’s a good question. One problem thus is that everyone answering is male. Anyone who’s thinking of answering, instead try and get a woman whom you know to read the thread and answer instead.

@Mario:

I’m not saying at all that you’re a racist. You asked why it’s difficult to admit that men’s and women’s brains are different. I tried to answer your question by saying it’s because making a statement like that in a discussion like this has a historical context, one I tried to explain.

I totally agree with you that the difference in numbers for male and female programmers you experienced means something. The question is what that means.

Stephan is trying to ask that question in a way that’s open to the possibility that he has something to do with the situation. You’re trying to shift the focus to pure biology. I think that’s unfortunate. Not just because of the sloppy generalization, and not just because of some of the philosophical errors involved. E.g.:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

No, what’s unfortunate about it is that unlike Stephan’s approach, your way of addressing the topic closes off most hope for improving the situation. As the open-source world demonstrates, most interesting change happens when somebody says, “Hey, what can I do to make things better?”

@K: I think you’ve hit on something.

One of my female programmer friends has always worked for companies that practice some flavor Extreme Programming, with a tight team environment and a lot of pair programming. She loves it, and has said that she could never imagine working in a stereotypical shop where most people spend all day alone in a cube.

I don’t know how typical that is, but it sounds like a great topic for some academic research.

@William Ok. I agree. I jumped to (my very personal) conclusions too soon. And that’s not constructive.

Let’s follow the more positive and open Stephan’s approach. You admit that my numbers mean something but you don’t say what. Of course my answer is too simplistic and somewhat provocative. Maybe I was looking at the effects but not at the causes. So I am happy to exclude it.

I tried to reply to the question in a very naive way, but actually you never replied. What is your opinion? What is the very root cause of the lack of women in computer science? I hope you are not going to say that men like to be geeks while women don’t. This explanation, if possible is more simplistic than mine. It’s ridiculous and I don’t buy it.

So my questions, like Stephan’s ones, are: why there are so few women in our field? What can we do to improve the situation?

But I also have one more doubt that possibly needs to be addressed before the Stephan’s ones: are you sure that there are so many women unhappy of this situation? Are you sure that there are so many women who would like to work as programmer, but for some reason can’t? Honestly I am not.

Maybe because they are smarter? In my country, in general, programming jobs do not pay as well as doctors, lawyers or engineering in other fields but requires a genuine interest in the field to be really good. This interest means a lot of unpaid hours spent honing your skills but you will still make less money, or at best equal, to other fields. Some of the engineering educations at my old university had a high ratio of females, e.g. chemical, biotech and industrial business.

I could imagine that on average, women perceive more easily the benefits of social interaction, and associate some occupational profiles to be lacking in that respect. I guess those profiles would become more appealing if aspects such as team work, consultation, and/or the social impact of such work would be promoted. There are illustrous examples for women excelling in abstract disciplines even from times when the social fabric created enourmous obstacles for them (think of Emmy Noether or Ada Lovelace). The problem may be more a wrong or incomplete perception of occupational profiles than of conservatively (mis)perceived gender roles, or of chauvinistic attitudes.

Indeed, I was trying to trying to point out that there is a PR problem which should be addressed when proposing IT positions or IT fields of study – another two possible areas of misperception are that not everybody knows that programming is only one of many IT activities, and that people doing interesting IT work are often versed in multiple unrelated fields, and/or required to be so (meaning that IT jobs are not necessarily definable within an IT only context).
I however, another obstacle for involving women in IT (and many other) fields is the perception that they would be singled out as possibly the only woman in an all male environment (that would be a problem also in other environments, for males in activities typically perceived to be women’s domain). This cannot be tackled well at the hiring face but requires community building afterwards.

Hi Stephan, the link to the post “Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men” is broken.
(Starts with: http://http//……

@Mario: Well put. Thanks for being so reasonable.

In my opinion, we’re 50-100 years out from knowing the true, complete answer to this question.

History suggests that relying on our naive intuitions is unlikely to work when the outcome is personally meaningful to us. We tend to find the answer that’s personally convenient. E.g., 1850 white attitudes to enslaved blacks, or male attitudes circa 1900 about women voting.

So if we can’t rely on intuition, we have to go the harder road of real science. This is an area not well suited to direct experimentation, so we’ll need to come up with strong, tested general theories of human development and social influence. We’re nowhere close. At best, we can enumerate some of the likely factors.

In the meantime, we have a world to run. We do know that some of the factors are definitely social, and unconscious sexism is one of them. E.g.:

http://people.mills.edu/spertus/Gender/pap/pap.html

And even if there are some biological differences, that doesn’t tell us a lot about what we should do. (See the naturalistic fallacy and the is-ought problem for more on that.) For example, there’s a certain restricted sense in which one could say that men are biologically better at sports than women. But that doesn’t tell us that women shouldn’t be trained or encouraged to play sports. It doesn’t tell us anything at all about what should be. (And it’s important to note that generalization conceals the fact that a great number of individual women are better at sports than individual men. It also brushes past what “better” means, how we settled on that definition, and who that’s convenient for.)

Further, some possible biological differences could just mean that we have to teach girls differently to achieve similar outcomes. If there are biological differences, or even substantial socially-created ones, with mainly male teachers and mainly boy students it would be surprising if current teaching methods weren’t optimized in favor of males.

We might, as Stephan suggests, change how we talk about the profession. We can even consider changing how we do the profession. E.g., More team-oriented approaches can produce substantial productivity gains, as well as perhaps being more appealing to women. Are there other improvements we’ve been missing that would be obvious if we looked at things with an eye toward improving gender balance?

So in sum, my take is that we can’t actually know why there is an imbalance between men and women in CS, but we do know that there are things we can do to make it better. Until we can prove that we can’t improve things, I think it’s our obligation, like all good hackers, to keep tinkering.

@stephan

““But even most male hiring managers do things that inherently favor men in the recruiting/hiring process and during management without really thinking about it.”

What do you have in mind for example?”

My husband had a favorite question that was something like, you’re in a room and the phone doesn’t work and what are the first few things you try. It wasn’t programming specific but it was about problem solving. To him and his (male) friends, this question was a great way to test programming skill… but of course, they’d all actually done some amount of wiring. So if I was faced with this question, I would inevitably do worse than a man (who had done this before) with equal problem solving skill. Similarly, any question involving wiring, building or cars are weighted towards men.

Here’s a counter example: how would you react if I asked you a question about problem solving common breastfeeding problems? In addition to being uncomfortable, you’d be at a disadvantage to all the women who had actually done it. (To be honest this probably favors women or men with children more than anyone without children) But you can make the same comparison for shoe design, or anything that MOST women naturally think about more than men. Yes, this is generalizing, but that’s what we’re doing here, we’re talking about the general woman, not the super-geeky woman who was ALREADY going to apply and do well in the male-oriented interview.

Similarly, sports references, action movie references, jokes in male-focused memes all put men at ease and have no effect or the opposite effect on women. Even being in a workplace where there is mostly men is enough to put men at ease and women not.

I remember my first job interview out of college where the interviewer told me they did WoW or some sort of game on Friday afternoons. Then he paused, as if I was supposed to be happy about it. I said, “Oh, cool” even though I didn’t care and would never join in. I asked about the maternity leave program, and guess what, there was none. They weren’t intending to be sexist – but is it any surprise that men are happier to work there than women?

I feel like I’ve already posted too much here, but a correspondent just sent me another link that is helpful for people concerned about these issues:

http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO.html

My previous employer had the same interview with me. “we have our own XBox”. They acted like it was a big bonus. What do I care? I don’t.

Also, it is so annoying when I fly through their stupid tests, get hired, and am then treated like I’m the most moronic stupid 5th grader on the planet. My boss just sent me a link describing what primary keys are…. Last week I had to explain to him that there’s such a thing called SQL profiler and what it does. I’ve had it with mens fragile egos. If a man stated the obvious you’d both get a good chuckle and move on, a woman states it and suddenly it’s a fight to the death for him because of his ego. WTF. I have worked in several fields and never been so rudely, condenscendingly talked down to as I am as a programmer. The girl who started before me used to complain to hR about his behavior. She was told it was her fault and that she was too sensitive. I guarantee if he talked to a man the same way he’d get his teeth knocked out. When I confronted him about his behavior he threatened to fire me. And hr told me I was too sensitive. I was a god damn LClp in the USMC! He’s an ass and this is a reoccurring theme in the field.

Who cares if women go into programming, they won’t stay in it long anyway.