I’ve worked in China and India and IME the disparity has been much less. Still more guys than girls, but a much better (and improving) ratio and in fact a few areas where women outnumbered men (e.g. quality (test) engineers).
So yeah it really does look to me like culture is the biggest factor. Not so much “evil patriarchy trying to keep women down”, but just fewer women considering this kind of a job as an option and getting the right kind of environment to become professional.
(What I mean by “environment” is that competition / collaboration is an important part of improving a budding programmer’s skills. Now of course you can get feedback, and collaborate, online.
But the previous generation of women may have been uncomfortable mixing in (mainly male) circles and often would have not received honest feedback.)
This is a topic that I’m really interested in. My disclaimer for this is that the skeleton of it is based off something my friend made on this topic, but she hasn’t given me the go-ahead to post a direct link just yet so I’m going to use her’s as a starting point. Research credit largely goes to her. Most of the superfluous comments and interpretation of the research are my own, though.
The first thing I’d like to point out is that female CS graduation has declined drastically. In 1985 37% of computer science degrees were attained by women (right now it’s about 12-13%). And between 2001 and 2008 alone there was a 79% decrease in female CS graduates. You could perhaps explain this by the field becoming more popular (especially immediately post dot-com boom), and so “more qualified” male candidates started edging out less qualified “less good at logical thinking” female candidates, and programs started becoming “more intense” weeding them out further, but I find this explanation dubious for many reasons. Though it has slowly plateaued (and even climbed a little) since 2011.
(These statistics come from the National Center for Education Statistics, 2008, and Higher Education Research Institute, 2008; the post-2011 stats are from this blog).
It IS true that men are better at math than women (and also worse, higher ends of both bell curves). The top 1% of math SAT scores are 2:1 male-female, and the top 0.01% are 4:1 male-female. Hoooowever, the vast majority of our CS graduates are not in this 1%. Not even close. Even if they were, even if we assume every CS student was from that top 1%, hell, even in the top 0.01%, we’d expect more female graduates. It’s clear cultural issues of some form are at play here (this doesn’t necessarily mean “discrimination”, but cultural factors regardless).
An important article on this topic is this paper by Whitecraft et al from 2007. One big thread throughout that paper is that women generally like to feel “more connected to society” in some way, and CS feels more detached to them. I’ll quote:
In general, the study in question finds women are more “people-oriented”. This doesn’t necessarily mean CS is a bad fit, but the culture of tech certainly isn’t that, when you think of the stereotypes. There are all sorts of ways IT and CS can help people! Especially if you get into research! However, it’s generally sold as making “stuff”, personal betterment, understanding minutiae, and so on. It’s rarely sold as “you can make cool apps to help homeless people”, or “you could make energy controllers more safe to help the workers in the plants.” It’s always focused on the Bill Gates or Steve Jobs who got rich and made cool, smart, hip products, or your NASAs who do cool science for the sake of its own coolness, more than being sold as something that’s for the betterment of society and uplifting people. In fact, the report that study quotes noted that 44% of the female students (and only 9% of the male) emphasized “the importance of integrating computing with people through projects with a more human appeal.”
The caveat is that after CMU added more diverse entry points to its CS major and eliminated its requirement for prior programming experience, it managed to up its proportion of women to 30% in 2004. After this change, the women in their CS programs suddenly showed much less interest in this regard. It’s entirely possible that there are easier avenues to get more women in the field, but women tend to self-(over)report the importance of human factor when asked for their gut feelings.
Women also tend not to like the (frankly unhealthy) lifestyle that comes with the whole industry. Lately there’s been a lot of backlash against this in the tech circles I frequent as well, so times may be changing. For a while there’s been a rather toxic culture that you kind of “live” tech; you better code recreationally, you better read a ton of tech blogs, you better be willing to pull all-nighters for your PASSION (coding). It’s very unhealthy and has led to a ton of exploitation in the industry, esp. of young coders by big companies, or simply unhealthy cultures in many tech startups. Companies that ask for “rockstars” or “code ninjas” are the worst offenders here. I think men are more likely to get a narrow-minded fascination with a topic, and be more willing to overlook all the trouble that brings when an industry is built around people who LOVE their job to the point that it’s a subculture and life as much as a profession.
Like, very few people LIVE accounting, though I’ll grant I have a couple of annoying friends who LIVE teaching. Though I’d characterize the way you live teaching or social work as a bit different than the way you live tech. That’s more about connecting with various people rather than sequestering yourself in a bubble of very specific cultural references and mindsets. As cool as XKCD is, it can kind of be an offender here.
One thing to note is that the female enrollment rate is a lot lower than the graduation rate. Women often get put off and change majors, and it doesn’t seem to be related to grades.
Note that a huge problem is that men tend to have prior experience in programming (or at least tech), whereas many women learn about things first in programming 101. (This is also a problem for non-white, non-asian minorities). There’s this thing that came out of Communications of the ACM called “nerdy strutting”. This concept should be pretty familiar to anyone on this board 
I have to admit that I myself have been guilty of this. Though oftentimes I was legitimately confused the instructor didn’t do it a certain way, or neglected a certain detail I thought was important. I’ve since learned to (mostly) save these questions until after class. The problem with asking questions that involve material from outside the class is that it tends to demoralize people not familiar with the out-of-class (and often out-of-curriculum) topics. Anecdotally, I’ve found that this is one of the biggest complaints I’ve heard from undergraduate women in CS (graduate student and employed women are different because they either exist in the same geek bubble, or have long since learned to live with it). Not the strutting itself, but the fear that they’re hopelessly outclassed by their peers and “don’t belong” or “aren’t smart enough” because two or three classmates are regularly asking questions about esoteric topics.
Hacker School actually has two rules to help combat this, and it sees a much higher attendance rate for women compared to many tech bootcamps:
Another paper is “Ambient Belonging: How Stereotypical Cues Impact Gender
Participation in Computer Science” by Cheryan et al (U Washington).
It’s a bit of a dense read, but the long and short is that by controlling environments for certain items of decor, they could almost directly control how interested women were in Computer Science after a short workshop. Things like sci-fi posters, junk food, memes, and other such stereotypically male or geek things tended to put women off while things like paintings, well-lit rooms, and so on made them more interested in computer science, without any change in workshop content.
Note that I’m not saying IT culture should just abandon itself to let more women it, but I do think that departments interested in attracting more women should strongly consider what they’re doing with regards to decoration and the sorts of cultural touchstones well-loved professors refer to in class. It’s not like nobody can reference Star Wars lest the womenfolk get scared away, but an overall less “geeky” environment seems to do wonders.
This one is always a bit contentious, though, because it does tend to make women who do like this stuff scoff, or even feel concerned that their personal interest in sci-fi is scaring away other women. I want to be clear that having interests, and even displaying them, isn’t “wrong” or “sexist” or “problematic”, but it’s very important to think about how students and potential employees see the general culture of the whole department. If you like Star Wars, by all means make a joke in your class presentation, but maybe ditch the memorabilia in the hall next to the CS academic advising office.
This also starts to edge into the controversy with ads like “Science: It’s a Girl Thing”. This ad seemed to be roudly criticized by women in tech, because it presented an extremely girly, gender binary-ish view. The problem I have with their criticisms are… you’re already IN tech, the ad wasn’t for you, was for the girly girls who are wary about tech. Now, is the ad effective? Is it problematic in a general feminist sense? I have no idea, but I feel like a lot of the criticisms were missing the point here. No, not all girls are into that stuff; yes, many women who aren’t like that like having a space where they can be their geeky selves. However, many women do like makeup or fashion or whatever else, and also have the potential to like tech if the culture were a bit different. I don’t know if this sort of marketing is the way to go about it, but I think it’s one worth trying.
Note that several CS departments have also been successful by adding a computational biology focus. For whatever reason, biology is the one STEM field where women tend to graduate at the same or greater rates than men. Though this kind of just moves the question to “what is it about biology?” I’d argue it’s probably the “human” (or “animal” in some cases) focus, but there are likely other reasons.
There are also, of course, issues with boorish comments, assuming the woman in your group is less competent, and so on. However, very few studies I’ve read have places a huge weight on these factors, in specific, playing a huge role in the lack of women in IT and STEM fields. These factors are problems, of course, even if they’re not adversely affecting women from joining to a huge degree, but it seems like other factors are much larger.
So in short, there are a lot of cultural factors at play here. What seems to not be true is that women can’t hack it, or aren’t interested in tech qua tech. It’s been shown in study after study that women are very interested in tech in the right environments. Hell, women tend to be about equally interested in tech as men in K-12. There’s something (in the West) about the environment and culture of tech classes, University CS/IT programs, and the industry in general that kills women’s interest.
At least at the lower ends, where a degree is not needed, males dominate because some males like computers and gaming from a young age. Female computer geeks when it’s not about a career are rare. In fact, being a computer geek at a young age makes it harder to get a girlfriend. Whereas not being a computer geek at a young age makes it harder to get a job.
That is a separate area to consider, but not what I’m referring to. Women enter and leave IT at almost the same rate. They don’t like the jobs. If women were staying in IT the field would still be dominated by men, but not so with such overwhelming numbers. This is not simply a matter of different abilities.
Excellent post, Jragon.
Here’s another hypothesis: The belief that some fields require “brilliance” may keep women out.
The above may or may not be related to this: Women’s prospensity for competitiveness appears to be related to how matriarchical the society is. Women in western societies are less competitive than their male counterparts. But in matriarchical societies, the reverse is true.
I once participated in a workshop for women scientists and engineers that introduced us to feminist discourse. One of the things that was discussed was the way female students tend to react when they are informed they are in a “weed out” class. That is, the kind of course where on the first day of class, the professor tells his/her students “Look to your left. Look to your right. One of your neighbors won’t be here by the end of the semester.” Apparently, female students are much more likely to believe that they are the “neighbor” who will be weeded out. I imagine this feeling tends to be neightened in any member of a stigmitized/disadvantaged minority group.
I disagree; I think that the greater “people-orientation” of women actively makes them a bad fit for CS, or any other sort of engineering/STEM type field that seriously lacks an interpersonal component to the actual work itself. On the flip side of the coin, the noted lack of social interaction also makes it powerfully attractive to the more antisocial among us.
So there’s a sort of double-whammy- it’s not a terrific fit for most US women due to the things that they’re typically interested in and like doing, and being a good fit for the more misanthropic sorts of men make it unattractive for the number of women who would consider it.
Reflecting on the smartest women I knew in undergrad… what did they do? Most ended up lawyers*, academics, accountants or doctors. Most of them wanted to do stuff that they thought was helpful to other people, already had academic interests, or were more… safety oriented, and wanted a job like accounting that’s steady and unchanging. CS didn’t fit any of those- it’s not typically “helpful”, most girls aren’t into “computers” when they’re younger, and the ever-evolving nature of most STEM fields repelled the rest.
Speaking from my personal experience in my CS undergrad days, I can still name the girls in my classes, some 20-25 years later, if that gives you an idea of how few there were, even back in the early-mid 1990s. And that’s the ones who stuck it out to our junior/senior years. A whole lot of the girls who had started out in the intro engineering classes had bailed out into something else by their sophomore years- they flat-out didn’t like doing calculations, or doing engineering drawings, or writing programs, etc…
(* Interestingly, ALL the female lawyers I’ve known (prob. 6-7) have quit the profession, by about 10 years out of law school. Basically, they decided that lawyering sucked, and didn’t like the macho bullshit about working 60-70 hour weeks and living on coffee and booze. And these women weren’t mail-order law school grads; I’m talking UT law, or Baylor law grads for the most part.)
Ah, but now you’re putting IT in the same category as actual science or engineering.
If you’re just talking about programming, you’re right of course that it’s mostly interacting with a computer rather than human beings (not even human beings through a computer).
However, most IT stuff isn’t programming. I’m in networking and spend a huge amount of time talking to other people (as in: face to face) and probably most of my time writing emails and documents. I don’t think this is very different from most other knowledge work jobs.
All of which pay more than low-grade IT work, at least around here.
Yes, anecdotally, in my situation I considered IT. I made my own website in a notepad editor at age 12, I thought games and coding was awesome, did well with logic and math, enjoy sci-fi, err on the side of less human interaction, and have an obsessive side to my personality. But when it came down to actually make a choice for my career, I looked at it and said “nah”. I didn’t want to put up with any smarmy male BS, or sit around and be ogled by the socially inept ones. I didn’t want to then enter a field where I was expected to slave away at my desk with 60 hour workweeks. The idea of office politics lumped on top of leftover college male BS mentality just…nope. Seeya. Not going there. I’ll learn that stuff for fun if I really feel like it.
Now, you can argue that these things aren’t really how the field are - well that doesn’t matter, does it? Because all that matters was my perception of the field in how I made my choice. So, it’s like Jragon says: how the environment is portrayed, work-life balance, etc, were big deciding factors.
I’ve always had an interest in IT (my current job title is Collaboration Lead so I definitely work in an IT field although not directly in the IT department).
When I went to university in the early nineties, I signed up for computer science, intending to make that my major. I was one of very few women in the class, and the only female in my tutorial group . I was actively ignored by the other students, my tutor was openly scornful towards me (although whether that was solely because I was female, or because I didn’t have the years of programing experience that my peers had, I just don’t know), and I dropped the subject and majored in Education instead.
I really wish I could go back to that time, but with the backbone I have now.
I’m an engineer working in IT and “people-orientation” is supermegaultranecessary for my job. I may have left a few prefixes out.
Not the need to be cozy-cozy, or to keep up with the glossies, or being a good parent, or stuff like that, but the ability to extract information from people who don’t even realize what they’re telling you is incomplete or incomprehensible. The ability to negotiate and cajole until impossible specs (or, as one of the local HR people puts it, “the hunt for the unicorn”) become something that’s both doable and robust. The ability to take a spec in user-speak and turn it into something the programmers understand. All that requires, or rather is, people skills.
Now, if the programmers growl when I approach that’s fine… so long as they get the fucking program done in time and to spec 
but they’re only a small part of the field. Even the hardware guys need the ability to figure out what kind of specs will make sense for a given person and to understand things such as “the machine was going ‘whirrrrrr!’” (please do not obstruct the vents, thank you).
As a computer scientist myself who pursued a PhD, I can’t add anything near what Jragon did in terms of research, but I can add some interesting anecdotes. For one, almost all of the women I’ve known in the field do seem to have a more service and/or people oriented approach. One I was studying on my PhD with was actively pursuing methods of using pattern recognition to help with recovery from traumatic brain injury. Another I know refused to get a job with a company that wasn’t doing something socially conscious and is now working in using gaming technology to help people with disabilities.
I met my ex-fiancee in grad school and she got a job with a small software company that wrote algorithms for advertising where she was the only woman there, other than the one doing secretarial and HR stuff. She was initially excited by the competitive environment, but often complained about how the hyper-competitive atmosphere was exhausting and that the guys pretty much just assumed she’d be best friend with the other woman there and more or less excluded her from things. She ended up hating it but was stuck there for reasons irrelevant to this topic and since she did ultimately express that she wanted to do something that “had meaning” it only made it worse. Last I heard, she left shortly after we broke up and was working for a company doing humanitarian work.
And in my own personal experience, I’ve met plenty of women doing government contracting work, but it seems the ones that get along best are the ones that are less aligned with traditional gender stereotypes and are more like “one of the guys”. Where I am today, there’s only one woman on my team, but there’s plenty of women on other teams; hell, one of them is majority women (7 women and 2 guys).
So, at least in my experience, it seems that there’s still a certain amount of “boys club”, though that seems to be fading to a certain extent. On the other hand, based on my experience, it seems that a significant number of women just have different interests than men. Is that something that is somehow inherent to women or is it something that is culturally driven? I’m not sure, but I imagine it’s a little bit of both. Speaking just for myself, I love delving deep into systems and understanding them, but I’m also driven by certain broader goals to the point that working in government is exhausting and I feel unfulfilled, even while enjoying certain aspects of my work. I want to find work that has has more real social and cultural significance than what I’m doing now, and yet a majority of the men I know are much more career driven or just happy to get under the hood and spend hours or days to make a small tweak in efficiency, and neither could care less whether that work is toward solving socially conscious issues or just meeting arbitrary criteria set by some random government official. Hell, some even prefer the latter precisely because it’s a tangible and measurable goal (eg, 95% automation success rate) rather than an intangible and nebulous one (eg, develop new techniques for assisting recovery for disabled people).
I think people focus too much on the Silicon Valley and start up world when they talk about IT. Every major corporation out there has a large IT department and there are huge IT consulting firms as well. These have your standard corporate culture and not the stereotypical bro programming culture of start ups. That’s the environment I work in, and IMHO I just don’t see very much anti-woman bias. From my anecdotal experience, the roles near programming like testers, project managers, business analysts, and SMEs slightly skew towards women. It’s hard to see how those roles aren’t affected by culture but the programming ones are.
I got into programming via a federally funded jobs program. They were required to have a diverse class and we had a sex ratio close to even and lots of ethnic diversity. Out of that group, there were 8-9 people who ended up as programmers, with the rest going to support roles. Only one of the people who made it as a programmer was female. The males were subjectively and objectively (we took a certification test) at the top.
It’s interesting to note that the women who are good are rocketing up the food chain. There’s huge pressure to increase diversity in the corporate world and especially corporate IT. There are a lot of diversity programs to help them out.
I think the idea is that, sure, those types of jobs are out there, but they’re not the ones advertised in culture and media. You go to college and the programmers that make themselves most obvious are more likely to be the bro programmer type guys, not the introverted type guys. You watch movies and TV and it’s about Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. The big, the glamorous, the guys who are kind of jerks, and how their companies suck the life out of their employees while they were starting up.
So it’s all well and good that there’s a variety of jobs available, but it isn’t what gets translated through to prospective college students. A student has to sign up for a class thinking this might be the career for them before they can even get to a professor saying, “And don’t think it’s all about…”. The media and environment play a role before getting to the professor that can dispel the idea. So it’s only natural that we talk about the effect of Silicon Valley mentality, because that’s definitely in a prospective student’s mind when making an IT career choice.
It would be interesting to see how many women leave the field because of the way they’re treated by customers. “I don’t want to talk to you - I want to talk to a man!” I can see where dealing with that sort of attitude all the time could wear a person down regardless of how much they wanted to do that job. As a sorta parallel example: I was shopping for a car. My husband was with me. Guess who most of the salesmen talked to? Being ignored or treated like a lesser creature gets old fast!
In my 20 years of technology and management consulting, I have worked with all sorts of firms. Big 4 professional services firms, Silicon Valley startups, corporate IT, specialized boutique consultancies. Firms in all sorts of industries with all sorts of cultures.
What I have seen is that women do go into IT, but they tend to gravitate to more relationship-driven roles like project management, sales, marketing and so on.
The fact is, to be a good programmer, you typically start fairly early in life. Not that you have to be a socially isolated nerd. But you have to have that desire and interest to bury your head in some technical project solving problems for long stretches of time. I don’t know a whole lot of women who like doing that. Women seem like they have a preference for studying how to do something rather than rolling up their sleeves and doing it from scratch.
Well, I’m taking IT as meaning anything from the broad categories of application development/enhancement/maintenance/support, IT infrastructure/security/administration, and project management/business analysis.
The first two of those categories tend to be overwhelmingly technically oriented, and overwhelmingly male as a result. The third- the project management/BA side of things doesn’t have the gender disparity (like msmith537 is pointing out), and tends to have a lot of women, at least in places I’ve worked.
It’s not so much that the programmers and UNIX admins and people don’t have to talk to anyone, but that the skillset that makes a good UNIX admin isn’t really based on his ability to build relationships with people and know how to negotiate and cajole them, just like the skillset of a good project manager typically doesn’t involve knowing how to write bash scripts or troubleshoot an TCP/IP stack.
One of the differences I see with women in IT today versus back in the 80’s is that today, the women seem like they enjoy programming for it’s own sake. Back in the 80’s, it seemed like many women got in the field because of the job prospects rather than enjoying computers. This likely led to many of those women moving into non-technical areas like management. Today that isn’t as much the case, and I think you’ll gradually see more-and-more women doing programming and IT jobs.
Probably back in the 80’s there was a stronger gender bias which kept women out of many tech fields. It’s getting better, so the young women who have a tendency for tech/engineering are more likely to follow their passion.