Ultimately my point was that women are making it to these non-programming roles. Meaning that it’s not culture or time demands or whatever as the work environment for these other roles is similar to that of programmers. The salary difference between a tester and a programmer in the field I am in is 10s of thousands of dollars a year. There is also an enormous demand for programmers. So very few people are testers and not programmers by choice. It ends up being because they don’t have the natural ability to be programmers.
The bell curve stuff is crap. It is so wrong … I can’t begin to list all the ways.
As already posted, there was an enormous shift in demographics in the 80s. There was a quite decent number of women in CS, then the field took off and the enrollments increased tremendously. But almost all of this growth was male.
Any explanation on the current percentage has to be able to explain this. (And the bell curve crap certainly can’t.)
(Back then, my grad school wasn’t in a college, it was on its own. This was quite common in CS. But the students were assigned to Engineering for enrollment purposes. The Engineer School loved this. It nearly tripled the number of women in the whole school! Bad their EO numbers look great. In fact, if they got any higher they would be looked at as too good and be suspected of discriminating against men.)
As a CS prof, I didn’t witness much discrimination against women students by male students. But it certainly existed among male profs.
I think the growth issue in the 80s played into this. When the departments were small, the profs could give attention to quite a few students, male and female. When they became huge (some had over a 1000 undergrads), profs only got to know and therefore help a much smaller fraction. And, perhaps due to biases, the smaller fraction was mostly male.
Another factor might be the job situation. Women CS majors are heavily recruited, even compared to men majors. The lure of industry is much higher. So fewer stick around to become faculty members themselves.
I’ve had women students complain about the small number of women faculty candidtates that pass thru during hiring season. I always told them: “If you don’t like it, go get a PhD and become a faculty candidate.” Rare to for any of them to do that. The number of positions, the salaries, and quite importantly, the possibility of promotion, are a big draw.
(Grads in CS typically get paid more on day 1 than what I made after decades.)
There is definitely a meme that IT work requires (minimum!) 60 hours of work a week, all-nighters, etc. I’ll just point out that that is largely incompatible with childbirth and infant-care in our society (of course the pregnancy thing is still exclusively female, childcare is still considered the responsibility of the women rather than something that can be done equally well by either gender). That no doubt also has an impact on women going into the field, or staying in it, since most women do want children and it’s not something they can put off to their retirement years.
We currently have more women than men in our IT department. The top IT boss is also female. I could never have found this situation 10 years ago. But am happy to see it now.
My friend’s daughter, who is getting her Master’s in IT next month started college wanting to be a civil engineer and design water systems. In her sophomore year, she got an IT internship ‘because no guys had applied for it’, in her supervisor’s words. She thought it would be a summer job, but she found she enjoyed the hardware part of IT and swapped her major in her junior year. She has a job secured paying her $80,000 that will start the week after she graduates. Good for her!
I think whether or not IT appeals to you is as much nurture as nature. As the old boys like this and girls like that stereotypes melt away, I think more women will find an interest in STEM subjects and thus an interest in IT. I can remember being not so subtly steered away from science, which I always loved as a kid, because ‘girls didn’t do that’. I’m happy with the path I took - largely because I suck at math and always have - but I resent not having been given a true choice without anyone biasing my decisions. Thankfully today’s girls have such choices.
THat’s easy. The rise of the PC. A person who has been into computers as a hobby from a young age at the expense of a social life is going to have a huge advantage on someone who spent their school years prioritizing fitting in and “having a life” and then deciding that CS is a good field for a career choice at 18.
In my company “plain testers” and “plain programmers” are paid the same, and testers have it easier to become management. But how many people outside the field even know that testers exist?
Why is it easier for testers to become management?
Has rotation between testers and programmers been tried? If so, how beneficial is it?
I haven’t been with the company long enough to answer the second, but from what I see it’s not so much that it was tested systematically as that there is much more commonality and interest in management in the part of the “freshly minted testers” than of the “freshly minted programmers”.
The second group is much more specialized; often, they are doing exactly what they want to do forever and ever amen. Most of them wanted to be programmers, got trained as programmers and still want to be, yep, programmers. Many have zero interest in even becoming technical analysts except for the fact that it pays more; these, you say “project manager” and they glare at you like you insulted their mother. Add that many companies take it for granted that programmers want to program and don’t try to provide any kind of functional training; they unwittlingly leave a big gap between “technical” and “management”, as the techies never get taught how to understand enduserish.
The first group is kind of by definition already outside its comfort zone from the moment they accept the job. Either they are people with backgrounds in programming who have accepted a non-coding position, or people from other backgrounds who happen to like computers. They have wider mindsets and already speak enduserish.
Of the programmers, which are most likely to end up in any kind of management positions? On one hand, those who have a natural bent for analysis, who jump to technical analyst within a relatively short time and stay there forever (they may become the manager for an all-programmers team, but with duties still more focused on analysis and programming than on the more “managerial” stuff). On the other, people who were recruited from other fields: physicists, engineers. These are likely to proceed further afield too, either moving sideways-and-a-bit-up into functional analyst or continuing further up into team lead, project lead, etc.
Re. the enduserish training for programmers.
A previous client of mine was a pretty large consulting firm which hires over 90% from CS and always trains in-house. That other 10%? They’re taught to program and then they are placed directly on the management track.
Once the project was almost over, the PM asked me to provide some functional training in SAP QM for the technical analysts, “not as if they were going to implement SAP QM, but so they become familiar with the vocabulary”, because they kept nagging for it. I heard the manager for the programming farm (i.e., someone who controls about 500 programmers and technical analysts) tell the PM “please hire her, I don’t care how much you have to pay her, she’s been able to solve doubts about Finance and Purchasing that we’d had for years!”
At another project, the programmer and I were the first two people onsite, so I asked him to come to the first few visits with me. Surviving the shock of finding himself outdoors and in warehouses with the kind of cleanliness one can expect in a tropical warehouse (don’t step on the spiders, it’s their home), at one point he asked me “so… materials… they… they represent different items? Things that are, like, physically different and you put them in different places and stuff?” He’d been programming materials-related things for ten years, but nobody had told him what his job was about from a user’s point of view.
It’s a big, big gap, but many people don’t even see it. I mean, if you had a multinational team, you’d make sure they all had some language in common, right? But the idea that you also need to make sure people can understand each other when they’re speaking different specialized parts of the same language goes over a lot of heads.
I’ve always thought that the strict segregation of programmers from the actual business side of things is a big mistake. Not that you really need some sort of BA/Programmer hybrid people, but that being so divorced from the actual product/application/etc… means that as a programmer, you’re totally at the mercy of whoever wrote your technical design, and by extension, whoever wrote the requirements. And vice-versa, in that if they didn’t prognosticate every tiny little possible situation, you as a programmer have no real guidelines to work from.
You see this with offshore contract programmers all the time- they’ll program literally to the requirements, and God help you if you miss a tiny detail or don’t enumerate every single possible event that might ever possibly happen. Because those clowns won’t engage their brains and say “Hmm… what happens if X?” and then either ask you, or handle it some rational way themselves. Nope, they’ll let their program do some crazy unhandled thing, or handle it in some half-assed way that doesn’t really solve the problem.
But if these guys had a clue about WHAT the actual software does and how it is actually used, they’d have the ability to know that they really do need to ask a question, or otherwise know that they at least need to stub it, so that later, they can come back and handle it better.
More knowledge is good on both sides of the equation, but there (IME) seems to be more angry resistance on the technical side about learning business stuff, than there is on the BA/PM side about learning technical stuff.
Sure, but that just shifts the question to why men are more likely to be into computers as a hobby. I don’t see any substantial difference between building radio controlled cars from kits (my childhood hobby) from designing and furnishing Barbie’s dream home. And girls seem to be just as big on Lego as boys.
Probably because men take being social outcasts better than girls. If a guy has to choose between his passion and being popular he’ll usually keep pursuing his passion. If a girl has to choose, she’ll usually choose having a social life. We see this in marriage and relationships too. Women seem far more likely to abandon their dreams for the sake of a man than a man is for a woman. It’s difficult socially for women to be devoted to one thing for years and years and years, and a lot of that is the fault of our social culture. More pressure is put on women to “grow up and fit in”, whereas guys who get off the beaten path are often lauded as visionaries. But some fault also lies with women for not putting up much of a fight when they are first encouraged to stop building the best computer system ever made by a 12-year old and make friends.
This is what I’ve seen over my getting-close-to-thirty-years career. I got into college just as the original IBM PC was being sold and clones were also being sold. So that dates me for discussion purposes. I am a girl and didn’t know such things as Heath Kits or computers existed outside of Star Trek. I picked CS at random for my college major and fell in love with it. I loved it partly for the logic and discipline but also because when I looked at the computer-related media at that time, the focus was entirely on the hardware and software. They hadn’t yet started draping the photos with bikini bimbos to move merchandise. It gave the field a very egalitarian feel. About ten years later all the ads were featuring bikini models and using sex to sell to what they thought was an entirely male market, which was very off-putting to me as a female programmer.
I agree that the work-hard-play-hard/rockstar/codeninja lifestyle and focus when hiring was also a turn off for me. While I dove deep into my chosen platform and adored the hell out of it, I also strove to be a well-rounded individual with other things as hobbies and interests. I think this is a large part of what drives women OUT of tech careers. Corporate America is too focused on squeezing every last drop of “productivity” out of their workers, and I think this is very obvious when you look at the giants who offer perks like bottomless fridges full of free sodas, free cafeterias or pizza delivery, free dry-cleaning, etc. All that stuff is designed to allow you to stay in the office longer, and young men seem to fall for it more than women do.
After 20 years, I bailed out of software engineering (to become a business analyst) for these reasons:
[ul]
[li]I was told quite bluntly by a few people and intuited the same message from the industry that they will not pay commensurate with 20+ years of experience. The only way to get pay for that much experience is to get promoted to architect or over into management. The openings for architect are very rare, most companies only have and need one.[/li][li]Most of my experience was on a platform that became legacy and then quickly obsolete. Although I did train myself in Windows and web development that was not paid experience so didn’t seem to count in the eyes of hiring managers. In order to move over to newer technology, I’d have to step all the way down to entry level again, with that pay level. (Switching to business analyst was actually less of a cut in pay!)[/li][/ul]
A final observation, since I still work with IT teams, I’ve noticed this demographic breakdown in the last few companies I’ve worked for:
Software development is 95% east indian and 5% white. Of those Indians, I do see that they are about 2/3rds male and 1/3rd female. But the Indian women don’t seem to stay long because they are family-oriented so they don’t put in “the lifestyle” needed to have a long career in programming.
Infrastructure teams (hardware, network) is 95% white, 60% male, 30% female.
I don’t know what that means, but I just think it’s interesting.
I am not convinced that the distinction you describe exists, adaher. What makes you think that men are more likely to choose their hobby over popularity than women?
Female programmer here. I’m the tech lead for product team at public company, writing software for finance and HR. I’m currently the only female programmer on my team. There’s a handful of other women in the company - maybe 15% right now. Of ~15 product teams, only two tech leads are female.
So why don’t women go into programming? Hell if I know. I’m atypical - I did start coding at a young age, I played video games from the early 80s on, I’ve always been drawn to technology. If I had to guess, I’d just say it’s the overall culture of it; it’s not cool for girls to be interested in tech, and thus they don’t gravitate there. Later on, it can be a bit of a rough industry, and there is competition. But that exists in many, many industries, not just programming/tech. Doctors, lawyers, etc are all highly competitive, and plenty of women find their way there.
I do know there’s a tendency for guys to assume the women don’t know what they’re talking about, but it’s not all guys, and I’d venture to guess that almost all men who actually want to excel at their career can’t bring that shit to the office. At least, not in my experience. Does it happen? Sure. Is it insurmountable? Nope.
Another thing I wanted to say was that programming does not automatically = math. Yes, some types of programming is math-intensive. But there are plenty of web development, API and other types of programming that are more about language skills than math. I know that in my long career I never, ever needed to use any of the calculus I was forced to learn in college. I used statistics and simple trigonometry occasionally and algebra a lot. I think we need to stop telling young people that they must excel at math to become developers.
Actually, it is very math-intensive, but of a type which I don’t think I’ve ever seen taught formally and called math outside of advanced college classes. One of my HS books had a chapter on it but we didn’t touch it: formal logic. Yep, that whole OR, XOR… is a type of math! But yeah, a lot of the reasons of why people choose a certain field or not have to do with how it’s sold, and that often has very little relationship with the actual work.
I think that may be a reason why my classmates who chose their career fields on the basis of information from relatives or acquaintances working in them generally did better than people choosing them because of media-based images (and I’m including books there - I had a bio of Marie Curie which managed to contain almost no information on her actual work, on what she did day to day): the first ones had information which was a lot more realistic.
I don’t think he’s that far off. It’s not so much about men “willing to be social outcasts”. I think it’s more about men deriving value from “accomplishing things” whereas women skew towards deriving value through “social interactions”.
It’s a big reason IMHO why women hit a glass ceiling. I see a lot of women who are great at studying, building consensus within the group, even leading others. But always in the context of executing someone else’s agenda, seeking their approval and validation. It’s the difference between being Sheryl Sandberg and being Mark Zuckerberg. For all her professional accomplishments and Lean In philosophy, here entire success is based on being a great employee. Mark Zuckerberg, in contrast, started his own company.
Why is a wealthy male executive fine with marrying someone from a lower paying, lower status job while women executives always complain they can’t find a man “at or above their level”?
Also, one thing that hasn’t been mentioned here is that coding fucking sucks. I did it early on in my career, still do it from time to time, and I freakin hate it. Not so much writing code itself. But the JOB of writing code sucks. Constant demands from dumb managers and PMs who have no idea about what you are doing or how long it should or should not take. Dealing with people who disdain the work you do as “nerd work” and resent it when they need you to do it. Late nights trying to get some stupid bug fixed in order to meet some unreasonable deadline. Depending on your personality type, it can be very isolating. And it’s largely treated as a commodity to be offshored anyway. It’s the sort of thing you only do if you REALLY love the technical aspect of coding.
Which is not surprising that any women who doesn’t LOVE coding soon realizes “I can be a PM and maybe get into management”, “I can go into sales and make twice as much money”, “I can get married and quit the workforce, or at the very least take some lifestyle job”.
The most blatant example of moderate-level but ongoing perpetual sexism I’ve ever seen close up (or interpreted it as such, at any rate) was the IT Department where I worked in the early 2000s. Obviously this is just anecdotal evidence and not statistical or anything, but holy shit.
I’ve been in IT since before there were such things as video games (I did my first coding on punch cards). The gender disparity in IT pre-dates video games. The boys who dominated IT since the beginning (Grace Hopper notwithstanding) decided to put their nerd skills to work *creating * the video game industry.