You don’t need to follow instructions to design and furnish Barbie’s dream home.
All the “parts” you need are fully assembled and pseudo-functional on their own. (Barbie’s convertible can be a plaything even if you don’t have a Barbie to drive it.)
Playing with Barbie is entirely creative and imaginative. There is no problem-solving with a Barbie. A Barbie can still be a Barbie even if you don’t have any accessories (naked broke-ass Barbies were all I had as a kid). A remote controlled car is not a remote controlled car if you can’t be bothered to put it together. It’s just parts.
Barbie is conducive for simulating social interactions. Now, I was one of those weirdos who was more fascinated by the mechanics of Barbie’s legs (did ya know that the plastic rib inside one can be filed down into a shiv?) But even I couldn’t resist playing make-believe with Barbie and the rest of my dolls (who I had similarly mutilated in an attempt to “understand” them). Kids that build remote control cars tend not to do so to make them characters in their “stories”. That’s not really the point.
When it comes to doll-playing, I don’t think girls and boys differ all that much. But I don’t think girls are encouraged to build things as much as boys tend to be. Create things, yes. But not build mechanical or electronic things that are supposed to work.
Re “social outcasts”
I think boys who are social loners are treated differently than girls who are social loners AND I also think they tend to gravitate towards towards different things based on what they are exposed to (which is a function of gender as well as other things). Regarding the second, I think if I had been exposed to more “mechanical things” (like remote controlled car kits) as a kid , I probably wouldn’t have felt the need to feed by curiosity by disassembling all of my dolls. But no one gave me “mechanical” or problem-solving toys. No one in my family knew anything about computers or programming either. I didn’t know programming was a “thing” until I was in high school, and by then I had developed other interests. But based on what I know about myself now and the competencies I’ve developed as an adult, I know I would have flourished in that arena.
OTOH male students say, “I want to be in engineering because I like to build shit.”
It’s not that women are not just as capable, it’s that many of them have goals that just don’t lead them in this direction. Whether this is due to societal pressures, cultural norms, genetics, or something else I have no idea.
I’m a female programmer. It was a second career for me, so even though I’m an old lady with many, many years of work experience, I’ve only really been in “tech” for about a decade, and I’ve only ever worked for one company as a “real” programmer. And as it happens, at this company, the majority of programmers in my area are also women. I can’t speak for the rest of the company, since employees tend to be somewhat segregated by the projects they work on, but my impression is that this is not particularly unusual here.
But this company is probably not what most people think of when they talk about programming. For starters, we’re not a software company as such. Our business is conducting social science research. So while we do build software, all day every day, it’s not the end product; it’s built for the purpose of collecting, analyzing, and reporting data. The kind of application we build depends on the needs of the project - it might be a website, or a program for a laptop, or even a phone app. I do primarily web programming and database design, so I’m still not a “real” programmer in many people’s minds. In fact, I often hesitate to call myself a programmer if I know the person I’m talking to is in tech. But I am one indeed.
So here are my thoughts. First of all Jragon noted many things that rang true for me:
I can’t say why this is, but I’ve always felt like I wanted to - or maybe, ought to, regardless of what I wanted - have a job that would “make a difference in the world”. For a long time, I wanted to be a teacher, but the first real paying gig I had nearly killed me, and for peanuts. Then, when I started looking for other jobs, I focused largely on nonprofits, because it just seemed like the right thing to do. And I did that for a while. Then, even when I moved to the corporate side, I worked for a tech company that served nonprofits, so I could still feel I was “helping”. You know. And even now, I’m at a company that supports social science research. Where I live, I could have easily gotten a job at any number of military contractors, but I felt better about “helping”.
But to be honest, much of what I do is so removed from the actual science we’re conducting that I’m “helping” about as much as the person who delivered the sandwiches at our client meeting. And that’s fine. I’ve found that what really matters to me, what really makes me enjoy my work, is feeling like I’m using my brain, getting to contribute unique skills and knowledge, and most of all, getting to solve actual problems. If I can’t figure out why the software is misapplying codes in the database - and fix it! Fast! - then the data will be incorrect, and the information gleaned from the study will be less accurate and/or complete. But I could never have envisioned a career like this, much less that I would find it so engaging, until I had been in the working world a while and learned that even the most life-affirming, humanitarian careers consist of drudgery about 90% of the time, and the important thing is to figure out what kind of drudgery you enjoy.
Yes. In college, I was friends with a bunch of the stereotypical Red-Bull-swilling, on-call-24-7, code-is-my-life guys. I was always fascinated to hear them talk about their work, but their lives just seemed awful. One of the reasons I was inspired to go into tech was getting exposure to careers in tech that weren’t like that. The tech people I worked with, the ones who built the database software our organization used, they all worked 9-5 and had families and took vacations and whatnot. Sure, if there was a major catastrophe, they’d work around the clock to fix it, but that was the rare exception, not the rule. When I saw that a programmer could have this kind of life, it made it much more appealing to me.
Yes to this, too. When I started college and met my friends who were studying computers, I briefly considered changing majors. But they already knew so much more than me, and the jargon they used to talk about it seemed so foreign and impenetrable that I figured even if the university let me choose that major, I’d never be able to hack it.
When I went back for my tech degree, I had accumulated enough experience with computers through work - as well as general work experience - that I was more confident in my abilities, and if someone piped up with an esoteric question, I didn’t think, “Oh my gosh, am I supposed to know what he’s talking about?!” but rather, “What an ass. Shut up and let the instructor teach,” or occasionally, “What an interesting idea - I should go look that up!”
I think this relates very much to both the toxic lifestyle and “nerdy strutting” discussed above. The stereotypical male geek accoutrements help signal that in order to be successful in tech, you have to live tech. You can’t just be *interested *in programming; even in your spare time, you need to be either thinking about nerdy/geeky stuff(discussing warp drives or lightsaber physics or sonic screwdrivers) or playing with nerdy/geeky stuff (watching a Red Dwarf marathon, pulling all-nighters grinding on a game to level up), to the exclusion of even eating a decent meal - hence the junk food. And all the memes and in-jokes and oblique references demonstrate that if you don’t already “get” all of this stuff, you never will.
At the first tech company I worked at, even though the programmers worked 9-5 and had lives and such, there was quite a bit of this, and I found it a little intimidating - even though I’m a pretty big nerd/geek myself, and love a lot of games and comics and sci-fi. But unlike the guys I was friends with in college, these guys were much less “gatekeeper-y”, and they a) loved that I was interested in this stuff, and b) made clear that it didn’t matter if I wasn’t.
It’s possible there’s a gender difference here, but I think it’s important to consider the fact that social expectations also play a huge role in where kids direct their interests, and what activities adults encourage them to engage in. I’ve always been interested in the kind of logic that programming uses, but I didn’t know that was what it was. As a young girl, I was obsessed with logic puzzles. I loved learning about Venn diagrams and matrices. I was nuts about diagramming sentences. But no one ever said to me, “You know, you should check out computers.”
I also liked playing video games, but we couldn’t afford a computer, and I didn’t have any friends who had one (N.B.: I didn’t have any friends), so being occasionally allowed to “waste” a couple of quarters on Pac Man or Frogger was about the extent of my experience. In middle school, we got to play with Logo one time. We didn’t get to do anything as fancy as a square - if I recall correctly, we made the “turtle” spin once in a circle. And thus ended our lesson in programming. In high school, I took a class where we learned to use Word and Excel. I’m pretty sure that was the only “computer” class they offered. If they did offer others, they were electives, and for me, those were entirely taken up with the “fun” stuff: art, drama, newspaper, French, and so on. I didn’t know programming computers could be “fun”, because all I knew about them was Logo: typing a bunch of lines of cryptic text for an insignificant result. Then I got to college, where I learned about the “fun”, but also learned (mistakenly) that it was too late for me.
This was me all over in undergrad. I was convinced I had gotten into college by the skin of my teeth, that I was a complete idiot, and that if I wasn’t extremely careful, I was going to be exposed for the fraud I was. If a professor had said this, I would have dropped that class like a hot potato. It was only after successfully finishing school and spending some time getting very positive feedback in the working world that I gained a decent amount of confidence, but it’s still something I struggle with, honestly.
And as it so happens, this is one of the things I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about. I’m told that I’m good at “seeing the big picture”, understanding the needs and goals of the project as a whole, so that I can identify problems (or more often, vast gaping holes) in the design and address them before they arise. And because we’re not a software company as such, our clients (and even many of our own employees) often know far less about how to write clear requirements than the average programming client. I chalk up my skill in this area to all the experience I’ve had working in a variety of jobs, including some tech-related ones, but on the client side.
Yes! Discrete math and formal logic! This was another reason I didn’t (originally) major in computers in college: I was always good at math, but I was always somewhat bored by it (except for geometry). Since I took advanced classes, I finished my high school requirement in my sophomore year. So I stopped taking math, and then found out that I was actually interested in a lot of subjects - like computers - that had four years of high school math as a prerequisite. But then! When I took discrete math for my tech degree, it was fantastic. It was like a class in logic puzzles! I was in heaven.
One other thing that’s been mentioned a few times here is simple bias against women in tech, whether it’s from their professors, their bosses, or their coworkers. I’m lucky enough to work in an environment where that’s never really been an issue (and the high number of women we have working here pretty much dictates that it can’t be). But in other places I’ve worked, and at friends’ workplaces, it certainly has been. And even here, I’ve recently begun working directly with another company on a project (they’re a sub-contractor), and I’ve had to explain to them more than once that no, the site doesn’t work that way because the data doesn’t work that way, and no, I don’t need to go ask a programmer, because I am a programmer, yes really, no not a “program manager”, a programmer, and in fact am the programmer for this project. In related news, there was a recent study of contributions to GitHub, a code-sharing network, that found that women’s code tended to be accepted by other users at a higher rate - unless the woman’s user profile identified her as a woman.
That might explain something, if the dates weren’t wrong (home PCs hadn’t been around in notable numbers at the time of the shift), and if it actually wasn’t basically circular.
I didn’t have time to finish my earlier post concerning some other stuff that went on at the time.
It wasn’t the home PC, it was video games that skyrocketed in that era. The home gaming world is somehow awfully male dominated still. The anti-woman culture is infamously bad. I could use dozens of negative adjectives about how bad it is and still not scratch the surface.
How much of that carries over to women going into CS/IT fields? Not really sure.
One very odd thing happened as PCs became common in high schools. We used to get a lot of incoming freshman who had a HS programming course. (Not as a % of all incoming freshmen, but as a % of those going into CS.)
This dropped off as PCs in HS became more common. Most them now only had word processing type exposure to computing! So students in HS who wanted to “do something with computers” used to have to take a programming course, now they didn’t. Perhaps there was some sort of filtering bias in this regard that affected women taking HS programming and therefore college CS courses.
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I don’t think the demands of a career can explain the big shift in demographics we saw in CS departments. These people (usually) were pre-family, pre-real life, etc. and those filters hadn’t affected many yet. (And college students pick majors for a lot of reasons, but future job load is rarely one of the big ones.)
Yet another anecdote from my CS prof days: Sometimes I would note a female CS student who was “like one of the guys” in the way they approached programming and such. I would ask about how they got interested in this stuff, etc. One common factor was a father who encouraged them in learning about tech stuff. E.g., giving the kid an old clock and letting them tear it apart to see how it worked, etc.
OTOH, I also met a lot of women who were really good at various things, but had a different approach. Success has more than one path.
I tend to think this is more that someone is encouraged in their natural interest rather than the interest was developed. That is, she had a mind for engineering and had the good fortune to have it supported. I’m very engineering-minded and tried to encourage my daughter whenever possible, but she’s not at all interested.
In general, I think boys are more likely to have an engineering mind. Girls can too, but I think it’s much more likely in boys. So even in a perfect, gender-neutral world, I would expect more men in engineering fields than women.
How much we can infer from this, though? Perhaps a boy child of your loins would have been similarly disinterested, or perhaps your kind of engineering isn’t as appealing as some other kind of engineering would be, if she were exposed to that.
I remember having a disdain for engineering when in middle school I participated in one of those ubiquitous “egg drop” contests for kids interested in engineering. It understood what the point was, but it was a big “meh” for me. But when I got to college, I realized the full diversity under the “engineering” umbrella. Sometimes I wonder if a lot of kids are turned off by engineering just because they didn’t care about saving eggs.
One major reason is economic and biological. Tech skills, particularly in the IT field, are very perishable. A woman who takes time off to have a baby will find that most of her skills have ceased to be relevant when she tries to reenter the field. Whereas things like teaching or lawyering or even nursing change very little in that amount of time. Most women will get pregnant in their life and communities studies show that even if we don’t plan to have children we still tend to make decisions as though we will.
I’m basing it on my experience growing up. I loved taking things apart and trying to fix them even when I was under 5. I had pretty bad parents and they in no way encouraged me to try that kind of stuff. It’s just something about how I’m wired. I’ve always found it interesting to think about how things work. It wasn’t hard to find other boys who were also into the same type of things. Girls, on the other hand, mostly had little interest in tinkering. It always stood out as unusual when a girl seemed to think in that engineering way.
As an example, consider putting together a piece of Ikea furniture. There are people who have trouble even when they follow the instructions, people who are successful when following the instructions, and people who don’t read the instructions and think it’s fun to figure out how to put it together on their own. People in that last group are likely wired in a way that makes them enjoy engineering challenges rather than they were encouraged to be that way. In my experience, it is much more likely that a man will enjoy that type of engineering challenge than a woman.
“That engineering way” implies that there is one way to be an engineer. It could be that there are a million ways to be an engineer (just like there are a million different ways to be artistic), but we’ve mistakenly assumed that the “boys” way is the only way. It could be that girls tend to display an engineering predilection in a way that doesn’t involve taking things apart.
I’d also argue that the last sentence doesn’t follow from the one before it. You can have a mind for a certain thing, but still not have show any interest in it because 1) you don’t like it, 2) you think you won’t like it, or 3) you don’t know enough to have an opinion. As a kid, I was certain I didn’t like math. I had fashioned myself as an artiste, which (in my mind) was not compatible with an analytical mind. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that I’m not too shabby in that department and that my youthful dislike of math was probably the result of me unwittingly absorbing my mother’s math-phobia. I also think that as a kid math was nothing but rote memorization of disconnected steps and navel-gazing about traveling trains. I didn’t see the point, so it wasn’t something I took to with earnest. And yet I do get jeeped up over statistics, which I didn’t learn until I got to college.
I’ve noticed this too, but I keep myself from making too many leaps. Because it’s complicated. Like, I know that I can tinker for hours and hours and hours, and I can thoroughly enjoy myself. But I also know that I wouldn’t be able to indulge myself like this if I were a more “typical” woman–one with a significant other and children and friends and a social life. Men can get away with having “man caves” because men are socially permitted to engross themselves over single-minded pursuits. The whole “man cave” concept encourages men to turn inward. In contrast, women are encouraged/expected to turn their passions “outward”. It is acceptable for her to be passionate about something as long as someone else benefits from her efforts. Hence, why the whole house is her cave. The house is where the family lives, and she’s expected to care only about the family.
This weekend I installed an in-ground pet fence in my backyard. I told a female friend about how I’d spent my weekend and she was shocked (hehe) that I was so bold. In her mind, I’m guessing she thinks that’s the kind of chore a woman should get a guy to do for her, not just because it’s “mechanical” but because it would take too much energy and time for a person with a long weekend “to do” list. Like a woman often has. So, it may be that women don’t tinker because they are too busy doing other things she feels are more important. But absent those other things, she’d do it and enjoy it.
I suppose for something which you had no knowledge about that’s true, but things are all around you. No one had to introduce me to the concept that there was stuff inside a radio that made it work. I looked at a radio and understood that there must be stuff inside and I wondered what that stuff was.
As a counter-example, consider home decorating. I have very little interest in it and will do as little as possible. My wife and daughters are the opposite. They truly love looking at things like paint, tile, and wood samples and coming up with different combinations to see how they look. When we all go to Home Depot, they eagerly spend their time in the paint section looking at colors. I could hardly care about that and quickly get bored. Those differences aren’t from how we were raised. There’s something in their wiring that allows them to enjoy that. It’s not that I was discouraged or not introduced to home decorating. It’s that for whatever reason, I don’t care about that. And furthermore, how I feel about home decorating is how my wife and daughter feel about fixing stuff. If I’m fixing stuff or discussing how to fix stuff, they are interested for a short while, but soon tire of it.
It was me too. I was way into my senior year when I was able to finally relax.
But I’m torn. As psychological damaging as the “weed out” concept can be, I think it motivated me to work harder than I would have otherwise. Somehow I simultaneously believed I was going to fail but that I wouldn’t if I worked hard enough. When the professor would do the “look to your left, look to your right” bit, I would take it as a personal challenge and inwardly reply, “You think I’m going to fail, but I’ll show you!” But I would still be afraid that he/she was right. I don’t know why some people succumb to the self-doubt but I didn’t.
I don’t suffer from the Imposter Syndrome anymore. It’s easy to feel smart when you work in government.
A person can have an interest in the workings of electronic equipment, but lack the moxy to take it apart. I know that if I had taken apart a radio as a kid, my parents would have fussed at me before “breaking” stuff and for trying to electrocute myself. I could have fooled around in secret, but I had a sibling who would have surely tattled on me. As rough and tumble as I was as a kid, I was like most little girls. I wanted to be “good.” I didn’t know how to be mischievous.
(My mother disapproved of me disassembling my dolls. She took it as a sure sign that I was an unfit doll-mother. Barbie and I are estranged, so I guess she was right.)
I don’t know how old your daughter is, but I hope you’ll consider the possibility that you haven’t figured out all her likes and dislikes and “wirings” yet. The things a person fixates on as a young person are not always the same things that they fixate on when they are older. And a person doesn’t necessarily display the same competencies in different contexts (e.g., at home with parents versus on one’s own). I’m sure you are right that your daughter shares your wife’s proclivities in home decorating. But that doesn’t mean she hasn’t inherited your “engineering” mind. Perhaps it just hasn’t revealed itself to you yet. I’m almost 40, and I still manage to shatter the impressions my parents’ have of me.
A while back NPR’s Planet Money looked into the drop in women in computer science, and one thing they found was that in the '80s and '90s many parents bought into the idea that “computers are for boys” and were thus more likely to encourage a son’s interest in computers than a daughter’s. (The episode is here, and there’s also a Morning Edition piece here.) Some families even did things like putting the computer in the son’s bedroom and requiring the daughter to get her brother’s permission to use it.
I saw a video on YouTube that says the blame falls on Nintendo.
See, the Atari home video game system was marketed as Home Electronics, and sold in the same part of the store that sold TVs. But after it died and Nintendo was looking to revive that market, they decided to market their product as a Toy, and thus it would be placed in the Toy Aisles.
In the US at the time (and pretty much still), the Toy Department is very segregated by gender. So when marketing a toy, one has to decide if the target market is girls or boys.
Nintendo decided it was boys.
The fact that video games were considered a “boy thing” resulted in overflow where computers in general were a “boy thing”.
The video asserted that the number of women pursuing Computer Science degrees fell sharply just a few years after the NES reached the US market.
Quick aside:
["]This](Redirecting to Google Groups[1-25) is a usenet post from 1999 (which is about when I first read it).
Long story short: a professional speech therapist picked a younger sibling up from a sci-fi convention, and observed “you people are weird”, which turned into her presenting a panel at a convention on exactly how they are weird.
The part that the quoted portion reminded me of was about how when someone was speaking, someone else would interrupt to correct a mispronunciation, and the speaker would then restate the word pronouncing it correctly and move along.
The therapist said “normal” people would find that interruption rude.
This passage struck a chord with my brother and me because our family, and most of our friends growing up, did that: the “interrupting with a small correction” thing. And the taking it as helpful, not rude.
Since we grew up in a college town, and our parents were both faculty (Mom taught English, Dad taught Communications Sciences which includes Speech and Public Speaking), we began to wonder if “fannish” might be related to Academia somehow.
At the very least, the strong overlap between IT students and fandom suggests that this behavior might come from fan culture.
Another point in the talk was that the fan community and “mundanes” use eye contact differently, and therefore perceive each other as rude.
Maybe, but that just kicks the can down the road. If it is the case that boys/men are more interested in video games (and related, technological nerdery), why is that?
About Grace Hopper:
“She was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer in 1944, invented the first compiler for a computer programming language, and was one of those who popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages.”
Hell, that kind of crap is one of the reasons to avoid identifying yourself as female if you game… from automatically being expected to heal to discussions among the men on who’s better at whatever you’re doing listing exclusively men. You’re in a raid group, the main tank is a woman, the second tank is a woman, and the guys are waxing poetic about what wonderful tanks a bunch of guys who haven’t tanked for months are…
Re the competitive courses, I attended what was at the time the only major/college left in Spain where the first year was selective (which c. 1950 had been the norm for all STEM majors). We knew only 1/3 of the class would ever reach the second year. The ratios for the first and second year have been pretty much the same since there were enough women to have a ratio and not a token; there was a specific bunch of my female classmates who did very badly but it was because their HS had inflated their grades, and they were compensated by several guys who gave up before even getting their results from the first set of exams. Could the teachers be manipulating the ratios? Yeah, sure. Do I believe they do? I just don’t see any benefit to doing it, so no.
This article is a perfect example of the crap that passes for studies in the social sciences. The M.O. is to generate data, find a slight difference, and then use that slight difference to support your preexisting notions. Supposedly the data shows that there is a pro-man/anti-woman bias on Github, but it doesn’t consistently do that. If the Github contributers were biased towards men then it follows that identifying as a man should increase your code acceptance rate. It doesn’t. It makes it less likely.
because they are all designed for and aimed at boys and men? Most are extremely violent and many exhibit a lot of misogyny. Personally, I don’t have the slightest desire to run around shooting things while looking at images of impossibly-shaped under-dressed women.
