What happened to all the female developers?

<i>And she said that one of the things that happens is that women don’t even think they’re qualified for something because it’s advertised in competitive language. The language of competition not only doesn’t appeal to many women, it actually puts them off.</i><p>This doesn't make sense to me because easily the most competitive path I've ever seen is premed. Almost all of the premeds I know are competing for the best grades, the best resumes, and the best internships. Organic chem is like a giant free-for-all where everyone tries to beat the curve. And yet, at least 50% of biology and medical students are women. Why are women turned off by competitiveness in CS (which I think is less common in my engineering classes where people often try to help other people and don't compete for the best grade), but not in medicine?<p>Aren't we just applying cultural influences to both genders in either case?

It's my understanding that in the early days working with computers was considered manually labor, something akin to data-entry of today. The "real" scientists and business people would instruct their CS conterparts to do a task, and how that task was accomplished was neither interesting nor remarked upon.<p>As computation became cheaper, CS still retained many qualities of data entry especially in the business sector.<p>As such, the whole profession was looked down upon. Men didn't want to enter it since after all they could simply be scientists and businessmen instead. So those who took it up were first women, then social outcasts (I'm exaggerating a bit here).<p>---<p>Around the 90s, everything started changing.<p>CS was still looked down on, but computing was so cheap and easy that you didn't need to trust it to someone with a specific degree to do so.<p>As such, the scientists and business people I remarked upon earlier began using their own computers. And where they didn't, they didn't hire someone with a CS degree to do it.<p>Also, the programming aspects of CS were better separated from data entry. Programmers which once were reviled, now could command healthy incomes and thus it became an attractive job for men.<p>Women on the other hand could get <i>any</i> job they preferred, and did prefer to get jobs in their own interest instead of CS which they might have only taken before because it was one of the few 'low class' labors that still made use of the mind and education.

I worked many years ago as a substitute teacher in Oakland, CA. During that time, there was interesting pattern. The vast majority of the older teachers were black and the vast majority of younger teacher were white. At a glance, this would seem strange given that discrimination was being actively attacked. But what was happening was more socially prestiges opportunities were opening for black college graduates and so few of them wanted to go into teaching, a field with less prestige than, say, law or business.<p>I suspect something different but with related qualities is going on with women and programming.<p>* Women now have more and more opportunities in a number of fields (I recall a statistic claiming the average income of a young woman college graduate in New York was higher than that of the average male college graduate).<p>* Programming has become a less desirable, less socially prestiges occupation.<p>* Programming became a more hobby-based occupation - the expectation is more that a programmer have been tinkering with computers forever and thus (as per the article).<p>* Programming became a more male-identified occupation through the media and through the hobby aspect.<p>* Age discrimination pushes the previous women programmers out of the field (and contributes to the field losing social prestige).

I wonder what the percentage of high school graduates who can program is, broken down by gender. My guess is there's close to an order of magnitude more 18 year-old males who can program than there are 18 year-old females, at least in the U.S., anyway. Furthermore, I'd guess that many if not most 18 year-olds who can program (male or female) are largely self-taught.<p>My thesis here is that teenage boys are much more likely to learn to program on their own than teenage girls are, regardless of raw aptitude. This might be true of technical skills in general, but programming (I would contend) is unusual in how easy it is to learn on your own.<p>This is just a hypothesis on my part, and I don't have hard numbers to back it up. It's a question I'd like to see asked, though.

Why did I (a boy) get into computers? I was a nerd and I had one friend and no social skills. I played no sports and did nothing but play with action figures and watch TV - until I found the computer. I never gave it up until I grew up, and now it's a job and sometimes a hobby (when i'm home long enough to play with it). Would you say it's more likely or less likely that an equal percentage of girls to boys would have similar experiences? Or would you say that girls might just have an easier time socializing and might be less prompted to lose themselves on the computer?<p>Why do we even care about which sex works more in that field? If we had the answer to this question, and somebody decided to increase the population of women in the field... Is it going to produce better code or something? What's the point other than just playing with social structures for fun, or exercising some strange need to reach some kind of artificial equilibrium anywhere we see what we perceive as an imbalance?<p>tl;dr there's not as many friendless geek women and who cares who's coding anyway

I'm so glad to see this message out there; a frustratingly small number of people are aware of the 1984(ish) peak in females in the field. My mom taught computer programming (Fortran) in a Chicago high school from 1967 until 1984, and was actually kind of surprised when I first asked her about gender balance issues in the field—they just weren't an issue then, and her classes were always more or less balanced.<p>But what they also were was everyone's very first exposure to a computer. Without exception, her students had never written any sort of program before, and they were recruited from good students in the math and physics classes, coming to programming with an open mind and no preconceptions. (A <i>lot</i> of them, girls and boys both, went into technical computer-related fields.)<p>The change, as has been noted elsewhere on this page, surely has to do with the introduction of computers, but my hypothesis is that it wasn't just home PCs (not in the 80s) but classroom PCs that were the problem: in a lot of places, computers in the classroom were a fad and showed up with no training of the teachers, so they sat in the back or the side, mostly unused... unless one or two of the students pestered the teacher to play with the computer, and then used the manual and/or trial and error to figure it out. Guess which students were doing that more?<p>But that, I think, wouldn't be enough. The knowledge should equalise after one or maybe two terms of college CS, right? But I'm pretty sure the real problem was that professors inadvertently reinforced and magnified the difference between students who'd had previous computer experience (primarily boys) and students who hadn't (of both genders). It turns out that as a teacher, it's very, <i>very</i> easy to look around the classroom, see that X% of the students seem to be getting something, and decide to move on. (You can't wait for 100%, usually, so it's always a judgement call.) That's fine if it's something you've taught well and only the weak students are struggling, but what if it's something you absentmindedly glossed over? Half the class understands it, so you must have covered it, right? This is very insidious, and even being aware of it is not always enough to combat it; and if the divide of "has experience" vs "no experience" partially reflects a gender divide, that divide will only get reinforced.

<i>"In the past year, the number of women majoring in Computer Science has nearly doubled at Harvard, rising from 13% to 25% (still nowhere near the 37% of 1984). [...] In the past three years, the number of female Computer Science majors at MIT has risen by 28%. And, at Carnegie Mellon, the portion of Computer Science majors who are women has moved from 1 in 5 in 2007 to 1 in 4 last year."</i><p>Focusing on the elite computer science schools obscures the overall statistic (which I don't see mentioned in the article). These schools specifically recruit and admit as many qualified females as they can into their program. At CS4HS, a CMU/Google conference for high school CS teachers, we were told as much, and tasked to do our own part to diversify our CS classes.

This post is presumably part of the patio11 campaign to boost Fog Creek's SEO and conversion rates by publishing "content you can't get anywhere else". Looking good!<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588431" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588431</a>

This question makes no sense unless it is also asked in conjuction with "what happened to all the male primary school teachers"?

Forgot where I read it but like true_religion said, some female programmers came into the field by way of secretary. As they kept typing instructions, they eventually figured out how computers work.<p>This photo set from Bell Labs taken in the 1960s is pretty interesting:<p><a href="http://www.luckham.org/LHL.Bell%20Labs%20Days.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.luckham.org/LHL.Bell%20Labs%20Days.html</a><p>One thing to note is that despite computers being a novelty back then is that primary education was in a much better state and students had a stronger foundation in science and math regardless of sex. Many long-time teachers would say (with some nostalgia premium) that high school graduates of the 1960s are equivalent to college graduates of today.<p>Another thing that isn't touched on is that computer programming as it stands right now is not a very female friendly profession. Women will usually factor in the possibility that their careers may get derailed at some point by having a child. Careers where time away from the field doesn't obsolete your skills is a big plus for women. Medicine and law are excellent fields in that regard.<p>"Partly because it is so tricky to juggle kids and a career, many highly able women opt for jobs with predictable hours, such as human resources or accounting. They also gravitate towards fields where their skills are less likely to become obsolete if they take a career break, which is perhaps one reason why nearly two-thirds of new American law graduates are female but only 18% of engineers.<p>A study by the Centre for Work-Life Policy, a think-tank based in New York, found that, in 2009, 31% of American women had taken a career break (for an average of 2.7 years) and 66% had switched to working part-time or flexible-time in order to balance work and family. Having left the fast track, many women find it hard to get back on. "<p><a href="http://www.economist.com/node/18988694" rel="nofollow">http://www.economist.com/node/18988694</a>

Based on the handful of women I know who can program, there seems to be a few reasons why not many go into CS: 1) It seems they aren't exposed to it as much. They're less likely to read about it on the internet. Or learn about it from relatives. Or take classes in it. 2) The handful that I know who took programming in high school never (or barely) turned it into a hobby, even if they later declared CS as their major.<p>Meanwhile, I know tons of guys who got into programming by themselves, or because their parents did it. Also, all of the CS guys I know who took programming classes in high school did some outside of class for fun.<p>So, when some women become CS majors, they get intimidated. They see "everyone" outperforming them, since everyone is mostly guys with a pre-built set of skills. Even guys who are so-so at something quite frequently talk like they know stuff; that's just the way guys behave. This worsens the above impression. There's an actual culture difference. Can't stress the importance of this enough.<p>As a result, instead of thinking "These guys have years on me and I need to catch up and put lots of work in," many women think "I suck at this," and quit. Then next set has the same problem.<p>EDIT: removed a bit of unintentional italicizing

I'm a female developer. I'm not going for CS, but a Systems Engineering degree. I share classes with lots of women (well, in the best of situations, we're 1/3 of the total population of a classroom). Even knowing lots of women going for a SE degree, I can count with one hand the female developers I know. Most of them aren't interested in developing, but in functional analysis and leading teams.

I can barely put up with all of the jerks in our industry as a man, I don't want to think about what it would be like as a woman.

The pictures in the article show an old IBM-style computing facility, the domain of the sages in white robes who tend the machine. This raises two questions in my mind:<p>1. Have hackers and the hacker culture risen in importance and influence in the broader tech ecosystem since, say, 1985?<p>2. Has this resulted in a change of computing culture contributing to the decreasing numbers of women entering the field?<p>One of the things present in Levy's <i>Hackers</i> was that the vast majority of the movers-and-shakers in the hacker community were men. Roberta Williams was, I believe, the only woman mentioned in the book with any direct involvement in computing. Has that culture risen in influence, and is it (partly) to blame? The IBM terminal &#38; mainframe rooms with their hospital-clean appearance don't make press much any more.

"But that means that I can’t really talk to my friends about the stuff I do for my classes, which is frustrating. Sometimes, there’s a really cool idea presented in class, but it’s only cool if you already know the background information to understand it – to grasp how and why it’s cool. Trying to present enough background to explain why this concept is awesome during the course of a conversation really just doesn’t work, as they don’t get a deep enough understanding of the background to see why it’s cool and spending several minutes attempting to explain frustrates me and bores them."<p>As a male software developer, this frustrates me too. You just get eye-rolls and snarky replies of 'flux capacitor?'

It could also be about riskiness. Computing moved from stable and secure to very risky and with nightmare hours, though I'm not sure when.

For better or worse, the thing that jumps out at me from that graph is that the numbers all look similar until you get to the code review, where half as many women made the cut as men.<p>If this is a statistically significant difference, it speaks volumes.

"What happened to all the talented female teachers?"<p>In the 1960s teaching was one of the few professional occupations considered "suitable" for women, and as a result many of the best and brightest women went into education. As other occupations opened up to women this resulted in a huge brain drain, with the average ability of teacher to drop dramatically.<p>I imagine the same happened in programming as well, as women has more choices open up to them they naturally moved on to other fields.

While we analyze why there isn't much gender diversity as it is before. We must also understand how much the industry has changed over years. The volume of work that existed back in the pre - 80's era and now isn't even comparable. And with volume the culture of our profession has changed drastically.<p>If its your usual 9-5 job, where you have to apply routine steps everyday then it would have been OK. But being progressive in programming requires you not just to work hard(And in most cases working under difficult deadlines and overnight) you also have continuously keep learning and update yourself with things that come along everyday. This is pretty demanding if you have a family, kids and especially when you are pregnant etc. There are physical limitations in those issues. If I look at the way my career has been, I sort of had to stay and overnights and work on difficult deadlines many times over long periods. It becomes very difficult for a mother with kids to accommodate work and family in that kind of schedule. So she has to often opt to be one side. A general counter point presented to this argument is to ask the Project manager to be more come with a more accommodating plan.This is often not possible due to economic reasons, given the time, money and resource something needs to be delivered. This has nothing to do with male domination in the society, these are just unavoidable situations.<p>This is typical of many other professions. Why don't we find as many female cab drivers as male ones? Why don't we have as many frontline female soldiers/nurses?<p>Let alone all that, if the current biological situation was reversed. And men could stay at home(Do the house choses, kids, food etc) and women had to take all responsibilities of house, family, money and security for their whole life. How many women in mass(not individual cases) would be happy with such a tiring and demanding life?<p>Well I guess everything in the nature and the way things go have a purpose.

<i>But the most common explanation is that the rise of personal computers led computing culture to be associated with the stereotype of the eccentric, antisocial, male “hacker.”</i><p>I think that's right, but the question is why girls did not use the opportunity that presented itself and put their own cultural stamp on it.

Do the influxes of women correlate with industry stability?<p>Women tend to not like to waste their time, but men will take high risks for high returns (according to <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2767867" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2767867</a>). So, men will explore, discover, invent. Some get rich; most get nothing. Women prefer reliable reward for effort e.g. law and medicine.<p>But the computer industry has been characterized by periodic disruptions of new hardware (mainframe, minicomputer, desktop), and while those revolutions were opportunities to make a fortune, they were not stable. Currently, the early land-grab of the web seems to have subsided and its future looks secure (e.g. smartphones aren't dethroning it). If we have entered a period of stability, it may be more attractive to women.

If you plot women's share of doctorates in different fields, it's pretty telling that CS is the <i>only</i> field in which the fraction of women dropped significantly between 1920 - 1960. In 1920, 20% of mathematics and CS PhD degrees went to women, by 1960 it was down to 5%. It took until around the turn of the century for it to get back up to 20%. (See <a href="http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf06319/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf06319/</a>)

Asking why there aren't more female developers is like asking why there aren't more guys who go into nursing or more guys who wanna be fashion designers or a chef.<p>Perhaps its personal interest, societal view that industries like games and computers are more masculine...<p>Honestly, who cares if the developer is a chick or a guy as long as the application or site being built is useful

"In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the systems analysts in America were women. ... the percentages of women who earned Computer Science degrees rose steadily, peaking at 37% in 1984."<p>While that's definitely higher, still seems like the field was male dominated (the majority were male).

my experience: Where I work, on my floor we are either a proportion of 50% - 50% or 40%-60% (in favor for the Girls). Hey, but this is Romania, we don't have feminist movements and so on. Different society. Even in college we are something like 40%-60% (males win here) but we don't take it as a big deal... Btw found CS girls in college that were smarter than me on some fields of this domain :), and I know where to ask if I have a question about those fields.<p>other answer: Depends on the "society" although while I was in the USA everybody was blaming it... and believe me is not because of it, is because of those who like to blame it ;).<p>Last but not least... my girlfriend is a developer.

Here you go: <i>It seems like sometimes the family computer is bought mainly for the boy to use and then he’s kind of forced to share it with his sister.</i><p>That pretty much explains it, doesn't it? Girls are discouraged from using computers because they learn from a young age that computers are the "domain" (property / territory) of boys.

Totally off topic, but, is that Font intended?

A cursory look at the graph indicates that the only place women suffered was on their own code. Resume, phone skills, interpersonal skills, all great.

Of all of the female computer programmers I've gotten to know well and worked with (maybe 4 or 5), none of them were half as good as the average male programmer I've gotten to know.<p>Programming is, and always will be a male profession. The only thing that will change this is if we force women to learn programming, but even then you can't make them like it. I think the solution here is to realize that there is a physical pre-programmed revulsion to everything that Higher math, Physics and Programming have to offer.