I'm not sure who is making this argument anyway. Women are naturally attracted to alpha males.<p>I think the truth is quite the opposite. Programming and IT have historically attracted a large number of social rejects, who, despite scoring high on self-evaluated liberalness, have no idea how to talk to women. Whether the individual problem is general awkwardness, sexist beliefs, bitterness towards women, or inability to engage with women or fawning all over them, if half the guys in an IT department have one of these problems then it's going to be a very unwelcoming place to be for a woman.<p>I remember in my undergrad that the ratio of men to women in CS classes created a problem in and of itself as any remotely attractive woman had to fight off all kinds of unwanted attention from a steady stream of unattractive guys. To me it's no surprise that by senior year they had dwindled to a handful.
<i>Now that doesn't mean the underlying problem isn't worth dealing with. It absolutely is! I think that the world of programming could be much more interesting if more women were part of it. I wish I knew how to make that happen. If I find out, I'll be the first to champion it.</i><p>This may get me a ton of down-votes, but I'm genuinely curious: is the gender gap in programming <i>actually</i> a problem? If so, why? In what ways would the world of programming be more interesting if it was more evenly split between men and women?<p>I'm not trying to sound misogynistic or anything, just haven't thought much about this topic and I'm not sure I understand why it's considered a big problem. Would love to hear people's views.
Interesting, but I think this argument is flawed. The author notes that different professions tend to have different distributions of male personality types. Programmers tend towards meek and introverted, lawyers and businessmen more alpha, yet women don't shy away from those fields.<p>This seems to assume that women must magically all have the same personality type and/or no personality selection bias in their career choices. Since women are comfortable going head-to-head with alpha-male lawyers, they therefore should be totally comfortable with geeky programmers. I don't buy it -- all women are not the same, just like all men are not the same.<p>It seems to me that women who become lawyers or businesspeople likely have A-type personalities themselves. Accordingly, they are probably more likely to view competition or confrontation with males in the workplace as a motivating challenge. Women who become programmers are probably, just like male programmers, a bit more introverted and geeky. Accordingly, confrontation/competition with males in the workplace is probably less likely to be motivating, and more likely to be intimidating -- especially when you consider that many "meek" male programmer types tend to drastically overcompensate for insecurity in physical situations with hyper-competitive and vitriolic behavior in virtual environments (I wonder what the gender and programmer/non-programmer ratios are like on 4chan).<p>In other words, just because male programmers don't rank as alpha-males relative to the general male population doesn't mean they don't behave like alpha-males in their own environment, especially relative to the female personality types interested in becoming programmers.<p>My 2 cents.
(Insert big anecdotal evidence disclaimer here...)<p>It's not programmers that keep women out of programming (or IT in general). It's not the tools, the bad hours, the awkward guys, or the 'girls are bad at math'/'girls can't program' stereotypes. Right from the beginning I was pushed away from computers (before I'd even decided what field I wanted to apply myself to) by teachers, career advisers, college lecturers, friends, strangers, employers and sexist colleagues.<p>I remember being 13/14 and sitting down to an 'interview' with a career adviser. We had to answer a series of questions on screen which were supposed to tell us our ideal career. Every time I answered I could see that various computer related careers were climbing up the list, and yet I was told by the chap doing the interview that I should be a vet or a police officer. Neither made much sense to me.<p>My computing teacher in school used to prioritise computer access to the boys for after school 'computer club', and although I did ICT at college (A levels in the UK), lecturers informed me that I would only be able to use the qualifications to get into admin/secretary jobs (boys were told otherwise). I was one of only two girls on my course at college, and the other girl dropped out by the end of the second year due to family pressure. My last boss used to make derogatory remarks about the fact that I was female, and colleagues supported my male colleague over me.<p>It's the attitude from everyone else that women can't and shouldn't get involved with computers that pushes women into other fields. I was lucky to have a very supportive family and a partner that wholeheartedly supports women in IT to push me through - oh, and being a stubborn bugger helped too :)
This bloody topic keeps reappearing, and the results look the same. As I (and others) have written previously, if you're capable of being successful in many fields (medicine, law, ...), why on $GOD's green earth would you pick this one??<p>The working conditions aren't the best, the weeks tend to run long and the tanning possibilities under fluorescent lights just isn't great. Throw in a couple examples of, umm, undersocialized folks and I know how I'd vote if I get a do-over.
"This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs."<p><a href="http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science" rel="nofollow">http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science</a>
I don't think that the lack of women programmers has much to do with male programmers or computer science programs. Male programmers and computer science programs always seem to love women who express an interest in it. Let's face it, none of us want this to be a male-only profession.<p>However, society does socialize people into gender roles. Women are taught not to go for math (which computer science, at least at an academic level, depends on) and the sciences just as men are taught to forgo sociology. Remember, there are departments that are mostly women at colleges and it's equally telling to ask why there aren't men in those departments - not as a matter of discrimination, but a matter of socialization. Anyway, women tend to be pushed away from certain paths just as men are pushed away from certain paths (while I find nursing to be an admirable profession, what percentage of nurses do you think are male? And I think it's decently clear that from a young age, many of us have the image of doctors being male and nurses being female).<p>It's a big problem in our society, but I don't think that programers and computer science departments are to blame. We train children from very young ages to go into certain roles. Once you're along a path (any path at any point in life) there is a high cost of switching. If you've been pushed away from math and science through high-school, the chance that you can switch that in college is very low. You have to make up a lot of work that the other students already did - and you're throwing away the work you've done on an alternate path. Having not had biology and chemistry in high-school, medicine was simply out of the question for me in college unless I intended to work much, much harder than my fellow students - and the premeds were an over-achieving bunch.<p>And, really, this is more of a problem if you're going toward the science than if you're going toward the social sciences or humanities. Why? At my school, computer science was an 18 course major; nuroscience 21 courses; biochem was up there too. What did you need for history? 8 courses. Sociology? 10. Anthropology? 9. And you could usually take those courses at the same time while the sciences tend to build on each other in a linear fashion to a greater extent.<p>It's harsh. Even if you want to change into a science, sometimes the barrier is too high. We need to do a better job teaching children that it's unacceptable for both genders to forgo science and math. Otherwise, you end up (like me) in a freshmen bio class realizing that you have to learn everything that everyone else knew from high-school without falling behind on this course. And I'd say that the majority would take the path of least resistance and go for something they weren't missing knowledge in.
Article doesn't mention whether sitting down with the groups is in mixed company. Perhaps men in the other occupations are more "inappropriate" <i>with other men</i>, but know how to hold their tongues when women are around. (In other words, maybe they're sexist in a way that helps them avoid repelling women.)
Its the tools, stupid.<p>We're an arts and crafts "industry". Only a fraction of our time is spent thinking about the problem in the abstract. A great deal of it is spent wrestling with our primitive tool kit to realize the concept.<p>When programming becomes entirely an intellectual field, you will see the same gender ratios as you see in other mature sciences.
There's not a single scale for outrageous behavior; context changes everything. Musicians, lawyers, and doctors generally understand and adapt to the social norms of whatever situation they're in. This is only sometimes true of computer programmers.
In my uninformed opinion, I don't think we do a very good job marketing what our field is about. If the uninitiated understood the creativity and artisanship involved in software, I think there would be more women programmers. Instead, they get a feeling that programming is something vaguely geeky and uncool, and the intro Java class doesn't do a whole lot to dispel the feeling.
This isn't something you have to have an uninformed opinion about. The issue has been noticed before, people have thought it was important to understand, and actual studies have been done. Here's the authoritative one:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Computing-Jane-Margolis/dp/0262133989" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Computing-Jane-Mar...</a><p>It's not an alpha male thing, though that's some of it. It's a socialization thing. Guys had more exposure before college, are more likely to learn the material on their own rather than in a group (how women usually prefer to learn), and so appear to be far more competent earlier. Girls who make it over that initial hump do as well or better, but not many do, because there's not a lot of interest in helping them through it.
When I was in college, quite a few girls left CS for Business cause it's so hard to get good grades. If I was getting a few C's in classes, I'd switch majors too. If I wasn't so comfortable without a social life and spending a lot of time in front of the computer by myself, I probably wouldn't have made it. It doesn't have to be this way, but that's what happened for me. As the whole experience improves there'll probably be more girls. I think creations like Ruby on Rails makes the experience that much better and that much more appealing and productive. I guess whatever that makes programmers in general happier, will have women programmers happier too. Ruby on Rails rocks.
A fine example of what-aboutery!<p>Reference:
<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-to-spot-a-lame-lame-argument-1667373.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-har...</a>
I get tired of technical environments online which assume there are no women present; or worse, that outright insult them. Slashdot and digg are particular bad about this, but you see some of that here as well. What message is that going to send to people who are considering joining the field? Who would want to deal with these jerks?<p>Assume that there are women present, even if you don't hear from them, and act civilly. That will make room for more women to come in. Thanks.
I'm interested in a study which looked for correlations between having a tangible role model in science/engineering during childhood and later joining the field.