[_ll5a]

Full disclosure: I'm a working female software developer, blah blah blah...

> I want to be that girl who no one thought she could, who had all the odds against her, that everyone thought was dumb, and yet she becomes incredibly successful in computer science. Then I want to turn that success around and use it a pedestal to expose every wound, every failure, every painful vulnerability I have, even with my hands trembling, because that is what I believe is what motivates women and gives them the strength and personal recognition of ‘if she can do it, so can I’, which then lights the spark to explore the field and helps women find their inner-strength to go for it.

I think this is a great sentiment, but....and maybe I'm just not hanging out in the right parts of the internet or whatever...but I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect. Maybe they just aren't upvoted to the top of HN or r/programming, heh. I've had a hard time articulating why I feel so prickly about promoting specifically "getting more women into tech", because I feel like it's starting to become this giant show pony. I think it's great that this lady is going into this field, but I feel really weird about this characterization that CS is supposed to be so super scary and women need special hand-holding and encouragement to attempt it.

I started programming when I was a kid because I wanted to make stuff. Nobody told me it was supposed to be hard or supposed to be for boys or whatever. I think we're doing a huge disservice by promoting this idea that programming is some super elusive thing - if we want more women in programming, then let's talk about how cool it is to build stuff, instead of how we can be role models or whatever. Just the opinion of one "woman in tech", I don't speak for anyone else but myself.

[AlyssaRowan]

Absolutely. What troubles me - partly why I nearly always stay the hell out of discussions like this, the other part being that it seems to induce sealiony arguments I don't care much for - is that an underlying attitude, though well-meaning, often seems to come from a reaction to the field being male-dominated: "women can (program|science|engineer|etc) too".

I don't feel that the unspoken "too" part is all that helpful. Of course human beings can do things. This isn't some kind of secret "boys' club" invasion.

For me, curiosity was the key. I saw my elder brother and dad doing stuff, and I wanted to join in and learn. No-one ever told me I couldn't: or if they did I was too hungry for knowledge, and too headstrong and precocious to listen - I can't honestly say a lot's changed about me! <g> If there's a solution to whatever problem we may have, maybe it's just that, and it's not just for girls, it's universal.

I rarely gave a moment's thought to my peers' gender because I was thinking about the important part, what I was actually doing: and for the most part, save for a couple of sexist teachers (who were - an even bigger crime - totally useless at the subject they were trying to teach) nor did they.

[splintercell]

> I rarely gave a moment's thought to my peers' gender because I was thinking about the important part, what I was actually doing: and for the most part, save for a couple of sexist teachers (who were - an even bigger crime - totally useless at the subject they were trying to teach) nor did they. <

Something I have been coming around to understand. There are two kinds of people.

a) People who live their lives for themselves

b) People who live their lives for approval and satisfaction of others

It's really important for people who live their lives for others that they get approval and validation from others. Without it, they won't ever take risks, they wouldn't hold strong opinions on anything (because that carries the risk of being wrong).

You don't care about women engineer/programmer/scientist or anything because you didn't care about living a life whose end goal is approval from other people.

However, those individuals who do live like this, something is worth doing only if others are doing it too because it means a general validation from the others.

The problem of seeking other people's validation exists everywhere, across all genders. The solution is to teach people to not live second hand lives.

[insickness]

>People who live their lives for approval and satisfaction of others

Every human being seeks the validation from others. We are social creatures. It matters to us what other people think. We all live in the minds of others to some extent or another. We don't do things just for money, or just to get the job done. We do things because we know that someone, somewhere will appreciate our work.

In fact, I would argue that all of mankind's greatest accomplishments have been the result of 'validation seeking.' The Nobel Prize, an Olympic Gold medal, a Pulitzer Prize--all are forms of awarding validation.

[splintercell]

> Every human being seeks the validation from others. <

Seeking validation from others and getting validation are two different things and you're confusing the two things.

People who 'seek validation' end up being extremely unhappy individuals. They seek validation because they see people who 'get validation' and want to emulate them.

If computers and coding wasn't a way by which I made living, I'd still be spending hours on it outside my work, like how people spent hours working on rebuilding old cars in 70s-80s. I used to get a LOT of shit for 'wasting' so much time on computers and not focusing on studies (90s). I still did it because I enjoyed it. If I was a child today, my parents would have been exhilarated that I was so much interested in Computers.

I am sure if we encouraged a lot more women to get into programming, there will be a lot more women programmers, but the problem is that they will be unimpressive programmers.

It's like aspiring to become a body builder, but refusing to left anything heavy in the gym, and fighting people who give you crap for not lifting more.

Instead, do things you would do, even if nobody in the world encouraged you and you will find that the world will rally around you.

[david927]

First, there really is a range: some people don't seek really almost any approval (and often seem crazy) and others who utterly define themselves by what people think of them.

Second, I would argue that the opposite: that all of mankind's greatest accomplishments have been the result of 'validation avoidance.' Van Gogh was well-known because he didn't need validation. He did his art regardless of it not selling, regardless of what happened. He would be mocked for stopping by the side of the road and staring at a flower for hours, but he didn't care.

And that's the sign of a true creativity. If you're concerned about what people will think, you're not going to be able to innovate. Prizes are nice, but for real innovators, they're never the motivation.

[splintercell]

Or to put it this way, 'validation follows true achievements'. 'Seeking validation always results in fake achievements'.

[roymurdock]

> all of mankind's greatest accomplishments have been the result of 'validation seeking.'

Some people are motivated by validation, doing what they do for the prize and the recognition.

Others are motivated by something else...a thirst for knowledge, or a test of their determination and intelligence. Some great thinkers and doers reject these prizes outright as they never wanted the recognition in the first place.

Most people are motivated by a combination of the two, which is fine. Different strokes for different folks.

[LyndsySimon]

> The problem of seeking other people's validation exists everywhere, across all genders. The solution is to teach people to not live second hand lives.

A mere upvote was not enough; this needs to be echoed.

[StavrosK]

I think that's spot on, and this kind of mentality definitely sounds like a show pony. I'm wondering if some female developers mistake "not being very good at what they do" for gender bias, because I've noticed that the women who are great at what they do don't talk as much about sexism.

I don't have enough data to draw any conclusions, and maybe I'm just bitter because a conference we're trying to get off the ground was accused of sexism when all 8 speakers were men. The kicker is that none of the 70 talk proposals the conference received was by a woman...

[atom-morgan]

> I'm wondering if some female developers mistake "not being very good at what they do" for gender bias

Or they mistake a rude person at work as being sexist or racist when they're really just rude.

[smt88]

I agree with you in some cases, but sexism can be plain-old rudeness directed by men at women -- it's the quantity of it that makes the difference. Racism can follow the same pattern, or it can come in the form of a comment that wouldn't be racist if said to a non-minority.

There's no universally agreed-upon definition of rude, and sexism and racism are very hard to define objectively. They're very context-specific and subjective, for the most part.

[atom-morgan]

> sexism can be plain-old rudeness directed by men at women

No, that's a double standard. But if we're using the modern redefined version of sexism, yes you're right.

[awakeasleep]

I disagree in two ways.

First, being rude can mean pushing someone's buttons. People have easy buttons to push regarding their gender, orientation, race, etc. So even if your primary motivation wasn't to express hate for their whole category, you can contribute to * ism that way.

Second, a more frequent expression of rude behavior to people of a class that you don't like is *ism even if you aren't using the forbidden slurs normally associated with whatever prejudice you're expressing.

[StavrosK]

Well, it depends. If someone is rude exclusively to women, then it's unlikely to not be sexism.

[pbhjpbhj]

> it's the quantity of it that makes the difference //

Surely not, surely it's the reason for the rudeness - if the reason is based [at all] on the sex of the person one is being rude to then it can veritably be called sexism. Otherwise it's just being rude to another person.

[zachwooddoughty]

I think the argument is that if people tend to "just be rude" to women more often than to men, then that is evidence of sexism. Even if there isn't a conscious reason for the rudeness.

There clearly isn't any easy way to measure "aggregate rudeness" to be able to prove that women receive a higher quantity of "just being rude", but that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't there.

[chongli]

You would think so. But the reason for rudeness rarely comes up. To those on the receiving end, the damage has been done and in the case of racism or sexism it is falling into a pattern that screams "You are not welcome here" to the person.

It's like the people who get arrested while walking home from work because they happened to enter a protest area. The reason for their being there is totally unrelated to the protest yet the effect of their being there is to increase the size of the crowd by one.

We can argue until we're blue in the face that this is unjust and the truth is that it is: it's unjust for everyone involved. It creates further entrenchment and higher barriers between people.

[mpweiher]

> it's the quantity of it that makes the difference.

But as many people have pointed out, quantity can have, well, quantitative reasons. I remember a blog post stating that being the only woman among 100 men at conferences, the author always got at least one stupid comment/question.

She even turned it into a formula:

   #(women at a conference) =  inversely proportional to #(times I talk about women in tech) [1]

Of course, that formula has simple quantitative reasons. Let's say that constant 1% of the 100 men there want to talk about women in tech. If there is 1 woman, you're it. If there are 2 women, 50% chance, 3 women 33% chance etc.

Same with rude people. Let's say there's an even 1% of women and men who are rude to the opposite gender and they are equally prolific. If there are 10% women at the conference/company/..., a woman has a roughly 100x greater chance of encountering that type of behaviour. Even though the level of rudeness is exactly the same.

Approximately: 1100 people, 1000 males, 100 females. 1% rude makes 10 rude males per 100 females, roughly 10% chance; 1 rude female / 1000 males, 0.1% chance, 100x difference.

Considering that "badness" of rude behaviour is likely going to be on a bell curve, you not only get more bad behaviour, you also get worse behaviour. Just from he numbers.

So you can have outcomes that look subjectively sexist (women encounter much worse and/or much more bad behaviour) without there actually being any sexism.

[1] http://www.felienne.com/archives/4828

[illumin8]

I can appreciate that you had a great environment with an older brother and father that encouraged you to participate in technical activities with them, but not everyone has the same environment.

I think the sentiment the author is sharing is that a lot of women feel social pressures to appear outwardly successful, popular, etc, and this creates a very difficult situation where its perceived that asking a question that might make you sound stupid causes you to lose social status.

This seems like a very tangible fear that a lot of women face, and I admire how she has conditioned herself to overcome this fear and it has helped her increase her knowledge and abilities.

It's awesome that you've had a better experience, but I'm positive that many women have dropped out of CS curriculum because of some of these social factors. Recognizing this and trying to improve the state of things is a great goal to have.

[Tobani]

> I think the sentiment the author is sharing is that a lot of women feel social pressures to appear outwardly successful, popular, etc, and this creates a very difficult situation where its perceived that asking a question that might make you sound stupid causes you to lose social status.

This is something i see my wife have constantly forced upon her by her mother. My wife wasn't allowed to do her own hair until senior year of High School, because she "Didn't do it right." My mother-in-law(MIL) would re-do homework that wasn't perfect. Essays that expressed opinions not 100% in-line with her opinion were re-written.

My wife is smart in her own right. She's smarter than me. She has her MS in Statistics. She's really good at what she does, but she has a hard time with confidence and asserting herself. She's been told she's not doing it right her whole life. I think some of the stress and lack of enjoyment at work stems from this. She should probably push back more often than she does. To be fair she has also had a few interactions customers who were outright sexist and make me want to punch somebody in the face.

Now, we let my daughter dress herself most days (She understands there times my wife picks her clothes and doesn't fight it). She may be wearing a purple, shirt, striped pants, and a polka dot skirt (honestly most of the time things don't clash THAT much). My MIL is horrified. "All of the other kids will laugh at her." No they won't, they're in preschool. All of the girls love whatever she is wearing. The boys don't even notice. We were talking her preschool teacher the other day and she told us "She'll be princesses with the girls one minute, and rough-housing playing ninja turtles with the boys the next." I couldn't be more proud.

Now that's not to rant against my MIL. My mother and father are crazy too in their own ways. As is everybody my family and that makes everything fun.

[whatever_dude]

Great story. My partner had a similar upbringing and I still see the effect it had. And I have my own quirks due to my parents' lack of supervision. We're definitely a product of our parents.

[Abraln]

As a mechanical engineer who has worked with software engineers on projects, I believe that the nature of the job can cause us to be more blunt than most. When the guys in the shop weld something poorly they don't get points for effort, they redo the work. Likewise, when one of my designs has a flaw I WANT people to point it out bluntly and immediately to save me hours of work, the company money and reputation, an possibly even lives if the equipment fails at the wrong moment. My dad is in the field as well and we both have to put effort into not being overly critical of others outside of work. I can certainly see how someone who seeks approval from others could be beaten down by this. Learning to separate your failures from your self esteem, as long as you learn from them, is a tough skill. I honestly think that "girl culture", at least what was at my high school, makes this much more difficult.

[nucleardog]

> As a mechanical engineer who has worked with software engineers on projects, I believe that the nature of the job can cause us to be more blunt than most.

To theorize as to why this is such an issue... I think it's because IT and Engineering is an area where, while still being a creative pursuit, there's still a right and wrong answer.

We have jobs that are entirely based around a right and wrong answer. If I work in an office and my job is to take forms and enter them into a computer, then I've either done it correctly or incorrectly. If someone's criticizing my work, it's because I've objectively done it incorrectly. It's really tough for someone to take it personally.

We have jobs that are entirely based around a creative solution. If I work in marketing my job is to come up with creative ideas. For the most part, no one will ever (or can ever) tell me my idea is "wrong", because it's entirely subjective. Someone might like a different idea better, but it's easy not to take it too personally since it's all a matter of taste.

But in engineering and IT we have an intersection of the two. We're tasked with coming up with solutions to problems which is a fundamentally creative endeavour, but at the same time at the end of it all there's no couching in friendly terms or subjective evaluations... either the solution meets the criteria or it doesn't.

You've got people putting themselves out there with their creativity and effort, but being judged by a harsh and unforgiving system. Some people thrive on that decidedness and the opportunity to make use of their creativity in a place where fickle humans don't get a say. Other people get their self esteem wrapped up in their work, and a blunt "this is wrong", which can and should be acceptable, destroys them.

To me trying to make these fields friendly to these sorts of people (regardless of gender) makes about as much sense as telling gallery owners they can't tell painters they don't like their work because it discourages people from painting.

Your work either works or it doesn't, and if it doesn't then no amount of feelings are going to override the reality of the situation.

[splintercell]

> I can appreciate that you had a great environment with an older brother and father that encouraged you to participate in technical activities with them, but not everyone has the same environment. <

What women need to understand is that just by solving this problem of "encourage women to do X" won't do anything. Why not? Because that's not the real problem.

What you miss about AlyssaRowan's post is that she is telling you that she never cared about other people's validation. What you read there is as 'her brother and father encouraged her'.

Try ignoring what other people expect out of you and you will find that suddenly everybody is rallying behind you.

[tremon]

The two are very much related. The way you learn to ignore other (random) people's validation, is by having enough validation early on from the people that really matter. If you've missed that early validation, it becomes a lot harder to build your inner validation.

[splintercell]

> If you've missed that early validation, it becomes a lot harder to build your inner validation.

That is not true at all. It's a choice, always. Even after not caring for other people's validation or their value judgment, more 'validation' is what you need in order for you to start caring about their validation.

Tell me which one would have a stronger effect upon you to live up to other people's values:

a) tremon I've always seen you happy, and I hope you will keep my daughter always happy

b) tremon you're a loser, you will never be successful in life. My daughter will be so unhappy with you.

If you think the first statement is what will make you not care about your in law's opinions, then you're totally wrong, and it tells me that you have never 'not-cared' for other people's opinion about you.

It's the second statement which makes me wanna work towards my own happiness with my future wife. The first statement pushes me to deny my own feelings because it's only in first case you could disappoint someone else.

[mynewtb]

Nothing you wrote is different for men.

[cableshaft]

Yep. Part of the reason I dropped out of Comp Sci the first time around is because I was struggling and thought I must be in the wrong major, because if it was the right major, it should be easy for me. (Note: throughout high school, most classwork was easy for me, or if it wasn't, I wasn't too interested in the subject, so it was a shock to actually encounter subjects I had a hard time grasping in a field I was actively interested in)

I did ask for help during office hours, though, and one of my professors actually said "If you didn't learn it in the lectures there's nothing more I can teach you."

Back then there was very few articles online, and no Stack Overflow, not even Experts Exchange, so my only real resources were two ancient textbooks in the school library and my professor.

But asking questions isn't easy, and in fact it's actively discouraged by your peers in high school, who mostly have nothing better to do with their time at school except judge and gossip about people in their classes.

[smt88]

I think the implication is that the pressure is amplified for women in male-dominated situations and/or that the game is rigged. As a man, there's almost nothing you can do in your career where you gender works against you. Society's bias is that men are more competent, and it's been demonstrated in experiments many times (even among women!)

I've heard many men express vocal shock upon hearing that a good PR (or whole project) was written by a woman. The game is definitely still rigged to varying degrees in programming.

[pbhjpbhj]

>Society's bias is that men are more competent, and it's been demonstrated in experiments many times (even among women!) //

I'll have to read your citations to be sure [hint, hint; ie citations please] but presumably this is context sensitive.

I've been mocked for being able to make a hot drink by a group of women ("Wow, a man who can make their own cup of tea!") and I've also been discriminated against at work ("Can we have the lady please" - I'm the one with the greater experience but it's in an area related to child care and so I'm assumed to be here to help my female colleague). Doesn't bother me, it's pretty petty after all, but it happens and it doesn't look like people assuming I'm more competent because of my sex; perhaps I'm mislead.

As a father I also get remarks like "do you know where his mum is" when the baby is crying ... (and no it's not because they know the baby needs feeding).

[smt88]

Citations below. It's very, very easy to Google these, by the way. There are literally decades of research that, all things equal, women are perceived as less competent, less hire-able, and less intelligent than men.

I agree that there is bias against men when it comes to domestic and caretaking tasks. The point that people are trying to make is that the discrimination against men is far less painful.

Your examples are actually perfect. They're small issues that didn't bother you. But what if you're a single mother trying to get a promotion? That bias could affect where your kids go to school, how much you save for retirement, and other vitally important parts of your life.

A really important note: we'd rarely discuss inequality in STEM fields if those weren't some of the best-paying and most sought-after jobs at the moment. Context and circumstances do matter here. There are certainly issues of discrimination against men that are important (men are less likely to seek mental health care because it's not "manly" to have feelings or be "weak"). But those things are also caused by men, aren't they? Are women the drivers of any seriously harmful discrimination against men? (I'm genuinely asking here.)

The overall point I'm trying to make is that bias against women happens in ways that have a huge impact on their lives, and bias against men (while still a problem!) happens in ways that harm us far less.

That's all moot, though: if we move toward gender equality, all of the discrimination should diminish. Men and women will be affected positively.

Copious citations:

1a. (writeup) http://www.washington.edu/news/2016/02/11/male-biology-stude...

1b. (study) http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

2. http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474

3a. (writeup) http://www.amazon.com/Blindspot-Hidden-Biases-Good-People/dp...

3b. (video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL9__gD88xk

3c. (study) http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~banaji/research/publicati...

3d. (study) http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~banaji/research/publicati...

3e. (many more studies) http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~banaji/research/publicati...

4a. (writeup) http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/stu...

4b. (study) http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109

5. (research done by my incredibly smart friend showing that the gender wage gap is about $.10 on the dollar when controlling all possible variables) https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/labor/news/2013/04/0...

[huherto]

May be we just don't understand the social clues.

I friend had a little sister in high school. And she was very happy learning programming. She thought about studying CS, but she changed her mind. She was never able to articulate a reason; she was not very excited about her chosen career. My guess is that her decision was influenced by social status.

[sridca]

What's different however is men hardly get the equivalent empathy for the said hardships.

[audleman]

> I think the sentiment the author is sharing is that a lot of women feel social pressures to appear outwardly successful, popular, etc, and this creates a very difficult situation where its perceived that asking a question that might make you sound stupid causes you to lose social status.

I think this is true of both genders and I believe her story illustrates that. She describes her experience in the lab where the TA was getting frustrated, that is until she proclaimed "I DON'T UNDERSTAND," and suddenly everyone was at ease. I think this shows how everyone, be it student or TA, is silently judging themselves for not knowing.

[mason240]

>I think the sentiment the author is sharing is that a lot of women feel social pressures to appear outwardly successful, popular, etc, and this creates a very difficult situation where its perceived that asking a question that might make you sound stupid causes you to lose social status.

This not a gender issue, it applies to everyone in every real world setting.

[jimbokun]

"I saw my elder brother and dad doing stuff, and I wanted to join in and learn."

I think this article is for those who didn't start early, but want to become good at programming or computer science, anyway.

Of course, the same issues would be encountered by a man introduced to programming and CS for the first time at college, but statistically it's probably more likely for a woman to first become interested in these topics later in life.

[klunger]

> I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect.

I used to wonder about this myself. But, then I met some ladies that write technical blogs anonymously, or under male or gender neutral pseudonyms. This was because of the harassment they experienced themselves, or witnessed in others, when they originally set out to write as a woman in tech.

So, I suspect that women writing about getting women into tech is one of the few ways that they feel comfortable publicly contributing to their field (even if not from angle they may have originally preferred).

[gurkendoktor]

Why would women be harassed for blogging about programming, but not for meta-blogging about the experience of being a female programmer (as the OP)? Is one really less dangerous than the other?

[4bpp]

The question what kind of harassment we are talking about seems pretty relevant here. Stories such as http://tech.mit.edu/V136/N9/harassment.html seem to suggest that overbearing, desperate romantic attention (often followed by lashing out when the advances inevitably turn out to be futile) generally is counted as such. In that light, I find the fashionable narrative about boys getting angry about cooties in their club to be somewhat questionable - what if the "unwanted attention" rather than the "sheer malice" type of harassment constitutes the bulk of it?

I imagine the typical perpetrator in that case is a man with negligible romantic experience, who is not particularly attractive, lives in a social environment with a 10:1 M:F ratio and statistically may well be encountering someone of the opposite sex who actually nominally has something nontrivial in common with them for the first time. The "something in common" part is contingent on actually signalling being a capital-p Programmer culturally (e.g. by blogging about programming), rather than someone who appears to be closer to a social activist who just happens to have a job in programming (and might as well be the secretary staffing the front desk for the purpose of commonalities, as far as the would-be harasser can see).

Grasping at straws inevitably ensues, and there are sufficiently many around that some don't react gracefully when the straws snap.

[huherto]

Perhaps the elephant in the room is the large number of young men in our profession that feel desperately lonely.

[Cthulhu_]

It's not related to the job per se though, it's more about personality / character (and there was another word but I forgot, er, words); people in IT and software development tend to lean more towards the introvert spectrum, the socially awkward, the physically less fit, etc. That + choosing to spend more time at a computer instead of interacting with people IRL (doesn't have to be that much even) causes a gap in development.

Of course, #NotAllDevelopers; I feel like I'm somewhere in between (but in part because of some effort on my own), and my company has quite a few developers that lean towards extroversion.

The problem in this case is that when someone steps upon a soapbox on the internet, they reach an audience of potentially millions; even if 0.00001% is a bit er, maladjusted, that's still enough for a few people to start making that kind of comment or show that kind of behaviour. Even if 99% of people were well-behaved, the 1% could still cause shit. And that's not easy to deal with.

[snowwrestler]

Lots of people feel desperately lonely, not just in programming.

But one of the modern expectations of a professional work environment is that people can manage how they express their emotions. Screaming and hitting because of anger is not permitted; similarly, harassing and touching because of lust is not permitted either.

I actually don't think that programmers are that much worse than other professions in this respect. We just talk about programmers more than lawyers or soldiers here, because most folks here are programmers or interested in programming.

[Lawtonfogle]

Harassing and touching shouldn't be and isn't permitted, but asking someone out on dates is pretty common (even if maybe it shouldn't be). The problem is that a mere question can seem like harassment when the ratio of askers to askees becomes too skewed.

There is also the issue that what is socially acceptable behavior depends upon characteristics which we do not want to admit. The difference between creepy and acceptable behavior is sometimes not found in the behavior itself, but in things like the race or appearance of the one engaging in the behavior.

[cuckcuckspruce]

Let me say that I agree with you, but that being lonely doesn't excuse their behavior (nor am I trying to say that's what you were implying).

[huherto]

Yes. I am definitely not excusing the behavior.

[cpfohl]

Really? And that's anyone else's problem but their own because...?

Sorry, learning social skills, learning to manage your time so you can meet people, etc. is not the job of an employer or a profession as a whole.

I'm sure there's plenty of lonely garbage men (purposely phrased as "men"), but no one's suggesting that the public works departments should be ensuring there's more women in the departments for their men to hang out with and fall in love with.

[Lawtonfogle]

>Sorry, learning social skills, learning to manage your time so you can meet people, etc. is not the job of an employer or a profession as a whole.

Didn't learn job skills, wasted a free k to 12 education, made bad financial decisions? Here, let society help you. We'll tax people to help fund a social safety net because there should be a basic standard of living.

Didn't develop social skills? LOL, LOSER! Why don't you try to teach yourself some social skills. You deserve to be alone until you improve yourself.

Crass and perhaps too blunt, but people should be able to get the basic idea of this double standard.

[gurkendoktor]

That's a good point. It only applies if you know your blog's audience in real-life (university, workplace, meet-ups etc), but I guess that's actually the common case. I wouldn't know, I'm not a blogger :)

[vertex-four]

Women are harassed when they do both, but as a general rule women who are willing to put themselves out to be harassed are involved in politics in the first place, thus the willingness of women who are willing to write at all to write about the political subject that is being a woman. "If I'm going to be harassed for writing anything, I might as well write about something that only someone with my perspective can write."

You'll also tend to find that women who blog about tech tend to hide their gender a bit more or post on community blogs, or their posts about tech will be on a blog with a wider scope.

[ZeroGravitas]

I think the unfortunate truth is that they'll get harassed either way.

But, if you restrict your blogging to the arcane aspects of database replication or whatever, then you can "pass" as a man.

This option isn't really available if you are blogging your experience "as a woman in tech" so this self-selects for people who can cope with abuse, are already receiving so much they won't notice any extra, or that think it's worth it to be a visible example to others.

[amelius]

> I think the unfortunate truth is that they'll get harassed either way.

Are women in tech harassed more than "average" women? I wonder if this is true both in real life and online.

[untog]

I'm pretty sure they get harrassed for both, but it's possible to write a tech blog in a gender neutral way, while it is not possible to write a "my gendered experience in tech" post in a gender neutral way.

[rndstr]

Males do not have the option to write a post about «being a female programmer». This does not pose a threat for the insecure males but a well-written post about tech does.

[EliRivers]

Why would women be harassed for blogging about programming

There are a great many total dickheads on the internet. Really. It's hard to comprehend just how many utter dickheads are running around out here. The exact reasons why? I've never really understood all of it. Some of it is because it makes them feel like big men, showing off to their dickhead friends; I've seen them come back to crow about it and they seem to get some kind of approval from their peers.

[Ntrails]

> There are a great many total dickheads on the internet.

I really hate this line of thought. The internet is not a different place to the real world, and the truth is that there are a great many people in your town/city/country/world etc who are kinda obnoxious.

[tbrake]

> The internet is not a different place to the real world

In certain vague, slightly pointless ways (i.e. "it's just people doing things on a thing" ) they're exactly the same, sure.

The specifics of what is possible in terms of breadth and time are vastly different though.

With regards to the topic at hand - and assuming I am a jerk - I can find 50 different programming blogs and write sexist epithets in the comments in ten seconds flat.

I cannot do that in the real world to 50 different people in that time frame nor with the same lack of repercussion.

[geon]

> The internet is not a different place

People act differently on it, though.

[EliRivers]

I've never seen anyone (outside a playground) identify a woman talking about something, run over to her shouting "stUPiD BitCH geT baCk iN tHe kiTCHeen!! lol lol lol!!" before returning to his chums for admiration and approval.

The effect does happen, but in a far more insidious way.

[tim333]

Yeah but the internet is more anonymous.

[douche]

If you act like a total dickhead in real-life, you're apt to get your teeth knocked in, which tends to modulate dickheadsian behaviors.

[coredog64]

I would also add that it's easier to be a dickhead online. You don't have to be particularly witty in real-time, and once you've gotten a working schtick, what wit you do have can be replicated via copy-n-paste.

[geofft]

There are a great many total dickheads in the real world, but in the real world, it is much more difficult to mask your gender than on the internet.

For a good account of total dickheads (in a nerdy subculture, no less) in meatspace, see http://latining.tumblr.com/post/141567276944/tabletop-gaming... If this were online, I bet the author would have assumed a gender-neutral / default-to-male pseudonym in a heartbeat.

[tomp]

You haven't really answered parent's question.

[EliRivers]

Perhaps I need to repeat it in fewer words; "because they gain peer approval by doing it".

I also edited what I said to remove some of the additional discussion and data, to make it simpler to see where I said it was for peer approval.

[OJFord]

Those 'meta-blogging' are probably more likely to be resilient to the harassment, seeing it as something they're already fighting.

In technical writing, I imagine you'd just think "I don't want that in the comments [or to deal with moderating them]".

I definitely agree that the answer is to just shut up about being inspiring, and be inspiring. (To any future CS student - not just women/schoolgirls!)

[mcv]

My impression is that some men (trolls, MRAs, you know the type) are uncomfortable with women talking about technical topics, but have no problem as long as they restrict themselves to "women's issues", which would probably includes "women in tech".

[zo1]

Really, you're clumping "Men's Rights Activists" with trolls and saying that they are uncomfortable with women talking about technical topics? That is very blatantly stereotyping.

[cuckcuckspruce]

You've run into the "it's okay when we do it!" mentality here from the poster you're responding to. In their mind, stereotyping, prejudging, and wildly generalizing is completely and totally wrong, a crime on the level of hate speech and misogyny, but they will engage in stereotyping, prejudging, generalizing, and demonizing groups that they disagree with because in their mind they're fighting the good fight, and only bad people would disagree with them.

[mcv]

Where am I prejudging groups on who they are? I'm only calling people out on their behaviour: the people who attack women who speak about tech. I'm labeling them trolls and MRAs, because I think those are the most likely motivations for why people might specifically attack women.

Of course there are plenty of trolls who are concerned with entirely different things, and of course there are MRAs who don't attack women like that, but I'm at a loss about what other groups would be motivated specifically to shut down women who speak about tech or similar topics.

[cbsmith]

There's also a number of them who probably skip over "women's issues" articles. Likely not enough though...

[chris_wot]

Ever heard of GamerGate?

[cuckcuckspruce]

I can't say that I have. Educate me.

[chris_wot]

Google it.

[facepalm]

I'm not convinced that the tech bloggers get harassed because they are female. Look at any hacker news discussion and things can get heated quickly, irrespective of gender. Look at the classic "Apple vs PC" wars and so on. For any technical opinion you voice, you will find scores of people who dislike it intensely (Java vs Ruby, is JavaScript a serious programming language, is agile stupid...).

[kqr]

I don't mind being harassed for preferring Emacs over Vim – it's a choice, after all. I can argue rationally for why you are wrong if you contradict me.

I do mind being harassed for being a man rather than a woman – that's not something I chose. I was born that way. I can't change that nor can I argue rationally for why I decided to be that way.

[Lawtonfogle]

>it's a choice, after all.

What about religion. It is an interesting intersection of 'is a choice' and 'protected demographic'. And why should it be any more acceptable to harass someone for what they choose? Is it more acceptable to discriminate against a Hispanic individual for choosing to identify with their heritage (a choice) than to discriminate against them for being Hispanic (not a choice)? Both seem wrong to me.

>that's not something I chose. I was born that way.

What about those who are of a different gender/sex than they were born? What about people who choose to change their gender?

Even your response itself can be an issue, as there is an implication that others are born a given gender and cannot change it.

[kqr]

> What about those who are of a different gender/sex than they were born? What about people who choose to change their gender?

If you actually speak to these people, they will inform you they didn't "change" their gender. What you are referring to is the practise of fixing the body to conform to the expectations of the gender they were born with.

[Lawtonfogle]

They changed the gender that society assigned them with. And on some level you might be able to say they changed the gender of their body to match the gender of their mind (depending upon where you fall on the mind/brain/body terminology).

[facepalm]

Well if the comments are like "shut up, woman, you can not know anything about this", I agree with you. I am just not sure that is the way it is - or if it is just the usual critical comments and women think they get especially bad comments.

[stepvhen]

Just because you're not convinced doesn't mean it isn't happening. Why would somebody, a lot of people, an awful lot, say X is happening if it wasn't? And why default on somebody lying instead of believing them, or at least giving them the benefit of the doubt?

[cuckcuckspruce]

>Why would somebody, a lot of people, an awful lot, say X is happening if it wasn't?

To push an agenda. Take as an example people that claim that video games are responsible, either partially or wholly, for an increase in violence. There is no definitive link between violent video games and violence, especially as the violent crime rate in the US has been falling for decades now. The people leading this crusade generally do not like games and feel that their disapproval and dislike means that other people shouldn't get to experience them.

[facepalm]

I don't think they are lying, just that their perception might be wrong. Or we are only getting half the story - what I often read is women claiming they get hate for being women online, when really they get hate for being radical feminists and telling random people on the internet they are assholes, for example (not saying that is the case here).

I haven't talked to any of them directly, so I don't know who is "somebody, a lot of people, an awful lot"? How many is "an awful lot", what do you reckon? 1-10, 10-100, 100-1000, 1000-10000? Millions? Maybe if I had more firsthand information, it would change my mind.

[FilterSweep]

There could also be discrepancy in "what exactly is harassment."

This came up when Sarah Sharp quit developing on the Linux Kernel due to 'abuse' from Torvalds [0]. A prevailing notion was that this language was necessary for everyone working in the kernel space.

I've also seen commenters on HN get torn to pieces because their javascript benchmarks ~5-7% slower than the "optimal" solution. Harassment is often based on opinion.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10338094

[facepalm]

That's what my original comment was about - the "harassment" might not be because of their gender, but just "normal" tech discussion that they aren't used to.

[Cthulhu_]

What the other commenters are saying I agree with; language or editor choice is about, well, language or editor choice; gender is about who someone is. It's the ad hominem fallacy, basically. Of course, similarly when someone makes a post about e.g. ruby or emacs, adding "as a X in tech" instantly makes it (to a lot of readers) about the person, not the tech.

Maybe more posts should start with "As a man in tech" or something. In gender-skewed areas, removing gender from posts (along with the assumption of what gender wrote it) would maybe be preferable. But, IDK.

[facepalm]

As I said, it is not clear to me that the women were attacked for their gender. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't, I don't have enough information.

[spangry]

> if we want more women in programming, then let's talk about how cool it is to build stuff, instead of how we can be role models or whatever.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

[arien]

But in this particular case, doing cool stuff is the actual reward of computer science. In other words, it's the endless sea of things you can achieve through it, not the fact that you can be cool while doing it :)

[mseebach]

YMMV. For me, I don't really care about the nuts and bolts of engineering (I know others do), it's just the vessel in which I take to the vast and endless sea.

FWIW, I have a totally unscientific gut-feeling that feeling cool about the process and the tools (rather than the outcome) is a slightly male-heavy preference.

[omginternets]

Here's some scientific validation of your gut feeling: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James_Rounds/publicatio...

[viraptor]

> I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect.

I wonder how much of that is bias of what information is put up front. I mean, I see a meta-post on female programmers probably just as often as I see posts about Qubes. Both include female programmers, but it's not as apparent in the second case. I'm sure there are some more posts where it's just not "advertised"... or at least not until someone comments that it was written by (gasp) a woman, when it suddenly becomes super-relevant to the discussion.

Or to put it another way, if this post was treated with s/girl/guy/, would anybody mention anything about "being a male programmer"? It would be likely received as just a post about learning. The community seems to be exposed to more "female programmer" posts now and they stand out. Even this post self describes as "female programmer" post to, but only the second paragraph mentions it directly.

[LoSboccacc]

It seems a variation of the good old there are no girls on the internet.

[tdkl]

> Or to put it another way, if this post was treated with s/girl/guy/, would anybody mention anything about "being a male programmer"?

Bingo.

There's a recent post on HN trending right now about mistreatment : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11429590

The difference is that the person is male and the comparison of comments here and there is - peculiar.

[akavel]

> "I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect"

I disagree.

That is, I kinda agree and I totally disagree. I mean... argh, this is so hard to phrase for me here: I kinda "agree" - that one sees "more of" the writing about the meta-topics by women. But I disagree with the underlying fact (that women actually do "write more about meta-topics than technical aspects"). The problem (but also kinda non-problem?) here is, that women do write, but a reader often may not notice when the technical-aspects writer is a woman!... I know this is true, because I totally was once corrected here on HN for answering "he something" when it was a she - and started looking more carefully since. And now I see there totally are woman technical-bloggers, and many of them highly notable ones! (off the top of my head: Julia Evans, Joanna Rutkowska, Limor Fried/ladyada, ... just to start with.)

With that said, I believe the visibility paradox is a kinda self-fulfilling prophecy and/or hard to untie conundrum: either you have technical-aspects woman writers who don't emphasize being women (and thus can currently often get overlooked), or you have technical-aspects woman writers who do emphasize, and thus easily fall into category of "women writing about meta-topics more than technical aspect"... thus I believe we "see" more of the latter mostly because we typically don't recognize the former :/

[sosuke]

I can agree with your feeling. When I read a technical article I don't think about gender but I would say 'he' unless I knew with certainty the author was a 'she'. Even when a picture of the author is present I might never notice it, read and enjoy the technical piece, and move on. Hell I might even consider that I would say he, instead of checking gender, because I project myself into the story.

Anyhow, I believe you've gotten it right. We don't highlight gender unless that is the topic to be discussed. Otherwise we don't notice, I wonder what the real numbers are a little but I don't care. The person that looks for gender, to harass, is someone I can't identify with or empathize with. I don't understand them at all.

So people of every shade of gender please keep writing technical posts and I'll keep enjoying them! Thanks!

[m4x]

> if we want more women in programming, then let's talk about how cool it is to build stuff

I really agree with this.

Girls just don't seem to be interested in programming when they are young.

Then they go to university, and largely avoid CS because a) they haven't developed any prior interest in it and b) it is perceived as a difficult and male-dominated field.

The ones who do enrol in a CS course often struggle because it's their first foray into programming and they aren't familiar with any of the concepts, unlike many of their male peers who have done it before and cruise through all the 100 level courses

If we want to see more women in CS, get them interested at a younger age and suddenly CS will seem more appealing and they will find it just as easy as the other experienced students.

We need to show girls that programming is a good outlet for their creativity and foster their interest at a younger age

[thaw13579]

On one hand I agree that getting women interested in CS earlier will help, but it also seems unfair for introductory CS courses to penalize people who are new to CS. One solution some schools have implemented is to have multiple entry points, so that the experienced students can start off in more advanced courses without biasing the other truly intro courses.

[humanrebar]

> it is perceived as a difficult

It is difficult. Why would that impression be problematic?

[naasking]

Expertise in computer science probably isn't intrinsically more difficult than any other field, like medicine which now has more women than men.

[humanrebar]

Sure. But would it make sense to get women interested in medicine by downplaying how difficult it is?

[m4x]

I didn't word that very clearly but I meant difficult in the "I will have to fight to get ahead because women aren't necessarily well respected by the men in CS" sense

It is also technically difficult, but if that is a turn off to a prospective student of any gender then they might not be suited for a career in software engineering

[agentdrtran]

> We need to show girls that programming is a good outlet for their creativity and foster their interest at a younger age

I agree, but not just with CS, with a lot of things. Most building toys are marketed towards boys, and a lot of baking/cleaning toys are marketed to girls. These things shouldn't be gendered toys.

[mrgoldenbrown]

>Then they go to university, and largely avoid CS because a) they haven't developed any prior interest in it and b) it is perceived as a difficult and male-dominated field. I think you're forgetting a few reasons that women have mentined when asked why they left, or avoided CS: c) they are actively steered away by advisors d) they are harassed by fellow students or professors.

[m4x]

Fair point, and those are definitely things that we should be consciously striving to minimise

I don't think it substantially changes anything I said earlier though.

If a girl has been actively programming since a younger age, she will have enough confidence to pursue CS without seeking an advisor or her peers' approval

[xherberta]

Scratch.MIT.edu is an amazing place where kids can make something, see it work, and share it with minimal frustration.

Yet trolling certainly exists among kids, too. If anyone's looking to make a difference, consider volunteering as a moderator or just hanging out in the scratch community and leaving positive comments.

PS: If you're a troll, seriously, disregard this. Pick on someone your own size.

[julietcharlie]

In general, girls are not really encouraged to build things as part of their play. Toys marketed towards boys are definitely more oriented towards building, such as legos, model kits, and tinker toys. Adults are also less likely to build things with girls and although households have shifted away from imposing traditional gender roles on their children, toys are slow to reflect the change.

[clevernickname]

There's a very good Norwegian documentary series Hjernevask ("Brainwash") that tackles this issue in its first episode.

"Why do girls tend to go into empathizing professions and boys into systemizing professions? Why does the labor market become more gender segregated the more economic prosperity a country has?"

It's freely available online if you're interested.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask

[whatever_dude]

(Full disclosure: white male software developer)

I certainly don't envy the role women and minorities have in tech today. Always being pressured to be a role, or lead, or to be an example, or to strengthen your group, or whatever.

When I got into programming it was because I was curious. No one ever asked me to do it. No one asked me how I was doing. No one directed me, no one told me to do anything different, no one told me I was smart, and overall no one judged me. I was 10. I never even thought it was possible to have a career in it until I was about 15.

The important thing: that allowed me to just enjoy programming with no distractions, no politics, no social aspect involved. I was purely directed by my interests only.

I'm not sure if that's possible today, especially for under-represented demographics, and that makes me sad.

The result is that we'll be pushing people to do things that they might not be comfortable with. We want under-represented groups to be vocal and open about what they do, so they can get other people interested? If I had to be vocal and open about what I was doing, I'm not sure I'd have got into programming in the first place! What attracted me was the fact that I could just be on my own, solving problems in my mind, by myself, with no distractions.

[towlejunior]

>CS is supposed to be so super scary and women need special hand-holding and encouragement to attempt it.

This. I think this is really damaging. A misogynist sees this characterization and thinks, "Lol. See, what did I tell you?" An employer thinks, "Hiring women requires hand holding." A young girl thinks, "My friends won't want to do this with me."

[greyskull]

I want a world where we don't have to have this conversation at all. But, until we get there, don't we still need some role model type people for those women who are intimidated? I may be completely off base here: any time there's a big social shift, it takes a bunch of effort by a relatively small number of people. Right now, the industry is male-dominated, and many women are either too intimidated to start or this is not even on their radar. "Role model" type people do help, and maybe at some point a few years down the line, we've bolstered the female population enough where people enter and exit naturally like any other balanced profession.

[Dr_tldr]

There's a difference between a role-model and a self-promoter. The role-model hacks away at lots of projects, has an active github, and develops lots of experience until they're at the top of their field. The self-promoter writes a lot of blog posts about "being" in tech instead of actually "doing" tech.

The cottage industry devoted to writing blog posts about how hard it is to be a woman in tech and all the sexism and hardship all women face along the way seems to be doing their part to continue to intimidate and discourage women from learning to code. But for the self-promoter, this continued imbalance offers basically limitless opportunities for career progression through pointing out sexism rather than through technical ability.

Easily 90% of the female engineers I encounter are from East or South Asia where these blogs aren't widely read. It's an interesting correlation, even if by itself it proves nothing.

[qznc]

I don't like it but active promotion feels necessary in a world, where attention is the secondary currency.

[nathanasmith]

The cottage industry devoted to writing blog posts about how hard it is to be a woman in tech and all the sexism and hardship all women face along the way seems to be doing their part to continue to intimidate and discourage women from learning to code.

As long as there is a market for that kind of rhetoric and enough eyeballs show up to generate the ad impressions, blog posts will be written about it. If shit on a stick was what everybody wanted to read about, we'd be up to our ears on whether blue or purple shit was the hotness this fall. The transparency of it and that people seem to find it confusing is the funniest thing of all.

[mpeg]

I think talking about the issues is a good thing.

Tech is scary for women. I've seen all kinds of casual sexism on the workplace that, while generally not intended as hurtful, men simply don't have to go through.

As a man, I'm pretty sure I've never had people talk about how hot I was after I left an interview or meeting. I've never been singled out to go fetch coffee, or told to "calm down, love".

[towlejunior]

Zero of those things fun, granted, but zero are scary. That's a total misuse of the word aimed at you coming off as sympathetic to women's issues.

FWIW, my mom, mid-50s, has been in tech since the '80s. She has complained of sexism. She also says the idea that tech is more sexist is a joke, and that her younger female co-workers complain a lot.

[mpeg]

Yeah my mom also thinks that Spain was better off under a dictatorship, but that's just because she's a raging conservative and it never negatively affected her directly.

Anecdotes are anecdotes both ways, you saying zero of those things are scary is missing the point, women are not some sort of fragile creature that will get easily offended or scared; none of that is scary, sexism is not scary most of the time, but it's demeaning to be treated as a lesser.

[enraged_camel]

Exactly!

About 3 years ago, a lady by the name of Jennifer Dewalt submitted her website on Hacker News, in which she had developed 180 websites in 180 days [1]. It was basically a documentation of her self-learning process, starting from scratch and every day's project a little more advanced than the previous day's, and it was impressive.

I emailed it to my sister, who at the time was trying to decide what to do with her life. She was very inspired and started learning JavaScript. The funny thing is that none of the "you should go into tech because..." type articles I had sent her previously had made a dent. Yet apparently all she needed was a "doer" role model!

I, too, feel that if more women focused on doing stuff instead of writing about the difficulties they experience, we would see more women in tech. Dewalt became a YC fellowship founder[2] and I'm sure her leadership by example has inspired many more women than just my sister.

[1]https://jenniferdewalt.com/

[2]https://zube.io/blog/how-i-built-180-websites-in-180-days-an...

[viraptor]

Here's another blog if you want to ever follow up with more advanced "this can be done" examples: http://www.windytan.com/p/posts.html

[tonyarkles]

jvns.ca as well

[yxhuvud]

For what it is worth though, if we remove the gendered aspect from the article then what remains is the insight that asking questions and alerting other people to what you don't understand is a great way to actually get the information you need and to gain skills. The advise really works for everyone.

[pbhjpbhj]

>Yet apparently all she needed was a "doer" role model! //

Do you perhaps mean a "doer _female_ role model"?

Maybe the problem here is that [younger] females are particularly sexist and so won't consider males as role models?

[akamaka]

My first boss was a woman who had started her career in the computer field in the mid-1970s, and nothing seemed unusual about it at the time. As years have gone by, I read an increasing amount of talk about women having a different experience with programming, but my experience of actually working with women programmers stays the same. They are just part of every team I've worked with and deal with the same day-to-day challenges as everyone else.

[ksou32]

The "who had all the odds against her" part made me feel sick.

I'm seeing nothing about sleeping in a car, or any hint of a struggle aside from academia. Maybe it's just because my childhood was so shitty, but I can't feel empathy here.

You don't need a CS degree to become a well paid programmer, I couldn't even afford to finish college and I do well.

The little secret is you need to do a large amount of independent study,programming side projects, etc to become a decent programmer.

[ralfd]

> but I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect.

One of my most favorite programmer figures quickly became Natasha Murashev...

https://www.linkedin.com/in/natashatherobot

...better known as NatashaTheRobot. Not because she is a woman, but because her Swift/iOS Newsletter is superuseful and interesting and she focuses on technical details instead of "did you know I am a girl?!".

https://twitter.com/natashatherobot

http://www.thomashanning.com/interview-natasha-the-robot/

Similar to Erica Sadun who writes all this Apple/iOS dev Cookbooks.

[ma2rten]

I agree, but I feel this post is not really about that. It applies to guys equally. It's just that the author happens to be female. At least it was very relatable to me.

[iherbig]

I think the problem that krstck is trying to address is not so much that the anecdote is invalid, but that prefacing it with "I'm a female programmer" colors the rest of the anecdote. Instead of it being a general anecdote which may be relatable to everyone in the field, it's specifically an anecdote about being a woman in computing. And krstck is saying there are certain problems that come along with that coloring of things.

[gonehome]

Yeah the core of the article is that it's good to admit ignorance and ask questions - that's how you learn quickly.

Paradoxically people will actually think you're smarter for it anyway - it's often when you pretend you know something you don't that you appear dumb.

The gender commentary is a distraction.

[eli_gottlieb]

>but I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect.

Ok, but as a male, I don't blog about everything technical I do. Most of the code I write or fix is just sort of quietly sent into internal code-review or pushed to an unpublicized github repo. I don't see what the problem is with a woman blogging about social/political stuff rather than technical stuff, since I figure it's plenty likely she's doing loads of technical stuff without yelling about it.

[groundCode]

> I think we're doing a huge disservice by promoting this idea that programming is some super elusive thing

very true! The heart of the article is really just pointing out that like anything, learning computer science is about admitting what you don't know, asking questions and perseverance.

I guess it's because I'm not female that the "female in tech" portion of the article didn't really stand out against the greater take away (for me anyway) of what it takes to actually learn. On the role model front though, I do think that they can play an important part in encouraging someone into learning a subject where they haven't had any encouragement/support from family or school.

[scott_s]

Disclosure: I am a male computer science researcher and software developer. I have years of experience as a TA, and I have taught a CS intro course to college students.

> I think it's great that this lady is going into this field, but I feel really weird about this characterization that CS is supposed to be so super scary and women need special hand-holding and encouragement to attempt it.

I don't think that is what the author is trying to convey. Rather the opposite, actually. She's trying to get across the notion that computer science is a topic like any other.

The problem is that many CS students (you included, it sounds like) come into CS intro classes with significant prior experience. To those without that experience, and not realizing that their peers have a significant head-start, they may feel dumb when they don't get concepts their peers instantly get. Many people will hesitate to ask for help in such a circumstance. I think members of a minority group are then even less likely to ask for help, because they already feel different and perhaps wondering if they belong.

Not many people come into microbiology programs with years of experience in the topic. So while CS is a topic like any other, it tends to have students unlike any other.

I do not think it is enough to just talk about how cool it is in programming. I think that the culture in our courses needs to change, and some of that is on the instructional staff.

[munchbunny]

Combine this with people who have varying thresholds for "understanding the content" and you have a context where it's quite possible that somebody who is actually quite competent doesn't feel that way because their threshold for "I get it" involves asking lots of seemingly obvious but not actually obvious questions.

When you put this kind of person in a climate where they feel like they are representing a group in front of others, then you have a recipe for somebody who has a lot of promise, but the environment suppresses learning. That's bad.

On the matter of whether this person feels like they are representing a group, it's important to distinguish whether this person "should" or "actually does" feel that they are representing a group. Women should not feel that they are, but we know that some do as a direct result of someone else generalizing them to represent women as a group. We know it happens. Maybe not by the people reading this comment, but we know it happens.

So this all combines into a situation where somebody saying "hey, asking questions is a good thing, stop worrying about making yourself look dumb" is necessary and helpful.

[nindalf]

I agree with your sentiment - I read most of the technical articles on HN and reddit and I rarely find that a woman has written them. I suspect that since only a tenth of developers are women, at best you're likely to see 1 in 10 articles written by women. Its worth discussing why the actual rate feels a lot lower than that.

Having said that, here's a fantastic article I read recently - [1]. Unlike most articles about switching languages, she tried several approaches to fixing her problem in the existing language and shared why it was impossible to do it.

[1] - https://medium.com/@theflapjack103/the-way-of-the-gopher-669...

[cauterized]

Actually, industry-wide, more like 20-25% of software developers are women. It's only in Silicon Valley and the startup milieu that 10% is the norm.

[visarga]

> I think we're doing a huge disservice by promoting this idea that programming is some super elusive thing

It's certainly not super elusive but it requires a specific kind of people that don't get anxious/frustrated when tackling complex systems, often badly documented. Some hate this kind of work, others love it. It involves having a certain type of personality as much as high IQ. Most men feel helpless when tacking such problems, too.

[c3534l]

> a specific kind of people that don't get anxious/frustrated when tackling complex systems

Eh, you learn to not let that get to you because you build up experience working through it over time. I think that's a learned skill, not an innate, immutable trait.

Also:

> Basic Cognitive Skills, as measured by standard cognitive ability tests, are not shown to be helpful in predicting programming proficiency

from http://pro.sagepub.com/content/27/7/647.short

[prawn]

There'd be a huge percentage of people who if you started them down the CS path would bail very early through frustration, not feeling comfortable with the topics, etc.

I imagine many of us learn to get better at aspects of it. Or we're more comfortable with what the job entails and so can make light of the frustrations and soldier on.

[c3534l]

That's definitely true. I suppose if I were teaching a CS course, I'd point out that it can be difficult at times and that being confused or challenged intellectually is a necessary part of growth, not something to be avoided.

[bladecatcher]

Reminds me of this video, where Maddox explores similar theme on women in video games

https://youtu.be/MpJGkG1g-Lk

[VeejayRampay]

This is nice and all, but it's also a tad simplistic.

It makes the huge assumption that women will be treated equally on their way to making video games. The video game industry is controlled by a huge majority of men, how do we know that any woman trying to enter the field will be treated fairly? The same goes for any field where there's a big unbalance in gender representation by the way.

[TeMPOraL]

> The video game industry is controlled by a huge majority of men, how do we know that any woman trying to enter the field will be treated fairly? The same goes for any field where there's a big unbalance in gender representation by the way.

I don't think this is really related to gender in any non-superficial way. It's the nature of business that the establishment wants to keep their high status and limit access to newcomers. Gender, if targeted, is an excuse. If you're not of wrong gender, you're of wrong skin colour. If you're not of wrong colour, you're from wrong country. Etc. What do you think would happen if suddenly women were to become majority in game development? Yeah, we'd see what could be perceived a discrimination against men.

The solution is to find a way to level the playing field for everyone, without going into specific characteristics - because those are transient and change depending on who's on the top of the hill.

[mcv]

It's possible that when women who do write about the tech itself, and don't emphasize the fact that they're women, people tend to not realize they're women. That said, I've definitely seen interesting tech articles by women. But I'm also aware of cases like Kathy Sierra being chased off the internet by trolls like weev.

As much as women would like to focus just on the tech, sometimes the "women in tech" issues are unavoidable.

In any case, this particular article doesn't seem to be about "women in tech" so much as about "how to get into tech when it doesn't come naturally", and I think it's very insightful and inspiring, and relevant for men just as much as it is for women.

[anouk_anca]

> Nobody told me it was supposed to be hard or supposed to be for boys or whatever.

This is an ideal situation, but sadly not what many women experience, myself included. Role models are necessary because these negative gender stereotypes are real and need to be explicitly countered, ignoring them and simply focusing on gender-blind education is not enough IMO.

[lsc]

>I think this is a great sentiment, but....and maybe I'm just not hanging out in the right parts of the internet or whatever...but I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect.

My observation of women I know personally is that they're a lot less likely to write publicly about things they have a less than perfect grasp of than, say, I am.

I do a lot of things that I am, quite frankly, unqualified to do, and most of them turn out crap. You can spend time with google and see megabytes and megabytes of text that came from my keyboard, and the vast majority of it is garbage.

I have, however, produced a few things that I think turned out to be pretty decent. in '09, I finished a book about the virtualization technology I used in my business. (To be clear, I co-authored the book, it wasn't just me, not by a long shot.) - but my point is that throughout my life, I've always felt like only my successes counted. I've always felt like falling on my face wasn't a big deal. And part of that was unhealthy; I kind of saw falling on my face as the default situation, the ground state. But part of it was healthy, too, in that the world really has been pretty forgiving of my mistakes, especially my technical mistakes. (my business mistakes, on the other hand.)

Where am I going with this? my impression is that many of the women I know personally who work in my field feel super uncomfortable with failure, especially with the kind of failure that comes from publicly being provably technically wrong, as you are, from time to time, if you publish technical documentation. My impression is that they fear falling on their faces more than I do. Part of that, I'm sure, is just that online, I think, people are just meaner to women. There seems to be this presumption that because I'm a white guy, I didn't get the job because of some quota... which seems really silly to me, for obvious reasons, but it's there.

I also think that men are socialized to deal with rejection more than women are, from an early age, and I think that if you aren't used to dealing with rejection, you are going to be a lot less likely to put yourself in a position where you are going to be rejected. And, if you are like me in that your technical abilities are a huge part of your sense of self, being proven wrong after writing up a thing does feel like a rejection, especially if the criticism is framed in a "you are not competent to write technical documentation" sort of way. For me, that's a rejection of what it is to be me; probably the worst feeling another person can inspire in me using only text. This goes back to the mean thing. People are very rarely mean to me in this way... and if people were often mean to me in that way? I would probably stop writing.

And it could be a lot more than gender; most of the women I'm thinking of went to good schools, both high school and college, while I barely made it through a terrible high school and have no college to speak of (though I'm working on changing that part) so I have a much different idea of how you learn. It's easy to see how going to a good school, or preparing to go to a good school could give you a different outlook on failure; Just failing one class can bring your grade average way down (I mean, way down by the standards that good colleges have) and a lot of kids feel like they only have one shot to get into the school of their choice. I've never experienced anything like that; If I do really horribly at a job, I can always just leave it off my resume.

[kqr]

> My impression is that they fear falling on their faces more than I do. Part of that, I'm sure, is just that online, I think, people are just meaner to women.

Part of that is also that women, in general, are much more sensitive to how other people perceive them; what their social "status" is. This can possibly be explained by their (prehistorical) roles as primary caretakers and being the "social glue" of small tribes. It could very well be deeply rooted in their biology.

With that said, I don't think it's relevant in this case. There are many other lines of work where women are in the majority where it's also easy to repeatedly fall on your face.

[lsc]

>Part of that is also that women, in general, are much more sensitive to how other people perceive them; what their social "status" is. This can possibly be explained by their (prehistorical) roles as primary caretakers and being the "social glue" of small tribes. It could very well be deeply rooted in their biology.

eh, I think that explaining behavior through cultural conditioning makes more sense than resorting to evolutionary psychology. Sure, the latter may or may not be the cause of the former, but we can at least directly observe cultural conditioning; it's quite difficult to verify anything about the social structures of prehistoric tribes. You could say the same thing, in a more verifiable way, talking about modern dating norms and expectations.

>With that said, I don't think it's relevant in this case. There are many other lines of work where women are in the majority where it's also easy to repeatedly fall on your face.

Note, i wasn't arguing that there aren't many women in computer science because it is easy to fall on your face, [1] i was observing that many of the women I personally have observed in the field aren't as active when it comes to publicly writing, I believe, because the consequences of that fall would be greater than those consequences are for me. Writing about the technology you use is rather different from directly working with said technology.

Most people write for social reasons; technical writing, generally speaking, returns practically homeopathic amounts of money. I guess I'm different there, too, in a non-gendered way; Being as I've got no education and only the skill that I have wrung from the miserly neck of experience, I need all the credentials I can get, and so writing well probably has a higher return for me than it does for someone who is educated, because I get the social juice, and I enjoy that social juice, but when I do manage to write something worth reading, it also serves to function as a kind of credential, and oh my, do I flog it. But for people who already have credentials? I would think that writing is mostly about the social rewards, and if those rewards are more negative for women than for men, as is my otherwise unsupported observation, that could certainly tip that balance to "I'm just going to do the work, let someone else talk about it."

[1]My own theory is that it's the trickle down from "cultural fit" discrimination at hiring. Why would you spend all the time and effort training if getting a job at the end was going to be really difficult? I'm in industry, in part because every time I've asked for a computer industry job, it has been a fairly easy process. Hell, I do nothing and people try to push or pull me in that direction. Every time I've asked for a job outside of this industry, it seemed like huge walls went up. If you don't want me here, I'm going to leave. But that's just me projecting my own feelings on to other people who have very different experiences.

[stkni]

Full disclosure: I'm not female but I have two daughters :)

This is bang on the money to me. The important part is having the interest/curiosity & opportunity to take tech apart and see what makes it tick.

We need more women in software development, but women should not necessarily take it up because we need more women in software development.

[p4bl0]

Wouldn't it be possible that when the matter is technical you/we do not pay attention to the gender, or worse, assume the author is a male?

[gus_massa]

Two blogs from female developers that appear here. They don't post too often, but the articles are usually very good.

Oona Räisänen: http://www.windytan.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=windytan.com

Julia Evans: http://jvns.ca/ https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=jvns.ca

[junko]

Full disclosure: I’m a female with engineering background who skipped to another semi-technical field because I got put off, blah blah blah …

Just thought I’d add another ‘female’ voice here. Apologies for the lengthiness.

For the longest time, I felt and agreed exactly what you said. I grew up being both artsy and techy, was labelled from geek to nerd, took things apart etc (though never at a too deep I-set-up-my-own-Linux-distro level) … in fact gender didn’t even occur to me. I couldn’t understand those who whine about gender issues either, of course I’ve had a few sexist incidents like boys not letting me play with their marble rollercoaster but hey, I didn’t feel particularly insulted as I couldn’t take <i>dumb</i> people seriously anyway. Maybe that sort of ego was what kept me strong, or rather provided the shield needed to keep me happy and giddy-go-lucky.

Adolescence came and I got hit by a series of personal crises – but still I couldn’t understand what the gender issue was all about. It must be noted that I must have had low empathy level to start with, as I couldn’t understand other types of discrimination – despite being non-white, foreign, muslim, short, lispy, bad skin, bespectacled etc. Why would anyone care about your ‘shell’ anyway?

When I went to university to study engineering, for the first time I was surrounded by more males than females. Friends, colleagues, teaching staff – but this is <i>great</i>, as I tend to get on better with guys than gals anyway! So initially it seemed fine, but then the gender issue crept in. Remember my low empathy level? Well that must have shot up, which was probably due to those humbling personal crises I mentioned (and which simultaneously ruined my confidence). So I guess I became more ‘feminine’, and my behaviour became more feminine too. For example, I became more conscious of the way I phrase things to make sure that it doesn’t sound so ‘abrupt’, like asking ‘dumb’ questions as conversation starters which surprise-surprise, was interpreted as reflection of my own dumb state of mind instead. More guys took me less seriously, even though we may have the same idea but I squeaked it out instead. Sometimes I get ignored completely! I admit, it’s my problem. It’s my fault for not being straightforward, for not being clear enough, but the point is, it couldn’t be helped (At least at that time, I’ve since worked on curbing it). But this difference in communication made me think, for the first time, that maybe there is a line between male and female after all. It’s a controversial point, I know, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I began to lose communication with guys and vice versa, that I began to socialise more with my female friends and that I began to relate more to my more timid, female colleagues.

I admit that there’s a lot of factors here, especially my own low confidence, but now I think that the gender issue is real. And it only became real when I became more sensitive and more ‘feminine’. Maybe gender doesn’t really exist, but lack of confidence sure does. And lack of confidence can come from perceived things too, like gender. You might scoff at it, you might be entirely unsympathetic to it, but who are you to judge? Whether something is perceived ‘wrongly’ or not, it doesn’t matter, because that person still feels the reaction from it. And how that person feels can affect his/her own decision-making. Frankly I’m still traumatised enough to decide quite strongly to avoid engineering … I know it’s stupid but I can’t help shudder at the bad memories of scornful male colleagues and embarrassed-looking female colleagues. Toughen up, you say? Get lost.

Let that women-for-tech blogger write. Maybe you think that she got the factors mixed up, just like I might have done in my little essay there, but you never did the full flip coin like I did to know that.

P.S. "You" is basically anyone reading this P.S.2. By saying 'male' and 'female', 'sensitive' and 'insensitive', I don't mean to simplify everything in a black and white way - of course there are many exceptions but my language skills aren't good enough to efficiently disclaim

[dkrich]

Completely agree with this. Reading this I got the sense that the author has the impression that struggling to learn new, complex topics and feeling uncomfortable falling behind is a male vs. female thing. It isn't. I struggled greatly in my early days of CS and had many of the same pressures the author did as I felt I fell behind my classmates. Some people pick things up very quickly, while others take more time before it "clicks." It's embarrassing and frustrating no matter who you are.

I have worked with many programmers and PM's over the course of my education and career and many of the sharpest people I've worked with were female. However there is one thing that has always bothered me which I do believe affects an outsized proportion of female programmers. Many times when I'm in a meeting or on a call discussing a project, I've noticed that somebody will ask a question and then immediately follow it up by apologizing and saying "I'm not technical, so bear with me." If you are female (or male- it just so happens that it seems that this person is almost always a female)- Don't. Ever. Do. That. First of all, what does that mean, "I"m not technical?" You don't have an understanding of what is being discussed? Then you should carve out time to meet with people to gain an understanding so that you know what's going on prior to the meeting. That isn't male or female or only applies to some group of people who were destined to be "technical", it applies to everyone.

Second, when you say something that is self-deprecating, the intent is usually to gain favor with others at your own expense, but I think somewhere there's an assumption that the other people still respect you anyway because of the other things you do. But whenever I hear that, I immediately get annoyed because I then wonder why the person is asking questions and attempting to manage timelines for something they clearly don't have an understanding of. It causes me to lose respect for them. I can't help that, they just told me that they don't know what's going on, laughed, and made no attempt to gain an understanding. If you go around telling people you aren't "technical" and laughing, you're giving them license to question your abilities.

Instead, it would be far more constructive to ask people to explain what they mean by X, even if you think X is something really simple. I personally haven't worked with many people who would have a problem taking a couple of minutes to provide a basic background, and if anybody does, then they aren't doing their job and that will reflect poorly on them, not you.

[pmelendez]

I believe is perception, I follow several women careers in tech and honestly it is just because they rock in the technical department and not because they are women, funny enough they don't write about "women in tech" (or at least I haven't seen them doing that) so if you are not searching in their particular area of expertise then you might not notice them.

Caitie McCaffrey and Hilary Mason comes to my mind but there are many more.

[matt4077]

That could be a result of selection bias: If women write 5% of the programming articles on HN (because they make up 5% of the group writing such articles) but 100% of the women-in-tech articles (because men don't care about that) you might get that impression even though women write technical articles with the same quality & quantity as their male counterparts.