> What is now considered a male-dominated field, was once defined as “women’s work.”
Once? It's naive to think that these attitudes do not persist, albeit in somewhat disguised forms, perhaps.
At some universities, for instance, engineers regard CS majors as "wimps". Engineering is hard, CS is soft.
Moreover, think about how there is an attitude that some "softer" or "easier" programming is lower on the pecking order. While programming as a broad category may not be "women's work", web design (even with client and server scripting) is "for girls" and, say, writing drivers for a network switch is for "real men".
Oh, the hard/soft stereotyping in digital tech is alive and kicking!
I briefly did front end web design work many many years ago. Now I have a masters in software engineering, two books published in web scraping in Python and Java, and years of experience in back end Java, database architecture, data science, and all that jazz.
The vast majority of the recruiter spam I get, as a female, is front end web development or UI/UX work. I removed all mention of "HTML/CSS" type skills from LinkedIn, but that hasn't stopped it. I'm beginning to suspect that removing my photo from public profiles would probably do more to stop the inappropriate job spam than anything I could actually change in LinkedIn, however...
> The vast majority of the recruiter spam I get, as a female, is front end web development or UI/UX work.
I'm transgender, and I can tell you that I got that kind of spam both before and after I transitioned. In fact, most recruiter spam I've ever gotten is wholly irrelevant to my skills.
You're getting that spam because the positions are in high demand, so there are a lot of them, and recruiters will spam all their positions to every single email address in their database.
They just plain have no respect for other human beings. Half the recruiter spam I get uses my old name, even though I legally changed it almost a year ago and changed it on my resume (which I posted to all job sites) a few months before that. I also list on every job site that I cannot relocate and I'm only seeking full-time work. Most of the recruiter spam I get is for positions out of town and for contract jobs. They never get it. I've written scathing emails to recruiters lambasting them for suggesting I uproot my life and move out of state for a shitty 6-month contract. I usually don't get a reply.
One recruiter took the cake. He emailed me about one such position, then called me the next day after I ignored his email, and I told him I wasn't interested in any contract work and that I don't ever want to do business with him. A few days later, he emails me again about the same position. I replied with a Cease & Desist notice making it clear that he is to have no contact with me from now on, and then he calls me again to try and convince me to take the job. I spent the next few minutes shouting at him and berating him for harassment. I planned to contact his firm's HR department about his conduct, but I never got around to it, sadly.
That's good to know! It's so hard to tell, having only the direct experience of being a single gender in the industry, what is normal and what isn't. I try to stay away from it, but some days, it seems like I'm filtering all my experiences through Medium blog posts about gender inequality and tech-conference-horror-story-of-the-day BS.
I might have to go back to front end work if that's really the hot thing everyone's clamoring for these days... (kidding! I love what I'm doing right now).
It's always interesting to hear about transgendered experiences in the sciences and programming. We need more points of view with control groups! ;)
The point was that I wasn't actually looking. So many of the articles on HN, and on tech blogs/news sites around the Internet are about gender inequality. As a human being, I can only encounter so much of it before it starts to affect how I view and interpret events around me, without realizing it. "Are they asking me to be a speaker at this conference because I'll provide valuable knowledge to the attendees, or is this a 'token speaker' situation?" It gets to you, after a while, even if you're actively trying not too let it.
My whole point was that that situation is bad, and hearing experiences such as ones from MTF or FTM transgendered individuals in tech can be valuable. I don't see any reason for you to be a jerk about it here.
This is unrelated to the topic at hand, but I'm trying to learn web scraping in Python and I'm looking for a source to use. Would you mind sharing a link to your book?
I see a few reasons for this (at least where I went to university).
First, CS required less math classes. Harder than most sciences, but still not as much as the default for engineers. There was a correlation between who math a STE major required and how hard it was viewed. Psychology which didn't require calculus and had a watered down stats course was considered the weakest. Physics and Engineering was at the top.
Second, professors in engineering were far less forgiving (I took a few classes). They were stricter and while their work wasn't harder, they were far more likely to just give a 0 for doing something wrong. Also their tests had more chain problems (answer to question 1 is input to question 2), and every one I had always insisted you had to have the right answer (so if you had the right answer to question 2 using the wrong answer from question 1, you got a 0).
Third, there were easy computer degrees. Name a degree in Information Management, while not CS, was often associated and it did not require the most complex CS classes. There were not easy engineering degrees.
I think the point is that it was a much more literal connection.
Specifically, programming itself was often considered secretarial work and, as such, was generally given to women.
Men tended to participate as engineers or mathematicians.
I don't think anyone would contend that CS is a female-dominated field although I take your point that some may consider it somewhat lower on the testosterone chart than traditional engineering.
What do they think about math majors? It's similarly "soft" in that it is a study of entirely intangible and abstract concepts - nothing to do with manly machinery or contraptions at all.
What do they think about electrical engineers? Circuit board sewers...?
That definitely matches what seemed to be the prevailing perceptions for me when I was in undergrad. Whether or not they're actually accurate... hard to say, but that's how the people around me generally felt.
Sometimes I get a little happy - maybe even proud - when I read about the achievements of women who pioneered this field (especially the awesome Admiral Hopper.)
Then I stop smiling and remind myself that, even in praise, it's not relevant.
Sometimes people claim that women are biologically, statistically, just not as good/interested as men at programming/technology, and point to current gender balance in tech as evidence of this ("There's a reason there's lots of male programmers, men must be just better!")
Remembering some of these women, and the early history like this, is very relevant today to show that that's nonsense.
The interest part is not nothing. Most women programmers I've known were on their way to something they considered better. My wife, for example, slung C++ and Java while getting her MBA in evening classes. For her programming was a path to earn a living until she got her 'real' job on the executive track. Another woman I worked with only wrote code for a while and moved on to run her father's machine shop. In both cases these women were good at what they did, but saw software development as something to do before the real job.
I interviewed at a company a week or so ago and was very happy to see their lead developer was a woman. I didn't dare bring up the topic in the interview, but I'd have loved to hear if she was aiming for CTO at a later point in her career instead of escaping tech work.
The shame of it is, almost any dev team I've been on is better with at least one capable woman on it, yet so few stay.
> My wife, for example, slung C++ and Java while getting her MBA in evening classes. For her programming was a path to earn a living until she got her 'real' job on the executive track. Another woman I worked with only wrote code for a while and moved on to run her father's machine shop. In both cases these women were good at what they did, but saw software development as something to do before the real job.
It's been my observation that the bulk of female programmers aren't hobbyists and just program because it's a job and it pays well enough. When they go home, they don't think about code.
There are exceptions (hell, I'm one of them, and I personally know a couple others), but in general, female hackers are much rarer than female programmers.
I'm not sure if it's proportionate to guys or not. There are plenty of male programmers who aren't hobbyists either (think of the legions of VB drones in the '90s). I don't know if the just-another-job to hobbyist ratio is just more noticable with girls because there are fewer of us in general or if the percentages are actually different.
But how much of that "lack of interest" is due to the person not finding the thing interesting, or not finding the industry/their peers interesting? If there are sexists in a group, then people who are the target of that sexism are less likely to enjoy that group. As the number of women decreases in a group, then the remaining women experience more sexism. Negative feedback.
Well do you have an answer? To me it seems highly unlikely that all the women have been turned away by sexism. I remember the times when programming and computers where considered extremely unsexy and basically made you an outcast and unlikely to get a girl-friend. Computer kids back then would have been very happy to meet a girl who was interested in computer stuff.
Nerdy boys largely get ignored by their non-nerdy peers. There's an attitude of "I don't know why anybody would like that, but whatever".
On the other hand, nerdy girls are treated like absolute shit by other girls. Instead of "not my cup of tea", it's more like "eww, that's disgusting, and you're disgusting for liking it". The movie Mean Girls could have been a documentary.
And adults can influence this too. Even well-meaning feminists are more likely to steer young girls towards careers in more "acceptable" professions like business, law, or medicine rather than something down-and-dirty like engineering. And if science is involved, it's likely to be either medicine or a research career in natural sciences (e.g. physics, chemistry).
That phenomenon is not limited to women. Corporate software engineering is a pretty dead-end occupation. You hit an income and title plateau quickly, and--especially in the startup world--ageism starts to kick in after that.
Modern women are statisticaly less interested in programming. That's because boys 20 years ago got c-64 or PC because they wanted to play games, and girls 20 years ago got barbies.
Turns out barbie doesn't have the same side effects.
There is evidence that the games kids choose and how they react with each other has an effect though, and some of that seems to be affected by natural gender-sensitive bias.
Though while this might be large enough to be considered statistically relevant, nothing I've seen suggests a natural bias strong enough to account for more than a fraction of the mis-balance we see in later life in the science & technology arenas, so social pressure (even "accidental" pressure due to, as you suggest, the "toys" parents and other family buy), both at a young age and as kids progress through school, are presumably the larger factors by quite some margin.
There are natural gender biases, mental as well as physical, that are not caused by external cultural pressure, and to completely disregard that would be a mistake. But I think (caveat: going by my experiences here rather than any scientific study) in most cases that the difference between the average man and the average woman is smaller than the range of differences within each gender (so if you consider only the bulk of the population it might be valid to consider us identical overall).
> There is evidence that the games kids choose and how they react with each other has an effect though, and some of that seems to be affected by natural gender-sensitive bias.
Research is of varying quality. We see some terrible research comin from actual professors in real universities. Here's one example of someone at a prestigious institution who has anti-science viewpoint: http://wjh.harvard.edu/~jmitchel/writing/failed_science.htm
So, when companies like Mattel (or whoever) do research into the colour pink and girl's toys we should probably be a bit wary about the conclusions they draw, especially when they don't release the full data.
I got basketballs and golf clubs. I had to beg my dad to get me my first amiga 500. He agreed only because he thought I'd might get rich from it one day. So my interest, to the best that I can tell, was self originated.
there is a difference between it being cool and being acceptable. you had an identity as a nerd. you were accepted as a nerd, and cool people were probably happy that you were because it put you lower on the totem pole.
I don't know about 20 years ago, but I think now there are pretty even numbers of girls who play games as boys who play games in my experience. I don't know how accurate that is for everywhere, but it doesn't appear to affect interest in programming. Of course, the boys aren't interested either, I think I'm the only one.
It seems that the decrease in women programmers seems to have started around the point where PC's supplanted mainframes. PC's were regarded as a toy by the established IT departments perhaps. I wonder if there is some correlation?
I got a computer TI-994A because I was curious about programming due to those old Radio Shack comic books that showed what computers could do.
It's much easier to make a game about shooting objects, or manipulating objects than about social interactions.
That's what most of games were about in 8bit and 16bit times, so boys were interested in them more than girls (because of natural inclination and social norms), so there's more boys than girsl in IT right now.
This will change because there's more gaming girls now, and there are other reasons to have computer.
Or, the game development industry was dominated by men at the start, who wanted to play action/violence games because they were socialized to find this fun, and these games socialized younger males.
Natural inclination is unnecessary to the story. The burden of proof is on you to prove that it exists in the first place.
I have two girls, they play with Barbies - and do a helluva lot of other geeky /boy stuff like play Minecraft, program for fun, and get dirty outside. Stop the Barbie hate - some girls like pink and still will kick your ass.
Because any other approach, even those with the best of intentions, eventually boils down to the supposition that what you've got between your legs is somehow relevant.
And you know what - on an aggregate, societal level - it might actually be: men and women are not the same, and that's OK. But this is a statistical observation that only applies to the population as a whole and is completely invalid at the individual level. If you feel yourself reaching for this knowledge at that level then evidently you don't have enough good information about the individual in front of you - that is the problem you need to fix.
If we took away all the contextual stuff we know about our founding mothers and fathers and referred to them only with asexual codenames like 'Person X', absolutely nothing would change. If one's aim is achieving equality, the only way to truly do that is to strip away all the bullshit: gender - just like hair colour, accent, and anything else you care to name - shouldn't even register. It's a non-thought.
If that's what feminism is about then I'm a feminist; but I'd never actually call myself that because 90% of the feminism I see today is most definitely not like this, it seems instead to be about making gender register in a very big way - and that's just as misguided and self-destructive as misogyny.
It's extremely relevant for women. Women are harassed more online and the harassment is more personal for women than men. Men get their work attacked, women get their identity attacked:
> According to a 2005 report by the Pew Research Center, which has been tracking the online lives of Americans for more than a decade, women and men have been logging on in equal numbers since 2000, but the vilest communications are still disproportionately lobbed at women. We are more likely to report being stalked and harassed on the Internet—of the 3,787 people who reported harassing incidents from 2000 to 2012 to the volunteer organization Working to Halt Online Abuse, 72.5 percent were female. Sometimes, the abuse can get physical: A Pew survey reported that five percent of women who used the Internet said “something happened online” that led them into “physical danger.” And it starts young: Teenage girls are significantly more likely to be cyberbullied than boys. Just appearing as a woman online, it seems, can be enough to inspire abuse. In 2006, researchers from the University of Maryland set up a bunch of fake online accounts and then dispatched them into chat rooms.
> Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7.
> [W]omen’s harassment is more likely to be gender-based and that has specific, discriminatory harms rooted in our history. The study pointed out that the harassment targeted at men is not because they are men, as is clearly more frequently the case with women. It’s defining because a lot of harassment is an effort to put women, because they are women, back in their “place.”
It's a damn shame that ENIAC's programmers and those that followed them get no greater mention in the annals of history than the footnote that "computers before 1945 were women". I had a really good CSSE education, yet until recently, if you asked me to name a notable female computer scientist, Countess Lovelace or Grace Hopper would be the only person to come to mind, and I would be a little hazy on their accomplishments to boot (then, I would have said something about Hopper creating COBOL when her work was really quite a bit more fundamental and wide ranging than that, and as for Lady Lovelace, even now without peeking at Wikipedia, I think she had something to do with the math surrounding Babbage's engines and couldn't be more specific). It took a recent Imgur posting to become aware of people like Margaret Hamilton, who _led_ some absolutely astounding work for the Apollo Program. I'm sure there are other women of whom I'm ignorant that are every bit as important to modern computer science and software engineering as luminaries such as Turing or von Neumann. If some kind of history of the profession is to be included (and I think it should), there should at least be some mention of them during one's CSSE education.
Of course, I don't disagree with you, but think of it from, say, this angle:
"Hey, class full of young women with university aspirations! Don't be put off from entering science and engineering fields. Look, there are even famous women in tech such as X, Y and Z which are behind some technology that you probably use, like the instruction language understood by the chips in most tablets and cell phones. Oh, they were born men and even had wives and kids, but don't let details like Y chromosomes and functioning penises be a distraction from this forcefully convincing rhetoric which I painstakingly prepared last night in my hotel room, on the backs of these two crumpled restaurant receipts. I'm confident that you can identify with them as human beings with struggles in their lives---just like you!"
My point is that certain kinds of examples can detract from a thesis, by drawing focus to some other thesis or factors that may be perceived as confounding or whatever.
Sidenote:
Disclaimer: I was heavily influenced by my Biology professors. I don't think society evolved in vacuum separate from genetic evolution. So while I don't appreciate insulting people by gender. I do however think there are gender differences.
> Is it fair to say putting your heart into something makes you an amateur at something ?
Yes, that is the etymology of the word 'amateur' : 1784, "one who has a taste for (something)," from French amateur "lover of," from Latin amatorem (nominative amator) "lover," agent noun from amatus, past participle of amare "to love" - http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=amateur
Later this word has been used derogatorily, but it is not its original meaning. When people use 'amateur' derogatorily, I believe that 'dilettante' is the more accurate word.
The professional puts the customer's heart into something, not his own.
My heart says I should spend the next ten weeks optimizing this interesting function that gets called once a year, because all higher priority tasks look like boring grunt work.
> The professional puts the customer's heart into something, not his own.
I like your definition - it puts authenticity in caring for one's partner at the center of the professional relation... First time in a long time that I read "professional" and it does not ring empty !
What does this even mean really? That they did a bunch of research and instead of writing numerous papers wrong a single book? Does it give a detailed explanation of each experiment enough so that they can be repeated? Or is it like those pop-sci books that take a few specifically picked studies, a lot of anecdotes, and a few 'expert' interviews and try to get the average reader convinced on a point (which may or may not be correct)?
I gotta say my enthusiasm is significantly dulled.
I prefer scientific articles, because they tend to be peer-reviewed, and have a testable null hypothesis.
Its also why I avoid books like outliers by malcolm gladwell.
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll probably check it out eventually.
Professional means getting paid, but there is a nuance of doing a proper job to deserve pay (even if there is no pay); a FOSS project that hasn't received even a dime in donations can be professionally developed.
I guess not professional appearance but professional standards.
Ex.I might expect a professional python programmer to follow PEP8 code style.
I think rather than coding like boy or coding like girl, we should be aspiring to be professional or at least competent .
That's the far bigger and inclusive problem.
On the topic of equality in general - As an old man and a father of a 22 year old woman let me tell you what I've observed - women don't need your help and when you act like they need your protection you're no better than someone who treats them as weaklings. It's a fine line and imho the best bet is to just treat them as you would anyone else.
Ugh. I am considering your intentions good, but your statement sounds evil.
Most human beings need protection and help. Programming is hard. Learning to program is hard. Leaving happily in these crazy times is hard.
Just be empathetic, dont be condescending and bam, your help will be greatly appreciated by men and women. That's what I think one should treat anyone else in this particular regard.
If you're talking protection in the physical sense, for 99% of women you're absolutely wrong.
I'm in the military and there are only a few women I know who would hold their own in a fight against a similarly fit man. I can think of maybe 1 off the top of my head.
Years of evolution made us this way, it can't just be undone by an egalitarian sentiment.
True, there are physical differences that are hard to overcome without help. But there is a lot of help out here in the modern world. Pistols, stun guns, pepper sprays, and other self defense techniques are just an example.
Whether or not someone is "act[ing] like [women] need [their] protection" is relative assessment and you haven't even accused anyone of fitting the description.
A good read. Although I was surprised the grandmother of programming, Ada Lovelace, wasn't mentioned.
Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. Because of this, she is often described as the world's first computer programmer.
As interesting as Ada Lovelace's and Charles Babbage's story is, their efforts have had little (if any) influence on the computer we know today. In a sense, they are not completely relevant when talking about modern computing. I also feel Lovelace tend to distract the subject on women in computing.
> I also feel Lovelace tend to distract the subject on women in computing.
Given that, as someone has already mentioned in the comments, there are people that hold the view that women are always at least second best to a man in regards to ability in computing because they are female, the fact that the first 'programmer' did so without documentation on a machine that existed in theory was a woman is very much central to the subject.
I agree, really it's Grace Hopper that we should be celebrating as "the woman who founded modern computing", because we're still feeling her influence every day!
Probably a reference to Leibniz having discovered/invented the binary number system back in the 1679 [1]. He also worked on theories of algorithms and designed calculating machines [2].
> "Software design and programming were considered clerical work."
I realize that there's a certain art of code, and even a science that goes into the underlying algorithms, languages, and methodologies. Indeed I've spent the majority of my life now in one way or another transfixed by software development.
But it seems to me that the vast amount of code written is still, in fact, "clerical work". Whether it's gluing together enterpriseBeanBuilderExpressionListMochaBusinessLogicAuditingFactories, or hooking up your node.js to your express.js to your bootstrap.js to transfer JSON over REST into your DOM, or even converting your 4000 character, 50 pipe bash one-liners into nicely polished scripts that properly account for exit codes, handle non-standard locations for sysfs, and work on a multitude of platforms, at the end of the day, a lot of this really does come down to clerical-style work. The difference is that the language, terminology, abstractions, and platforms are more obtuse than the previous generation's clerical work. The nouns are different and strange, but the predicates are all the same.
There are indeed wondrous areas in computer science and software engineering, but I think for most of us, we're just doing fairly menial work. We feel smart doing it, because it's still new enough that the objects and content of it are still uncustomary for most folks, and in fact the best of secretaries and clerks have indeed possessed great intelligence. But at the end of the day, we need to recognize that most of what we do is mere clerical work, glorified only by the odd shapes of the more obscure symbol keys on our keyboards.
> It becomes increasingly important to value each member of a programming team regardless of gender, age, race, or creed to attract and keep the best minds to build our future software.
And this is actually what you don't want to do. You don't want to ignore gender, age, race, or creed. You want people to understand it, be open to the value it brings, connect with others outside their comfort zone, and embrace the differences. Doing things 'regardless' is how we've got here in the first place. We are all different. Ignoring those differences is not helping the problem.
I have never heard anyone in real life tell a woman that she "codes like a girl.", as if that would be a diss anyway?
Given that anyone with even a basic understanding of history would be awed by some of the women in the industry (ada and grace anyone), you would have to pretty stupid to come to the conclusion that women cant code.
When a guy tells another guy "You run like a girl.", "You hit like a girl", "sit like a girl", etc... it's historically an insult.
Recently, there has been an effort to "take the phrase back" and turn "... like a girl" into a good thing - instead of being considered an insult - Like the commercials that tout "Running like a girl".
I've never heard "coding... like a girl" either, so you have to frame it as part of this movement.
> Given that anyone with even a basic understanding of history
Y'know how some film might have "hackers trying to break the FBI's firewall key"? And we all laugh because those film makers are so stupid about technology? Or how a newspaper will tell you how magnets and cabbage will cure your brain age?
Find some forums for historians[1], and you'll see historians laugh at how bad common understanding of history is.
Many people don't have an understand of basic history.
The article has a problem WRT "women used to code 50 years ago" and coding has changed and we don't have women anymore, from a statistical rounding perspective. Sure Ada and Grace were cool, but so are Limor Fried and Radia Perlman. There are real female programmers out there, not just activists or management plants or ancient history. The whole world isn't SV startup "brogrammer" culture where women are not permitted under a cloak of "culture fit". Personally I wish there were a judicial ruling that candidate rejection due to culture fit was prima facie legal evidence of racial or gender bias in hiring, because I know that to be the truth in practice.
Apple does - I doubt anyone truly believes that Steve Jobs personally designed the whole iPhone; also, the Chinese workers are at least in the public consciousness - apart from the Foxconn labour controversies, each unit has 'Made in China' written on it somewhere.
If as the article says the ENIAC news reports were along the lines of 'here is a machine that can calculate trajectories, and these are the men who designed it', who's to know that maybe half of the effort was undertaken by others not mentioned?
It think this has nothing to do with gender:
In those early projects those who got the biggest respect (like John Neumann) have done the intellectual heavy-lifting. Seriously, that guy was a genius.
Today it is the same way: The CTO or chief scientist of an elite company gets much bigger respect than a subordinate programmer who mostly does what he/she is instructed to do.
This is not a gender issue in my opinion. Women like Yahho CEO Marissa Mayer or researcher/Coursera founder Daphne Koller are much more respected than an average programer guy maybe at a mediocre company.
You are naming anecdotes (really just one that is relevant to the era of history in question) involving individual people, while the writer is pointing out more general trends. I'm going to sympathize with author.
Coding doesn't involve as much kinetic and immediate action, and I can't imagine it being infantilized. When it comes to violence, you can be weak, and so "like a girl". "Driving like a woman" I think means to drive naively, like a child, which women have generally been seen as equivalent to for thousands of years. (Edit: not that I agree with any of that, of course; it's how gender is constructed)
I haven't seen it. One can only assume insults like "[violent act] like a girl" is still used among male youth to horrible effect, encouraging more violence and self-hatred.
Tip for anyone having trouble reading this in Chrome: Hit F12, select "elements", go over to "Styles", and scroll down to find the "font-weight" and "color" entries, and uncheck them. This will let the default (readable!) font settings show through. For those of us who spend a lot of time on needlework and other fine tasks, it helps a lot!
I don't know squat about CSS or how to fix this for real, but I've bumbled around enough to be able to override this crap when it makes an article physically uncomfortable to read.
Not boys, not men either though, but guys. Guys and girls tends to be the informal nomenclature for men and women. Why not guys and gals? Gal sounds so antiquated yet guy does not.
Grown men are not referred to as boys except ironically: "old boys", "boys' club", "boys and their toys", "the boys in blue", "bring our boys home".
In other ways, to be a boy is to be like a girl, as in "the hardships in this remote camp separate the men from the boys" (i.e. the hardy and able from the weak and effeminate).
I prefer to describe myself as a girl. It's the female version of "guy".
"Woman" is stuffy and formal, and it makes me feel old. When I hear the word "woman", I think either Hillary Clinton or somebody's grandma, neither of which I have any desire to be.
That's fair enough, though people retain the right to describe themselves in a particular way whilst simultaneously being entitled to forbid others to do the same.
Lady and Ladies is another set of words that could be used.
It's interesting that "Woman" is seen as stuffy and formal, whereas "man" is often used like "be a man" or "man up".
You usually have to put an adjective on "man" to give it a negative connotation, in my experience.
user mrits below also made associations with "woman" and formality. i have never heard any such associations or objections for man, and can't think of a situation where it has negative connotations.
You see it in self reference as well. I hear women talk about their girlfriends all the time, but I never hear men mention their boyfriends. It is often the guys.
In Dutch, "jongens" (boys) is very common, even for mixed age and gender. However, jongens taken literally means "young ones", so it's actually very general. Use of "mannen" (men) among a group of adult males is usually actually more ironic than the more general "jongens".
Native Dutch speaker here, and i beg to differ: i would be very surprised if someone said "Daar staat een groepje jongens" (there's a group of jongens) and meant a group of girls. "Jongens" is definitely masculine.
I probably worry about this a bit too much, but broadly speaking i try very hard to de-gender my language where possible. E.g., i avoid saying "hey guys" and using 3rd person pronouns other than "they" when referring to undetermined people (such as "the user" and "they" in a technical manual). Therefore, no, i would not find it natural to say "jongens" to a mixed group of people. I used to have a boss in a dev team who always started his emails "Heren, ..." (== gentlemen) which irritated me no end. Apart from the fact that it sounds like a toilet designation (another pet peeve: why, in 2015, do we still have binary gendered public toilets?!) i found it incredibly exclusive language.
But indeed, perhaps this is outlier behaviour and others pay less attention. I suppose it's a tic i have because i'm in such a masculine-dominated field -- i try not to make it worse by talking as if i expect everyone to have XY chromosomes.
It's not uncommon in sports. That's the kind of thing I'd expect to hear in the locker room or on the ice when playing hockey. I don't feel like maturity plays into it there. It's almost a term of endearment.
Yes, I am aware. But then again I phrased my original statement to show that there was a small frequency of use of these terms. Where females (in my area) have a very high frequency of referring to each other as girls. Almost like "woman" is a formal term.
interestingly this might be because girls like to retain some semblance of youth.
anecdotally my girlfriend (Russian if that makes any difference) absolutely hates when I refer to her as a young woman, or use the word "woman" at all. She much prefers to be referred to as a girl.
I have no issues with being called a man.. not saying that this pattern is everywhere but it's very apparent with her and her family.
No critical thought here is necessary, I suppose? It just... so happens that women "like" to look youthful? Maybe it's biological? Just the natural order of things? I am reminded of the ads from the National Geographic I own from 1940.
but "Mister" is not "Man" even my girlfriend doesn't mind being called "Miss" or "Ms", she might take exception to "Misses".. but I don't think anybody assumes at her age anyway.
I've seen this more often, i think its because girls can be acting like adults/grown ups. And boys… well that sounds (and generally is correct) like they are immature, not grown up.
Once? It's naive to think that these attitudes do not persist, albeit in somewhat disguised forms, perhaps.
At some universities, for instance, engineers regard CS majors as "wimps". Engineering is hard, CS is soft.
Moreover, think about how there is an attitude that some "softer" or "easier" programming is lower on the pecking order. While programming as a broad category may not be "women's work", web design (even with client and server scripting) is "for girls" and, say, writing drivers for a network switch is for "real men".
Oh, the hard/soft stereotyping in digital tech is alive and kicking!