[rmc]

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.

[slowmovintarget]

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.

[amyjess]

> 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.

[rmc]

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.

[facepalm]

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.

[amyjess]

The worst of the sexism comes from other girls.

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).

[rmc]

> The movie Mean Girls could have been a documentary.

Mean Girls was actually based on a book on helping your teenage daughter survive bullying in school ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Bees_and_Wannabes )...

[kazagistar]

There is a large difference between being treated as a professional equal, and being treated as potential meat by sex starved nerds...

[facepalm]

So you say yourself that girls don't like nerds. So who is to blame? And the "treated as potential meat" remark is just sexist from you.

Also those where the days of playing video games on home computers. Professional IT work was decades later.

And boys weren't the gate keeper to the technology either - how should that have worked? Today as then, if you are interested in doing stuff with computers, nobody can prevent you from doing it.

[rmc]

> So you say yourself that girls don't like nerds.

No many women don't like being hit on constantly by people. That's not the same thing as "not liking nerds".

[bkeroack]

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.

[ajuc]

It's not nonsense.

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.

[dspillett]

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).

[DanBC]

> 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.

[mrits]

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.

[thirdtruck]

One crucial difference is that your father did buy you that Amiga. A lot of girls couldn't get one at all.

[rmc]

Exactly. Geeks used to be picked on, and bullied. Maths and science wasn't cool.

[ibebrett]

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.

[sthreet]

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.

[ajuc]

And I'd expect number of women in programming catch up in 20 years.

[bradleyjohnson]

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.

[_bfhp]

You say the theories of biological ineptitude of women are not nonsense and then point to childhood socialization?

[ajuc]

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.

[_bfhp]

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.

[ajuc]

http://fpb.case.edu/smartcenter/docs/SpitCamp/Booth%20et%20a...

> Testosterone-related differences in aggression in the non-delinquent sample were studied as well. None were statistically significant. The only difference manifested was that adolescents with higher testosterone were more likely to respond more vigorously in response to challenges from teachers and peers. The vigorous response finding is consistent with our assertion that testosterone is linked with aggression only when it is part of dominance behavior.

> Using measures that incorporated self, peer and teacher ratings, Tremblay and his colleagues discovered that testosterone levels at the start of puberty were linked to social dominance a year later but not to physical aggression. Dominance was not related to current aggression or aggression over the previous three years. On the other hand, body mass was a predictor of physical

> Although research provides considerable evidence that testosterone is associated with dominant behavior, correlation does not prove causation. If the administration of testosterone was followed by an increase in dominant behavior, we would have a stronger case for asserting a causal relationship. Two experiments support the idea that the link is causal. In one study with a double-blind, randomized, crossover design, young men were given doses of testosterone or a placebo. Subjects were paired with a fictitious subject and told that each member of the pair could, by pushing a button, reduce the cash flowing to the other member. The subject was told that the other individual was reducing the cash that was flowing to the subject. Subjects receiving testosterone rather than the placebo pushed the button significantly more times (Kouri, Lukas, Pope and Oliva 1995). A second study with the same design was conducted with men aged 20 to 50 years (Pope, Kouri and Hudson 2000). This time testosterone was administered over a six-week period. Subjects participated in the same experiment. Results indicated that those who had had the treatment pushed the button many more times. These studies put us in a much stronger position to claim that testosterone stimulates dominant behavior.

That's just one study, but there are a lot more.

And, using common sense, how many cultures do you know, where women play team sports, and men don't? Where girl play war and boys play home?

I'm all for allowing to ignore social roles, I'm not good example of stereotypical men myself, but let's not ignore evidence that's all around us. It would be enormously unlikely, that biological differences between sexes, and behavior differences were just accident.

Of course social influences have big part, but they don't explain everything.

And there's a reason that men made games, and women didn't, when both were present at first in programming. I doubt it's just because of social reasons.

[rmc]

Really? What about all the adventure games? The MUDs? The text adventures?

[rmc]

20 years ago was 1995, when Windows 95 was released. You might be off by a decade with the C64.

[ajuc]

I got mine in 1993 IIRC. My uncle got ZS Spectrum in 89 for more than 2 monthly salaries.

Ex communist countries worked differently.

[josefresco]

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.

[cauterized]

But as you note -- the lack of interest isn't something inherent -- it's related to early experiences and expectations.

[facepalm]

The kids probably got what they wished for.