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Girls Go Geek Again
nessus42 writes "Computer science has always been a male-dominated field, right? Wrong. In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the systems analysts in America were women. Women had started to flock to computer science in the mid-1960s, during the early days of computing, when men were already dominating other technical professions but had yet to dominate the world of computing. For about two decades, the percentages of women who earned Computer Science degrees rose steadily, peaking at 37% in 1984.... And then the women left. In droves. ...it looks like women are now returning to computer science."
I thought the headline read "girls DO geek again" and I got all excited for a minute there. Domn Slashdot misrepresenting headlines.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
To the women, it's just a job. Not a lifestyle.
"Computer science has always been a male-dominated field, right? Wrong. In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women." That means 58% were men ... and 58 > 42, last time I checked ... looks like I was right about computer science always being male-dominated, thank you very much.
S/He said girls. ...
it's a good thing.
were there in 1984 anyway?
But they certainly aren't in any of my classes. Which is of course, quite disappointing.
It seems the girls are looking for something.... coming, leaving, coming again. What might it be? Girls are strange :P
most of the hot women i've seen on Google+ so far seem to work for MS or Google. and in media
Its been a total sausage fest in I/T for the last 20 years. We need more women so we can act uncomfortable and awkward in what we consider our native surroundings.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
and then get me a beer :)
Computers were simple to program up until the late 80's. Eventually computers got too complex for their puny girl minds to comprehend. So they left the discipline.
In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women... the percentages of women who earned Computer Science degrees rose steadily, peaking at 37% in 1984
If women with computer science degrees peaked in 1984 at 37%, then it also means women working as software developers were less likely to have a degree.
From the Article: "In the past year, the number of women majoring in Computer Science has nearly doubled at Harvard, rising from 13% to 25%"
If there was that much change in a single year, I'm betting it has more to do with the admissions process or other factors than any society-wide phenomena.
It has to do with the complexity of the systems. Those early computer systems were not very complicated. Then, throughout the late 80s and 90s systems and software became much more complex. However, in the last ten years or so, much of the complexity is hidden. Programming and systems management has become just a lot of pointing and clicking without any need (usually) to really understand what's going on underneath the covers.
I want to add that this is just a theory, and that tt's not that I think women are incapable of understanding very complex systems, it's just that I think the majority of them have no interest in that kind of work.
Proverbs 21:19
I find these figures hard to believe. Sure there are lots of women in the IT field but not at the same level as men. Every IT company I know usually have 90% men and 10% women doing high level IT work. Most of the women are doing secretarily work, answer phones etc.
Don't believe me, look up any major software package and see how many female names developed it?
I have nothing against women working in IT, I wish there were more, but it seems that most women are not interested in this type of work.
Perhaps I missed a math lesson somewhere, but aren't 42%, 34%, and 37% all below half, meaning that even at that time the respective fields were male-dominated?
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Maybe I'm feeding an AC troll, but there are 1500 people in the engineering department where I work, the majority being software engineers. While there aren't many women, all of them can code in C and C++, because that's what we use for our products.
Although it's great that more women are getting back into CS, these kinds of articles make me itch. Geek girls shouldn't be hired or coerced into taking CS because of or in spite of their gender. They should be hired because they're good at what they do, and they should be encouraged to study if they have a sincere enthusiasm for the subject. If it turns out that the best students, or the best employees are male... so be it. /female CS grad and web developer
I don't not believe there isn't a God.
Since when is 42% dominating?
Women didn't leave the field voluntarily. Once it became apparent that programming was becoming a lucrative field women were systematically driven out by a system that favored men:
The gender disparity in programming is not the result of slight differences between men and women or subtle unconscious biases. It is the result of overt discrimination going back decades to the origin of the profession. And it will take overt action to correct the disparity.
i happen to know a woman who actually is using C/C++/Oracle. And who also did some java development without even having java skills in her resume.
And just for the record, she was "forced" to do the java development, because the male java expert was not able to do it, for one reason or another...
I don't think it has anything to do with a rising interest in IT. its that women need jobs these days too, due to the economy, so i bet you will find ALL industries are increasing their woman count. Especially 'clean' jobs since most women ( or men really ) don't want to go out and dig ditches for a living.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
women are now returning to computer science
Where?!!!
If nothing else, one thing this article reaffirms is that Marissa Mayer is easy to look at.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
These days your average person pushes a button, types in a username/password, and starts clicking things to get to work.
She powered up various large devices in order, typed a long hex boot string into the system, then proceded to load punch cards, open reel tapes and hard drive cake platters, and perform other various complicated tasks.
It's a lot easier now.
I think it was supposed to read "Girls Go Greek"
I just like the related link Submission: Girls Go Geek Again!
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Microsoft released Windows 1.0 in 1985. They had been threatening with that since 1983. Of course the women left, they are much smarter than us men.
Why is it that America always represents the world? The World is so different from America.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
And how many of these women are ones that did something with computers decades ago yet still claim they're IT experts even though they've never kept up with technology? That's the type of majority I've run across in my career at different companies. A handful of competent ones and then the old ones that stay where they are and can't understand anything new because they refuse to learn because they seem to think they don't need to keep up with anything. Those are the ones that still call help desk because they need someone to plug in their keyboard for them. It's always an excuse though about why they can't do it but they always have an excuse.
Unfortunately, misogyny is rampant in all "geek" fields (as it is in the rest of society). Just see the "Perform Like A Porn Star" talk at Ruby Con 2009, or even "ElevatorGate" in 2011.
(Btw, here in $European_Country, the percentage is still something like 10% female/90% male.)
HAND.
All I'm seeing is a bunch of sexist virgin nerd posts :)
No female comments or point of view in almost 100 comments.
Goes to show... the only women in IT and on the internet are 40 year single old men with issues.
Even though this was a small sample, as Joel mentioned lets look at the numbers:
Made it to resume review: Female - 75.68%, Male - 72.05%
Made it to the coding stage: Female - 28.38%, Male - 26.49%
Made it to phone interview: Female - 0.054%, Male - 0.099%
In person interview: Female - 0.041%, Male - 0.0565%
Received an offer: Female - 0.041%, Male - 0.0194%
Official Hire: Female - 0.014%, Male - Male - 0.013%
Even though this was a small sample, is there anything we can derive from this? The last stat to me doesn't matter as much, even though the numbers were for all intensive purposes the same percentage, even though there were 8 times more male applicants.
If we were to break down the stages the women had better percentages up to the phone interview. Does this show or should this show that the males did better at the coding assignment? If we can agree that that is what happened then the whole "boys play with computers more, tinker, etc etc" might have 'some' truth to it. Before the phone interview the females led by nearly 2%. By the time the phone interview came around, the males had gained that 2% but additional ground on top of the that.
However 100% of those females that made it to the in person interview made it to the offer stage while the men lost the ground that they gained during the coding stage. Does this mean perhaps that the males had poorer social skills to cause some doubt in their ability to do the work or perhaps be a good fit? Did the women wear low tops?(i am not suggesting the Joel and his interviewers are biased regarding to this, but i am just babbling there).
Would be interesting to see what others think or perhaps what Joel thinks of the numbers after he printed them(assuming that he wasnt keeping track as things progressed through the entire process.
My Computing class is all male and i don't know any females who know about computing or would care to. I'm not saying they don't exist, I just haven't seen any.
I care not for your karma and your mod points.
Look at the open source community. Nothing prevents one gender from contributing as much or more than the other gender contributes. They just do not. At some point, we might need to reconsider the rationality of the idea that equality of the number of each gender in all career fields is necessary, or even desired by anyone. We can be "equal" and still differ. It's OK for the male gender to prefer certain activities and the female gender to prefer different activities.
It's only a problem when people try to actively prevent someone of a gender from entering the career field of their choice based on gender.
Try being a male nurse, or schoolteacher, or daycare employee.
People will think this is "discriminatory", but it a factual and objective observation of someone who has supervised -MANY- IT workers of both genders.
More than 80% of female IT workers I have asked "why do you like IT work" answer with a variation of:
Flexible hours, working from home/teleworking, higher wages, helping people.
More than 80% of male IT workers I have discussed the same question with respond:
Love technology, solving problems, higher wages.
Primary female complaints:
IT is challenging technically, and they'd feel more comfortable managing IT projects.
Primary male complaints:
Users are stupid and they'd like to make more money.
That's the last 30 years of IT in a nutshell.
That's true: women had started to flock to computer science a long time ago... The problem is that women and men geeks are all so ugly that nobody can actually distinguish between them :-D
(Written by a geek)
The GP never said there weren't any women on Earth who couldn't code in C, just that he had never met one. And I suspect he's not the only one.
Most people don't know 1500 people (let alone 1500 software engineers) well enough to know their coding skills. You know there are 1500 people in your department but all you can tell about the number of women is that "there aren't many"? What does "not many" mean? 500? 200? 5?
My CIS major was almost 50% women.
...all the girls want to be Willow.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
"The first working programmers were all women: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman. Also Ada Lovelace is popularly credited as history's first programmer, although her work never ran."
Here is the real reason people go into specific careers, especially women:
From TFA:
I’d say I was able to make more friends through things like the dorm than in my Computer Science classes. But that means that I can’t really talk to my friends about the stuff I do for my classes, which is frustrating.
Women tend to value social activities and communication far more than men. Women want to be able to talk to other women about common interests.
So if fewer women are in a field, fewer women will go into a field for lack of women to communicate with in that field.
You get a critical mass above a certain percentage, and the number of women increases rapidly, it drops below a certain percentage, and the number drops even faster. Simple social phenomenon.
What is that?
Google VP Marissa Mayer: " People ask me a lot what it's like to be a woman at Google. I don't think of my experience that way. I'm a geek at Google."
what the hell is that? Now I see what they mean by Google 'perks'.
You can't handle the truth.
Let's not forget Admiral Grace Hopper who programmed, developed a successful programming language, led successful standardization efforts, managed--did just about everything you could do with computers both as a direct individual-contributor and as a high-level manager.
She was a nerd and she did "stuff that mattered."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Finally some properly-targeted spam on Slashdot! OMG, I never thought I'd see this day!
I...I think I'm going to cry...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
given that the required skills necessary to become a good software developer are not gender specific
And that statement is based on... what evidence, exactly? Has there been some grand study comparing the code written by men and women?
Maybe men are better at using some languages (or some types of languages) while women are better at others. Or maybe there's no difference at all (though, comparing the number of men and women who work as programmers, I suspect there is at least some difference in how much each gender likes to code). Either way, you can't make that kind of statement without supporting evidence.
Why is it so hard to accept that males and females might have some mental differences, as well as physical?
It's a well-established fact that women see and remember colours better than males, while males see and remember shapes better than females. That seems like the kind of fundamental difference that might influence something like coding. Maybe the reason why women are still a minority in programming is that they're expected to use languages designed mostly by males, and adapted to male thought patterns. Or maybe coding in general is just something that doesn't appeal to most women, who knows?
It's hard to blame it on "discrimination", when the number of female candidates is so much lower than the number of males. If women were as interested in coding as men, the number of candidates would be similar (even if later they were discriminated against - or for - during their careers).
It would be interesting if someone actually studied that, but apparently anyone who even suggests there might be a difference is immediately labelled a "sexist"...
once you go geek you never go back
heh heh heh heh ssssssssssssssssnort.
excuse me.
Even though this was a small sample, is there anything we can derive from this? The last stat to me doesn't matter as much, even though the numbers were for all intensive purposes the same percentage, even though there were 8 times more male applicants. ...even though the numbers were for all intensive purposes the same percentage... ...for all intensive purposes... ...intensive...
We usually see fewer women make it to our interview process, but hire a lot more of those who do. I've usually chalked it up to women being less likely to bluff or bluster; we more often find that we've brought in dudes who talk a good game and can write a function, but when push comes to shove either the skills aren't there or their ego is big enough it'd need its own cube. Women we're more likely to be able to filter out early on. "How good are you?" usually gets a nervous chuckle followed by a diplomatic but pretty accurate assessment, for example.
Computer science has always been a male-dominated field, right? Wrong. In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women
So, 58% isn't "dominant"?
behind "just a theory" you misogynist piece of shit.
"all intents and purposes," not "intensive purposes."
"In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the systems analysts in America were women."
So 58% of developers were men and 64% of systems analysts were men. Looks like men dominated the field then too.
Even though this was a small sample, is there anything we can derive from this? The last stat to me doesn't matter as much, even though the numbers were for all intensive purposes the same percentage, even though there were 8 times more male applicants.
the phrase you're looking for here is clearly "for all in tents, and porpoises".
Subject says it all. Programming industry is only industry that is basically a service industry that has very few women.
This is because many males in it wont admit the fact. Not only it drives many women out of industry or blocks their entry,
it also causes many men to leave the industry altogether.
More than half of the problems that exits within programming projects, arent problems that have anything to do with programming itself.
Most problems revolve around project management, customer management, personal relations within workplace and overall workplace satisfaction. And the industry fails on these all accounts time after time.
People who dont see this a problem, are those who want systematic almost mathematic silverbullets to each problem each time.
Their mostly male, because they put too much value things like good code compared to satisfied customers or even sensible timetables.
To use analogy, programmers are bit like truck drivers. They put longhours and miserable wages just to drive the big noisy truck.
Just change the big noisy truck to heroic intellectual problems solving with impossible deadlines. Having nice and sensible place to work is less important than getting feeling you've just climble the mountain 11112:th time. You get nice malebonding experience from that too.
However, many males and most womens just dont like it in long run. These are the smart people. They understand that how many hours you put on code or how magnificient it is, it never will fix the basic problems that all projects have. And thats handling human relations.
That problem never gets fixed, so people leave inudstry. Especially women that usually quite good at that in every other service industry.
Keeping clients and connecetd groups happy is far more important than techinal babble.But engineers and programmers dont see it that way. They are more intrested on latest shining idea or hardware.
Please!
the numbers were for all intensive purposes...
The idiom is "for all _INTENTS_AND_PURPOSES_". ARGH!
IT is being offshored, and inshored, to death. It is not especially unusual to find a US IT department that is about 80% from India. For whatever reason, most H1Bs are males. So it would only stand to reason that IT would become male dominated.
go ahead and make fun. i was typing as i was working and it came out wrong. please stop the spelling nazi police. perhaps a one time edit would suffice?
one thing that is obvious that i forgot to mention is that just making it to the resume review, females were ahead 3.63%. That could show that females are better writers that just know more about how to get someones attention. It would be interesting to find out exactly what one had to do or what their resume had to show to even get to that stage? Did they throw resumes out that were clearly not prepared? spelling errors? bad objective(even though we all know the objective is to get the flippin job because we want experience and have bills to pay.)
The statistical sample is not significant. When it comes to BSCS majors: they only use three universities, and only one year. Whereas the previous figures included national figures over decades.
Also, software engineering today, is not what programming was decades ago. A lot of the programming, from decades past, was very routine labor; and did not require a college degree.
Go away! Go out there and be hot, and keep your paws from our computers!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
So long as we stay fixated on these pointless issues, We can never move forward.
How about we just hire the best person for the job they're interested in and be done with it.
Other than a few people with entitlement issues, does anyone really want to force themselves into a company that doesn't really want them anyway? Is that something that you'd really want to look forward to everyday?
27 students in the final today; 4 women. Let me add that I also took a stats class with about the same number of students and probably slightly more women.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
"Intensive purposes"? Really? It's "intents and purposes".
During the 90's, the dot com boom attracted tons of male trying to make a quick buck, that is why the ratio of female engineers decreased. The actual number may actually increasing, but it was outnumbered by the massive increase of male engineers.
New Economic Perspectives
In the 80's and 80's, 10% of the resumes were from women and in the late 70's I don't remember a woman in my comp sci classes. There might have been one or two out of the 30 or so total, but I can't remember seeing a woman in the lab at all.
Sounds like people are inventing statistics again for some other gain.
Further of note: only a third of female applicants who received an offer ended up being hired, whereas for male applicants the percentage was twice that.
*all intents and purposes
I taught a module that required students to write C last term. The highest few marks were from guys, but so were the lowest - not unexpected, since they made up about 90% of the class. I think all of the women were in the top 50%, and most were in the top 25% when I marked their coursework. Now, it's possible that they all cheated, but not very likely.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
intensive purposes ?
I would love to have some geeky women overlords, to welcome, ....if they can find them......and if they can all have say.....36 d and up???
Somehow I seriously doubt that more American women are being enrolled in CS. It is far more likely that with the increase of foreign students studying abroad that do not share the same cultural bias are enrolling in CS. Considering sample size and moderate increase, this is a plausible explanation.
Men and women are capable of understanding computers. Most people in IT do it for the money. If the money was elsewhere they would change jobs without much regret.
There is also a sizeable minority in IT for whom their work is also their hobby. It occupies their day and their evening too. Those people tend to be men (though not exclusively).
The hobbyists are the ones who work overtime or stay all night to bring a server back on line. The former tend to go home at the end of the working day because they have other things in their lives which are more important to them.
There are few women - though any and all are welcome - who spend their free time working on computer topics, writing open source applications, figuring out how stuff works, pawing through books or researching on line to get to grips with an IT topic.
That's why there is a skew towards more men in IT. Apart from the odd IT manager who hates women the vast majority of men would like to see more women in their department. There are no barriers and there haven't been for a long time. Men's and women's interests just tend to be different.
The people who write open source software are the least sexist group of people you are likely to find yet you only need to look at the kernel development group photograph to see that women do not flock to help. They can't put up with the unwashed male developers you say; where is the all women, volunteer kernel development team I say.
I think people here are missing a lot of other factors. Of all those women who can code in C/C++, how old are they? A lot of engineering fields are seeing a complete lack of young people filling in the voids left by retiring older folks. The OP even said 50% of the men couldn't code either, and that was 10 years ago, shortly after the tech boom started going bust. I remember lots of people back then complaining about kids who had no interest or skill in computers going into those fields just for the money. The foosball tables and giant signing bonuses are long gone now. And kids these days aren't like the computer geeks from the 80s who taught themselves C and assembly before they got to college.
Because we can’t ask applicants their gender, we guessed based on first names. It’s not perfect, to say the least, but it’s the best we have.
Perhaps Andrea, Kelly, Tracy and Stacy have been hired. Can anyone see a problem with the quote from the intial article?
There is nothing in the technical business universe that requires a penis. There is nothing that needs to be peed into or that needs any other attention that only a penis can carry out.
What women generally hear, all day, on a tech job.
You're icky and stupid.
Why can't I get laid. Why won't you go out with me.
Why are you here? You are making everything icky and stupid.
Why do you keep complaining. Only icky and stupid people complain.
Hey, she made me take the porn down off my cube wall. All of you are icky and stupid.
Why can't I get laid.
Granted, it is couched in other words, like those of the majority of the comments here. Like the first one that complained that the headline did not mean that women would now sleep with geeks. Which, if one actually does comprehend logic rather than make wild claims about understanding logic requiring a penis, directly claims that all geeks are heterosexual men. Who can't get laid.
Sit with that for a while.
One of the thousands who walked away from the server room with a deep sigh. Oh, and there are jobs that require technical understanding that pay pretty well that do not require 80 hr weeks. Some of us went there.
Yeah I know there are 1500 people in my department, and all I can say is "there aren't many" women. I don't know all 1500 people. If I were to hazard a guess I'd say they are 5-10% of the engineering workforce.
One of the things at my is that it's the electrical and computer engineers that do most of the C programming - CS majors touch on it, and depending on the classes they take they may use more, but most of the CS department uses Java. And for all of the CS majors complaining, the ratio in ECE is significantly worse than in CS (closer to 90% guys than the 80% that is the ratio in CS). I'm a girl in CompE, and since my focus is algorithms and computer architecture there are usually no other girls in my classes. Out of my C programming class, only 5 out of around 200 people were girls. On the other hand, the top two students in the class was myself and one other guy. So no generalizing. But it means that at least at my school, the ratio of C programmers is almost no girls because of the lack of girls in CompE.
I have been in the IT field for 40 years. In those 40 years there have been very few females that have been real coders and then the debugging has dwindled down to a few. As far as supporting a production group there has been almost zero. Managers assigning them to production expect them to quit within 6 months as they cannot seem to be ready to be called out at 3AM or 4AM even 1 AM for some reasons woman that I have been exposed to can't handle it *AND* have the backbone to stand up and to state the issue/cause in front of a management review staff and to be able to stand up to them. I remember when I was first on the job I had a puzzle and carried through the debugging process and form a iron proof argument and I was drilled for 60 minutes on my reasoning and I stood in front of high level officers and their staff trying to pick apart my thought processes on how I fixed the issue at 0200 and the steps I went through. This pissant senior sargent tried to make a run at me a couple of times and luckily I had all the documentation that I just opened the page(s) to prove what I had said was what I did. I think the 2nd louy got his assed chewed out after I left the room as he was trying to go after me as I was not military enough for him. He got transferred out a month later. My boss got me a promotion just on that one item alone.
"Intents and purposes", not "intensive purposes".