Slashdot Mirror
Female Software Engineers May Be Even Scarcer Than We Thought
itwbennett writes "According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2012 about 22% of computer programmers, software and web developers in the United States were female. That number comes from the Current Population Survey, which is based on interviews with 60,000 households. But Tracy Chou, an engineer at Pinterest, thinks the number is actually much lower than that. And last month she created a GitHub project to collect data on how many females are employed full-time writing or architecting software. Even at this early point, the data is striking: Based on data reported for 107 companies, 438 of 3,594 engineers (12%) are female. Here's how some well-known companies stack up."
Male elementary school teachers may be scarcer than we thought.
Who gives a shit?
Why is there an imperative to increase the number? For sure there shouldn't be sexual discrimination if women want to be software engineers. But if it's simply a case that a fewer proportion on them want to be, so what?
Men and women are different. One or more of those differences may account for the disparity in software engineers. For example women tend to be more social creatures. Maybe they tend to choose jobs that are more sociable than coding?
and taking responsibility, and dealing with reality
something that very few women are capable of doing
I bet if she took out FOBs and only counted western born 2nd generation+ women the number would be closer to 0%
And the pun in the last sentence of the Slashdot summary is why there are not more.
You must be a male first poster! Is it not about a time we tackle the under representation of female first posters on /.?
Are made for having babies, keeping house, and rolling in ze hay. Barefoot in all cases. It is written in the Bible. So it has been, is now, and will be forever.
...good thing or bad?
Rape Culture!
Study up your Feminism 101! Be an ally!
pointless article, pointless comment
Women in general aren't introverted enough. Most women refuse to live in a dark room with a slot in the door that someone stuffs food through. Without that you can't be a successful programmer.
Don't get it. So women don't want to program. That's fine. Why do we feel the need to inflate the numbers? Feminism is an outdated concept by this point - and frankly, it doesn't apply to software engineering.
when they complain about lack of female loggers and roofers, and farmers and fishermen (fisherfolk?), and taxi drivers and construction workers and miners and linesmen(linespersons?) and welders
then "feminists" might have a point, right now the only men who pretend give a crap are the white knights and those who have women within earshot
I read this as "Female Software Engineers may be even Scarier Than we Thought" and I couldn't wait to find out how in the world that was going to be quantified and/or justified.
I love geeks, scary or not.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
In order to work there, you have to be a fanboi which means that females are automatically disqualified.
As a female geek,I remember working for a large tech company that was so sure they didn't discriminate, they had their HR team pull together the stats. Even after accounting for age, education, experience and anything else they could think of, they discovered they were underpromoting women. The whole initiative immediately got hushed up, so it wouldn't become lawsuit material.
Seriously... Zuckerberg and other big wigs from tech companies are pushing to increase H1B1 visas, instead of investing in our own citizens. And now he's sponsoring training sessions for illegals. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/21/zuckerberg-immigration-ha_n_4138638.html
Fed up with these companies that keep trying to extort cheap overseas labor, instead of investing in their own country.
I thought it said Female Software Engineers May Be Even Scarier Than We Thought.
I draw from this that most females prefer other careers. There is NO problem. NO crisis. They just want to do other things.
For that matter, since when was "1 out of 4" or "1 out of 8" depending on which set of numbers you believe, "scarce".
you want "scarce"? how many bisexual transgender autistic bi-racial native american / tongese dwarf insomniac coders do we have? not too damn many I bet. we need more. let's make that a goal.
LOL, I thought the title read: Female Software Engineers May Be Even Scarier Than We Thought
haha!! I was thinkin that would piss a lot of people off but WHAT female would visit this site anyway :)
Female and male sofware engineers should receive equal payment. Female engineers should get half the total payment, males get the other half. That's only fair, isn't it?
no, I don't have a sig
If the Bureau of Labor and Statistics gets its data from the Internal Revenue Service tax returns, then
(a) there are an enormous number of women lying to the IRS and claiming to be software engineers to cover illicit sources of income (e.g. escorts or cam girls pretending to be software engineers)
(b) half of the women working as software engineers suddenly became unemployed since January, or
(c) this survey somehow failed to sample about half of the women who are claiming their income comes from software development positions.
I'm sure there are a few of (a) and (b), but (c) is most likely, so I claim that this survey is worthless.
Why should we believe semi-anonymous data collected by an engineer through github is more reliable than the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a well funded government agency that's purpose is collect accurate an anonymous employment data with a much larger base to sample from. Just the fact that she's requesting volunteers on a tech website already puts a severe bias in the data.
Most hairstylists are women. Should we wring our hands about that too?
Male elementary school teachers may be scarcer than we thought.
Who gives a shit?
Men and women are different. One or more of those differences may account for the disparity in software engineers. For example women tend to be more social creatures. Maybe they tend to choose jobs that are more sociable than coding?
Computer work requires accountability and taking responsibility, and dealing with reality something that very few women are capable of doing.
Female Software Engineers May Be Even Scarcer Than We Thought
In these admittedly "androgynous time" we live in... how can we really be sure who's who?? :p
Women are smarter than men?
Maybe we should appreciate the fact that software engineering is one of the last bastions of masculinity.
Interesting raw data, but be very careful about drawing broad conclusions from this fascinating but highly-self-selected set of companies: the spreadsheet lists mostly companies that are relatively young and almost entirely Web-facing.
The world of software development extends far, far beyond work that is clustered at the edges of the Internet.
So 10% of software engineers are female, but, the entire list of firms listed are "within the decade", web-based firms that program mostly in Javascript.
Get into the insurance or banking businesses, or anyone that's been computing since the 1960's and you'll find those numbers are different. If we're programming Cobol, I'd have to say that almost 50% of our developers are women.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
They think ahead a bit more than men, because of kids. They take one look at the dysfunctional, never-ending treadmill that is software and they say "no thanks". Guys are more like kids, they have fun now so they think "this is it".
they discovered they were under promoting women
That was just a side effect of women not seeking promotion actively.
I know because I tended not to get promoted either (well without changing companies) until I started to try to get promoted.
But the whole system is so annoying I decided I wanted to work at smaller companies where "promotion" is kind of meaningless.
You can't blame the system for not selecting women when all it is is generally selecting people who strive to be selected.
No, it's not just "preference".
How do you know?
There is usually a reason why nearly half of the whole population stays away from some completely normal activity, but not any of (supposedly similar) others.
So what's the reason males tend to stay away from elementary teaching but not high school teaching. It's not because they are discouraged by the school system. Elementary schools tend to want to get some (or more) male teachers.
Over the past five years I have prepared over 200 students that became Cisco CCNA Certified, over 50 that became Cisco CCNA Security certified and 6 that went on to get their CCNP. Total females: 11. However, most of these 11 were brilliant and yes, they were all very beautiful.
1) Have a society where women are expected to be primary caregivers of children.
2) Ensure that daycare for three or more children makes working uneconomical.
3) Demand that all applicants have recent (in the past two years) experience.
4) Act surprised that few women meet that bar after staying home.
Or...
a) Have social activities focused around shoot-em-up games, sports events, or meals at establishments with scantily clad female servers.
b) Either get in a huff at any female who suggests that this isn't fun for them, or just stay silent (or snicker) while a different co-worker supplies the rant, guaranteeing that the women feel like everyone is ganging up on them.
c) Single them out to be on some special panel on how to increase the percentage of females in whatever, rather than giving them the same career enhancing training and experience male workers get.
d) Act surprised when they quit, and change careers.
Just looking in my rear-view mirror...
Why women aren't in STEM jobs has been studied to death. Bottom line: enough men don't want them, and women are smart enough to know where they're not wanted.
https://medium.com/about-work/9b14f05a9832 ... even IF its partially assumed on her/their part, the fact remains that as long as women feel this way in the tech world, they will remains scarce.
I'm still not aware of any coding female. Yes they are "in IT" but no they don't poop lengthy masses of algorithmic wonder.
What went ye into the wilderness to see? A man clad in fine raiment?
I'm a male, but frankly I quit pursuing academic and professional computer science years ago largely on account of the same factors that alienate women. "Computer people" are, by and large, just not people I want to spend time around. Exceptions to the rule at an individual level, of course, but everyone more or less knows what I'm talking about. The dark triad with a sprinkling of misogyny.
It turns out that many people, especially women, probably don't want to "bro down and crush code" - and yet, that's where the culture of the industry lies. Especially at the level a recent graduate is going to get involved in.
I for one know many degreed people who spend their time developing, architecting and writing software. Most of them are women.
A lot of them are Biostatisticians, Web developers, and others who are not "software engineers".
You're mixing different population samples.
Maybe it helps if you know what it is you're trying to say, before you leap to conclusions?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
when they complain about lack of female loggers and roofers, and farmers and fishermen and taxi drivers and construction workers and miners and linesmen and welders then "feminists" might have a point,
Women working in the skilled trades make two to three times more than women in traditional careers.
Non Traditional Employment For Women
Interpretation-wise, both numbers are way too low, and the industry needs to put in an active, collective effort at increasing them.
Statistically, that's a weird margin. Both surveys seem to have fairly sample sizes. How do they manage to differ by 10 percentage points - nearly as much as the smaller number?
If only 10% of CS majors are women, then 10% of software engineers should be women.
Fix the education system first.
Scarcer than "we" thought? Who is the "we"? In close to 30 years of working with computers, I can count on one hand the number of females I've run into who actually code for a living.
I think more wind up in some sort of project management position over a group of developers ... but even that's not quite commonplace.
I don't think this has much of anything to do with equality of pay between men and women, nor is it the fault of sexist hiring practices. It's simply fact that very few women get too excited about the prospects of working in a job where you have to sit in front of a computer screen all day, entering lines of code and trying to figure out small syntax or logic errors causing your code not to work properly.
By and large, I find the women I've known to be more interested in creative pursuits (like photography, art or music), or there's an interest in being a little more people oriented (everything from Human Resources jobs to middle management to marketing or sales). Those who really embrace the idea of having a quiet desk job in a comfortable office and would rather solve problems than shake hands and talk to people tend to lean towards accounting/payroll positions.
In fact, I'd say you find a few more women interested in software coding when the task is more creative (Roberta Williams, for example, who co-founded Sierra Entertainment and wrote the King's Quest adventure game series). But the kind of development most companies are hiring for is far from creative, except at a very micro level where few people even appreciate a novel, efficient line or two of code to accomplish some small portion of the overall task.
Ya know, I think I know when I'll be worried about not enough women software developers. When the same people who decry that men are unfairly overrepresented as executives, developers, and other professionals loudly decry that men are overrepresented in prison populations, then I'll start worrying about it. Sound fair?
What about race? What percentage are Black? Hispanic? Or class? What percentage come from financially challenged households? What about education level of parents?
There is a big, popular push going on to address just one of the underrepresented groups in software development. And interestingly enough, that's the group that appears to be better represented in engineering undergraduate classes than any of the others we might consider.
If we're going to put extra effort into "balancing" the pool of engineers, let's at least start with identifying the most egregiously missing groups. And that's not women at the moment.
Yes, I'm aware that some ethnic "minority" groups are currently over represented. That's a result of decades of intensive effort to get them there.
I'll take an interview of 60,000 households over a self-selecting, unheard of poll that requires participants to dick around on Twitter and Github.
By the way, I'd love to see more women in software engineering. It's turning into a ridiculous, alpha-geek, manchild fest, and I'm sick of it. I've always enjoyed my jobs on teams with women much more. They often bring a different view to the table, and they're much more likely to get shit done instead of pointlessly bicker over bike-shedding pseudo-problems.
99% of female players on World of Warcraft are actually dudes.
All but a few of the companies providing data had miniscule teams. Not exactly likely to be a fantastic representation of the averages.
I was surprised to see that flickr supposedly has 40 developers. They must all be on dilbert style cofee breaks because from a customer's perspective they can't get the site working for beans. Having personally reported significant bugs to them months ago (every one of which is still present), it's extra disappointing. Maybe they're too busy writing encryption to protect datacenter communications in the name of protecting my publicly available information.
It's funny to see the many (obviously male) comments here along the "So what. If women don't want to program, why panic about it"-lines. Clearly there are some male software engineers out there who are quite nervous at the thought of more competition on the job market...
I'm female and studied Software Engineering, and decided not to pursue it as a career. I still remember when I made that decision: going for a job interview as a programmer and being told that all the guys like making sexist jokes, and that I'd have to be OK with that.
Well, no thanks. I still program from time to time within my chosen alternative field, but screw having to fight for it throughout my career.
Some of the comments here show that the culture still isn't women-friendly in a lot of places. It only takes one jerk allowed to speak their mind to make a workplace unbearable.
I was one for about seven years. It was the fun I ever had and certainly the most meaningful work, although the comparison is a bit unfair as I only have bookkeeping at a software company in my early twenties and retail work in my teens to compare it to. The great problem is those in your care grow up. Preschool or kindergarten steals them. As for new families, eventually even the most progressive today will reject you. Hiring a male nanny in his twenties is adventurous and forward thinking. Hiring a man in his thirties is another story. It doesn't matter how good your references are. Mine couldn't be better. 31, back in school, pursuing a degree in biochemistry. Pediatrician perhaps?
Are women a minority in other sciences?
Based on enrollment in engineering studies they are a distinct minority (17.7% in 2009 per the NSF PDF):
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/2013/pdf/tab2-9.pdf
Given that, I would expect that under 20% of software engineers would be women (in no year did the % enrolled exceed 20%).
An individual, regardless of gender, must choose to go into engineering(software included), usually via a degree program (I went actuarial and then moved into software development - but I had a lot of software development experience previously, into architecture/process optimization now).
As an alternate example, men only represent about 10% of the Registered Nurse population (not sure of the year):
http://www.minoritynurse.com/minority-nursing-statistics
I see no issue or sexism based on the number of women entering engineering sciences. I imagine the stats generally follow the % by gender that seek such degrees.
BlameBillCosby.com
a good majority of them are in New Zealand, and they do a wonderful job on the software that we work on! Just saying... I think that they need to stop doing Harris polls to get all of their data.
...I thought that said "even scarier".
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
But... Are there any social inequalities when it comes to female software engineers? Is the man somehow keeping chicks out of coding classes? Is the ol' boys club not allowing cooties to spoil their source?
yeah, kinda. It is documented that girls lose interest in STEM subject matter in elementary school, presumably because they pick up on society clues that 'women aren't supposed to like math'. We aren't spitting at them or threatening them for showing up to flip bits, but it isn't easy to swim against societies expectations. The (few) girls that I have meet that write code have been fairly unconventional individuals that didn't fit any traditional female archetype. It seems to me that the girls that are becoming coders are the types willing to fly in the face of society's traditional gender perceptions. So, yeah, there are.
Or to put it another way: if it was a 54/46% gender split, I could write it off and say that there isn't anything wrong. 90/10% split? Yeah, something is going on.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
All of the companies listed in the article are small companies that do strictly commercial software development. I don't see any numbers for the really big commercial software companies like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. Likewise, I don't see any numbers for the big aerospace companies like Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed, CSC, BAE, etc. Big companies and, especially, big companies that work on government contracts are much more likely to have affirmative action policies and specifically recruit women and minorities. Chances are you would see much higher percentages of women working at these companies and it only takes a couple of 100,000+ employee companies to totally swamp the small fry that are in the current survey.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
I have been a professional software developer for 22 years. Over that time I've worked for 5 different companies, of varying sizes, the largest having maybe 100 employees.
Not once in all these years was there a single female software engineer working for any of those companies. Not a single one.
Anyway, from the single data point that is my personal experience, female software engineers seem to be about as common as unicorns. Even 12% seems way too high a figure.
I don't know why this is, but I think it's a shame.
I read Usenet for the articles.
In other news blacks dominate the NFL and NBA, Jews dominate physics.
an ill wind that blows no good
They are not just jerks. They are breaking the law. You would be within your rights sue. It is sad that your talent is discouraged.
an ill wind that blows no good
When I was in physics, we had the same problem. In a freshman class of 20 or so students, there would be 2 or 3 women. By graduation there would only be 5-10 men left and no women.
I asked one of the women that started the year after I did why she switched to math. She said that we guys all got together to work problem sets in the dorms while she had to do hers alone (the college offered limited opportunities for men and women to visit each-other's dorms at the time). This surprised me as I always did my sets alone.
This was back in the 80s.
Just last week I had a chance to visit the same college and sit in a senior-level quantum lecture offered by my favorite professor. I was pleased to see that there were three women to six men. Still not parity, but much improved!
this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
There is a very simple reason why more women aren't developers - it's because programmers are geeky and few women want to be associated with that. Think about yourself. You were probably an outcast in high school. Then you discovered computers. And for once in your life you are not judged. The computer does whatever you tell to do. You understand the computer better than people. You fall in with that crowd in high school who host LAN parties and play Doom on a Friday night when everybody else is out dating. Then you get to college and major in Computer Science. Now you meet hundreds of other people just like you! These are people who love Dr. Who and Red Dwarf and know the Hitchhikers Guide in and out. The social deficiencies you had in high school are celebrated here. So you become more and more geeky. Now tell me if that isn't you. If you are a woman, you may be smart, but there is this horrible stigma assigned to hanging out with the guys in the computer club. In America, women are supposed to be pretty, not geeky. So when you get to college you major in Communications or Marketing or maybe Math. You may want to be an engineer, but it just isn't socially acceptable. I'll tell you this: I wish there were more female computer programmers - we are too homogeneous and when you have a homogeneous group, your ideas suffer from groupthink. If everybody is thinking alike - somebody isn't thinking. The real question is how to change it - and I don't have an answer for you. But I'd rather have one Grace Hopper than 10 Mark Zuckerbergs.
MALE SOFTWARE ENGINEERS
They're supposed to be equally viable candidates, remember?
I'd never seen a statistic of 22%, which sounds high based on my experience. 12% sounds much more plausible to me.
I don't give a damn.
I got called sexist because I was promoted over a womyn-born-womyn I was more qualified than. The feminists called me sexist, even though the person who promoted me was also a womyn-born-womyn.
Guess what? I'm still making shit per hour while she went off and got married, had a seven day honeymoon in Hawaii, and is now a stay-at-home Mother. (Yes, with a capital M.)
We'll get more womyn-born-womyn in STEM careers once we decide that womyn-born-womyn need to have a career that pays more than minimum wage BEFORE we allow them to get knocked up. PERIOD. That's ALL THERE IS TO IT .
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
It's not the guys who say this, depressingly I've found it's women (at least down here in Australia) that commonly lament that they (feel they) are mentally incapable of tackling programming. =/ Of course, typically nobody challenges those assertions.
I suppose what's needed is a bit of public education. Sure, coding is a logical thing at its core, but a whole lot of creativity goes into producing great code as well.
Maybe the solution is to popularise pair programming more?
whoops...
It all boils down to searching for a mate. Some percentage of the population chooses their profession because it's something that they love to do, or something that they happen to do exceptionally well. A lot of males end up being computer geeks because they lack the social skills or the looks to do anything that involves interaction with other people. In any tech company that I've been at, it's the sales guys that are raking in the money when things start to go well. Sales guys get the money because they're good at selling things - themselves. Software engineers are stupid enough to accept the role that they love what they're doing and that's reward enough. Maybe they'll get a pizza thrown their way for staying at work until 8PM - stupid. The women (other than the ones that become engineers because it's something they love) are certainly not going to gravitate toward computers for a reason of that's where they're going to find a man that can take care of them and their future offspring. STEM is for losers. That's what our culture promotes (see "The Internship" for the latest example). Until we decide to start rewarding those who can use their brain instead of throwing a touchdown back in high school, STEM will continue to be for losers and women will steer clear.
Perhaps if computers worked via feelings, emotions and mood swings, things would be different?
How many women are treated as independent contractors or freelancers because of fear that they'll leave anyway because babbies?
Female is an adjective, not a noun. There is no such thing as 'females' (nor 'males' for that matter). If you mean women, say women.
Women know better than to take public polls on their gender. The data is used to discriminate in the hiring process, and often used by unscrupulous data handlers to hunt for "eligible" women both for "social" projects and for spam they *do not want*.
Women dont like it, are not good at it and would rather do something else, let them
Why does my company have 2 female bathrooms and 2 male bathrooms, when most of the employees are male? Shouldn't they have 3 male bathrooms and just 1 female bathroom?
Reading through the comments there are a large number of "who cares" and "why does this matter". The tone and number is interesting. If all these "who cares" people really don't care why did they even come into the comments and post? There's almost a tone of fear to it all.
Better question: Why does my office have one male bathroom and one female bathroom (very small company), when they're both single-occupancy?
But... Are there any social inequalities when it comes to female software engineers? Is the man somehow keeping chicks out of coding classes? Is the ol' boys club not allowing cooties to spoil their source?
yeah, kinda. It is documented that girls lose interest in STEM subject matter in elementary school, presumably because they pick up on society clues that 'women aren't supposed to like math'. We aren't spitting at them or threatening them for showing up to flip bits, but it isn't easy to swim against societies expectations. The (few) girls that I have meet that write code have been fairly unconventional individuals that didn't fit any traditional female archetype. It seems to me that the girls that are becoming coders are the types willing to fly in the face of society's traditional gender perceptions. So, yeah, there are.
This.
Why don't more women explore STEM careers? Because American society tells them it's not cool. Contrast this with Iceland, for example, where Mathematics is considered a subject for girls. (At the risk of over-simplifying, the boys just want to finish high school and join their fathers on the fishing boats.)
Or to put it another way: if it was a 54/46% gender split, I could write it off and say that there isn't anything wrong. 90/10% split? Yeah, something is going on.
Historically there has been a gradient downwards in female representation in the sciences from the "softer" (psychology, biology, etc.) to the "harder" (chemistry, physics, mathematics.) In the past I have heard the discrepancy to be as wide as 90/10 in physics.
There may be differences between male and female brains, but I think that's only an argument in favor of encouraging both genders to participate in STEM disciplines. For science to advance, we need different perspectives from minds that don't think alike.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Yep - the HR monkey or lazy manager sees a female name on the CV and decided that it's pointless training someone to be a good worker if they are going to leave to go off and have kids. It was never fair to begin with and doesn't even make sense now with such a mobile workforce where a man is just as likely to quit as a woman and you don't expect most of the workforce to sit tight for ten years.
So because of that the women couldn't get the jobs in IT in the 1990s despite being half the enrolement and since then it's been seen as a male dominated area not worth getting into, so only the driven ignore their guidance councillers or whatever and do it.
Dropbox started as a very dodgy collection of python scripts as a front end to Amazon storage, with a long list of security incidents right up to and including people getting other people's files without needing a password (just username in one case, file hashes in another and a failure to revoke access once granted but looks as if it did as a third). They had an idea but few resources to implement it. To go from where they were to where they are now and where they want to be requires a lot of work which is why they have so many development staff,
You've misunderstood a statement of "then the server went down on me".
I'm living/working in a country that seems to care somewhat less about gender roles in IT than the US. In my career I've worked with various women, and I never detected any sort of institutionalized sexism.
However, a number of women I've worked with tended to gravitate to non-programming roles (Business Analyst seems to be a favorite, others are Testers, Configuration Managers and what not). I've heard a couple of times "programming is too hard". It needs to be noted that these where intelligent people and their programming output, from what I could see personally, was certainly not inferior.
I'm puzzled by it, but I guess in an industry that does not enforce quotas but allows people the freedom to progress as they see fit, what is the harm?
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
I did that once and it was rejected. Then about half a day later there was the same article, almost word-for-word, by Roland Niquepaille.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Because there is a severe shortage of good developers. I don't get the outright bile and hatred so many idiots here display about women in the workplace. Afraid they will take you jobs? I could double my income by getting people placed, and getting the bounty for finding them, in companies were they are desperate for GOOD developers, not the anti-social misogynists who want to see the world burn lousy coders who react with such angst to the idea a woman might be able to do their job.
But I don't know any good developers who aren't already making top dollars for their field who want to move. I know a shit load of really bad developers. Oh most of them can code, they just can't for the life of them deliver a project per requirements on time and on budget. Then your code quality don't matter, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
We need MORE people in the field because right now projects are on hold because there is nobody to do them. And that sucks! And to anyone who feels threatened by competition from either immigrants or women in this field must be really bad at their job.
I would not ever consider hiring phoenix03, he is clearly poisonous in the work place. Why is he so afraid of women?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
No lie, I saw that and read: "Female software engineers may be even scarier than we thought".
When I was in college there were very few women in engineering and computer science. They were mostly in political science and other liberal arts areas.
True story: a week before I entered my first college (an engineering school) I got invited to a 'frat party'. When I got there I saw one girl in the room. I asked one of the guys "How are the women here?" He said "they're ok. We invited all of them." All 13 of them. I was immediately depressed.
My next school was a university. But I was in comp sci, and other then CS101 there were again very few women. One day some girl I met asked me to meet her in some building I had never heard of. When I went in my mouth fell open. There were hot girls everywhere. I had ventured into the drama department.
So IMHO there are less women in software development because there are less women interested in the field.
One of the things that causes friction in the workplace between men and women? Things like this.
Honestly, my boss is a woman, all of the HR people are women, there's TONS of developers here that are women... I'm tired of this. There's no disadvantage in the US for women workers. The only disadvantage? The women who believe they ARE disadvantaged.
Look at Hillary, look at Mayer of Yahoo, look at the other countless women in executive positions.
How did they achieve what they have?
They didn't give in to the drivel from the lesser females like this.
Get a backbone, do your job, if you don't like where you're at, change your position.
These are the habits of successful people, notice I said people, and not men.
(ha, the CAPTCHA says 'reinvent')
The idea of me being afraid of women is ridiculous, as you would know if you actually KNEW me. Any assertions you make about me are invalid purely on that fact - you know nothing about me. I happen to treat my girlfriend with a tremendous amount of respect and love. I have nothing against women coders - I work with a couple. They are very talented, and I enjoy working with them. As for me being poisonous in the workplace? My superiors would disagree.
You completely missed the point of my post. If women want to code, then God bless - there's plenty of work to be done. If you don't, great - plenty of other fields for you. Where you lose me is the perception that because women CHOOSE to do something else, it something that has to be addressed. No, no it doesn't. And there are plenty of other comments addressing another completely ignored problem - where are the 'demands' for equality in teachers? or nursing? Don't hear much there. THAT is true equality - when both sexes are allowed to choose the fields that compliment them and their skills/desires, and let the distribution fall as it may.
As for hiring me? I would never in a million years work for you. You sound like a terrible boss.
Where is it written that men and women have to like the exact same things in the exact same percentages? Has anyone considered that the percentage of women in IT is low because *drumroll* Women find other professions more interesting / fulling? Do you like rhetorical questions? For instance, around 2011, 91% of all nurses were Women. And before you say "well, it's because Women are naturally nurturers", consider only 35% of Doctors are Female (http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/employment_occupations/cb13-32.html, http://www.yalemedlaw.com/2012/05/women-in-medicine-how-female-doctors-have-changed-the-face-of-medicine/). I don't see men launching music videos trying to get boys to put the GI Joes down and be nurses (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/a-viral-video-encourages-girls-to-become-engineers/?_r=0) How about let the women who want to be engineers be engineers without forcing it because you're OCD and can't stand an uneven split in the demographics.
When women say they are just naturally no good at programming, what you are hearing is social programming. They didn't just all independently come up with this idea. This idea has been drilled into womens' brains, along with thousands (millions?) of other ideas of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. They are not due to "naturally evolved differences between men and women" I mean jesus CHRIST. Do people actually think that?
No, there are not fewer women in this profession because they all quit to have babies. That would just reduce the ratio of women in every profession, which it has not.
I'm also seeing a lot of comments about the "feminization of society" and how men are being discriminated against now that the feminazis are in power. I guess the MRM has a presence on /. as well, since they are really the only group that uses that rhetoric. Truly tragic. I don't really have the strength to tackle the incredible amounts of denial and misogyny inherent in Mens' Rights dogma, but if anyone's interested I'd imagine I can find a takedown pretty fast, given that MRM is considered a hate group.
In conclusion, that's enough /. for me today. Or maybe just enough altogether, if this is the userbase this place attracts.