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Female Software Engineers May Be Even Scarcer Than We Thought

Posted by Soulskill on from the somewhere-between-too-few-and-not-enough dept.

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."

3 of 445 comments (clear)

  1. computer work requires accountability by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    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%

  2. Re:So what? by pspahn · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    I work at home, and last night my gf gets home and is bugging me while I'm in the middle of migrating a development site to a staging server...

    "I'm making chocolate turkeys to bring to work, want to come downstairs and help me decorate them?"

    WTF?!?!?!?! Of fucking course I don't!

    Do the results of the poll surprise me? Not the least, and maybe it's this way for a good reason, since source code that has been decorated has been found to be about 22% less efficient.

    --
    Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
  3. Re:This is a problem because....? by spiffmastercow · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    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 Feminism is an outdated concept by this point - and frankly, it doesn't apply to software engineering.

    So that our future sons can get laid, and so that our future daughters get knocked up by smart douchebags instead of idiotic douchebags.