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."
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
There are fewer women in programming for one reason and one reason only: families.
Both in the US and Canada, I worked with a lot of bright young women over the years. And the vast majority of them quit their jobs shortly after getting married with the intent of raising a family. By the time they were ready to return to work, their tech skills were stale, so they took jobs as headhunters and HR interviewers because they had *technical skills* needed to fulfill those roles, even if they weren't current enough for *coding*.
Most of them also ended up making a hell of a lot more money that way than they would have if they stuck with programming.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I just counted - there are 8 engineers focused on reddit.com, and 4 engineers focused on redditgifts.com, and 2 sysadmins. That's the entire technical staff. source: http://www.reddit.com/about/team/ also: i work there too