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."

Comments

And?

[Anonymous Coward]

Male elementary school teachers may be scarcer than we thought.

Who gives a shit?

Re:And?

[ShanghaiBill]

More importantly, this entire "study" is garbage. It is a self-selecting poll. So it doesn't "prove" there are fewer women, it just shows that men are more willing to fritter their time away on some stupid web poll.

Re:And?

[phoenix03]

If by 'social inequality' you mean the increasing attacks on male rights in our culture, I agree.

Re:And?

[thesupraman]

In this particular case (male teachers) it is far more about the painting of all males as child molesters and rapists who cannot be trusted around children.

But yes, the huge feminisation of many aspects of society, including schooling, is a major factor. Most male teachers end up seeing their views ignored,
themselves patronised, and their care values bought in to question on a continual basis, basically to marginalize their position as a teacher.

After all, 'think of the children!'

Re:And?

[phoenix03]

George Carlin has a great quote that addresses your final sentence.

Re:And?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Male elementary school teachers may be scarcer than we thought.

After all, everyone knows there are only two kinds of people who love small children: female elementary school teachers and male pedophiles.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I heard the requirements for engineering school were exactly the same across the board.

Re:And?

[amicusNYCL]

I'm more interested in the number of engineers than the percent that are female.

Apparently Reddit gets by with only 14 engineers, Khan Academy needs 24, SnapChat only 13, Flickr needs 42, but then Pinterest needs 105, Etsy needs 149, Dropbox needs 143, and Mozilla requires 500 engineers. Some of those companies are much more lean and efficient than I thought. And others are way more bloated.

14 people at Reddit can manage their entire infrastructure of servers and networking gear hosting all of their forums, in addition to the mobile version, browser extensions, buttons and widgets and whatever else, but Dropbox needs 143 people to manage file uploading, storage, and access. Not to downplay what Dropbox does, but I don't think they offer 10 times the product that Reddit does.

Re:And?

[Jane Q. Public]

"After all, everyone knows there are only two kinds of people who love small children: female elementary school teachers and male pedophiles."

I certainly hope you were being sarcastic. Because if we wanted to take your comment literally, then all fathers would be pedophiles.

On the other hand, it has certainly seemed as though society has been willing to look askance at any male who pays any attention to children. This is a problem in our society that I noticed over 20 years ago.

Hint, folks: treating an entire gender as though they are likely perverts is far worse than discrimination in employment. In fact, I would call that a perversion in itself.

Re:And?

[Stormy Dragon]

Uh no, those 14 people are who Reddit has "writing or architecting software, and are in full-time roles". Presumably there's an entire different pool of people managing their infrastructure of servers and networking gear, etc. IT people are not software engineers any more than your car mechanic is a mechanical engineer.

Re:And?

[HeckRuler]

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?

You're looking at the end result and and claiming that there must be social inequality that lead to it. I understand this line of reasoning when it comes to the military, corporate CEO positions, and professional sports. They have a history of barring or diminishing women.

But engineering? Software engineering? Dude, during my time in academia I saw them bend over BACKWARDS to get girls into their program. Between the scholarships, special clubs, awareness programs, and general reports like this that stated more women needed to go be geeks. Even culturally, we geeks LOVE geek girls. It's a thing.

Now, it might be some sort of culturally imbued sexism. The sort that diverts men from being grade-school teachers and women from being truckers. There are plenty of counter-examples, but they're a minority. But it's not so much social inequality, so much as latent social norms and expectations. Breaking them doesn't get you burnt at the stake, but it might raise some eyebrows.

If you want to stop the NFL from being assholes to women, or to break that glass ceiling when it comes to corporate CEO positions, I'm all for that and you have my full support. But if you want to shape culture so that there's no stigma with being a male nurse or a female software engineer, that's getting a little close to the sort of fascism that demands we think a certain way. Your way. Sorry, but you just can't steer culture like that.

But hey, we need more female software engineers, because we need more software engineers. So I'm down with this sort of effort. But the lack of chicks around here has very little to do with social inequality. So don't get your panties in a twist.

Re:And?

[westlake]

Male elementary school teachers may be scarcer than we thought.
Who gives a shit?

As a man, Wiederspan is a rarity in U.S. elementary-school education. And experts say that as boys continue to lag behind girls academically, schools could use more male teachers.

"Having male teachers, boys have a model that it's OK to be male and be in the classroom, he said. "School isn't just a female enterprise. That's what the presence of a man says to kids."

Why Men Don't Teach Elementary School

Re:And?

[Dynedain]

Not to downplay what Dropbox does, but I don't think they offer 10 times the product that Reddit does.

Why not? Dropbox offers a file storage service that works across a myriad of wildly differing device types and platforms using native platform development. Not to mention they store many orders of magnitude more data than Reddit.

Meanwhile, Reddit only provides community-moderated plain-text discussion threads via a lightweight web interface.

Just because Reddit has more content that is specifically valuable to you, how do you make the jump to assume that what they're doing is on par or more difficult than what Dropbox does?

Re:And?

[lgw]

Well, part of the "problem" IMO is probably also the discrepancy between 22% "in the field" and 12% "working on code" - female developers choose or are steered to management by a large margin. I'd say 40% of the development managers I've met in my career have been women, while the 12% number sounds right for coders. I've worked with just one women who was senior on the non-management technical track out of the hundreds of coders I've worked with in my career.

There's definitely something interesting there, but I'm not sure it counts as a "problem".

Oh, I should also point out that in 20+ years and hundreds of co-workers, I've never seen people making sexist jokes who expected women to just "go along to get along" with that. There were a few guys here and there who thought that sort of thing was funny (certainly not the norm), but they all had the basic manners to shut up and look embarrassed if one of the women on the floor happened by. But then, I'm not a brogrammer wring Ruby on Rails, either - I hear the culture is pretty awful over on the web side of the industry.

Re:And?

[msobkow]

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.

Re:And?

[srichard25]

At some point our society went from "leveling the playing the field" to "drastically changing the playing field to make the end-game scores the same". See, it doesn't matter that millions of years of evolution have resulted in some significant differences between males and females. It doesn't matter that there are already programs/scholarships to place to favor one group over another. It doesn't even matter if they can't find any specific examples of discrimination. The very fact that there are more of X than Y in a specific profession is reason enough to try to slant the playing field even further in an effort to make the end result the same.

Re:And?

[Pheret1]

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

Re:And?

[Cederic]

I think he's referring to the rights that females have, that males lack.

In the UK those would include retirement age, parental leave, medical care (and life expectancy), equality of treatment in education and the workplace.

Re:And?

[maharvey]

Yes, although this is eventually true of men too, from what I've seen.

Many males, by the time they're in their 40s and 50s, have moved on from coding to architecture, management, multifunctional roles like customer engineering liasons, highly specialized SWE roles like JVM optimization, or have switched careers altogether. Hard to compete with the young kids who'll work 12 hours a day for pizza.

In other words, by the time the women are ready to come back, the men (of the same age) aren't generally doing that work anymore either. So it wouldn't be appropriate for women to return to that role. The main difference is that men tend to stay with it longer, through the family years, where women bail sooner. And that's good. People gravitate to what they are intereted in, and where there is demand. It is a fact that women are better at raising young kids, and more importantly they want to do it more than men do. We all know it.

The sexes are not interchangeable. They can fill the same roles, because as a rule humans are remarkably adaptable and intelligence goes a long way to compensate for gaps in natural talent. But often, one or the other will be better precisely because of talent or interest. The edge may be small but it is still significant.

For example, I think women are better in roles where they are dealing with people, or in program manager type roles where there are a zillion little things to keep track of all at once. I don't understand why, but I often see this pattern, and I see that women often to a better job than men do in these roles. Women are better at staying home with small children; if society pushes them in that direction maybe its because there is good reason for it. Men are better at focused attention. You don't need studies to tell you this, it's everywhere, it's obvious to anyone with even a little intelligence or intuition. Of course women can be good software engineers, and depending on individual talent and interest, may be as good or better than men. Humans are varied. Some men excel at things that women are usually better at. And that's all good. But it is foolish and ignorant to pretend that there is no difference, that differences do not exist in the population as a whole.

Talent is extremely hard to measure, but interest and motivation are very easy to see. Personally I think that interest is far more important than talent. It goes back to that large brain thing. We can learn to be what we want to be. And in my opinion, most women don't want to do software engineering. Why should I care? Why they be forced to do what they don't want to do, in the name of political correctness? I thought modern society was all about giving women choice?

Re:And?

[Stormy Dragon]

Okay, then tell the people at your company who aren't actually software engineers to stop calling themselves software engineers. Contrary to common opinion, it's not a term for any vaguely computer related job.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they're wanting equal treatment, then being 'one of the guys' is what you get. If they're wanting to be treated like girls, then what that really means is being given all the additional benefits that they've come to expect from other social settings. I think the rude awakening for a lot of girls out there is the contrast between the two. They might see a guy being a jerk to them, when in reality they're probably just getting the degree of interaction/effort that any guy would expect to get in her place.

Re:And?

[Grishnakh]

Now, it might be some sort of culturally imbued sexism. The sort that diverts men from being grade-school teachers and women from being truckers.

That's exactly what the problem is. In all my years of engineering school and work, most of the female engineers (or engineering students) I've met were not American, they were Indian and Chinese. Apparently, their cultures do not divert women from these jobs the way Western or American culture does.

Re:And?

[epyT-R]

No. That is not an accurate translation. That is shaming language, the last resort of those backing the politically dominant yet outmoded popular position for emotional/self-interested reasons.

Re:And?

[epyT-R]

Maybe, but the demand that there be equal distributions everywhere is also part of the problem. It's a rather childish, simplistic, and dysfunctional worldview to have.. esp when forcing large tracts of society to comply with it via the law. All it does is breed more discrimination against those labeled as the 'oppressors' which in turn breeds actual, real contempt in that group for the protected 'victim' classes. ("She got the programming job? Was it achievement or politics?" instead of "She got the job, ok great I look forward to working with her")

Liberals always like to preach 'tolerance' and 'diversity' when they don't really understand the implications of the terms. 'Tolerance' of difference implies that things won't always be equal, that we are all individuals with different strengths and weaknesses, and so we are not interchangeable square pegs. Liberals are fine with this until it touches on race, gender, or sexual orientation, where we are expected to throw out any rational thought and assume that any imbalance is due to bigotry (instead of biology, or free choice, or life choices or..).. This is as irrational as the 'god hates fags' mantra of westboro baptist.

Re:And?

[epyT-R]

Ah so men should be punished for being 'crude' around women, yet they should tolerate the inappropriate emotional dramacoasters and the passive aggressive, hypergamous behavior of the stereotypical modern female office worker? Yeah, fuck that.

You want to be treated 'equally'? Fine.. Time to break out the thick skin and deal with it. (Healthy) guys don't tolerate that above mentioned behavior for a reason. It completely disrupts productivity. If you're taking every damn quip someone makes personally, you're the one who's lacking. You say guys telling crude jokes are childish boys? What about the childish girl that's always crying when the boys say something she doesn't like? Stop demanding that men walk on eggshells around your princess ass so that you don't have to change. Equality is not demanding that everyone else live up to your priorities and expectations. Equality is the opportunity to measure up in relevant ways. That's all.

If you demand that men roll out the carpet for you, many of them will, mainly because so many of them are pussy beggar manginas/white knights, but the consequence is that they will never respect you as an equal afterward.

Re:And?

[srichard25]

On average men are taller than women. Does that mean every man is taller than every woman? Obviously not. But if there is a job that requires reaching tall heights, you can bet that there will be more men working in that position than women.

http://www.webmd.com/balance/features/how-male-female-brains-differ
"Boys generally demonstrate superiority over female peers in areas of the brain involved in math and geometry. These areas of the brain mature about four years earlier in boys than in girls, according to a recent study that measured brain development in more than 500 children. Researchers concluded that when it comes to math, the brain of a 12-year-old girl resembles that of an 8-year-old boy. Conversely, the same researchers found that areas of the brain involved in language and fine motor skills (such as handwriting) mature about six years earlier in girls than in boys."

Re:And?

[CodeBuster]

Complain all you want about the particular way that people try to solve problems, but the idea that we should just ignore biased outcomes under the assumption that nothing is wrong is absurd.

It's no less absurd to jumpt straight to the conclusion that different outcomes must be attributed to bias or discrimination simply because outcomes are different. What about different life choices and personal preferences? Isn't it reasonable to assume that people, when left to make their own choices freely, might experience different and possibly even unequal outcomes? Liberals are far too concerned with equality of outcome and not nearly enough with personal freedom and the right to a fighting chance. They fail to see that by using the power of the state to force equal outcomes they destroy both personal freedom and equal opportunity.

Re:And?

[CodeBuster]

I thought modern society was all about giving women choice?

Free to choose as long as society doesn't view the choice as politically incorrect it seems. For example conservative women who vote Republican are often criticized viciously by the left as being stupid, unsophisticated and unliberated for choosing traditional family values. These progressives profess tolerance, at least for those that agree with them, but are themselves intolerant of those that deviate from their ideals.

Re:And?

[AmiMoJo]

The GP was referring to the reason given by many trainee male teachers for not wanting to go into primary schools. It's a major problem in the UK, with children lacking male role models. They spend a lot of their young lives at school so it is important.

We have had a long and relentless campaign against paedophiles, lead by newspapers. This is the result - our children are being harmed far more.

Re:And?

[serviscope_minor]

Every time I walk into an NHS establishment I'm bombarded by posters about 'well women clinics' pre/post natal care, breast/cervical cancer screening. Where are the posters inviting men for cancer screening, offering drop-in opportunities to discuss their health issues, regular healthy checks?

The posters I do see that are targeted at men? "Feeling suicidal? Call.."

Seems sensible to me. Women get breast cancer more often than men (wtf, eh?) and men commit suicide much more than women. Oh and breast cancer is the most common type along with prostate cancer. You can get screened for that if you wish:

http://www.screening.nhs.uk/prostatecancer

I do see evidence that women working part time earn more than men working part time in the same roles. I do see girls getting better grades in exams because the whole education system switched to a female friendly mode of measurement.

What the heck is a "female friendly mode of measurement".

I do at every fucking job I've ever had work for women that earn more than me.

That's generally the way it works: if you work for someone they'll be earning more. Welcome to the world.

At every job where a woman has done the same job as me, she's earned more - irrespective of relative capability.

Perhaps they were better at negotiating salaries.

In the UK gender discrimination is illegal and yet men get fucked over anyway.

Oh yes, we get massively fucked over. I guess this is why women vastly disproportionately occupy all the most senior positions in society.

Yeah there are things in legslition that are not equal and damn well should be. I agree. On the other hand, women have been the oppressed class for the last few thousand years and that has not yet been shaken off completely. To pretend otherwise is blind.

Is that a...

[unixisc]

...good thing or bad?

Women in general aren't introverted enough

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Women in general aren't introverted enough

[_merlin]

It's a funny thing, one girl developer I know is far more introverted and anti-social than me. She has to be almost dragged to social events, spends weekends in her bedroom gaming, and would rather communicate with a chain of e-mails than do a phone call.

This is a problem because....?

[phoenix03]

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.

Re:This is a problem because....?

[tftp]

"So women don't want to program. That's fine." -- Do we know that? I sure don't know that.

I'd understand if you profess your lack of certainty when we are discussing geology of Mars. But, reportedly, a few women are present on Earth, and since they are sentient you can ask them and get an answer :-) Wouldn't that be the most reliable way to find out what their motivation is?

Re:This is a problem because....?

[Anonymous Coward]

Feminism has nothing to do with equality, the moment it achieves equality, the feminist cry foul and change the rules. Feminism is a religious cult more than anything else.

When female privilege backfires - watch this.

roman_mir

Re:This is a problem because....?

[vux984]

The genders are different.

Yeah, they sure are in horrifying and amazing ways. But I'm not aware that "inherently not being talented at or enjoying computer programming" is one of those ways.

Simply looking at their participation in computing science is not valid evidence.

You know where ignoring this is causing all types of havok? The military.

Oh, this is going nowhere fast.

Among other things, you are in a company of women on the front lines. Do you trust her to carry 100lbs of gear or to carry you if you get wounded?

I am not in favor of different standards for men and women in the military. If she can carry 100lbs of gear, she can carry 100lbs of gear. There are plenty of women who are stronger than I am.

So what if many female sailors get pregnant during voyages or during a tour of duty to get out of combat duty and go back home and collect benefits.

Not really sure what to say to THAT noise except that men have deliberately injured themselves to get out too. Pregnancy in that scenario is no different from any other sort of self-inflicted condition to avoid service. Men may not have THAT particular option, but there are plenty of others. Not to mention that pregnancy like injuries can also be accidental too.

So what if they affect unit cohesion, we have your fweelings on equality to consider.

Men have ditched service too.

Just because the system isn't producing the results you want, doesn't mean you get to make accusations of unfairness without even examining the dynamics at play.

Except that I was doing precisely what you want. I was suggesting we examine the dynamics at play.

You are the one going off spouting nonsense.

Go play social justic warrior elsewhere where you'd do less damage.

Like software development, you know... the actual topic at hand. What damage are you worried about?

Re:This is a problem because....?

[Macgrrl]

If you don't think it's hostile, ask three women you know to anonymously count the number of hostile comments posted here.

Sorry, I ran out of fingers for my poor fragile female brain to count on.

Scary

[lazarus]

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.

Misread that

[Atrox666]

I thought it said Female Software Engineers May Be Even Scarier Than We Thought.

Re:Misread that

[X10]

I thought it said Female Software Engineers May Be Even Scarier Than We Thought.

We are.

Re:"Scarce"

[phoenix03]

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.

I would so work with one of those.

Re:Proof that the dinosaurs still live.

[BasilBrush]

Proof? Where's your proof?

Do you actually have a point to make?

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, telling a story about your mom and pretending that you have a girlfriend really doesn't make you cool. Because with that attitude, I really doubt you have an actual gf (or at least that you will have one for very long).

Re:Then again...

[VortexCortex]

Androgynous? When I was a small boy I began reading all sorts of magazines and finding out things about the sexes. Imagine a 7 year old trying to talk about complex issues like gender or gravitational lensing with moronic adults. Despite everyone telling me what was "normal" for a boy I had different urges -- I wanted to do things that boys aren't supposed to do. In my teens I finally realized that my brain was trapped in the wrong kind of body -- One that could survive the harshness of space. I should have been born a cyborg. You pathetic humans are disgusting.

What about other sciences?

[turp182]

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.

Re:So what?

[Riceballsan]

The issue, stems down to elementery and middle school. Personally IMO I think it is very similar to why countries have specific olympic events they specialize in... IE there is nothing in the biology that makes kenyans faster runners than other countries, it is that kenyans push their aspiring athletes towards running, because that is the field that the culture cheers. Same goes for smarter women and engineering/coding. Personally I think if the problem is going to be addressed, it needs to be addressed at a much younger age than people are looking. The divide of genders in fields starts by grade school levels... Once you are looking at college and above, you are already working with the 10-20% of women who either don't give a darn about cultural stereotypes and won't be discouraged, and some who are doing it for uninteligent reasons (either chose at random, or specifically because it is stereotyped against)

My andecdotal evidence

[ObjetDart]

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.

Re:My andecdotal evidence

[Barlo_Mung_42]

I'll add my anecdotal evidence. The place I work at has about 20% female developers. We do device drivers, not web stuff.

Last time I saw a thread about this on Slashdot someone posted what they called the Dave threshold theory: Within any software group there will be as many or fewer female developers as there are people named Dave.

I've been here for 10+ years and we've always been above the Dave threshold (and we do have a Dave).

Re:So what?

[yurtinus]

How is software engineering not social? I work as a part of a team and frequently interact with my team to see how my little piece of the pie needs to talk with their pieces. Are there times I need to hide away and crunch some numbers work hammer out some documentation? Absolutely, but by far my most productive time at work is when I'm in the lab working directly with the other engineers.

The whole "anti-social software guy" as the norm is absolutely untrue. I work with a handful of them, and while they generally do brilliant work (they have to, they can't count on the team to help fill knowledge gaps), they are handled carefully and given tasks they can crunch on without much interaction.

I'd also argue that the rockstar programmer is a myth, but that's a rant for another time.

Fortunately, there's an alternative

[Azure Flash]

MALE SOFTWARE ENGINEERS

They're supposed to be equally viable candidates, remember?

Technical terms

[dbIII]

You've misunderstood a statement of "then the server went down on me".

Anecdote

[codeButcher]

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?