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Will Peggy the Programmer Be the New Rosie the Riveter?
theodp writes "The Mercury News' Mike Cassidy reports that women are missing out on lucrative careers in computer science. 'The dearth of women in computing,' writes Cassidy, 'has the potential to slow the U.S. economy, which needs more students in the pipeline to feed its need for more programmers. It harms women by excluding them from some of the best jobs in the country. And it damages U.S. companies, which studies show would benefit from more diverse teams.' The promise of better financial results, says Anita Borg Institute Director Denise Gammal, is making diversity a business imperative. It's 'the sort of imperative that cries out for a movement,' argues Cassidy, 'maybe this time one led not by Rosie the Riveter, but by Peggy the Programmer.' So, where will Peggy the Programmer come from? Well, Google is offering $100 to girls attending U.S. public high schools who complete a Codecademy JavaScript course. 'Currently only 12% of computer science graduates are women,' explains Codecademy, 'and great tech companies like Google want to see more smart girls like you enter this awesome profession!' Google joins tech giant-backed Code.org in incentivizing teachers to bring the next generation of girls to the CS table.
But Silicon Valley claims the talent crisis is now (although there are 19 billion reasons to question SV's hiring acumen). So, what about the women who are here now, asks Dr. AnnMaria De Mars. 'If you are overlooking the women who are here now,' De Mars writes, 'what does that tell the girls you are supposedly bringing up to be the next generation of women in tech that you can overlook 15 years from now? Why do we hear about 16-year-old interns far more than women like me? If it is true, as the New York Times says, that in 2001-2 28% of computer science degrees went to women compared to the 10% or so now — where are those women from 12 years ago? It seems to me that when people are looking at minorities or women to develop in their fields, they are much more interested in the hypothetical idea of that cute 11-year-old girl being a computer scientist someday than of that thirty-something competing with them for market share or jobs. If there are venture capitalists or conference organizers or others out there that are sincerely trying to promote women who code, not girls, I've never met any. That doesn't mean they don't exist, but it means that whoever they are seeking out, it isn't people like me.'"
But Silicon Valley claims the talent crisis is now (although there are 19 billion reasons to question SV's hiring acumen). So, what about the women who are here now, asks Dr. AnnMaria De Mars. 'If you are overlooking the women who are here now,' De Mars writes, 'what does that tell the girls you are supposedly bringing up to be the next generation of women in tech that you can overlook 15 years from now? Why do we hear about 16-year-old interns far more than women like me? If it is true, as the New York Times says, that in 2001-2 28% of computer science degrees went to women compared to the 10% or so now — where are those women from 12 years ago? It seems to me that when people are looking at minorities or women to develop in their fields, they are much more interested in the hypothetical idea of that cute 11-year-old girl being a computer scientist someday than of that thirty-something competing with them for market share or jobs. If there are venture capitalists or conference organizers or others out there that are sincerely trying to promote women who code, not girls, I've never met any. That doesn't mean they don't exist, but it means that whoever they are seeking out, it isn't people like me.'"
Peggy Hill as the spokeswoman. I could get behind that.
If a group isn't interested, they aren't fucking interested. You don't HAVE to have two of every creature in every positon.
Hell, the NBA is really lacking of white college educated women....are we freaking out and trying to induce them with $100 to work to get into the NBA (and god help them if the teams discrimate!!).
Geez, please...get over it..people will do what people want to do.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Or Frank the pharmacist? These two professions are dominated by women. Perhaps we should make boys more interested in those professions as well somehow.
"The Mercury News' Mike Cassidy reports that women are missing out on lucrative careers in computer science. 'The dearth of women in computing,' writes Cassidy, 'has the potential to slow the U.S. economy,
No they are not, there is no such thing, and I smell bullshit.
If you make up fairy tales, you can put any ending you want on them. That is what is happening here. Women are not missing out, they are choosing to not do certain things. Let's look at a very good reason for this to be the case.
Programmers tend to work horrible and long hours. Most women are choosing to manage life and work together, and not work 60+ hours a week. That is a choice, and I have no issues with them doing so. I used to work 60+ hours a week, and decided I was missing out on too much living to continue. I'm glad more women refuse to work 60 hour weeks, more men should do the same. Your average company does not reward you for the extra work, they simply take advantage of you for doing it.
This is similar to the myth that women on average make less money than men doing the same work. Sure, there is some of the good'ole boy network that does this intentionally, just like certain places won't hire minorities. Those places are extremely rare, and not "normal". If a man works 50 hours a week and a woman works 40, the man does and should make more money. Women on average choose not to do this for various reasons.
Reality is a real drag when you start to look at it, but it's reality. I don't buy this line of shit because that's what it is. It's a piece of trash intended to increase hostilities toward each other and ignore the bigger issues like corruption.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
MOST women don't like to code, stop fucking trying to turn them into programming machines. Some do, good for them, let them be great programmers, but for fucks sake stop trying to force women to do shit most of them have no interest in doing. Its not going to get you a girlfriend, you'll still be an asshole.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Was wondering when this topic would finally get some coverage again. It's been at least a week since this important injustice graced the front page.
Well done slashdot, your click bait got me again.
You missed the big one.
Todd the Teacher.
Men have been practically excluded from teaching, by being painted with the sexist assumptions
that they are all child molesters and pedophiles with nothing positive to contribute.
In comparison to this particular problem, an imbalance in programmers is nothing.. bias in the
teaching of our children should be a huge priority, and yet, its not....
They just don't have the upper body strength that the job requires.
No. No she won't.
Padma the Programmer, however, is a name with potential.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
. . . and then the baby programming project will be done in a month!
We need more good programmers, not just more programmers. And their sex is totally irrelevant. A good programmer is a good programmer, regardless of sex,race, religion, shoe size, hair color, etc . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
This is soooo freakin tired. And not just on /. Women are not stupid. Or no more so than men. If they want a career/job in comp. sci they certainly can figure out what to do. Can we stop wetting our pants that 51% of the work force in industry X is not women?
Programmer burn-out and turn-over to other IT careers is high. Age discrimination and RSI injuries are common, and you are competing with 3rd-world wage-slaves and typically work long hours. For those who want to be involved with family life, long hours is not a selling point.
Programming is a stepping-stone job into project, network, equipment logistics, and server management, but not the only path. It's only real appeal is quick money out of college. After that you statistically will flat-line compared to other options.
Enough STEM career bullshit already.
Table-ized A.I.
I've seen an absurd number of stories on this topic, probably ever since the Hour of Code crap started. /. would you please give this topic a @#$% rest???
Enough of this narrative already. Women are given every opportunity and are practically begged by universities (via discriminating scholarships under the guise of 'diversity' programs) to major in comp-sci and other engineering/science majors. They've been doing this for decades, now, and they're still looking at it as though it's 1970. The problem is they're measuring success by the standard of equal outcome on the false premise that men and women are physically and psychologically the same. They're not, so they won't always make the same life choices given similar backgrounds and opportunities. Despite what the PC crowd will say, there's nothing wrong with this at all. This is the very essence of diversity. In a diverse systems, equal outcome is not a given.
How about we focus on equal opportunity based upon relevant attributes (ie demonstrated interest and aptitude), rather than building systemic bias into society under the guise of eliminating it? After that, let individuals make their own life choices. The only thing this bias does is teach women how to play better victims, which denies them opportunities to earn real respect among their peers. Getting society to discriminate against men will not empower them, either. It just creates more irrelevant discrimination and bilateral bigotry.
just hire more women and pay them 75 cents on the dollar.
It'd be worth every quarter just to drive out some of the brogrammers
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The field is already glutted. US workers are being replaced by offshore workers in droves. Wages are not going up.
But IT workers are never cheap enough for the tech companies, so they churn out this propaganda routinely.
You obviously ignored the sarcasm tags.
But to play ball: in the US as in many other developed nations you can't discriminate against employees because of things like that. If I have diabetes you can't discriminate against me because I may have low blood sugar one day and have to go home. You can't discriminate someone with a propensity to get the flu every winter because on average that person misses more days than someone who doesn't get the flu. Furthermore you can't just lump all women together and generalize about them. Some choose not to have children, should they be punished because some women do choose to have children?
Were you really trying to say that there is such a disparity between the number of men and women in software engineering because they may take more time off? Or were you just waiting for your chance to get in a cheap shot against women?
You may not be a misogynist, but you do have some silly thoughts regarding women.
I'd just as soon "Peggy" found something else to do. The entire "shortage" is a mythical construct of tech companies engaged in their biannual attempt to raise the H1-B cap.
If you need to be convinced to take up programming you probably won't be very good at it anyway.
Seriously, what the fuck difference does it make what sex, race or religion you are to be in IT??!?!
It makes a difference when the path to the field, and the field itself, is hostile to non-straight, white, men. Reading through the comments here there's a lot of really angry, hostile, dismissive posts. Which certainly doesn't help counter the argument by TFA.
Hell, the NBA is really lacking of white college educated women....are we freaking out and trying to induce them with $100 to work to get into the NBA (and god help them if the teams discrimate!!).
Aside from the fact that a sports league has nothing to do with IT, when's the last time you watched a WNBA game? Can you name a SINGLE WNBA player playing this season? How about a single hall-of-famer? Can you name your area's WNBA team? When was the last time you even accidentally came up on an WNBA game on TV? (hint: rarely, because they're not televised nearly as often.) Or how about this: why doesn't the NBA sanction both men's and women's leagues, ie, why did the WNBA need to be formed in the first place? Answer: because the NBA refused to allow women's teams.
So, women don't get the same TV coverage, sponsorship, press, etc.
The gender bias in professional sports *is* a huge problem. And it's a problem in scholastic/collegiate areas as well, which is the whole point behind Title 9 - all the money for scholastic and collegiate athletics was going to men's sports.
Please help metamoderate.
I for one fervently hope so.
Oh, not because this is a real or important issue. I find "diversity" studies in technical fields laughable. You can have more diversity in relevant thought between two white males who graduated from different schools than between a white male and a black female CS graduate. Race and sex are not equal to diversity.
No, I hope this works because I'm fucking tired of hearing about it. So very, very tired.
Does that question even make sense without some sort of suitable historical context?
Is there some massive draft underway, with hundreds of thousands of code monkeys being churned into cannon fodder, that I missed out on?
Even casually equating a total-war domestic propaganda/production mobilization exercise with the half-assed plan of the day by silicon valley to get slightly cheaper programmers just seems... tone deaf. At best.
The female hostile tech work environment is largely a myth nowadays. I've heard atrocious war stories from older female engineers who were treated like secretaries at former employers... and then they proclaim how much better they are treated at their current job. I've also heard numerous women with no actual experience paint an unappealing picture of what they perceive to be the work environment in (non-bio) science and engineering.
The reality is that the majority of women just aren't as interested in doing that type of work, either due to social conditioning (Barbie: "Math is hard") or innate lack of interest. There have been decades of effort to promote women in STEM positions with no real results other than the biology related sciences. Is that the fault of men or it is just because women aren't interested no matter how much boostering is directed their way? Is it really that important to put so much effort to create an artificially level paying field? Nobody is complaining about the paucity of male elementary school teachers. Why aren't there alarmists crying over that?
In my experience, the technical women are treated fairly and the negative image is just an outdated stereotype perpetuated by women themselves. I'm sure there is still a level of unfair bias and inappropriate behavior but from my observation the modern male tech worker is the most welcoming to women compared to other fields. I can't enumerate all the times I've heard inappropriate comments come from female coworkers that any male compatriot would not dare say for fear of going to a reeducation camp.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Exactly which war is Peggy the Programmer going to help us win? The war against 35-year-old virgins?
Maybe I'm too dim, but I'm just not seeing a meaningful connection here.
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Incredibly, though, this one is still working as a riveter as of about 5 months ago.
A common assumption I read here is that the male dominated culture is keeping women out of engineering and programming.
Let us indulge in a little thought experiment about two male dominated fields.
50 years ago Law schools and Engineering schools had less than 5% women. Today, Law schools are 50+% women and Engineering schools are maybe 10% women. We can therefore conclude a) Techie men are much bigger jerks than lawyers, or b) something else is causing this.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
"Brogrammers" aren't hostile to women, they're hostile to intelligence. Anyone with more than a few brain cells left, man or woman, would flee the fucking place as fast as possible.
That's not necessarily true. There are many high-income professions which are male dominated.
I think that there's a great deal of interrelationship between the way men and women treat each other, and the way people treat each other at work and outside it. And one of aspect of that that I think is not looked at often enough is the way people make their sexual choices. Women can feel under pressure to be thin and beautiful with large chests because of men's preferences, but men come under pressure, too - under pressure to have high status jobs earning a lot of money (or, at least, to be higher status and higher earning than their prospective partner - one ex-partner told me that she wouldn't have considered me if I had earnt less than her). Inevitably, this will push more men than women in to making the sacrifices to their personal well-being to gain those things. In doing so, they make the labour market and working environment more competitive, political and hostile, and so less attractive to everyone. But that disproportionately puts off women, who don't need to deal with that to find the 'best' partners.