A Bechdel Test For Programmers?

Nerval's Lobster writes In order for a movie or television show to pass the Bechdel Test (named after cartoonist and MacArthur genius Alison Bechdel), it must feature two female characters, have those two characters talk to one another, and have those characters talk to one another about something other than a man. A lot of movies and shows don't pass. How would programming culture fare if subjected to a similar test? One tech firm, 18F, decided to find out after seeing a tweet from Laurie Voss, CTO of npm, which explained the parameters of a modified Bechdel Test. According to Voss, a project that passes the test must feature at least one function written by a woman developer, that calls a function written by another woman developer. 'The conversation started with us quickly listing the projects that passed the Bechdel coding test, but then shifted after one of our devs then raised a good point,' read 18F's blog posting on the experiment. 'She said some of our projects had lots of female devs, but did not pass the test as defined.' For example, some custom languages don't have functions, which means a project built using those languages would fail even if written by women. Nonetheless, both startups and larger companies could find the modified Bechdel Test a useful tool for opening up a discussion about gender balance within engineering and development teams.

Comments

18F is not a tech firm - it's the government

[Anonymous Coward]

18F is not a tech firm. It's a technology program at the General Services Administration of the Federal Government. https://18f.gsa.gov/

Re:The dumbest thing

[JonathanP.Bennett]

Then someone else will make it work. The test suggest that we should care about the gender of the coder more than the effectiveness of the code. That is sexism. How exactly did I call for a stop to learning? If someone really wants to examine their code for such a test, that's up to them. I'll stick with prioritizing code quality over gender, thanks.

Re:Here's MY test

[NotDrWho]

Why on earth would you find this offensive if you made the swap?

I tell you what. Call a meeting with all of your minority and women programmers and ask them if they would find a requirement that all future code "must feature at least one function written by a white male developer, that calls a function written by another white male developer" offensive. If they say "No, it's fine, we're cool with it," then I'll concede the point.