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

Here's MY test

[NotDrWho]

If you can substitute the term "white male" into your premise and suddenly find it offensive, then was actually racist/sexist all along.

"a project that passes the test must feature at least one function written by a white male developer, that calls a function written by another white male developer. "

Re:Here's MY test

[Anonymous Coward]

Please explain how you fit majority and minority into his post, which does not feature those words.

Keep in mind that whites are a minority in the world, and that men are also a majority (in most countries and worldwide).

Re:Here's MY test

[Anonymous Coward]

Woman are actually the majority in many countries. Including the united states.

http://www.census.gov/prod/cen...

Minority does not mean what you THINK it means. What you mean is 'disadvantaged'.

Re:Here's MY test

[Anonymous Coward]

It offends me because I could give two shits who wrote a function in a program. All I give a fuck about is does the fucking thing work the way it's supposed to when it hits production; and if not whose salary am I cutting in half next quarter? All groups - Men, Women, each with various levels of melatonin dictating skin color and race - contain shit programmers as well as brilliant ones. It's about the fucking dedication of the coder. Fuck the race card. Fuck the gender card. If I have to fucking fix your shit in production cuz you couldn't be bothered to make sure it works in test and model environments, you're a shit coder. I don't give a shit who you are.

Re:Here's MY test

[sycodon]

Or, women don't give a shit about programming. Like I don't give a shit about interior design, or the latest clothing fashions, two areas dominated by Women.

Re:Here's MY test

[fey000]

If you can substitute the term "white male" into your premise and suddenly find it offensive, then was actually racist/sexist all along.

Why on earth would you find this offensive if you made the swap? Because you're a white male and it would highlight how virtually no software fails the white male test, but a huge amount fails the female test?

Why on Earth is it relevant if a software project passes the test? Does it make the code better?

This is a completely made up non-issue. Should we start rabblerousing about the white guy Bechdel test in the NBA? What about the unfairness of native English speaking programmers in Russia? Should we start a test for them? No, because it's fucking stupid, and contributes 0 to anything other than the wallet of those who get "offended" about "representation" as a profession.

Re: Here's MY test

[Fwipp]

You just unintentionally illustrated the entire point of the Bechdel test - how many team software projects pass your version of the test? Nearly all of them, right? The bechdel "test" is meant to illustrate how low the bar is, and how many movies/projects still fail it.

Re:Here's MY test

[itzly]

What makes you think women don't like programming? Is it because there are so few women doing it? That sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Because most women have simply no interest in it. Otherwise, they could just buy a computer, and teach themselves how to do it. They could buy a hardware device, plug it into their computer, and discover that Linux has no support for it. They could decide to figure out how to write their own device driver, and become a kernel hacker. They may even start their own business. Many men have done exactly that, without anybody pushing them, or even supporting them.

Re:Here's MY test

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. It could be that female privilege gives them opportunities to work in other careers that men are excluded from. For example, it could be due to rampant discrimination in education where 76% of primary and secondary school teachers are female. With 3.7 million teachers, we have 864 thousand women just in the US that pull from the software developer candidate pool. Teaching isn't the only field where we can see this kind of imbalance.

After looking at this, we can also look at the number of women who choose to work as opposed to MUST work. If men could simply sleep their way into not having to work, you can be sure the number of men in fields that require life long dedication would decrease. I'm not saying that all women sex their way through life, but during the years when career choices are made, there most certainly are a very large number of them that do, and most of the rest have the option. The fact that this affects career choices isn't because of some genetic difference between men and women. PEOPLE who have the privilege of not working are simply far more likely to... well... not work.

You can see this with attitudes towards parents after the birth of a child. A father is more likely to get the advice that he now has to buckle down with work, while women are asked if they will just quit working all together. This is going to have an effect on people's career choices. Not because of some genetic factor, but due to environment.

Re:Here's MY test

[jedidiah]

> But in practice we have half the population who are capable of programming but who are severely underrepresented

That's a totally unsupported assumption.

It also ignores the question of DESIRE. It completely degrades half of the population by stripping them of any sort of free will at all.

That's the whole problem with these do-gooder crusades that fixate this kind of "imbalance" while ignoring the the imbalances in the skilled trades or nursing.

Re:Here's MY test

[itzly]

Have you considered that there may be societal pressures about what a woman is supposed to be, and a nerdy programmer doesn't fit that?

Yes, I have considered that. Have you considered that there's also societal pressures against men who are nerdy programmers ? Or against men wanting to become fashion designers ? Still, if you have a passion, you're not going to let society stop you.

Or try giving a young girl a lego set for her birthday and see what the other adults think.

I have a son and a daughter, and we had boxes of legos, cars, dolls, and various other toys all in the living room where both could play with anything they wanted. And from the beginning it was very clear that they had their own interests. Even if they were both playing with the legos, my son was always building cars and bridges with them. My daughter was building houses and people.

Re:Here's MY test

[izat]

The proportion of women in my workplace is about the same as the proportion of women in my computer science courses. Blame schools, parents, or the media. This imagined discrimination in the workplace has nothing to do with it.

The dumbest thing

[JonathanP.Bennett]

Seriously, this is the dumbest thing ever. Just make the code work. I don't care at all if women wrote it. There are so many issues that actually matter, and this isn't one of them.

Re:The dumbest thing

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the kind of thing that discourages women in traditionally male-dominated fields. Nobody cares if a programmer is a man or a woman if they can write good code. But when a team member starts disrupting the work culture with irrelevant things like making things a man vs. woman contest, they're no longer going to be welcome regardless of their sex.

Re:The dumbest thing

[Anonymous Coward]

And what if the people who could make the code work are women who don't want to work in IT due to some hitherto-undiscovered reason?

The hitherto-undiscovered reason was discovered a long time ago. It's just that you radfems refuse to listen to it because it goes against your already strongly held prejudices. It's simple: When women have the freedom to choose all else being equal, they choose differently to men.

Just once, it would be fucking great if one of these radfem retards started a business that was, you know, concerned with software development. As far as I know the only businesses they ever start are about their own self-promotion. They almost never studied STEM subjects themselves.

Re:The dumbest thing

[Austerity Empowers]

Seriously, this is the dumbest thing ever. Just make the code work. I don't care at all if women wrote it. There are so many issues that actually matter, and this isn't one of them.

Moreover, it's probably sexist. We have established that there is a gender imbalance issue in the workplace. If the requirement is that two women are in close collusion on the project, that's statistically less likely than two men (which may number 5:1 in some fields, including mine). The mathematical proof is left to the reader, but select 2 from N where N is a collection of one of three genders with a skewed distribution: Male, Female & No Interaction where No Interaction defines tasks that are purely self-contained and represents the greatest part of the distribution. The way to pass this test then is to force your women to work together and isolate them, functionally, from the men. The odds of those two interacting increases dramatically (but as much of our work is solitary, it's not a definite). To get definite interaction you need to have a woman work on the user facing portions of the code (i.e. "outside" the engine) and another who is a user. Either way this doesn't strike me as good for anybody, and certainly doesn't seem very equal opportunity/diverse/ideal or even rational.

It has to be much, much worse on the kinds of software projects I see a lot these days. Someone buys/acquires some code written elsewhere by persons gender unknown but almost certainly male (more so as the software approaches the OS/hardware level). You can have an entire company of women tying their code into this codebase and they may never write a function for each other, each tackling this big hairball independently for her own module. They may not have cause to interact, and your all-woman company fails the test.

Bad idea. In any event I don't think it solves any issues I see affecting women in the workplace in a helpful way, it just seems to be more distracting data-points leading away from the cause of the actual problem that should be examined.

discussion

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

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.

And what exactly is it you want to "discuss"? Are you entering this "discussion" being open to the idea that your ideas about "gender balance" are wrong? Or are you just trying to hit other people over the head with your particular views?

This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

The Bechdel Test is about female characters. It depends on the story taking their characters and lives seriously.
This stupid thing is nothing like that. It totally trivializes the real gender inequalities that still exist.
Code has no gender.

Someone doesn't undestand the Bechtel test.

[gurps_npc]

It isn't about getting jobs for female actors.

It's about people misrepresenting the world as lacking interesting women with something on their mind besides men.

If all you do is insist on two functions, each written by another women calling each other, you have made a mochery of the test.

What are they trying to show?

[91degrees]

The Beschdel test is based on the idea that many writers will create female characters not as actual characters but as a love interest. Hence the qualifiers. It's not a perfect test but you can at least see how it is likely to correlate to a specific type of poorly written character.

So what ae they testing for here? Are they saying that female developers are just macguffins?

Re:Totally agree with Bechdel

[ChrisMaple]

It is only pervs who consider images of unclothed women degrading.

Re:Totally agree with Bechdel

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, it's just a joke.

By the way, I like to have sex with women because I LIKE IT. Not because I want to objectify women. Not because women are some subclass species that must be subordinate to my every whim. Because it's in my nature to want sex with females of my species. The fact that you feel this is wrong in some way just speaks to how out-of-touch you are with reality.

Re:Totally agree with Bechdel

[ShanghaiBill]

Kinda sad this got modded up so quickly. it seems a kneejerk putdown.

It was a joke. Which is all this idiotic topic deserves. The Bechdel test makes some (although not much) sense for a movie, where the characters and dialog are the whole point. But for a software project? Why should I care about the gender of who wrote the software I am using? Why should I care about whose function calls another function written by whoever?

How many garbage trucks, driven by women, pick up trash cans that were put on the curb by a woman? My suspicion is the percentage is very low. Is Obama doing anything about that?

Re:Totally agree with Bechdel

[Jane Q. Public]

That is the crux of the problem, that you do not care.

Absolute nonsense. No programmer I know gives the slightest damn who wrote a function they use. They just want it to work. And that's the proper way to look at it.

Insisting that a program include functions written by women that access other functions written by women is by definition sexist. The opposite of sexism isn't more sexism in the opposite direction... it's truly not caring.

You don't fight discrimination by institutionalizing discrimination. It hasn't worked, and it doesn't work. You fight discrimination by eliminating its consideration.

I no more care whether a software tool I use was written by a woman or a man than I care whether a bolt or a piece of material used in a weekend project was made by a woman or a man. It just has to work. Who made it is completely irrelevant... and should be.

Re:classic example?

[ewibble]

"The objectifier treats the object as something whose experience and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account" -- check

Your experience of sex must be very different from mine. A very important part to me is that the woman enjoys it too.

The other parts well, are very general.

"The objectifier treats the object as a tool of his or her purposes"

Arguably you do pretty much everything for your own purposes, even making someone else happy. You do it because you experience pleasure from there happiness.

"The objectifier treats the object as interchangeable (a) with other objects of the same type..."

If someone you want to have sex with refuses, what are you supposed to do? Not have sex ever again because no other man/woman will do? If you get no longer want to have sex with someone clearly they are not interchangeable since the old person will not do.