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

Totally agree with Bechdel

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite porn always passes the Bechdel Test.

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.

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]

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

[shadowrat]

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. "

i'm a white male and most of my projects don't pass. It's a joke i know, but it's a good metric in a way. Really, joking aside, to pass, a project should feature at least one function written by a developer that calls a function written by another developer. i'm aware that sadly, I don't work as well with others as i should. I often reinvent the wheel and isolate my codebases. From what i've seen, this is common.

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

[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

[Orgasmatron]

Sigh.

It is sad how many people don't get your point. It isn't that anyone is expecting much software to fail your test, it is that the test itself is foul. The original test.

Perhaps subtlety is no longer called for. Run the whole article through the translator.

I'm about fucking done with the SJW invasion of slashdot. Is it possible to take the site back?

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.

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

[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.

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

[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?

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?

Author vs. content

[DrYak]

This even stupider, because the original "Bechdel Test" is about the *content* of the movie.

i.e.: the Alien movie discussed in Bechdel's comics happens to have been written and directed by guys. But none the less, it depicted strong female caracters, who actually have motivations, goals, etc. of their own.
the female *characters* of the movie aren't passive decorations, they are not only here to observe (or obsess about) the guys, they have a life of they own, their actions are here to move the plot forward.

counter exemple: you can probably find tons of romantic film or novels, written by author which happen to be female, but completely fail the test as their female protagonists are more or less only here for the sole purpose of falling in love with male caracters.

This "Programmer's test" is stupid because it only considers the *author* of code.
An author should be judged solely based on the quality of the work produced, no matter what sets of reproductive organs the author happens to be equipped with.
What should be judged in theory, is the depiction of gender role in the produced work. As code is sexless, there is no point in that. It doesn't depict roles or creates models for future generation, in merely gives instruction to hardware.

As always, it only goes one way...

[bradley13]

I teach computer science. No one will be surprised to hear that most of our students are men. This is a problem, at least, we are continually told that it is.

The news yesterday had a report on schools that train people to become small-animal veterinarians here in Switzerland. They happened to mention that 80% of the students are women. This is apparently fine; there is no outcry to find more male veterinary students.

My son works in professional child care, where women are something like 95% of the workforce. No one seems terribly concerned by this, even though the lack of male role models for young boys is arguably an actual, genuine problem.

Personally, I am very tired of articles like this. Why the continual one-way focus on women? Why can't we just let individuals be individuals, and do whatever they want? Ensure that there are no artificial barriers due to gender (or skin color, or hair color, or whatever), stop pushing people in directions they don't want to go, and just let people choose whatever career they want.