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Survey: More Women Are Going Into Programming
itwbennett writes: We've previously discussed the dearth of women in computing. Indeed, according to U.S. Bureau and Labor Statistics estimates, in 2014 four out of five programmers and software developers in the U.S. were men. But according to a survey conducted this spring by the Application Developers Alliance and IDC, that may be changing. The survey of 855 developers worldwide found that women make up 42% of developers with less than 1 year of experience and 30% of those with between 1 and 5 years of experience. Of course, getting women into programming is one thing; keeping them is the next big challenge.
In all my years working in IT I have NEVER seen the kind of behavior that is claimed. Women get out of IT because IT sucks. It's incredibly socially isolating (working with a machine all day). *Most* women want much more inter-personal interaction. That's a fact.
They're not going to be tossed out as obsolete. As another poster above noted, women are a majority, not a minority. Just not in actual coding; they're a majority in places in management, project management, testing, and UI design. So the women are concentrating (smartly, I'll add) in things which will be the last things to be outsourced, if ever, and aren't as subject to age discrimination. As usual, this shows that women in general are more social than men, and move into jobs which require more socializing and less of just keeping your nose stuck to a monitor all day, even when it involves working with men who do exactly this.
Why not both? If 1/2 the population feels excluded they certainly aren't going to be helping move the craft forward. Being more inclusive means there will be more brains working on hard problems. That's a good thing.
The fact that 48% of first programmers are women does nothing to show more women are getting into programming. It is entirely possible (and maybe probable) that it's been 48% for a long time, and what we're seeing is not more women getting into programming but that a lot of them are getting out again quickly.
But... what I don't want to see is the political correctness infect programmer ranks. I like IT the way it is, something akin to the Wild West, at least places I've worked. I don't like working for women because they tend to lean to being PC, overly sensitive. I like the boys' club mentality of IT, always have, always will.
I rejected pair programming because I don't work well sitting next to someone. I rejected the notion of sitting in one open environment to "foster sharing and collaboration". Doesn't work for me. I need my own office where I can stream trance music all day long and focus on what I'm doing. Having to tiptoe around being nice to women, watching my language, being PC all the time. No. I love women, but as wife and friends, not colleagues.
Oh, get over yourself. I'm female and I gave him a mod point for that.
I haven't made use of my fainting couch in years, by the way.
-LaurenC
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Ah, ah, ah... You can't use male motivations if one cannot use female motivations. We need to MAKE SURE that there is a 50% male population in those areas. Isn't that how this works?
I think he's referring to situations like this one:
Three male developers have been tasked with improving the quality of the software systems they're responsible for. They're looking into using the Coq proof system.
They're sitting together in the office's open workspace discussing this tool. The conversation goes something like,
Programmer 1: "What do you guys think about playing around with Coq?"
Programmer 2: "I've played with Coq for a few minutes, but I don't like it very much."
Programmer 3: "Yeah, I've tried Coq a few times, too, and sometimes it's way too hard for me to handle."
Programmer 2: "Yup, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, too."
Programmer 1: "Ok, that settles it. Coq is no good for us, so we won't touch it."
Well, since they're in an open environment, some of their coworkers overhead the conversation. These coworkers include a couple of women, and a male homosexual who is transitioning into becoming a woman, all of whom work in project management and design. All three are extreme feminists.
Taking the discussion totally out of context, these coworkers mistakenly hear "Coq" as "cock", as in penis.
As you can imagine, this brings an extreme level of outrage to these self-righteous coworkers. They think they're hearing sexually explicit, and possibly homophobic, discussion in the workplace. They go to HR, and raise a shitstorm.
HR cracks down hard on the three male programmers, who have no idea why they're being attacked. They try to explain what Coq is, and how it has absolutely nothing to do with penises or sex. It doesn't matter. They dared to say a word that sounds like "cock", and for that they must pay dearly, because coworkers got offended.
Instead of using their skills to improve the products that the customers want and need, the programmers are now stuck fighting political battles over a total non-issue.
I think that that's what the GP was talking about. Situations like those.
There are much more interesting numbers than that. IQ is not a good indicator of overall intelligence, but it directly tests a few things like pattern recognition and abstract logic. While the curves of men and women are very close, the curves do NOT have the same shape.
The curve for women is steep while the curve for men is more shallow in comparison. This makes men's IQ more variable than women's (this same variableness compared to women is noted in tons of such charts). In addition, there are more men than women that are conceived (with miscarriage rates for males being 2x the rate of females and a ratio of around 100 women for every 108 men -- 105 men in the USA). These numbers become about equal by the 26 or so at which point women continue to gain (think about that, in the US, at least 5/100 men die before 26 -- if no women die at all).
From an evolutionary standpoint, this situation is fairly optimal. Women's genes are more stable meaning that fewer children are being born to absolute idiots. The expense of this stability is fewer women at the extremes (note: fewer does not mean none and does not mean that the women in the extremes are any less capable than men in the same category). In order to continue to push society forward, humanity rolls the risky dice with the men. 108 men are born with more geniuses, but also more idiots. A huge amount of these idiots are killed off early in life (which is probably why IQ favors men by a few points overall). The point in time when most men are considered to be at their most attractive also happens to coincide with the age where the genders approach balance.
Depending on which IQ analysis, the ratio of women/men at the 95th percentile is as much as 1 to 4 with the numbers skewing even more drastically in extreme top. The number of STEM jobs is estimated to be 7.6million, but that number includes non-technical roles as well (things like managers and "sales engineers"). If we accept the given numbers, then 1 in 18 people -- 5.5% of the population -- work in STEM. If these people generally correlate to the best and brightest (interestingly, our 95the percentile number), then we would expect to see ~20% of STEM workers to be women.
Since these numbers are accurately reflected in the current distribution, why would we assume that there is a shortage of women?
Finally, if STEM is so discriminatory, how do we describe other professions. Society as a whole and medicine in particular use to heavily stigmatize against women entering the field. The discrimination faced by women was very pervasive and fairly well-documented. Women dealt with the discrimination and proved how good they can be as doctors. STEM has far less stigma and far less resistance to women entering. Why haven't women done what they did with medicine? The answer is that the women who are both interested and have the capability are entering and succeeding. Any other answer will imply that women are too weak -- sexism of the most extreme kind.
The number of female hams (ham radio operators) is a consistent ~11% across countries, cultures and time. Back in the olden days of personal computers, hams were first adopters of the technology, being well versed in electronics.