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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.
Must've been us misogynerds who have the temerity to suggest to a woman that something could be done in a better way.
Not sure how much longer I'll be in the field. One can only be called sexist so many times over proprietary software that doesn't work the way a woman wants it to, even if I agree with her. One can only be called sexist so many times after devoting years of one-on-one mentoring because the person leaves due to harassment from other women. It's funny. When I have to break the bad news to a guy that a vendor isn't willing to implement something we want or when a guy I'm mentoring walks down washout lane, then it's not sexism. On that basis, I'm pretty sure the person in the mirror isn't the problem. (Whoever responds to this suggesting that without reading the next paragraph gets a cookie.) These accusations of sexism tend to say more about the accuser and the efficacy of the media slur campaign against tech.
Protip for anyone who's reading this. I've found turning off the computer and doing things on paper is a very effective way to short-circuit the idea that "computers are for boys" or that computers are scary and hard. (Although there's nothing to be done about some women who presume that computers come naturally for me because of my gender and not because I've been doing this since I learned to read decades ago, at least nothing that a man may do--I've tried: it only backfires.) Use props when teaching about arrays, queues, and stacks (nothing fancy--just cut out some paper squares, put brackets on two of them, and let your apprentice come up with things to push, pop, shift, and unshift). Yarn is useful for more than nanoseconds; think linked lists. Get a game of checkers for red/black trees. Whoever came up with interpreting sorting algorithms as dance is a genius! I can turn a bright young woman (or man) who unfortunately has an English or Humanities major or somesuch into a programmer. I've done it before. What I can't do is turn a young woman (or man) who barely graduated high school into a programmer. But hey! I must just be a misogynerd!