This seems like a good opportunity to plug the hackathons at the various women's colleges! LOL
Wellesley has a big one open to everyone (I think), as does Smith, and Bryn Mawr hosts one called SisterHacks open to the 7 Sisters (yes, even the men at Vassar.) Lots of women coding on the floor.
Since the late 80's, a lot of other fields have open up to women. Business is not nearly as much of a old boy's club, as it was in the past.
Perhaps with more options available, programming doesn't seem as appealing. For example, engineering has improved since the early 1980s, when only 5.8% of engineers in the U.S. were women. It's still low, with only 14% of engineers being women, but much higher than it's been in the past.
That is a lot of engineers, that in the past may have felt limited to programming.
This is a pipeline issue. By and large, employers want to hire CS majors for software engineering jobs and as Data10 points out, there’s a 4:1 ratio of male to female CS grads.
is the time commitment less in other countries where this gap doesn't exist, or are the women different in those other countries?
EU has much stricter labor laws and general culture is oriented much more towards work-life balance. However, the ratio of female programmers in larger in less developed countries like India and Iran, and within EU I believe it's Bulgaria, one of the poorest. This may be attributed to more opportunities for women to have a decent salary and be respected in fields other than STEM in rich European countries. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/
It doesn't mean women are less capable to go into STEM fields, or might enjoy them less. I have a friend in Paris who used to work for a French branch of a large well-known IT company, first as a programmer, then a manager. She liked her job but finally got tired of it, became an elementary school teacher and is enjoying it very much.
One other factor not mentioned in this yet in this thread was the advent "PC" culture in the mid-80s, when the first "PC-compatible" computers came on the market, and before "PC" came to mean political correctness. It was a very specific social demographic. Building computers became the white male nerd equivalent of working on cars, and this eventually segued to "LAN parties", multi-player games, creating web servers and "hacking". Many from this group did go on to get CS degrees, and their influence persists to this day.
I found this ironic in the article, regarding the very first successful woman they profiled:
But even as Wilkes established herself as a programmer, she still craved a life as a lawyer. “I also really finally got to the point where I said, ‘I don’t think I want to do this for the rest of my life,’ ” she says. Computers were intellectually stimulating but socially isolating.
Could it just be as simple as males on average prefer working with things and females on average prefer working with people?
This may be attributed to more opportunities for women to have a decent salary and be respected in fields other than STEM in rich European countries.
It might indeed be that there are simply more and better options for women now, over software coding.
I'm not sure I believe that is the reason there are fewer now, and here, but it probably contributes.
It doesn't mean women are less capable to go into STEM fields, or might enjoy them less.
Agreed. But STEM as a whole is a different thing, this article focuses on software coding - computer programming - specifically. Because lots of women used to do it and now far fewer do (as a % of majors and jobs vs men).
Interesting, @Data10 . I think we need to ask where these women are going. At one point, late 80s?, I wanted to shift into a more engineering role (including returning to school to make it official) and the engineers around me were adamant that the earnings potential and the variety of challenges were much better in marketing, (which was the broad category for what I was doing, in a hybrid role.) At that time, engineers tended to top out early. Maybe in the 50k range, while marketing allowed a lot more.
What I did find remarkable about my role was that the need for highly qualified staff was high and *no one* stopped to say, "But she's woman." True in other companies Iworked for, as well. I mostly worked for start-ups and appreciate that.
Maybe the question is, why do more men stay in CS, keep coding, not branch out. ?
roycroftmomRegistered UserPosts: 2,108Senior Member
I don't think it is a pipeline problem at all. Few high school girls study or college women major in CS, so it won't just naturally fix itself in the future. CS coding can be very well paying, and it is unfortunate that many women don't even think of it as a career option. Hackathons may appeal to some, but bear very little relation to the actual work world, so I'm not sure why participation in them is considered desirable by employers.
Hackathons may appeal to some, but bear very little relation to the actual work world, so I'm not sure why participation in them is considered desirable by employers.
Hackathons are about collaboration and solving problems, and major ones generally have well-known corporate sponsors (Googles, Facebook, JP Morgan, etc.). The companies sponsor these events for their own benefits (e.g. discovering new talents), but most student seem to participate primarily out of their intense interests. For some of them, it certainly doesn't hurt to establish relationships with the sponsors via these events.
Maybe the question is, why do more men stay in CS, keep coding, not branch out. ?
Perhaps these men are passionate about CS? Don't we encourage our kids to pursue their passions?
Anyway, coding is only a small part of CS. CS is not about coding but solving problems computationally. AI, a branch of CS, will likely make many of the programming jobs themselves disappear. Some of those who pursue these programming jobs may become disappointed.
This topic fascinates me and I even had a thread about this a while ago when another study on this topic appeared.
When I studied math and computer science in the late 70's I was in the minority as a woman. However, there were several women in the company where I worked who were above me and could serve as role models. I was successful and did not feel that the culture was negative towards women at that time.
Things definitely shifted, as the article states and I think the article is correct in saying lots of it is cultural. Horrible sexism in the high tech companies, which is not only allowed but encouraged. In what other industry could managers get away with only hiring those who are "like" them (as is discussed in the article). Why would an intelligent woman want to subject herself to this type of behavior when another pursuit would welcome her and her skills?
My daughter, a recent college grad with a Math degree, was in a smaller minority than I was. Many tough Math classes started out pretty even but ended up overwhelmingly male (so many women dropped the class). She had only one female Math teacher in her entire college career (so no female role models). She currently has a quantitative job (not coding), and is again in the minority. However, her company's culture is fair and women are welcome and respected.
She had an internship in a tech company where she clearly saw that her boss as a woman was treated disrespectfully. Nothing her boss said was taken seriously by the male engineers in the room. It was obvious, blatant, and an accepted part of the company culture. She knew that she wouldn't ever want to work in that type of environment and sought something different when she graduated.
I think the college programs are a good start, as are the initiatives for younger girls ("girls code programs"), but the industry will need a huge shake up from the top down to make any significant changes. Tech companies need to stop being run by the "boys only" nerd club.
The problem is pretty simple. CS is still rooted in math and science. From empirical evidence, females in general start losing interest in math and science by the time as early as junior high, even in our area which is 70-90% Asian. We see this in our school numbers year after year. I would say that for my kid’s HS Calc BC and Physics C classes, 80% were male.
I can't find the data (my google skills are failing me), but women in other sciences is much higher than CS or Math. So the argument about girls not being interested in science is wrong. I even saw an article (again with charts that showed the numbers), saying that CS and Math were losing bright science-loving women to Bio because Bio was more welcoming to women. The numbers of women in Medical school is also high.
Replies to: Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong?
Wellesley has a big one open to everyone (I think), as does Smith, and Bryn Mawr hosts one called SisterHacks open to the 7 Sisters (yes, even the men at Vassar.) Lots of women coding on the floor.
Perhaps with more options available, programming doesn't seem as appealing. For example, engineering has improved since the early 1980s, when only 5.8% of engineers in the U.S. were women. It's still low, with only 14% of engineers being women, but much higher than it's been in the past.
That is a lot of engineers, that in the past may have felt limited to programming.
EU has much stricter labor laws and general culture is oriented much more towards work-life balance. However, the ratio of female programmers in larger in less developed countries like India and Iran, and within EU I believe it's Bulgaria, one of the poorest. This may be attributed to more opportunities for women to have a decent salary and be respected in fields other than STEM in rich European countries.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/
It doesn't mean women are less capable to go into STEM fields, or might enjoy them less. I have a friend in Paris who used to work for a French branch of a large well-known IT company, first as a programmer, then a manager. She liked her job but finally got tired of it, became an elementary school teacher and is enjoying it very much.
Could it just be as simple as males on average prefer working with things and females on average prefer working with people?
It might indeed be that there are simply more and better options for women now, over software coding.
I'm not sure I believe that is the reason there are fewer now, and here, but it probably contributes.
Agreed. But STEM as a whole is a different thing, this article focuses on software coding - computer programming - specifically. Because lots of women used to do it and now far fewer do (as a % of majors and jobs vs men).
What I did find remarkable about my role was that the need for highly qualified staff was high and *no one* stopped to say, "But she's woman." True in other companies Iworked for, as well. I mostly worked for start-ups and appreciate that.
Maybe the question is, why do more men stay in CS, keep coding, not branch out. ?
Anyway, coding is only a small part of CS. CS is not about coding but solving problems computationally. AI, a branch of CS, will likely make many of the programming jobs themselves disappear. Some of those who pursue these programming jobs may become disappointed.
When I studied math and computer science in the late 70's I was in the minority as a woman. However, there were several women in the company where I worked who were above me and could serve as role models. I was successful and did not feel that the culture was negative towards women at that time.
Things definitely shifted, as the article states and I think the article is correct in saying lots of it is cultural. Horrible sexism in the high tech companies, which is not only allowed but encouraged. In what other industry could managers get away with only hiring those who are "like" them (as is discussed in the article). Why would an intelligent woman want to subject herself to this type of behavior when another pursuit would welcome her and her skills?
My daughter, a recent college grad with a Math degree, was in a smaller minority than I was. Many tough Math classes started out pretty even but ended up overwhelmingly male (so many women dropped the class). She had only one female Math teacher in her entire college career (so no female role models). She currently has a quantitative job (not coding), and is again in the minority. However, her company's culture is fair and women are welcome and respected.
She had an internship in a tech company where she clearly saw that her boss as a woman was treated disrespectfully. Nothing her boss said was taken seriously by the male engineers in the room. It was obvious, blatant, and an accepted part of the company culture. She knew that she wouldn't ever want to work in that type of environment and sought something different when she graduated.
I think the college programs are a good start, as are the initiatives for younger girls ("girls code programs"), but the industry will need a huge shake up from the top down to make any significant changes. Tech companies need to stop being run by the "boys only" nerd club.