Shut up and build something
There is something that has been weighing on my heart for a long time now that I feel I need to get out. This may make some folks angry, and I apologize in advance. However, I think it's imperative to open up this dialogue.
I don't need to tell you about the horrible deficit of women in programming. Less than 10% of the 2009 CS grads were female. This is down an incredible amount from two decades ago where the equivalent degree program (MIS) attracted nearly 40% women.
As you can imagine I get asked about this issue a lot. Some of the more cynical men I have spoken to have asked, "Why do we need more women in software?" I'm not going to sit here and say we're better at project management and design it drives me crazy when people go there. Though our biology does predispose us to these things I like to think that I contribute the same value as my male counterpart. Suggesting we are better at some things also says we are not as good at other things. I don't want to reduce the value of my sisters.
The answer to the question of "why" is simply: we don't. The industry would survive and likely thrive just as much without us. If you are someone who is super into white and asian guys software is for you. If you don't mind your daughters being completely turned off by the idea of being the only female on most teams and having no female role models then definetely keep the status quo. However, if you want to make this a community that is full of excellant men and women something needs to change.
I have been invited to countless "Women in Tech" events by some really awesome people. I understand that these events are beneficial to some, and I don't dispute that. I choose not to go because I don't like to segregate myself from my fraternal brothers in software. I alos believe that nothing is accomplished by discussing this over and over again. We have been talking amongst ourselves for a long time and we are yet to find a solution.
One of the biggest issues in this movement hit me yesterday in the PDC Keynote. Some developers of now successful start ups such as Icanhazcheeseburger and Seesmic. I have seen a lot of these cool products demoed, both here and at the New York tech meetup and they all have one thing in common. Their creators? Men. All dudes.
THAT is where we are lacking, not in support groups, in end product. Off the top of my head I can think of only two female developer leads on projects, Sara Ford and formerly Leah Culver. THIS is how we will attract girls to programming. When they look at us and say "wow, I can do that." We can talk until we are blue in the face, however, unless we take action we are not role models.
So, I'm challenging you ladies, GET OUT THERE. Fail, over and over until you succeed. Let's show this crop of high school girls how awesome it is to be a woman that produces awesome software. Let's focus on clean code, and beautiful apps, and getting the recognition for what's important; not being a WOMAN in software but for being an amazing developer with great ideas. Let's be the ones on stage showing off our super popular new apps. In short: let's stop talking about it, let's get out there and get awesome.
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Comments
Will Rogers on on 11.19.2009 at 2:51 PM
In your 3rd paragraph you may be comparing apples to oranges. This may explain away the disparity you're perceiving.
From my understanding, MIS degrees (I have one) are more business-focused and are not equivalent to a CS degree. At the school from which I graduated, the CS degree required more technical classes and higher math classes. Accordingly, a much higher percentage of women opted for the MIS route.
Brian Ensink on on 11.19.2009 at 3:08 PM
Sara, I think you overlooked one general reason why we need more women in software. If more women pursued CS degrees presumably this would not significantly change the number of guys pursuing the same degrees. Instead it would just increase the pool of qualified students -- and help weed out the dead weight that can just barely pass their CS classes. The quality of CS graduates would dramatically increase because of the increased competition.
Undoubtedly some of these women would become brilliant and gifted developers and compete against and win over less qualified developers in the marketplace.
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malcolm on on 11.19.2009 at 10:18 PM
You raised the point about differing biologies. There is hardly room for argument here; women and men have different imperatives evolutionarily. I.e., think about how some essential female biological functions generally lead to increased temporal awareness. The tangent I'm spawning from your statement is that different physiological focuses can lead to different manners of approaching problems, which can, potentially, result in an increase in the variety of results.
In essence, homogeneity will tend to keep output somewhat cookie-cutter, while diversity allows for a broader spectrum of expression. Women in engineering can bring different processes of analysis to bear. Nowhere is this as powerful as when women are behind the helm.
(btw, looking at comment 3, I recommend a capcha for submission here. :-)
Matt on on 11.19.2009 at 10:35 PM
I've been working for Microsoft now for about 2.5 years. One thing about this company, at least from my vantage point, is there is a lot of female developers. On my team of about 90 people, I would say roughly half are women. They are a good mix of testers, PMs and a lot of developers.
some random asshole on on 11.19.2009 at 10:41 PM
excellant spelling
anonymous on on 11.19.2009 at 11:10 PM
Completely agree with Brian above. More the women start adapting computer science as their major better would be the quality of software engineers in the industry. At least that is what my experience tells me. Most of the girls during my undergrad and grad school were brilliant computer scientists.
Sympatheic Dude on on 11.19.2009 at 11:49 PM
.......
.......
THAT is where we are lacking, not in support groups, in end product. Off the top of my head I can think of only two female developer leads pon projects, Sara Ford and formerly Leah Culver. THIS is how we will attract girls to programming.
==============
I apologize and no offence, but you lost me right there. Leah Culver?? As any sort of role model? Come on. The only reason she gets any profile because she is slightly pretty
-- a geekier version of Julia Allison -- and she know how to manipulate the male blogger/techie. Cleaning up Python module documentation and turning it into some sort of blog post does not a "role model" make.
I would have liked it very much if you would have mentioned women like Radia Perlman, Barbara Liskov, Niniane Wang, Ester Dyson, Katie Sierra, Katerina Fake ... even Carol Bartz (read The Economist profile). These can serve as a much better role model (from parents point of view) and have solid reputations and careers.
And in now way should you underestimate the ones who work quietly in the background and support/suffer their techie spouses who do extremely good work: partners and wives. Linus Torvalds has Tove, Alan Cox has Telsa Gwynn, Bram Cohen has his sysadmin wife Jenna, Donald Knuth has Mrs Knuth. I say the tech community has a debt to these ladies for a providing a stable environments so that their spouses can continue to thrive.
Sexist? Probably....but true nevertheless.
And please do not put forward names like Carly Fiorina or Meg Whitman. Former screwed up one of the greatest engineering cultures in history at HP, latter ran eBay for 10 years without any real innovation -- and screwed up the Skype deal so badly, they're suffering today. And now they want to be politicians -- probably apt.
Randall on on 11.20.2009 at 12:30 AM
I wonder too why this is. I'm not sure it is something we can "change". I wonder why it is that some things are male dominated or female dominated. Why is poker male dominated? Why are most astronauts men? Airline pilots? Why are most librarians women? Nurses?
Why do we believe we need more women in CS? Existentially speaking, why do we need? Will something greater be achieved? It has been suggested that diversity leads to better solutions.
Is it an accessibility problem? Do we want to make programming more accessible? How do we do that? Do we teach it better? Do we make it easier?
As a commenter above mentioned, MIS is quite different from regular CS. To really see if we are losing females, we should compare graduation rates among the same majors.
You suggest in the post that more women should create and succeed in order to show women that women can create and succeed. You want them to do it for someone else. You want women to succeed -- not for their own benefit -- but for the benefit of *other* women. Why?
Maybe there is something different about men and women that drives them to succeed in different fields. Sometimes, with programming, you have to *want* it. Not for someone else. Not to be great. Not to make money. Not for your family, but simply because you want it. You must make it work. You must do it and hack on it until it works. Poker is like that. You have to want to win. If you just throw in the cards, you lose. I don't think someone can be externally motivated to succeed in poker or CS. It's something you have to want -- hard.
Do women *want* like that? What do women want?
I don't know the answers, I only have questions really.
Anonymous on on 11.20.2009 at 1:04 AM
If you don't want to be singled out as a woman and just let your code stand on their own (which, I think is a really AWESOME idea), why is your domain girldeveloper.com?
I don't own boydeveloper.com.
Berislav Lopac on on 11.20.2009 at 4:18 AM
It's a gross overgeneralization, but statistically speaking women need stability to foster slow but steady growth, while men need action, adrenaline and quick but large returns. It's evolutionary embedded in us, and wile there are exceptions it holds today just as well as when we lived in caves.
With regards to IT, that means that women will flock towards stabl environments such as banks, large infrastructure systems and such, where they work just as well and skillfully as their male counterparts. On the other hands, project that naturally attract more media attention -- most notably Web startups -- will be a perfect environments for action-craving men, which explains the apparent lack of women in what IT is supposed to be according to the media.
abp on on 11.20.2009 at 4:22 AM
Hey, the problem i see is simply the absent of interest in technology. Most woman i know are hard to get interested in technology, even if it's just trying another browser or things like that. Even the suggestion to go for a career in software development results in explanations why that couldn't be the right thing.
Sure, there are exceptions to that. I personally know 2 excellent female developers. But without a lot more women that are into technology it's not likely to see as much excellent applications written by women. But i'm looking forward to see this happen. :)
Dana on on 11.20.2009 at 5:03 AM
I gave a few talks on this topic and have since moved on - you are right; we can talk all day but is it really OUR responsibility to recruit our sisters into the field? Nah. We got into this field presumably because we enjoy it. I'd like to see more female devs head up open source projects too - that is relatively easy to do (at least at the outset).
One comment - some of the responses to this very post illustrate why many women do not wish to go into technology. Some of the elitist male counterparts seem to have a need to try and make others feel "less than" - without adding any real value to the conversation at hand. Condescending, sarcastic, belittling snide comments aren't helpful in the dialogue either fellas.
Tobin Titus on on 11.20.2009 at 5:50 AM
I agree with Matt above. At Microsoft, we don't have the same issues, necessarily. We have a lot of women that I see as role models myself. Lili Cheng (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/lilich/), Betsy Aoki (http://blogs.msdn.com/betsya/), Emily Kruglick (http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=jh-AAAAAEBAJ&ie=ISO-8859-1), Mai-lan Tomsen Bukovec (http://blogs.iis.net/mailant/) just to name a few. These are people that I think have a lot to teach me - not because they are female, but because they are bad-asses at what they do!
Of course, we have groups too, but not really "support groups". These are inspirational groups: www.microsoft.com/.../wam.mspx
All this said, you and I discussed how I feel about this topic. No need to rehash over things but in summary, I think we agree. We can create all the support in the world but the only folks on this planet capable of fixing the problem are women themselves. I applaud all that you do toward that end.
Steerpike on on 11.20.2009 at 6:00 AM
Interesting post. For some reason it made me think of this address to the American Psychological Association www.psy.fsu.edu/.../goodaboutmen.ht . Not totally sure why, but I thought it was an interesting explanation as to why more men are at the head of successful startups.
chakrit on on 11.28.2009 at 4:07 PM
Hi, just found your blog from your post on SO.
I wanna add one to your list of cool female role models in tech: Tess Fernandez ... how many womens do you know who can master debugging memory dumps, and find bugs where teams of men couldn't spent days to find and gave up and have to call in for support?
Keep up the great work!
Matt Ellen on on 12.03.2009 at 4:28 PM
I think more female developers would be a good thing. I'm glad to hear such a balance exists at Microfsoft.
The reason I want more female programmers is that males do come together when it's mutually beneficial for them, and are capable of cooperating. However we rarely build lasting programmer communities, (notable exceptions being the 2600 community (obviously not a programmer specific community, but a lot of programmers there) and Stack Overflow) which I believe are what are required to make code better.
For whatever reason females are good at making cohesive communities. Males are always competing to be in charge and that makes for unstable communities. We forget that a community doesn't need a leader, what it needs is cooperation and a direction.
A good developer community, even in a small team, means that developers pass on their knowledge happily and accept criticism (although neither gender does that particularly well) because we're all equals.
Anyway, keep up the good fight.
@Yoav Perry on on 12.09.2009 at 1:16 AM
I was going to say something about the fact that most women in tech pick an outfit like guys in construction... but I figured there is something real and important to say here:
Israel is the third largest center for tech entrepeneurship after Silicon Valley and New York (Would strongly suggest reading Startup Nation). In Israel however, the ration of male/female in tech is nearly 50%/50%. That kinda throws all of the theories about why out the window. It's a social issue and nothing else.
Israeli society is driven by tech; it is appealing, exciting, and hot (Heck, the Israeli version of HBO's Entourage is about 4 guys who are making an exit for their startup). At the very least, tech makes for good job security; a job where you don't have to lift heavy things and carry them. Remember though that in Israel women serve the army too; many of which come out of their service with the skills of a Masters degree in computer science, working with theories, use cases, and mission-critical inventions one can only dream of working with. Also in Israel men must serve the country one month out of the year, so all that stuff about pregnancy and babies as the cause of chauvinistic boss not to hire women really has no merit. There is also no fear of female bosses. People get used to having female superiors in the army and that's the end of that.
So in other words, an equal workplace, respect,
highly qualified workforce and a field of employment that is considered "in" are all the differences that make it work
John Galt on on 12.11.2009 at 5:27 PM
usually, the ones who feel/say they're developers are the ones who can only talk but don't know much....
Mike Portson on on 12.16.2009 at 6:45 AM
I agree that there is very few women developers, but this is (in a way) normal situation. Women and men are equal for me but some of female still have problems with believing in own strengths. Many of them say "it's not for me, because I'm a woman". I would answer that this is not like working in mine, everyone can do that. Maybe all women need is a little bit more optimism.
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