> What is now considered a male-dominated field, was once defined as “women’s work.”
Once? It's naive to think that these attitudes do not persist, albeit in somewhat disguised forms, perhaps.
At some universities, for instance, engineers regard CS majors as "wimps". Engineering is hard, CS is soft.
Moreover, think about how there is an attitude that some "softer" or "easier" programming is lower on the pecking order. While programming as a broad category may not be "women's work", web design (even with client and server scripting) is "for girls" and, say, writing drivers for a network switch is for "real men".
Oh, the hard/soft stereotyping in digital tech is alive and kicking!
I briefly did front end web design work many many years ago. Now I have a masters in software engineering, two books published in web scraping in Python and Java, and years of experience in back end Java, database architecture, data science, and all that jazz.
The vast majority of the recruiter spam I get, as a female, is front end web development or UI/UX work. I removed all mention of "HTML/CSS" type skills from LinkedIn, but that hasn't stopped it. I'm beginning to suspect that removing my photo from public profiles would probably do more to stop the inappropriate job spam than anything I could actually change in LinkedIn, however...
> The vast majority of the recruiter spam I get, as a female, is front end web development or UI/UX work.
I'm transgender, and I can tell you that I got that kind of spam both before and after I transitioned. In fact, most recruiter spam I've ever gotten is wholly irrelevant to my skills.
You're getting that spam because the positions are in high demand, so there are a lot of them, and recruiters will spam all their positions to every single email address in their database.
They just plain have no respect for other human beings. Half the recruiter spam I get uses my old name, even though I legally changed it almost a year ago and changed it on my resume (which I posted to all job sites) a few months before that. I also list on every job site that I cannot relocate and I'm only seeking full-time work. Most of the recruiter spam I get is for positions out of town and for contract jobs. They never get it. I've written scathing emails to recruiters lambasting them for suggesting I uproot my life and move out of state for a shitty 6-month contract. I usually don't get a reply.
One recruiter took the cake. He emailed me about one such position, then called me the next day after I ignored his email, and I told him I wasn't interested in any contract work and that I don't ever want to do business with him. A few days later, he emails me again about the same position. I replied with a Cease & Desist notice making it clear that he is to have no contact with me from now on, and then he calls me again to try and convince me to take the job. I spent the next few minutes shouting at him and berating him for harassment. I planned to contact his firm's HR department about his conduct, but I never got around to it, sadly.
This is unrelated to the topic at hand, but I'm trying to learn web scraping in Python and I'm looking for a source to use. Would you mind sharing a link to your book?
I see a few reasons for this (at least where I went to university).
First, CS required less math classes. Harder than most sciences, but still not as much as the default for engineers. There was a correlation between who math a STE major required and how hard it was viewed. Psychology which didn't require calculus and had a watered down stats course was considered the weakest. Physics and Engineering was at the top.
Second, professors in engineering were far less forgiving (I took a few classes). They were stricter and while their work wasn't harder, they were far more likely to just give a 0 for doing something wrong. Also their tests had more chain problems (answer to question 1 is input to question 2), and every one I had always insisted you had to have the right answer (so if you had the right answer to question 2 using the wrong answer from question 1, you got a 0).
Third, there were easy computer degrees. Name a degree in Information Management, while not CS, was often associated and it did not require the most complex CS classes. There were not easy engineering degrees.
I think the point is that it was a much more literal connection.
Specifically, programming itself was often considered secretarial work and, as such, was generally given to women.
Men tended to participate as engineers or mathematicians.
I don't think anyone would contend that CS is a female-dominated field although I take your point that some may consider it somewhat lower on the testosterone chart than traditional engineering.
What do they think about math majors? It's similarly "soft" in that it is a study of entirely intangible and abstract concepts - nothing to do with manly machinery or contraptions at all.
What do they think about electrical engineers? Circuit board sewers...?
Sometimes I get a little happy - maybe even proud - when I read about the achievements of women who pioneered this field (especially the awesome Admiral Hopper.)
Then I stop smiling and remind myself that, even in praise, it's not relevant.
Sometimes people claim that women are biologically, statistically, just not as good/interested as men at programming/technology, and point to current gender balance in tech as evidence of this ("There's a reason there's lots of male programmers, men must be just better!")
Remembering some of these women, and the early history like this, is very relevant today to show that that's nonsense.
The interest part is not nothing. Most women programmers I've known were on their way to something they considered better. My wife, for example, slung C++ and Java while getting her MBA in evening classes. For her programming was a path to earn a living until she got her 'real' job on the executive track. Another woman I worked with only wrote code for a while and moved on to run her father's machine shop. In both cases these women were good at what they did, but saw software development as something to do before the real job.
I interviewed at a company a week or so ago and was very happy to see their lead developer was a woman. I didn't dare bring up the topic in the interview, but I'd have loved to hear if she was aiming for CTO at a later point in her career instead of escaping tech work.
The shame of it is, almost any dev team I've been on is better with at least one capable woman on it, yet so few stay.
Modern women are statisticaly less interested in programming. That's because boys 20 years ago got c-64 or PC because they wanted to play games, and girls 20 years ago got barbies.
Turns out barbie doesn't have the same side effects.
Because any other approach, even those with the best of intentions, eventually boils down to the supposition that what you've got between your legs is somehow relevant.
And you know what - on an aggregate, societal level - it might actually be: men and women are not the same, and that's OK. But this is a statistical observation that only applies to the population as a whole and is completely invalid at the individual level. If you feel yourself reaching for this knowledge at that level then evidently you don't have enough good information about the individual in front of you - that is the problem you need to fix.
If we took away all the contextual stuff we know about our founding mothers and fathers and referred to them only with asexual codenames like 'Person X', absolutely nothing would change. If one's aim is achieving equality, the only way to truly do that is to strip away all the bullshit: gender - just like hair colour, accent, and anything else you care to name - shouldn't even register. It's a non-thought.
If that's what feminism is about then I'm a feminist; but I'd never actually call myself that because 90% of the feminism I see today is most definitely not like this, it seems instead to be about making gender register in a very big way - and that's just as misguided and self-destructive as misogyny.
It's a damn shame that ENIAC's programmers and those that followed them get no greater mention in the annals of history than the footnote that "computers before 1945 were women". I had a really good CSSE education, yet until recently, if you asked me to name a notable female computer scientist, Countess Lovelace or Grace Hopper would be the only person to come to mind, and I would be a little hazy on their accomplishments to boot (then, I would have said something about Hopper creating COBOL when her work was really quite a bit more fundamental and wide ranging than that, and as for Lady Lovelace, even now without peeking at Wikipedia, I think she had something to do with the math surrounding Babbage's engines and couldn't be more specific). It took a recent Imgur posting to become aware of people like Margaret Hamilton, who _led_ some absolutely astounding work for the Apollo Program. I'm sure there are other women of whom I'm ignorant that are every bit as important to modern computer science and software engineering as luminaries such as Turing or von Neumann. If some kind of history of the profession is to be included (and I think it should), there should at least be some mention of them during one's CSSE education.
Sidenote:
Disclaimer: I was heavily influenced by my Biology professors. I don't think society evolved in vacuum separate from genetic evolution. So while I don't appreciate insulting people by gender. I do however think there are gender differences.
Professional means getting paid, but there is a nuance of doing a proper job to deserve pay (even if there is no pay); a FOSS project that hasn't received even a dime in donations can be professionally developed.
I guess not professional appearance but professional standards.
Ex.I might expect a professional python programmer to follow PEP8 code style.
I think rather than coding like boy or coding like girl, we should be aspiring to be professional or at least competent .
That's the far bigger and inclusive problem.
On the topic of equality in general - As an old man and a father of a 22 year old woman let me tell you what I've observed - women don't need your help and when you act like they need your protection you're no better than someone who treats them as weaklings. It's a fine line and imho the best bet is to just treat them as you would anyone else.
Ugh. I am considering your intentions good, but your statement sounds evil.
Most human beings need protection and help. Programming is hard. Learning to program is hard. Leaving happily in these crazy times is hard.
Just be empathetic, dont be condescending and bam, your help will be greatly appreciated by men and women. That's what I think one should treat anyone else in this particular regard.
If you're talking protection in the physical sense, for 99% of women you're absolutely wrong.
I'm in the military and there are only a few women I know who would hold their own in a fight against a similarly fit man. I can think of maybe 1 off the top of my head.
Years of evolution made us this way, it can't just be undone by an egalitarian sentiment.
True, there are physical differences that are hard to overcome without help. But there is a lot of help out here in the modern world. Pistols, stun guns, pepper sprays, and other self defense techniques are just an example.
Whether or not someone is "act[ing] like [women] need [their] protection" is relative assessment and you haven't even accused anyone of fitting the description.
A good read. Although I was surprised the grandmother of programming, Ada Lovelace, wasn't mentioned.
Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. Because of this, she is often described as the world's first computer programmer.
As interesting as Ada Lovelace's and Charles Babbage's story is, their efforts have had little (if any) influence on the computer we know today. In a sense, they are not completely relevant when talking about modern computing. I also feel Lovelace tend to distract the subject on women in computing.
> I also feel Lovelace tend to distract the subject on women in computing.
Given that, as someone has already mentioned in the comments, there are people that hold the view that women are always at least second best to a man in regards to ability in computing because they are female, the fact that the first 'programmer' did so without documentation on a machine that existed in theory was a woman is very much central to the subject.
I agree, really it's Grace Hopper that we should be celebrating as "the woman who founded modern computing", because we're still feeling her influence every day!
> "Software design and programming were considered clerical work."
I realize that there's a certain art of code, and even a science that goes into the underlying algorithms, languages, and methodologies. Indeed I've spent the majority of my life now in one way or another transfixed by software development.
But it seems to me that the vast amount of code written is still, in fact, "clerical work". Whether it's gluing together enterpriseBeanBuilderExpressionListMochaBusinessLogicAuditingFactories, or hooking up your node.js to your express.js to your bootstrap.js to transfer JSON over REST into your DOM, or even converting your 4000 character, 50 pipe bash one-liners into nicely polished scripts that properly account for exit codes, handle non-standard locations for sysfs, and work on a multitude of platforms, at the end of the day, a lot of this really does come down to clerical-style work. The difference is that the language, terminology, abstractions, and platforms are more obtuse than the previous generation's clerical work. The nouns are different and strange, but the predicates are all the same.
There are indeed wondrous areas in computer science and software engineering, but I think for most of us, we're just doing fairly menial work. We feel smart doing it, because it's still new enough that the objects and content of it are still uncustomary for most folks, and in fact the best of secretaries and clerks have indeed possessed great intelligence. But at the end of the day, we need to recognize that most of what we do is mere clerical work, glorified only by the odd shapes of the more obscure symbol keys on our keyboards.
> It becomes increasingly important to value each member of a programming team regardless of gender, age, race, or creed to attract and keep the best minds to build our future software.
And this is actually what you don't want to do. You don't want to ignore gender, age, race, or creed. You want people to understand it, be open to the value it brings, connect with others outside their comfort zone, and embrace the differences. Doing things 'regardless' is how we've got here in the first place. We are all different. Ignoring those differences is not helping the problem.
Readit News
Once? It's naive to think that these attitudes do not persist, albeit in somewhat disguised forms, perhaps.
At some universities, for instance, engineers regard CS majors as "wimps". Engineering is hard, CS is soft.
Moreover, think about how there is an attitude that some "softer" or "easier" programming is lower on the pecking order. While programming as a broad category may not be "women's work", web design (even with client and server scripting) is "for girls" and, say, writing drivers for a network switch is for "real men".
Oh, the hard/soft stereotyping in digital tech is alive and kicking!
The vast majority of the recruiter spam I get, as a female, is front end web development or UI/UX work. I removed all mention of "HTML/CSS" type skills from LinkedIn, but that hasn't stopped it. I'm beginning to suspect that removing my photo from public profiles would probably do more to stop the inappropriate job spam than anything I could actually change in LinkedIn, however...
I'm transgender, and I can tell you that I got that kind of spam both before and after I transitioned. In fact, most recruiter spam I've ever gotten is wholly irrelevant to my skills.
You're getting that spam because the positions are in high demand, so there are a lot of them, and recruiters will spam all their positions to every single email address in their database.
They just plain have no respect for other human beings. Half the recruiter spam I get uses my old name, even though I legally changed it almost a year ago and changed it on my resume (which I posted to all job sites) a few months before that. I also list on every job site that I cannot relocate and I'm only seeking full-time work. Most of the recruiter spam I get is for positions out of town and for contract jobs. They never get it. I've written scathing emails to recruiters lambasting them for suggesting I uproot my life and move out of state for a shitty 6-month contract. I usually don't get a reply.
One recruiter took the cake. He emailed me about one such position, then called me the next day after I ignored his email, and I told him I wasn't interested in any contract work and that I don't ever want to do business with him. A few days later, he emails me again about the same position. I replied with a Cease & Desist notice making it clear that he is to have no contact with me from now on, and then he calls me again to try and convince me to take the job. I spent the next few minutes shouting at him and berating him for harassment. I planned to contact his firm's HR department about his conduct, but I never got around to it, sadly.
I see a few reasons for this (at least where I went to university).
First, CS required less math classes. Harder than most sciences, but still not as much as the default for engineers. There was a correlation between who math a STE major required and how hard it was viewed. Psychology which didn't require calculus and had a watered down stats course was considered the weakest. Physics and Engineering was at the top.
Second, professors in engineering were far less forgiving (I took a few classes). They were stricter and while their work wasn't harder, they were far more likely to just give a 0 for doing something wrong. Also their tests had more chain problems (answer to question 1 is input to question 2), and every one I had always insisted you had to have the right answer (so if you had the right answer to question 2 using the wrong answer from question 1, you got a 0).
Third, there were easy computer degrees. Name a degree in Information Management, while not CS, was often associated and it did not require the most complex CS classes. There were not easy engineering degrees.
Social construction of gender will seep into dynamics at any point where something can be argued as "weaker" than another thing.
Specifically, programming itself was often considered secretarial work and, as such, was generally given to women.
Men tended to participate as engineers or mathematicians.
I don't think anyone would contend that CS is a female-dominated field although I take your point that some may consider it somewhat lower on the testosterone chart than traditional engineering.
What do they think about electrical engineers? Circuit board sewers...?
The general opinion was:
ME was harder than CS.
Math majors were unlikely to get a job.
Electrical and Chemical engineering were harder than ME (especially chemical)
Civil engineering was a joke. (Probably because our statics and mechanics of materials classes were so easy in comparison with ME classes).
These aren't my opinions just some observations of general opinions of undergrads.
Dead Comment
Then I stop smiling and remind myself that, even in praise, it's not relevant.
Remembering some of these women, and the early history like this, is very relevant today to show that that's nonsense.
I interviewed at a company a week or so ago and was very happy to see their lead developer was a woman. I didn't dare bring up the topic in the interview, but I'd have loved to hear if she was aiming for CTO at a later point in her career instead of escaping tech work.
The shame of it is, almost any dev team I've been on is better with at least one capable woman on it, yet so few stay.
Modern women are statisticaly less interested in programming. That's because boys 20 years ago got c-64 or PC because they wanted to play games, and girls 20 years ago got barbies.
Turns out barbie doesn't have the same side effects.
And you know what - on an aggregate, societal level - it might actually be: men and women are not the same, and that's OK. But this is a statistical observation that only applies to the population as a whole and is completely invalid at the individual level. If you feel yourself reaching for this knowledge at that level then evidently you don't have enough good information about the individual in front of you - that is the problem you need to fix.
If we took away all the contextual stuff we know about our founding mothers and fathers and referred to them only with asexual codenames like 'Person X', absolutely nothing would change. If one's aim is achieving equality, the only way to truly do that is to strip away all the bullshit: gender - just like hair colour, accent, and anything else you care to name - shouldn't even register. It's a non-thought.
If that's what feminism is about then I'm a feminist; but I'd never actually call myself that because 90% of the feminism I see today is most definitely not like this, it seems instead to be about making gender register in a very big way - and that's just as misguided and self-destructive as misogyny.
* Lynn Conway, who co-launched the Mead & Conway revolution that made VLSI feasible for the first time
* Sophie Wilson, who developed the ARM architecture
Sophie Wilson was "born Roger Wilson" (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson).
"While struggling with life in a male role, Conway had been married to a woman and had two children." (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway)
Sidenote: Disclaimer: I was heavily influenced by my Biology professors. I don't think society evolved in vacuum separate from genetic evolution. So while I don't appreciate insulting people by gender. I do however think there are gender differences.
Another person on HN linked me to this documentary, which opened my mind. https://vimeo.com/19707588
That would pretty much mean the death of almost every open source project that depends on unpaid amateurs.
Because we put our heart in it - so we code like amateurs. The best professionals are amateurs who just happen to be paid.
I dunno, this feels off. Did I misunderstand the analogy ?
However as I'm usually short on time, I'd prefer to just read the scientific articles for myself.
Do you have any notable scientific articles from the book references to recommend ?
What does that mean? Suit and tie? Clean shaven, short back and sides?
Ex.I might expect a professional python programmer to follow PEP8 code style.
I think rather than coding like boy or coding like girl, we should be aspiring to be professional or at least competent . That's the far bigger and inclusive problem.
Most human beings need protection and help. Programming is hard. Learning to program is hard. Leaving happily in these crazy times is hard.
Just be empathetic, dont be condescending and bam, your help will be greatly appreciated by men and women. That's what I think one should treat anyone else in this particular regard.
I'm in the military and there are only a few women I know who would hold their own in a fight against a similarly fit man. I can think of maybe 1 off the top of my head.
Years of evolution made us this way, it can't just be undone by an egalitarian sentiment.
Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. Because of this, she is often described as the world's first computer programmer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
Given that, as someone has already mentioned in the comments, there are people that hold the view that women are always at least second best to a man in regards to ability in computing because they are female, the fact that the first 'programmer' did so without documentation on a machine that existed in theory was a woman is very much central to the subject.
But it seems to me that the vast amount of code written is still, in fact, "clerical work". Whether it's gluing together enterpriseBeanBuilderExpressionListMochaBusinessLogicAuditingFactories, or hooking up your node.js to your express.js to your bootstrap.js to transfer JSON over REST into your DOM, or even converting your 4000 character, 50 pipe bash one-liners into nicely polished scripts that properly account for exit codes, handle non-standard locations for sysfs, and work on a multitude of platforms, at the end of the day, a lot of this really does come down to clerical-style work. The difference is that the language, terminology, abstractions, and platforms are more obtuse than the previous generation's clerical work. The nouns are different and strange, but the predicates are all the same.
There are indeed wondrous areas in computer science and software engineering, but I think for most of us, we're just doing fairly menial work. We feel smart doing it, because it's still new enough that the objects and content of it are still uncustomary for most folks, and in fact the best of secretaries and clerks have indeed possessed great intelligence. But at the end of the day, we need to recognize that most of what we do is mere clerical work, glorified only by the odd shapes of the more obscure symbol keys on our keyboards.
ducks
"I swear, by clerical, I meant the clergy!"
ducks again
And this is actually what you don't want to do. You don't want to ignore gender, age, race, or creed. You want people to understand it, be open to the value it brings, connect with others outside their comfort zone, and embrace the differences. Doing things 'regardless' is how we've got here in the first place. We are all different. Ignoring those differences is not helping the problem.