Why are there so few female programmers? [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Career Prospects: Women at Management positions in Software

Why are there so few female programmers?

My wife asked me and I didn't know.

Answer 1

It could be because it's such a stupid job. Sitting in a darkened room, staring at a flickering screen, mumbling to yourself, trying to figure out why the page renders one pixel too far to the left.

Perhaps the girls are just too smart :-)

Answer 2

Answer 3

Cultural factors at work. Many of the answers here cite biological differences, but I find that difficult to believe given:

• In the US, programming was initially considered "women's work." The ENIAC was the first computer developed in the US (used to automate ballistics computation during WWII) and most of the programming was done by 6 women. At the time, programming was seen as clerical work, akin to secretarial work. Jennifer Light's paper, When computers were women, is an interesting read on this topic.

• In other areas of the world, such as India, China, and Eastern Europe, the gender ratio is much more balanced. If I remember correctly, women actually earn a slightly higher percentage of computer science degrees than men do in Bulgaria -- I don't recall the exact figures, but this is mentioned in Cordelia Fine's book Delusions of Gender (not enough reputation to post a link), which has nearly an entire chapter discussing the under-representation of women in computer science.

Answer 4

As a female programmer, I have to say that I have rarely met resistance or discrimination from any man. Most seem happy that a girl has walked into a male-dominated arena with her head held high. Coworkers are mostly pleasant, and I've never felt held back or underpaid.

However, I dread being asked by a woman what I do for a living. Nearly always am I either immediately ignored, told off, or receive a slight disgusted look. Or they completely misunderstand what I meant by programming and start talking about doing art for websites.

Answer 5

From my experiences women are put off by programming for two reasons:

• It's an inherently single-threaded activity, and women prefer multi-tasking more than men do (on the average).
• The field requires a mindset of rigidity and rule-following, which attracts people that prefer stereotypical gender roles. Most of the men in the field have a higher tendency than men on average to treat women according to gender roles.

While the second reason is culturally driven, I think the first reason is primarily due to biology. This seems to be backed up by studies I've seen on the relative performance of women and men at multi-tasking. It's possible that the whole thing is 100% cultural, but it seems unlikely. I find it very hard to believe that the biological difference between men and women is strictly cosmetic, when the cosmetic difference is so radical.

While I agree there is gender inequality in the field of programming, I reject the implication that we should strive for a 50/50 split. Gender equality is not about statistics, it is about individual opportunity. We should have equal encouragement and opportunity for girls and boys to get into the field of programming, and equal treatment after they enter the field. But we can get that equal opportunity and still end up with an 80/20 split.

Answer 6

Probably something to do with social expectations. It wasn't that long ago we were supposed to stay at home and raise a family, and it takes a while for that to work its way out of a generation.

Answer 7

I would have voted up and commented on the other answer that had similar content to mine (and was voted down), but I need to add support to the biological component despite my lack of 15 reputation to do so.

Before you vote me (or him) down, consider whether political correctness is impairing your critical thinking. Males and females are very different, in a multitude of areas. Women have demonstrated in numerous cultures that they are just as capable as men in being able to learn the skills and perform the tasks involved with highly technical professions such as programming, but the disparity comes down to a case of motivation.

Whilst there are certainly exceptions to every rule (some boys like dolls, some girls like guns), by and large, women trend towards feminine activities (which tend to have a focus on creative and social components) and men trend towards masculine activities (which tend to have technical, physical and competitive components).

This is not 50's chauvinism at work, this is millions of years of evolution and biology. Women are not discouraged from this field at all, they just don't trend towards actually being interested in it at all.

Answer 8

Most games are targeted at the macho market. Don't underestimate that hook. I would have never ended up in an IT field if I didn't have to fight with 640 KB to get games to run.

I think part of the answer lies in the answer to one of the hardest questions in a marriage (assuming it's a traditional marriage): Why does the woman care so much about that paint color while the man cares so little?

Answer 9

In my country, take an example of my class. there was around 62 students in computer science engineering out of which 24 was girls. Believe me or not out of 24 twenty got passed with good score. Imagine out of first 10 students 7 was girls. Of course they showed more intelligence than boys but alas only 3-4 of them are interested in doing job. They all wanted to get higher degree but not to work. I asked to few of them and they replied that they just want to get married and nothing else.

But from last two years I can see lots of female programmers and they are working very good.

And the moral of the story is that "It's all about necessity and interest".

Answer 10

Hanselman had an interesting podcast not too long ago that dealt with women programmers in the Muslim world. He interviewed two women and their perspective on why there are so few western women in IT was surprising.

I could be misremembering but I think freedom of choice was cited. Also, one woman's story was dripping with irony: she wanted to leave IT but her father made her stick with it.

Answer 11

There is a big biological part. We are programmed to behave differently, and thanks to that, we can combine our efforts to allow procreation. But this doesn't prevent us to do "unconventional" decisions. In fact, I like the idea to be unconventional.

There is also the cultural aspect. In western countries, it's not common, but in some countries like India, there is a lot of female programmers. Certainly because there, programming is less a passion than a profession.

Still today, I've haven't met any girl programming by passion. I know they exist since one of them actually wrote a wonderful book called "Design Patterns, Head First".

I believe it's a combination of the biological & cultural reason.

Answer 12

The same question gets asked for the engineering field and I think that here in the United States the "answer" that most people have started to accept is that there are cultural differences that lead young women to make different career choices than men. Likewise, I've read a couple articles saying that women who started out interested in going into software development decided not too after starting college for a verity of reasons (e.g. harassment by men, didn't find the classes interesting, work was too tedious, etc).

One interesting issue is that the statistics can be skewed a bit by industry in that some sectors have a more balanced gender ratio (assuming that 50-50 is possible). Based upon my observations in the industry I work in, there are a lot more women doing laboratory work than men and a fairly even distribution of women with PhDs as well. On the IT side of things, the development teams tend to have more women in them, but usually they are roles such as project manager or analyst as opposed to the developer positions.

The US Department of Labor has some interesting reading on this subject from a more generallized standpoint in their Women's Bureau section if you want a bit of light reading.

Answer 13

As a woman and a programmer, I used to ask myself the same question, until I got to graduate school. Most of the people in my information systems program were women, and most were not Americans. In this country, men have historically migrated more to programming for a variety of reasons others have discussed. In many other countries, there doesn't seem to be such a difference. I'm curious to know why this might be the case.

Answer 14

Simon Baron Cohen*, in The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism, suggests that there's a spectrum of brain masculinity/femininity, where on one end you have autism and people with generally a strong ability to analyze things systematically, and on the other end of the spectrum you have people with strong empathy. The more "male" the brain is (which is dependent, iirc, on hormone secretions during pregnancies, and other factors) the more it tends to be located toward the first end of the spectrum. If true, this can be a partial cause of having less women in exact sciences, engineering, and so on. There are of course other reasons, for example external social factors.

The author is professor of Developmental Psychopathology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom

An interesting read.

---

• Yes, it's his cousin.

Answer 15

There's a lot of truth in this answer.

[anecdote]

I probably wouldn't have become a programmer if it weren't for my dad. Waaaay back when VB5 was shiny and new, my dad had gone as far as he could go as a mechanic in the Air Force, so made a career change and went to school for a degree in microcomputer science.

He showed me one of his homework assignments: it was a square shown on screen, you click on the square and turns into a circle, you click on the circle and it turns back into a square. Was I impressed? No. More like BLOWN AWAY BY THE SHEER AMOUNT OF AWESOME.

I asked my dad how he did it, and it seemed so easy. So he'd always show me his programming assignments, asking me if I could figure them out, we had some pet projects we worked on together like a poker hand evaluator and centipede game, etc.

I loved it! I always stole my dads textbooks and taught myself how to program, made cute little apps as a hobby, and 10 years later it spiraled out of control and became a career. I'm now a better programmer than my dad.

[/anecdote]

There's another female developer on my team who has almost exact same story.

We care about more than just boys and make up. I think its important for programmers, dads especially, to be involved in developing their daughters latent talents and interests.

Answer 16

There's a factor I haven't seen mentioned yet.

I'm not claiming that it's universal, but I remember a not-too-subtle undercurrent of sexism and outright misogyny in my CS program, both among the professors and other students. Given that I can count the number of women who went through the program with me on one hand, I think there's a correlation. The program my wife went through at a different school was an order of magnitude worse; she was repeatedly groped by a classmate, and her complaints were met with a "tough shit" from the department chair (she quit the program shortly afterward).

My industry experience hasn't been that much different; if you're a reasonably attractive woman, you are a target for inappropriate attention from some fairly gross personalities. You'll be valued for your programming skills, yes, but you're just as valued for your boobs.

Answer 17

Based on my experience.

Back when I was college, female population where more than the male when we graduated in our IT department. But after that, those females did not went to seek jobs that inline them. One said, trouble about programming just have to stay to her college life. Maybe that's one reason.

Answer 18

Girls play with Barbie's and Boys play with Computers.

Jokes apart, reason could be nature of Job like sitting in front of an computer and thinking is not an easy task.

Answer 19

I think social perceptions and pressure. I think as the trendy girl gamers evolve perhaps we'll see more female programmers. Maybe they should have more computer programmer Barbie dolls, shrug.

What's funny is the first programmer is female, Ada Lovelace.

Answer 20

Looking around me, I think a lot of it has to do with lifestyle. Put simply, the programming lifestyle as described by a lot of men (take start ups as an example), where it's almost a complete obsession, just doesn't appeal to women.

In the areas where it's more stable - say maintenance/systems programing/systems admin, more stable working environment with some recognition of life outside cubicle/desire not to depend on pizza boxes for lunch....there are more women.

Women are inherently good at problem solving. When the problem is "lifestyle is rubbish", then the solution is "don't get involved".

I've seen similar debates where women are pretty much castigated for not going about programming the male way - they don't pull the all nighters, or the obsession and that's somehow less? However, in my experience, that doesn't mean they write worse code (often it's better). But the programming culture in many - dare I say it - Anglo-Saxon programming shops is unattractive.

Answer 21

I'm a bit surprised by the question, perhaps I was under the misimpression, that a heavily skewed gender ratio was peculiar to my particular workplace. Having done the higher education thing in the 1970s, women in physics and engineering were rarities, but it seemed that quite a few ended up in computer science, and even mathematics. I currently work at an ME software vendor, the ratio of user trainee's in class (these would be practicing MEs, not programers), is maybe 15-20% women. Compared to the low single digits percent that was common when I was that age, that looks pretty good to me. I assumed programmers would have an even greater female participation ratio.

One anecdotal observation regarding my own family. I did software as a career, not by choice, but because it was the only decent career path available to me. I wanted to avoid it -you spend most of your time struggling with complicated broken things, which isn't my idea of something which promotes mental health.

In any case my wife had started out as a programmer, but her first job was very unpleasant assembly code maintenence for a now defunct computer manufacturer. She hated that and switched to technical writing and would never again consider any sort of programming. So perhaps the differential social pressure to make a high wage, even if the profession isn't that intrinsically attractive is part of the reason the schooling to the profession pipeline leakrate is so skewed.