10 PRINT “issue”; 20 GOTO 10; 15 BREAK;
I want to talk about gender diversity in the tech workplace, mainly because it’s better than talking about Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump attempting to wave their micropenises at other.
I write code and I don’t see very many female programmers. Statistically, there aren’t very many. That’s just a fact. The female programmers I have met were usually every bit as good or bad as their colleagues — you can normally measure the ability of programmers in groups rather than as individuals because duh, this is not the place for a screed about code sharing, code standards and interchangeable resource but there you go.
Logically therefore, one can reasonably assume that one of these is true
a) the female programmers we see are outliers who happen to be exceptional and all the shit ones got fired
b) the female programmers we see are outliers who happen to be relatively bad and thus weren’t forced out by a giant conspiracy of underperforming male programmers who were terrified of losing their jobs
c) women largely don’t apply to be programmers.
Let’s apply Occam’s Razor to these three options.
a) this would leave a significant paper trail of fired female programmers. No such trail appears to exist. Due to Occam’s Razor, we will not take this evidence of a conspiracy to hide it but rather assume it was never there.
b) is, due to the lack of paper trail, actually slightly more believable but depends on a conspiracy and is therefore almost certainly nonsense.
c) the plural of anecdote is not data (unless the count of anecdotes is statistically representative) but I’ve done some IT hiring and firing and this reflects my experience. Available statistics also lend credence to this option. So for now, let’s accept it as the most likely alternative and move along.
So, why don’t (many) women apply to be programmers? Let’s posit some reasons.
(i) Women face a societal pressure to avoid STEM subjects and thus feel that others fields suit them better
(ii) Tech companies are discriminatory and don’t hire women
(iii) Women believe that tech companies are discriminatory and don’t hire women
(iv) Programming is intimidating due to the largely male population of programmers
(v) Programming largely looks like an underpaid, unsafe shit job with no prospects
(vi) Male programmers don’t mentor female programmers well because we’re socially impaired nerds
(vii) oh fuck, spend my life with the chess club nerd-virgins I’d rather die
I can only give my own opinion here because statistics generally do not support a definitive why; they can highlight that an issue exists but determining why an issue exists is the job of an analyst and everyone’s analysis differs. That said, mine will at least be free of political leaning because I only actually care about working with the best programmers.
I think there’s a large dose of (i). Gender roles are largely defined by society from birth and although that’s something I’ve tried to avoid with my own sons, I already get furious by proxy at all the girly shit marketed at girls and tough-guy shit marketed at boys. I have two sons and hope to have a daughter one day and if I do, I hope she’ll be as ornery and intractable in pursuit of what she wants to do as I am and as her mother is. With her grandfather’s unbreakable stubbornness, too. Anyway, (i) is a societal problem that we can all work on at home but not something the tech industry can react to.
(ii) might once have been an issue back in the “IBM rules the world” days but today, any company that refuses talent on arbitrary grounds will sink and they all know it. Still, the memory of it leads to (iii) fairly directly.
(iii) is dangerous because it’s so seductive in providing an easy target for blame and an easy solution in the form of positive discrimination. I suspect it’s a factor, especially among certain activists. The problem is that if tech companies actively fight this — say, by visibly promoting female programmers — they’re going to a) not necessarily promote the right person, the stats don’t lie, and b) create a culture of tokenism and quota-filling which leads to resentment.
(iv) is almost certainly a factor but that’s chicken&egg. What do you do, fire 66.6% of the blokes?
(v) should be a factor even if it isn’t. Most IT jobs suck. I don’t know whether women know this or not but I’m going to posit that they (generally) don’t due to low numbers and it’s not a factor however much it deserves to be.
(vi) That’s a big issue. By and large, programmers hobble ourselves with our inability to communicate clearly and our high-school virgin lack of social confidence among anyone other than those we perceive as our peers. Luckily I don’t have it so much (I might be communicating poorly and generally repulsive but I think I’m doing okay so the confidence thing is not an issue). But yeah, I suspect women don’t get as good training on the job as men do for this reason.
(vii) this is just a feeling but I suspect it’s a factor. Programming isn’t cool. We’re not rock stars, we’re not fashion designers, we don’t (often) save lives or do cool catwalk presentations and nobody loves us. We’re the mechanics in the background who make the ugly bits that the pretty bits cover up. Oh sure, we have status among ourselves but it’s nerd-status. Ask an 18 year old girl if she wants to be admired by a bunch of guys who think Iron Maiden t-shirts are evening dress and she probably won’t go for it. Not exactly an Amal Clooney career choice.
Finally, having gone through all this, we have to ask — is it a problem? And if so, what do we do about it?
Well, I think it is a problem because I want to work with the best, especially if they’re better than me and I can learn from them. Odds are, some of the best never wrote a line of code due to at least some of the reasons above.
Further, I think anyone who doesn’t think it’s a problem has their own interests rather than the interests of our industry at heart. We should be gathering and encouraging talent, not putting knowledge in silos and worrying about our own inadequacies. We’re the future. We’re going to wipe out and automate all the shit jobs that kill people and bore people and waste people. We’re going to give humanity time, time to create and think and play and be people instead of cogs. I don’t think we can do that for everyone unless everyone is represented in the effort. We’ll miss stuff. We do that. We need help.
So what can we do about it?
I realize this is going to be an unpopular opinion but I don’t think positive discrimination is helpful, at least at the mythical “quota” level. You can’t go around making people do jobs they don’t want to do or are simply not right for, whatever the reason. You also can’t just fire the right proportion of the male programmers because then who’s going to write the code we need now? And it leads to shit like James Damore writing weird-ass bullshit about how women physically can’t be as good as men because his Nazi mates on reddit all agree with him. For the record, firing somebody who puts on the record that he thinks his co-workers are inadequate because they’re women is entirely reasonable.
I think probably the best thing we can do is not legislative but domestic. We raise boys and girls differently. Bastard marketing chimps advertise at them differently. They get taught differently, whether you want to admit it or not. That’s wrong. Okay, maybe the teaching in schools bit can be legislated but the rest is down to parents and surrogate parents like childcare professionals and nurseries. We’re the only ones who can do anything with that.
This applies to boys too — social pressures and shaming of boys and boys being afraid to talk to girls are hurting women’s chances at decent training in the IT workplace. The clique of Mean Girls who will socially cripple you for talking to one of them must be destroyed as if it never existed. The gender apartheid we allow to flourish must be ended.
It will take time, inevitably. Time nobody wants to spend, perhaps, but there’s no other option. One day A-Level physics classes might be representative and if that day comes, we know we’re getting there.
We also need to accept the idea, unpleasant thought it undoubtedly is, that I’m wrong. It might be that women just don’t like the actual work of IT jobs and that it’s not societal pressure or discrimination or gender predisposition for falling into a certain area of the autism spectrum but just the way it is.
Thing is though, we can’t know that until the other factors are removed.
A lot of work has already been done. More needs to be done. Let’s get busy.