Out of the many articles that bemoan the lack of women in technology, two recent ones stood out for me. One is an article about Etsy’s attempts to up the count of women engineers by Anne Friedman. The other is one that claims that India has a lot to teach Silicon Valley about its gender problem, by Vikram Chandra.
Both of these articles have one thing in common — they look for the source of the gender imbalance deep in culture. Both agree that the root of the problem is that fewer women pursue computer science in college (the ‘broken pipeline’, as Ann Friedman calls it), and that is the core reason one finds fewer women programmers in industry.
Ann Friedman blames the ‘hoodie archetype’ of the programmer in Silicon Valley. While Vikram Chandra talks about the mythology of the lone warrior surrounding the software industry. Maybe these archetypes do not gel with how girl students see themselves.
I applaud their intention, but ultimately I feel like both nibble at the edges and do not get to the heart of the matter. Why do women mostly stay away from programming careers? Let’s talk about that.
My Deal
A bit about me. I am a programmer, and have been for over twenty years. I’ve also been female for at least that long (and longer). I got my software education and first job in India. All told, I am an Indian female programmer. I now work in SOMA, the tech center of SF. For years, I ate burritos from the same South Park eateries where companies like Twitter were hatched; and now work round the corner from others like Pinterest and Adobe.
I mention these facts to tell you that I have a particularly good vantage point in this debate. Most such articles frustrate me because they state the problem of fewer women in moralistic tones, as if it is clearly rampant sexism that keeps them away. The low numbers of women are obvious for all to see, but the causality is simply asserted.
But I don’t find this convincing. If overt sexism was so pervasive in the industry, I would have noticed it around me. My daily interactions would not be as above-board and respectful as they are. Silicon Valley, in general, is not a hotbed of sexual harassment, despite the occasional conflagrations in the media.
Misogyny in the news
But…but… DongleGate! And CodeBabes! How can I possibly say that women in Silicon Valley are not harassed on a regular basis? Because most of the media oxygen is sucked up by either the gaming industry, where the adolescent user community has been taking pitchforks at the few women developers; or by the bad-boy behavior of CEO’s and founders.
But I want to focus on something else — I want to talk about the programmers, the nerds that fuel the fortunes. We are a lot more boring. The conflagrations on Twitter or the boozy billionaire parties have little to do with the day-to-day environment of programmers. The numbers of women in these teams is abysmally low, But the high-profile news stories do not have the explanatory power they are often given.
How could they? For one thing, the stories that rev up the media tend to be oddities that are not representative of anything. Here is an example of this genre — CodeBabes. This is a strange website that purports to teach you PHP while showing you pictures of scantily-clad women. If this were the norm in training, it would certainly have an impact on the number of women coders. The wonderful thing, though, is that the intolerably vast majority of training materials in programming tend to be dry, to-the-point, and completely devoid of sexual content. CodeBabes is about as representative here as the Hooters chain is of the restaurant industry.
Another such example is Titstare, an app that was presented at TechCrunch by an Australian duo. Almost immediately, they found themselves out-of-step with the culture in the Bay Area, and their subsequent apologies sound somewhat bemused. Once again, I am hard-pressed to see how this could represent the culture of Silicon Valley companies, or have anything to do with the number of women coders.
More importantly, while the media tends to see all of the tech industry as one indiscriminate blob, any insider will tell you that women are not evenly distributed among all job descriptions. Some skew female, such as project management and technical writing. Some are about fifty-fifty, such as analysts. And others, such as programmers, skew heavily male. As a matter of fact, more women manage programmers than program themselves. These are people that work together daily on the same teams towards the same product. If the tech industry were a seething cauldron of misogyny, it would keep women away from all these kinds of jobs — not just programming. It is this difference that needs explaining.
Goodbye, Brogrammer
But isn’t the Brogrammer keeping women away from being coders? Most discussions of women in programming trot out this unlikely chimera — a bro, who is a programmer. Now while there may be bros in management positions, we are talking about actual engineering jobs, and here, the Bro is rather scarce.
Let me tell you why. ‘Bro’ is a designation given to a particular sort of young white male who was a frat boy in college. He is a high-fiving, sports-watching, glad-handing extrovert. He might wear a baseball hat and drink lots of beer, preferably from kegs. He might have given nerds wedgies when younger. According to the stereotype, he wants to sleep with a lot of women and say things like ‘Score!’.
As an archetype of a programmer though, I have to tell you, the Bro is both inaccurate and insufficient. He is too extroverted to enjoy communing with the computer for eight hours a day, too high-level to enjoy being immersed in sea of detail, and too fond of victory to deal well with the daily defeats that technology throws at you. If a Bro mistakenly finds himself in a programming environment, he quickly self-deports himself into the business side of software where more glad-handing is to be had.
No doubt, there are plenty of Bros in that area — the business side of software, whether it be marketing, or product management, or sales. You might notice though, that these jobs do not skew heavily male. There are a lot of women in business jobs in tech companies. So how much explanatory power does the Bro have, when it comes to keeping women out of programming jobs? Not much.
Hello, Dudegrammer
If we are going to talk archetypes, let’s get our taxonomy right. The hoodie-wearing archetype identified by Ann Friedman is the Dude, not the Bro. A Dude might be seen wielding a ping pong paddle or wearing a hoodie. He might have very male ways of relating to their work, like calling a variable ‘that sucker’. While the Bro is hardly ever found in programming jobs, the Dude often is. While the Bro is more type A, the Dude is more type B. He is less extroverted than the Bro. He is geekier and more laid-back than the Bro. As a matter of fact he dislikes the business-school glad-handers with a passion. There is constant tension between the marketing bros and the programming dudes. One thinks the other is too abstruse and slouchy, while the other thinks the first is too fake and corporate.
Ann Friedman has a somewhat more nuanced take on the subject of women coders — she accurately says that the root of the problem is that fewer women start and complete degrees in computer science. She then speculates that perhaps it is this Dude archetype makes women look askance at programming as a career choice. I don’t find this convincing either, for the following reasons.
For one thing, it gets cause-and-effect reversed. What set off the initial influx of Dudes into programming? If there were no deeper reason, it could just as well have been women that flocked to it, giving it a feminine air. Or programming could have become one of those many professions that neither skew female nor male, like real estate agents, for instance. It seems to make much more sense in the reverse way — because so many Dudes flock to programming, it starts to build up this stereotype.
Also, it elevates the power of these stereotypes so much that it denies agency to women. We have plenty of it, thank you very much. The Dude supplanted the Nerd as the symbol of a Silicon Valley programmer. If enough changed in the climate and culture that Dudes could break the mold and insert themselves into what was then a Nerd-kingdom, why would women keep themselves out, just based on these similar nebulous notions?
The other reason I find this to be a stretch is that the Dude is not the only kind of programmer one finds in the corporate software environment, or even the most common.
Many teams consist almost entirely of first-generation immigrants from Eastern Europe, China or India. The nerdish engineer is still very much a thing. So is the abstract-thinking professorial type. All those types above are culturally quite distinct from the hoodie-wearing Dude.
Why would the Dude archetype have so much power, but not the others? For that matter, how did these non-Dudes figure they would take up programming despite the stereotype, and yet the stereotype is strong enough to keep women away?
The India Difference
I believe that Vikram Chandra’s lone warrior is the same hoodie-wearing Hacker Dude identified by Ann Friedman. No doubt this is a very American type. Since India does better with encouraging women into IT careers, it seems like we have found our smoking gun, right? Dude missing; women programming; QED?
The author then looks for the source of this difference thousands of years back in Indian history, back the to the importance of debate and collaboration in the foundational books of Hindus. While I don’t deny that cultural threads can stretch all the way back to the beginning of civilization, I tend to look for more prosaic reasons, if one is to be had. Fortunately, one is.
The absence of the Hacker Dude and the greater numbers of women programmers can both be explained by a simpler fact — that in India, programming is more a profession, less a vocation.
Once schooling is done, kids in India go through the career mill. Parents get into a sort of fever at that time in their child’s life when a few points up or down in the child’s final mark sheet might determine their careers. Every machine is thrown into gear. For the kids fact-memorization becomes an extreme sport. Every long-forgotten acquaintance that might have ‘influence’ is reached out to. Some colleges will accept bribes but call them donations, so that amount is stockpiled.
While kids from wealthy families might be free to take up a vocation and kids from poor families are struggling to be literate at all, kids from the giant middle-class strive to get a degree that will give them a profession. Without one, a middle-class child will fall behind into genteel poverty. I have seen this happen in my family, and been terrified of this fate myself.
Many doctors, dentists, engineers of all types, chartered accountants, lawyers, and such, are created by this career mill. The child’s interest in the subject is often only a small part of the career choice. In modern India, with divorces becoming more common, girl students are herded in just as much as boys (some parents think of a well-paying profession as a substitute for dowry). Clearly engineering is one of the main choices of career, and parents of girls often consider software engineering as the one kind of engineering that is suitable for women.
So while American students are contemplating Peace Corps or thinking about art school or anthropology, Indian students are single-mindedly pursuing a professional degree. While an American student might combine a major in Biology with a minor in Literature, engineering students in India get to study only as much English as will enable them to write office memos.
It is a different mindset and produces a different cohort. Programming offices in India are filled with competent engineers who aim to use their education as a springboard into a comfortable management job, because an entire life spent programming was not what most wanted anyway. American students who bother with this very rigorous course of study are usually the sort who would be programming regardless, and can’t believe that someone will actually pay them to do it.
This is why computer science in America is the province of the hobbyist, for whom programming (and tinkering, and gadgetry) is a lifelong passion. While the working stiff who is studying for a programming degree for practical reasons is overrepresented in Indian professional colleges. And fewer women than men have programming as a hobby.
This is true is India as well. One of the few universities in India that isn’t just a career mill, that tends to attract students who have pursued their interest in engineering from early age, are the IIT’s. And the proportion of women in the IIT’s is very low — less than 10%. The few women on campus are often derided and put down. So does India have much to teach Silicon Valley about gender balance? I don’t think so.
A Male Environment
While I have been batting away the more cartoonish depictions of misogyny, let me turn to more grounded critiques. Clearly, women who code are entering a male domain. It is not going to be as harmonious as joining a knitting circle. Programmers tend to be male, and in addition are a socially oblivious and fractious bunch. I have certainly seen some men become a bit goggle-eyed that a woman could wield concepts that they perhaps got used to thinking as their own province. I have also seen women being isolated away from male-bonding over walks to the vending machine or over the famous ping-pong table.
Much of this not is active discrimination, but simply the normal push and pull of human relationships. I don’t want to minimize the loneliness of any female coder, but compared to the challenges women face daily in many professions, this is small potatoes. Compare this with the faceless crowds that a flight attendant must serve hour upon hour, none of whom can be held to account with HR for bad behavior. Or with the demands on nighttime hours that a medical resident must face. Or the number of anonymous customers that a waitress faces, the more egregious of whom surely feel like they are owed favors for their tips. Many of these professions are those that women flock to regardless.
Compared with this, I see software development as a bit of a safe haven. For one thing, one’s skills or the lack of them are plain for everyone to see and hard to argue with. For another, this is the industry that has pioneered the use of flexible times and home offices. Given a computer and a good internet connection, work can be done from anywhere, including with a baby sleeping on you in a sling.
This is also the sort of thing that can turn on a dime. Much of the loneliness of female coders is because many are, in fact, alone. A single generation of young women who decide to take up programming would cure the problem in an instant.
The Female Programmer
I have met several very brilliant female engineers, but none for whom the thrill of sheer gadgetry matters much at all. What they get out of it is the thrill of analysis; and if they can stomach the gadgetry aspect, they stay. While for many male engineers, the thrill of gadgetry is the whole reason they got into programming in the first place.
(A note of clarification: when I talk of gadgets, I’m speaking of software tools, not physical objects.)
This creates an interesting dynamic in programming teams, even ones where the number of females and males is evenly matched. Programmers tend to self-select themselves into a spectrum. Some learn more about the domain and functionality of their code. Some learn more about the technology that goes into it. Both ends of the spectrum are crucial to the job. But, males tend to self-select into the technology end, while women tend to self-select into the functionality end.
This can cause a bit of a disconnect, sometimes. Male engineers who cannot share their enthusiasm for gadgetry with female engineers might find themselves at odds. While female engineers might think the males engineers who disregard the users’ experience are missing the point entirely.
I have also found that there aren’t as many women who program for a hobby. Now most men do not program for a hobby; not even most men who are professional coders. But amongst the set that does program for a hobby, there are fewer women.
One sees this clearly in the open source community. This is a voluntary act; most contributors are coding on their own time for free. One’s presence on GitHub is purely virtual. One is known by little more than a user name and newsgroup posts. Most never meet each other in person. But surveys have shown that the number of women among open source developers is even less than in corporate software.
What do we make of that? People have speculated that it is the harshness of flame wars that puts women off (I can see this making a difference on the margins, but it is hard to see this as being the entire cause of the gender difference). Or that fewer women feel empowered to contribute code, because they assume their code won’t be as good (while I can see how this could have some salience, it can’t explain the fact that there are ten times as many women by ratio who feel empowered in the corporate context as in open source communities).
I am a great proponent of Occam’s razor, and I feel like these attempts at explaining the gender imbalance miss the most blindingly obvious one, one that is stepping around in the room with great elephantine footsteps breaking crockery in every direction.
Programming as a Vocation
I think that in general women aren’t as obsessively interested in programming as men. Therefore, when programming is a vocation, not a profession, fewer women choose it. Put yet another way, the set of outliers for whom programming is a hobby contains fewer women.
Am I saying the same thing as Ann Friedman — that women don’t choose computer science in greater numbers because the archetype of a programmer does not match their self-image? No, because that leads to infinite regress (women don’t choose programming because earlier women did not), and as any programmer knows, infinite regress will kill your stack.
No, what I am saying is that women in general are not that interested in gadgetry, and since that is an unavoidable adjunct to programming, this keeps them out of choosing this career path.
Look, we are not shocked when more teenage boys than girls mail-order electronic kits from Radio Shack. Or that even fully grown men are found in hobby stores buying model airplane kits and building them out. Or that for some men a perfect weekend is spent lying on their backs under their cars. This same drive to tinker with chips on bread boards and see LEDs light up leads them into tinkering with programming.
Is this nature or nurture? I have no idea (nor does anyone else); but given the fact that nature and nurture influence each other so intricately, this may not even be a meaningful question. The relevant point is that it does not seem like a shakable preference. Women’s general disinterest in gadgetry seems pretty immutable across cultures as widely disparate as India and America.
What to do about it
Should we try to get girl students to be more interested in programming? It is obviously a very lucrative field and the worry is that women will be left out of the benefits.
Well, I have a nine-year-old girl of my own, and while I certainly encourage her to explore computers and programming, here is why I don’t worry about it much. For one thing, there is something glorious about America in it that allows students to earnestly consider what makes them happy before choosing their majors in college. While I am an excellent programmer (in case anyone from my professional life is reading this), if I had grown up with the freedom that America gives kids, I would have chosen Biology, because that is where my heart is.
For another thing, programmers alone cannot make an industry. There is a reason why the word ‘hacker’ was chosen. Any group of programmers needs their analysts, their project managers, their interface designers. While they are not as cabalistic, a good analyst or designer can make or break a project. Without them, programmers let loose by themselves can create great and abstruse tools for other programmers (see Git), but where the general user community is concerned, they are at sea. And women are quite well represented in these other roles.
Also, the generation that is currently in school is already outmoded. Kids nowadays are growing up in constant touch with technology. My daughter gets nothing but pleas to ‘stop using that iPad!’ And still, she has figured out ways to tinker with it and change settings on her unsuspecting parents. If she has an interest in programming, I’m sure she will find it. And it will find her.
