Jeni's Musings

“Meanwhile, Len questions whether it matters that there’s a low proportion of women in computing, if they have nothing to offer that men can’t. I’ve been taking it as a given that the field would be enriched by having more women in it, but I can’t offer any proof to back that up, only the feeling that I shouldn’t have to.”

Well, the first obvious answer there is that there’s often a higher proportion of women in your end-user group than there are men in your programming team, so having more women in the programming team would help with designing programs that women would find intuitively easy to use, and also allow the programming team to identify features that women would want the product to have.

The second obvious answer is that the proportion of women using the Internet, gaming, and using high-tech gadgets is rising all the time, and so women are one of the big (relatively) untapped markets. The more women you have in your product design process, the easier it will be for you to successfully target that market.

The third obvious answer is that women are still responsible for many of the buying decisions in families, and for children. If you want to market your product to families, children or teenagers, you often have to convince Mum first. Again, having more women in the product design process from the start would help with that.

The final answer is the most obvious, and the simplest: discrimination = bad.

I’d like to link you to the Male Privilege Checklist: http://colours.mahost.org/org/maleprivilege.html, and the Bingo card for sexism: http://girl-wonder.org/girlsreadcomics/?p=4. I’ve found both to be very useful in answering men’s questions and arguments about sexism and feminism.

I’d also like to recommend a book called “How to Suppress Women’s Writing,” by Joanna Russ. It’s a short book that identifies all the ways in which women can be systematically excluded from a group, using English Literature as an example. I think the principles she identifies would apply to computer programming.

One simple way in which I think you could increase the number of women programmers is to de-emphasise the mathematical part of the process, and start emphasising the fact that it’s a language. After all, girls traditionally have better language skills than boys at school, so if universities gave the same weight to an applicants’ A in English as they do to an A in Maths, you’d get rid of a lot of institutional sexism right there.

Thank you for posting this. I enjoyed reading it, and I love posts that make me think.