Home › life › equality

Do we need more women in computing?

Thu, 2007-06-21 21:45 — Jeni

Woah, so Tim took me seriously about linking to women’s blog posts from his own, and suddenly I get readership! Edd phrases what I was trying to say better than I did myself:

As Jeni brings her article to a close, it’s with some shock and shame that I get the punchline loud and clear: “this isn’t about you.”

It’s about empathy, inclusivity and selflessness. Human qualities that are unrestricted to either gender.

But I wanted to address some of the comments that question whether we should really care about this. For example:

Why we need to have an equal number of men and women in every job field known to man is beyond me. Women freely choose not to be programmers. That is manifestly not a problem, and certainly not a problem that needs fixing. I try to respect peoples decisions about what they do with their lives, so I for one vow to do absolutly [sic] nothing about this.

I agree completely that there shouldn’t be an assumption that we need to have an equal number of men and women in any job field. I think it’s very likely that, if culture is taken out of the equation, there will still be a lower proportion of women in computing than men. But if you look at history, the proportion has been higher in the past, and similarly, the proportion varies by country, with a number of countries having higher proportions than the UK (or US). So it seems unlikely that culture has been taken out of the equation.

What I was discussing was not the low proportion of women in computing in absolute terms, but the likelihood that some women are put off entering computing for cultural reasons, rather than due to a free, unbiased choice.

In his post Maybe the Women are Right, David Megginson also suggests that the status quo is nothing to worry about:

These postings all assume that we need to do something to pull more women into coding. Why? Do we think there are there lots of women would be happy coding, but aren’t smart enough or motivated enough to choose the right careers for themselves, or are too timid to deal with any barriers unless someone comes along and dismantles them first?

If I’m a smart, motivated and brave female student, equally attracted by and able in medicine and in computing, which profession am I going to enter? The one where women make up more than 50% of the intake, or the one where they make up 25% of the intake? The one where I know women can succeed and be recognised, ‘cos I see them on TV all the time, or the one in the industry where all the big players seem to be men? The one where, when I visit the campus, I get welcomed by a bunch of female students, or the one where I get ignored by a bunch of guys?

If it were a choice between coding and nothing, then of course the smart, motivated, brave woman is going to choose to code. But given a choice between coding and an equally satisfying career that has a track record of attracting, accepting and promoting women, it’s a no-brainer.

(I’m still digesting David’s post, and may well return to it another time.)

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.

Comments

Fri, 2007-06-22 12:33 — zellieh (not verified)

Re: Do we need more women in computing?

“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.

Fri, 2007-06-22 07:35 — John Cowan (not verified)

Re: Do we need more women in computing?

Having women in computing (or any other field) is important, because all-male organizations quickly degenerate into boys’ clubs, and boys’ clubs are terrible for their members, except for the alphas, and even more so for non-members.

Shaw said that, given the choice between the suffrage for women and 50% women in all legislative bodies, he unhesitatingly preferred the latter, and cited a case that came up before the aldermen of Dublin (he was one at the time) about public toilets for women. With zero female aldermen, the issue was treated as a joke; when one woman sat (elected by a male-only vote), the issue was suddenly a serious matter.

Furthermore, every woman discouraged by sexism from entering the field is one less mind available for the work, and we don’t have so very many competent minds that we can afford to discard any of them.

Thu, 2007-06-21 22:35 — Anonymous (not verified)

Re: Do we need more women in computing?

Hi!

> Why we need to have an equal number of men and women in every job field known to man is beyond me. Women freely choose not to be programmers. That is manifestly not a problem, and certainly not a problem that needs fixing.

This hinges on the definition of "freely". If we're in a society where men have personal access to computers earlier in age and are more likely to have access than women, where a boy's interest in computing is encouraged and a girl's is dismissed, and when interested women are shown sexism, we're clearly not having women "freely" choose whether or not to be programmers.

Along with the excellent references I've seen in this thread so far, people might be interested in the two PDFs of the FLOSSPOLS report, which specifically looked at the reasons for women failing to join open-source communities. While the number of women in the software industry in general is bad, the number in open-source communities (<1%) is close to being non-existent, which makes the kind of feedback loop Jeni talked about -- with few female role models to follow and be inspired by -- a very real and pressing problem.

Thanks for the excellent blog posts!

- Chris.