Let's exclude more men from the field of programming - er, let's make everybody bend over backwards to make it easier for women (but just women) to get into the profession

ion9a · 2014-06-02T01:14:54+00:00

Where's the outcry for more male nurses, teachers, etc?

McFeely_Smackup · 2014-06-02T05:21:27+00:00

I've worked in IT for over 20 years, and my unqualified opinion is that the vast majority of career programmers are high functioning aspergers qualified.

I just don't know ANY programmers that are "normal" for lack of a better term. They're all just a little off.

2014-06-01T23:43:10+00:00

Girls know the stereotype of a geeky guy hacker in his basement all too well, and interacting with women who use computer science in their professional lives gives them an idea of something to go after besides an endless string of code.

This stood out to me in particular. If girls know that stereotype, then why not work to fight it by finding cool male mentors as well? Otherwise the stereotype doesn't change; the girls only learn that women are in the field too.

jag213 · 2014-06-02T19:02:55+00:00

There was a good article on here a while ago by an old school female programmer who said she was never treated differently until the whole profession became political. I'll try to find it.

edit: Found it

SnowyGamer · 2014-06-02T11:05:21+00:00

Is this a good thing for good programmers? Won't this weaken the skill level in the labor pool, so top programmers can demand more money?

tankerton · 2014-06-02T13:21:13+00:00

This is a gender issue that I've been involved with at a personal level, because this is my profession of choice.

I see many of the issues that plague the "programming" profession at the population level. One of the major ones is gender dominance, which I will speak to in this post.

Like all professions, I believe practices of the programming profession will become stronger over time. However, I also believe that it takes a lot of diversity to change high level practice (changing how programers document code with both comments and clean "real code" is hard in comparison to changing how programers use prebuilt tools with new tools in their kit). The area of diversity that programers really need going into the future is women. Page 13 of the census on STEM education shows a telling graph of how few women still are in the STEM based professions as a whole. While I cannot find a good simplified graph of population in Computer Programming professions, I'll assume it is 25-35%, a 5% buffer on the STEM average.

Let's face it. Women and men tackle problems differently. The variety in approaches is important to keep the profession, as a whole, flexible in practices and also allow for faster growth with more approaches to problems being taken.

Male nurses, teachers, and nannies are important issues with notably less outcry. I don't try to detract from that. I will state that any growth in computer programming as a profession is good, because programmers are a need of modern business and more programmers means two things. First, more programmers to enable more businesses to hire. I'm not yet out of school and I'm being contacted for Senior level "Data Science" positions, it seems as if there is a shortage of different specializations of programmers from this and my classmates experiences. Second, more programmers means more competition for the same jobs. Competition leads to better production over time.

Lets try to take away some of the fears someone has of the profession before they even try it so we don't scare them away. That is something that, in the academic world at least, is the biggest key to get women into STEM programs. People are scared of the difficulty, people are scared of the hours involved with STEM education, and people don't like STEM-student stereotypes. Women, further, are afraid of being treated differently for being the only girl in a classroom. Get them into the classroom and the only reported reasons for dropping are the reasons people in general don't enroll in STEM fields, difficulty, time, and social views.

I come at this from an opportunistic standpoint, in a sense. More women in programming will boost the field (assuming that they are equally skilled as their male peers). I ultimately believe that more people in programming will be better for the profession because of its impact on modern business and spreading influence in different fields. I see the problems people have with the profession which may steer clear of it, but also additional problems women have that can be addressed.

Again, not detracting from flipped sex dominant professions of male nurses, etc, I see women as easier to target to up global enrollment of programming professions than men.

shinarit · 2014-06-02T09:39:12+00:00

I didn't see any extremity in the article. Where is this bending over? Yeah, the whole pretense is sexist, that we need to force girls into IT, because reasons or whatever. But nothing that cannot be justified by enough talk. It's a slimy subject.

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