Maybe I'm just of a younger generation, but I've literally never heard this in my life. The assumption among people my age has always been that women just generally aren't interested in software development at the same rate that men are; not that they're naturally worse at it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/gender-ineq...
The research contradicts you (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox).
>We have tons of data on that, including experiments where using a feminine or masculine name changes how contributions are received.
Your link is to reporting of a viral anecdote shared by an editor for a movie review site. It's also about how clients responded, not coworkers.
Aside from the "experiment" being N=1, easily confounded by any number of factors (such as the simple fact that, from the client's perspective, a supposedly troublesome contact was being replaced at all), and at least partially an excuse for Mr. Schneider to complain publicly about his boss, all of this clearly has nothing to do with "STEM", let alone programming. Historically it has been common in programming circles to receive contributions under pseudonyms (or, for that matter, first-initial-plus-last-name usernames) that don't disclose gender.
The argument you present here is simply not intellectually honest (and I have seen very similar arguments countless times over the years).
I remember reading about a large study of pre-college students in OECD countries that found that while the top students in STEM fields were about equally split between boys and girls, for the boys it was more likely that they were only top in a STEM field. The girls were more likely to be top students in multiple fields.
Students tend to go on to the field they are best in. For the top boy STEM students that tends to be STEM. For the top girl STEM students the field they are best in often turns out to be one of the non-STEM fields they are also top in.
Is this a product of nurture or culture? I don't know.
HN is in complete denial of this simple fact. It's hilarious how seemingly intelligent people can be so badly influenced by identity politics.
But yeah, I'm 39 and have never heard anyone serious claim that the gender imbalance is due to innate ability.
This isn't going to give accurate results. It's common for those who are female to conceal this fact, with neutral usernames and profiles, to avoid harassment from predatory males.
Similiarly, there are many males who present with a feminine username and profile for various reasons, such as a desire to be female.
If you could actually get accurate data identifying which programmers are actually male or female, and which male programmers desire to be female, I wonder if you'd see a quantifiable difference in their code compared to regular males.
...or more often to capitalize on the short term, early benefits (attention, leniency, opportunity, etc) often offered to women. This (males using a female name + character) is a common practice in multiplayer games.
ie. Stylistic differences likely arising from in-group dynamics, cross reading, pair programming, etc.
As such there's likely no implicity { transgender, male, female } style, more various styles that are more pronounced in groups that cluster, be that male programmers, female coders, transgender hackers, google devs, etc.
You can't imagine how that can result in different code?
It's the least remarkable claim imaginable. Though I'm not sure this study quite proves it.
I don't think it is impossible that there are differences. I just don't have it as my prior.
- 380 men
- 19 women producing good code
- 1 woman producing bad code
I think the error bars on that one woman would be quite large, too large to draw any conclusions.
Now if I guessed wrong and you've actually had not 400, but tens of thousands of colleagues who you've been secretly tracking and ranking in your spare time, maybe you'd have enough data to draw a conclusion.
I'll be just as lazy...4x the number of male duds across that number of observations? It's going to be statistically significant.
In any case, I would generally agree with your take but express it a bit differently— the group of programmers who really blow me away with their ingenuity and commitment to excellence has significantly more women in it than the larger population ratio suggests should be expected.
> The first algorithm intended to be executed by a computer was designed by Ada Lovelace who was a pioneer in the field. Grace Hopper was the first person to design a compiler for a programming language. [0] Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, and up to World War II, programming was predominantly done by women; significant examples include the Harvard Computers, codebreaking at Bletchley Park and engineering at NASA. After the 1960s, the computing work that had been dominated by women evolved into modern software, and the importance of women decreased. [1]
What a crazy history, and wiki entry. My supposition is that as soon as it started to become even slightly obvious that software was going to eat the world, the dominant social paradigm prevailed.
[0] WTF, how is she not way more celebrated? She invented the effing compiler!
Babbage designed the first programs for the analytical engine.
> Grace Hopper was the first person to design a compiler for a programming language.
Hopper was the first person to use the word "compiler" for a program, but it was not a compiler by the modern meaning; it was a linker, and not the first.
> Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, and up to World War II, programming was predominantly done by women;
Not by the modern meaning; they manually entered programs designed by men.
> After the 1960s, the computing work that had been dominated by women evolved into modern software, and the importance of women decreased.
The design of programs has always been done by men mostly.
>> The first algorithm intended to be executed by a computer was designed by Ada Lovelace who was a pioneer in the field.
> Babbage designed the first programs for the Analytical engine.
I am trying to understand the wiki entry in my gp vs. this post [0]
Is the wiki entry entirely wrong?
[0] https://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/adalovelace/2018/07/26/ada-l...
Methodology seems questionable.
By their own definitions earlier in the article, it seems like Pylint would provide biased results.
???
Yeah there's still some sexist assholes around like this, but this is hardly a mainstream opinion in most circles imo.
I'd say a more common explanation these days is lack of interest, rather than aptitude.
So while I can see why a toxic community would stop women from contributing to an existing project, I think the 'starting' a project would be more interesting to look at. Most open source projects start by accident not intent. One would expect women to not have the same probability as men of a project hitting it big presuming they make the code public.
Perhaps I am obtuse, but I've been in FOSS for 15+ years and I have never heard this as a common topic. When it is infrequently mentioned, its almost always shouted down quite quickly in the FOSS community as sexist nonsense.
The first is that the measure of quality doesn't actually capture quality. It's like measuring the quality of a writer by looking at only their grammar and spelling.
The second is that it implicitly makes causal claims, but the design makes it impossible to infer any causal relationship between sex and code.
Curious what others' take is on just the empirics of the paper itself.
The senior developer is made manager on the team. He begins to require all javascript code to have C-style curly brackets. (the opening bracket goes below the function declaration, not right next to it). The reason for it: he is the only one on the team with a C background and prefers to read everyone’s code that way. Overnight he goes into all repositories for multiple customer projects that have nothing to do with each other and changes the code to his preference. The next day the individual developers who work on each project, lose hours sifting between meaningful changes and style preferences and adjust their code. The next night he changes everyone’s code again. Control and desire for dominance over the code base when the code is essentially multiple consulting projects for multiple different customers done by multiple developers at the same tech consulting firm. His treatment and outbursts were worst against the female developer. The female developer among others on the team left for more senior roles elsewhere soon after.
The female software engineers I have worked with have been diligent and thoughtful and often more skilled than male peers, but the treatment of them has always been different in one way or another. I am not surprised if most hide the fact that they are female in open source code contributions. One of the perks of crafting software is you don’t need permission to make stuff, and you certainly don’t need to tolerate bad behavior distracting from the work. The easiest way for teams to lose female developers is to let an insecure bully chase them out.
