I came across Jean Hsu’s blog post about her experiences as a female software engineer. All I can say is: yes, yes, a million times over, yes!
I had been programming for years. My parents bought a Timex-Sinclair 1000 when I was in grade school, and my dad and I learned BASIC on it together.1 My parents didn’t make any comments about girls and computers, and they always encouraged me to do whatever I could. I didn’t run into condescension until I took my first real CS course in high school. At that point, I could program circles around most of my classmates, so I didn’t let it bother me.
When college time came around, like Hsu, I didn’t consider CS. I was planning on a dual major in biology and English, both classes in which I’d done well in high school. I took a CS course during my freshman year to fulfill a requirement, and I was taking the standard Calculus course for the same reason. Hsu says this about changing majors:
It was a sort of revelation for me–I was pretty good at most subjects, but here was the thing I could stand to work on (and enjoy) for 10 hours straight, forgetting to eat and losing track of time into the wee hours of the night.
My biology homework didn’t keep me up at night, and my English homework certainly didn’t, but my CS homework did. I had the same thing happen to me later during my CS degree. I was enjoying my math classes, and was well on my way to a math minor. But then the head of the department collared me in the hallway one day and asked why I wasn’t majoring in math. He dragged me back to his office and showed me that it would only take an extra semester for me to get the second degree. I did it, and I loved every second of those courses.
Hsu also points out how bloody condescending some men, who are our fellow geeks, can be. Knowing the deep innards of *nix isn’t appealing to me. I can still bash together2 some sed and awk, but it doesn’t excite me. Software engineering is exciting to me because there are hard problems to solve, and I can solve them through logic. Knowing the fine details of a given language (or OS, or vi, or whatever else a given geek want to rathole on) doesn’t make you a better software engineer than I am. It’s a big field, and there’s plenty of room for both a type of deep love for C hacking as there is for my particular software engineering skillset.
Sadly, as you might expect, the comments thread on Hsu’s blog post is rather obnoxious, and just as condescending as Hsu was pointing out from some of her CS counterparts. It starts off with someone who is spouting some nonsense about what evolution “proves”, having no idea that this theory has long since been debunked.
Hsu’s anecdotes about being a woman in software engineering, and my own experiences, match up neatly with much of the research that’s been done about the gender disparity across engineering and mathematics. The most recent report, Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, “demonstrates the effects of societal beliefs and the learning environment on girls’ achievements and interest in science and math”3. Relatedly, xkcd has a great comic about how it works.
Oh, and a note to my parents: Thanks for getting that TS1000, and for giving me the right environment so that I could get where I am today.
- I wrote a longer post about this on my old MSDN blog: Q&A: How did you get into software? ↩
- Pun intended. Sorry. ↩
- The report is 84 pages, so settle in for a long read. ↩
Great post–and thanks for reading mine! Sounds like you got an early start–I wish more kids, especially girls, had that opportunity. Following your blog now!
Not long after my first daughter was born, someone shoved a copy of Nicky Marone’s How to Father a Successful Daughter into my hands. It was a real eye-opener. That was more than 15 years ago, so some of the data has likely changed. But, one fascinating point Marone makes is the, then, disparity, at the jr and sr high school levels, between girls in coed classes and girls in single-sex classes. The latter regularly outperformed the former.
Marone’s explanation for the disparity is that cultural notions of what constitute “attractive” characteristics for women and men lead to some rather confused inputs for girls in the coed situation, where being attractive to members of the opposite sex is a very strong social force. That struck a chord in me.
I did skim the report looking for data on this, and didn’t see any. Did I miss something? Is the disparity no longer as prevalent as it used to be? Just curious.
The data has changed a bit. In terms of performance, the gender gap has narrowed; on average, girls are doing as well as boys in math. However, fewer girls than boys take Advanced Placement courses in science and mathematics, and fewer women are entering college with the plan of majoring in science and math (and the gender gap gets worse if you take out biology). (That’s p3-p6 of the report.) This gets worse when looking at PhD graduates.
I didn’t see anything in this report about a difference (if any) between girls in co-ed classes and girls in single-sex classes. Are these girls more likely to major in math and science? I don’t know from this report.
I found one piece of this report quite depressing. A study cited in this report says that a successful woman in a traditionally male role is less well-liked and more likely to be on the receiving end of personal insults. Worse, a woman needs to have more achievements than a man does to be rated at the same level of achievement. That is, women who are successful must be more successful than their male counterparts, and face a bias as a result of being so successful. I think an excellent example of this is Hillary Clinton. Whether or not you agree with her political views, she is a successful woman, and you can see the personal backlash against her.