{"id":256,"date":"2011-01-27T07:33:10","date_gmt":"2011-01-27T15:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/?p=256"},"modified":"2011-01-27T10:05:43","modified_gmt":"2011-01-27T18:05:43","slug":"software-engineering-for-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/27\/software-engineering-for-women\/","title":{"rendered":"software engineering for women"},"content":{"rendered":"

I came across Jean Hsu’s blog post about her experiences as a female software engineer<\/a>. \u00a0All I can say is: yes, yes, a million times over, yes!<\/p>\n

I had been programming for years. \u00a0My parents bought a Timex-Sinclair 1000 when I was in grade school, and my dad and I learned BASIC on it together.1<\/a><\/sup> \u00a0My parents didn’t make any comments about girls and computers, and they always encouraged me to do whatever I could. \u00a0I didn’t run into condescension until I took my first real CS course in high school. \u00a0At that point, I could program circles around most of my classmates, so I didn’t let it bother me.<\/p>\n

When college time came around, like Hsu, I didn’t consider CS. \u00a0I was planning on a dual major in biology and English, both classes in which I’d done well in high school. \u00a0I took a CS course during my freshman year to fulfill a requirement, and I was taking the standard Calculus course for the same reason. \u00a0Hsu says this about changing majors:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My biology homework didn’t keep me up at night, and my English homework certainly didn’t, but my CS homework did. \u00a0I had the same thing happen to me later during my CS degree. \u00a0I was enjoying my math classes, and was well on my way to a math minor. \u00a0But then the head of the department collared me in the hallway one day and asked why I wasn’t majoring in math. \u00a0He dragged me back to his office and showed me that it would only take an extra semester for me to get the second degree. \u00a0I did it, and I loved every second of those courses.<\/p>\n

Hsu also points out how bloody condescending some men, who are our fellow geeks, can be. \u00a0Knowing the deep innards of *nix isn’t appealing to me. \u00a0I can still bash together2<\/a><\/sup> some sed and awk, but it doesn’t excite me. \u00a0Software engineering is exciting to me because there are hard problems to solve, and I can solve them through logic. \u00a0Knowing 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. \u00a0It’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.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0It starts off with someone who is spouting some nonsense about what evolution “proves”, having no idea that this theory has long since been debunked.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0The most recent report, Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics<\/a>, “demonstrates the effects of societal beliefs and the learning environment on girls\u2019 achievements and interest in science and math”3<\/a><\/sup>. \u00a0Relatedly, xkcd<\/a> has a great comic about how it works<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Oh, and a note to my parents: \u00a0Thanks for getting that TS1000, and for giving me the right environment so that I could get where I am today.<\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n
    \n
  1. I wrote a longer post about this on my old MSDN blog: Q&A: How did you get into software?<\/a> ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Pun intended. Sorry. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  3. The report is 84 pages, so settle in for a long read. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I came across Jean Hsu’s blog post about her experiences as a female software engineer. \u00a0All I can say is: yes, yes, a million times over, yes! I had been programming for years. \u00a0My parents bought a Timex-Sinclair 1000 when I was in grade school, and my dad and I learned BASIC on it together.1 … Continue reading software engineering for women<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nadyne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions\/258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}