Mike-O-Matic

Thought-provoking article over at Venture Beat today. The author, Joyce Park, points out that there is a substantial gender gap in the computer engineering field since few girls seem inclined to tinker with computers on their own time. Her primary assertions are as follows:

• Almost all of the male engineers I know report childhood experience “playing” with computers. I also had this experience, as did most of the female engineers I know; but non-engineer women seem far less likely to have done so.
• If Programming 101 classes started with social software rather than math problems and competitive games, more women might discover an unexpected interest.
• Women seem to be disproportionately attracted to careers where they feel they can help others — for instance medicine (which of course requires rigorous, highly competitive scientific training) — rather than careers that promise high pay or entrepreneurial possibility.
• Male self-taught engineers often begin working with computers as a hobby — for instance, legions of Open Source devotees (including myself) began this way. Women seem less inclined to learn programming just for fun, and more likely to see it as simply a job (to be fair, many self-taught male engineers also seem to primarily see their work as a job rather than a personal passion).
• Women often seem to gain self-confidence by pursuing institutional affiliations, credentials, and clear career goals — rather than simply pushing forward as “lone wolves” driven by individual curiosity.

To head off this problem, Joyce recommends a Silicon Valley-sponsored, one year certificate program for girls to help those who are so inclined get a foothold in the industry. It would introduce them to cutting-edge technologies and give them a chance to work at real entrepreneurial companies, and hopefully serve as a springboard to a programming career.

Joyce mentions that her proposal received a lot of criticism from male engineers (which I assume is Silicon Valley speak for coding monkeys) on the grounds that it would take away opportunities from more-qualified males and result in a glut of less-then-stellar female programmers only in it for the free training. Both of these points have a lot of merit, however counter-revolutionary they may sound.

I’m still not really convinced that the gender gap is a problem, though, as much as it is just what is.

If we are looking to deconstruct why more women don’t get into computers, we need to look really far back into how gender roles are formed in our society.  It’s a little presumptuous that we can get through this in one blog article, but here we go.

First of all, people who self-select computer programming as a hobby are generally introverted.  That isn’t to say that they are all anti-social, although some are.  Just that people who decide to take on programming in something more than an occupational way (Joyce’s “playing”) enjoy spending time alone with their thoughts, and don’t mind talking to a machine instead of other people.

Second, women tend to be more socially-inclined than men.  While it isn’t a rule, women are generally the more social gender.  From an early age, girls form elaborate social structures as a way of establishing their own identities relative to others.  Even those who don’t participate are brought into the fold by becoming objects of ridicule for the social “haves.”  Similarly, older girls and women tend to enjoy things like dancing and clubbing much more than men, who only engage in these activities because there are women present.  Trust me on this one.

Third, men are allowed to deviate from social norms more readily than women.  There are many women who are introverted, but they pay a higher price than men by acting on these tendencies.  A guy can stay up for 36 hours straight coding, not shower for days, have stains on his clothes, wear the same ratty-ass t-shirt from high school, live off of cheeseburgers and beer, and still be perfectly acceptable to society.  We have cute names for such people, even.  But if a girl did the same thing, she would be an outcast.  Men would avoid her, and women would ridicule her mercilessly.

Based on all of this, it is logical that there are many more men into computer programming than women.  Even if they were so inclined, social mores being what they are would prevent most women from joining such a field.  Joyce had many other good points as well; women tend to favor activities that have clearly-defined institutional mandates, perhaps because these activities are already deemed “good” by some social authority.  Of course there are exceptions to all of this, and females can be every bit as talented in software as males if they put in the same amount of time to learning the craft.

I sincerely hope that these things work themselves out someday, because coding is a very gratifying career and we can use all of the new talent in the field that we can get.

As an aside, I think it is interesting how people choose to politicize (however mildly in this case) something which can be explained away by other means.  By calling a “difference” a “gap,” (as Joyce did in the first article in her series) it implies that there is something which is being held away from a deserving group by some other group, and that this “situation” needs to be rectified.  At one point she says “I surmise that both individual women and Silicon Valley itself are suffering from the opportunity costs imposed by lack of sufficient numbers of female engineers.”  While I can’t argue with what she surmises, I think that if Silicon Valley is concerned about anything, it is likely to be the lack of qualified engineers, period.  Coding is one of the more gender-blind activities out there, and as much as we would all like to see more females take up the call, we are better served by letting people who actually care do the work than attempt to inflate the numbers to meet some artificial goal.

Til next time.

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