The title here is misleading, I think the article is right.
I didn't get into tech because it was interesting, at least not initially. I got into computers because the movie War Games was cool as hell and I wanted to be like Matthew Broderick's character in that movie. I was 5 or 6 when I saw it.
It was only after I got a Commodore 64 that I learned that it was going to be really difficult to do the things in the movie. But the idea that with enough practice I could be like that was very appealing. I don't think girls today have anything similar.
Let's be honest, very few children are that into math or computer science where it becomes an end unto itself. That comes much later. Younger males in the industry today seem to have grown up in the gamer->modder->hacker path that didn't really exist when I was a kid, and certainly doesn't exist for girls today.
And if you're asking the tech industry full of nerds to fix this problem for kids of any gender you're going to get something completely misguided.
Complain to Hollywood. When the military wants to recruit people they don't change to be more appealing, they help make "Top Gun."
This doesn't exist today? What about Minecraft mods, or building Redstone circuits? Game modding is as big as it was when I went through that cycle, isn't it?
At least, that's what I plan to show my daughter when she gets a bit older to test her interest.
I'd be inclined to say the gamer->modder->hacker path is generally less accessible in the mainstream today than it was 10 or 15 years ago. The above comment made me realize that's effectively the path I followed too, but can today's AAA titles be tinkered with the way Halo PC, Counter Strike, etc could be so thoroughly modified after a few hours poking through forums? I can remember the first time I used the (fan made) halo editing kit to play as an alien on the Silent Cartographer as a crystallizing moment for me to go from a computer user to a computer creator.
I'd say Bethesda games are likely the exception - though from what I remember, trying to mod Fallout 3 mostly previewed to me how frustrating development can be :p
Edit: For what it's worth, I attended the Syracuse University ischool for my bs/ms and while that's also not a computer science program, my classes were usually at least equally proportioned between men and women. So that's at least a personal anecdote that the runway for women entering tech may be improving.
As someone who followed that gamer->modder->hacker path, I would like to see statistics of how many developers got there start that way. The cohort of CS/EE majors I went through college with in 2010 had a solid percentage who started that way, but I don't really see that in the 18 year old CS major of today.
The path is still there, just not in mainstream titles (at least not as frequently in mainstream titles). If I may point you at my favorite crack, err, game: factorio.
True, but shouldn't/doesn't matter, especially if the game has no voice chat required (or encouraged by the nature of the game). When I played WoW for a little over a year, the guild I was in had several women. LoL has lots of female players (mostly due to the size of its playerbase), Hearthstone even has a few popular female streamers.
> culture can be toxic
Also true, but most mainstream companies are responsive to feedback about negative players via reporting functionality or something of the like. You deal with negative interactions as a female just by being on social media, games are no different. The main difference is that being a dick to someone is a bannable offence in a lot of mainstream games.
The gaming “culture” ain’t got nothing on Twitter.
Basically, any platform a person can hide behind a screen is going to have toxic people. Gaming is a lot better about keeping the community in check than ANY social media company.
Where are the women game developers creating blockbuster hits for their gender? I am asking in a non-inflammatory way. Same with companies. Break the system and its bonds if it is not serving 50% of the population. Should be tons of opportunity to be had.
Gaming culture isn't really any more toxic than other culture held by people who take the subject of their interests too seriously. Other forms of media also have various unhinged individuals acting like jerks online.
And neither have anything on sports, where the toxicity can go beyond the internet in quite a few situations. For all the comments about toxicity and causing violence, games actually have a pretty good record by comparison.
Jeez, War Games was my inspiration too. I saw myself as that clumsy nerd ("Remember you told me to tell you when you're acting rudely and insensitively?" I ask my wife to do that to this day :)
It is true that young males view themselves as modders/hackers in a way that many young females do not. Many reasons for this exist, but the answer can surely only lie in educating this age group to think differently. I don't hold out much hope that Hollywood will respond with a gender volte face.
As far as I know there is no lack of female hackers in movies nor of creative girls and women in real life. Take the electronics/maker scene. Even though there is even less women in EE/ME than software (which is quite the feat in itself) I can think of at least half a dozen public women in what little scene there is. Software culture is much more subjective and largely based on things that doesn't exists anymore. And even if it did it would to a large extent have been created by and for men. If we want more women in software culture it has to be about making cool things and not about fitting into stereotypes.
I have noticed that some women only tech events tend to go very lightly into technical matters and lean more towards the social justice side of things and I can very easily see just how unappealing such events would be.
No, I'm pretty sure its "Code like a girl". That's the name of the submitted and is the completed form of said URL.
I'm also reasonably sure that referring to women professionals as "girls" is also one of those things you shouldn't do.
Right hand, meet left hand. These are adults, and they happen to be male/female/white/black/asian/whatever. (Unless we're actually talking about k-9 school aged females. Then girl is accurate.)
Edit: I don't get the downmod. The first thing to change is our language. They are professionals, not girls. When our language entails using that modifier, it sets the emotion starting at that point. So, set the barrier to that of men, unless you think "son" and "boy" are acceptable ways to address other male professionals.
> I'm also reasonably sure that referring to women professionals as "girls" is also one of those things you shouldn't do.
Agreed. But this site doesn't do that. It consistently refers to women as women.
For example the about page:
> Welcome to Code Like A Girl, a space that celebrates breaking down society’s perceptions of women in technology. We believe that by providing women and girls with strong female role models we will be able to tip the gender ratio scale in tech. We hope to achieve this by amplifying the voices of women and their allies!
Or look at the Role Models section, it consistently uses women. The Girls section of the site has stories about female children.
Could you please not do this here? Comments like this only make the discussion worse for everyone. It's a form of peeing in the pool, and it breaks the site guidelines badly, so we ban accounts that do it repeatedly.
Any good-faith view is possible to express thoughtfully, so that's what we ask of HN users.
So, one thing that this article ignores is that kids pick up really strongly on what is expected of their gender. I think the "let's make programming more pink" thing is silly, BUT hey, isn't that what toy manufacturers and clothing manufacturers all do to signal "hey girls, this is for you!"?
So if you slap a bunch of pink stuff on things, yeah, you're kind of making an invitation to them to join in.
BUT I think that the "girl" version of things is also always assumed to be the "easy" version of things. Which girls pick up on too.
As a woman trying to get into tech, I'm super uninterested in woman-only bootcamp type things, since I feel like the perception will be that I "couldn't make it" in the "regular" bootcamp.
I do think it might be different for little kids though, as they might be operating more on the "I want to do what's expected of my gender" level than a grown up who is able to think "I don't care what's expected of my gender."
Agreed, although in fact I have found that the younger children tend to be pretty gender-neutral in what interests them when coding. It is only really when they hit 9 or 10 and above that I have started to notice the girls favouring pink or flowery items more than the boys.
An interesting personnel anecdote I work in an industrial plant the diversity statistics here are pretty bleak - we have an internal social media site - mostly it is just used for company announcements and that sort of thing. The most popular post I can recall from recent memory was a picture of a pair of purple steel-capped boots and a bit of a blurb that one of our suppliers was now offering a choice of colors. It generated hundreds of comments mostly along the lines of "wow how can I order a pair of those" a lot of the comments were from female employees the whole tone was overwhelmingly positive.
Now I'm a male and hardly what you would call fashion conscious I wear steel-capped boots because it's a safety requirement I couldn't care one way or the other what color they are. Does offering brightly colored safety equipment count as pinkify-ing my workplace? At least some portion of people seem appreciative of having the choice available.
I honestly feel like framing the debate around surface elements like color (of all things) is worse than useless, and would rather people focus on what tech-y groups have historically attracted young girls with no problem - neopets(1), for example.
(The linked article below focuses on a few things that really resonates with me - emotional security paired with the freedom to play and hack, not having to ~present~ a gender to participate, having an aesthetic flexibility around your own spaces, etc.)
Some of the problem with this discussion is the fact that we talk about technology as an end in itself. We expect that people will get interested because they like tech for techs sake, not because they view tech as a means to some other end. It's possible to become interested in tech because you'd like to build things or make movies or program games. My daughter is really ambivalent to "engineering", but she'd very much like to make movies and has become fairly tech savvy as part of that process.
The pursuit of knowledge in technology can be an end in itself. Very often there is another purpose, such as your daughter wanting to make movies, so the tech knowledge happens through that greater desire. However a (small) percentage of children in my classes will quite happily play with BIDMAS equations in Python for an entire hour-long lesson, and then come back at lunchtime to see how addition and subtraction are affected by parentheses. They come back just for the kick of seeing maths equations calculated in a coding language, and they are an equal mix of male and female.
I think there is a balance to be found between "pinkifying" and "de-blueing" (to wrangle an inversion out of that word). Many of these early education coding platforms use "play" to introduce fundamentals and concepts to kids. They're not intended as formal platforms for computer science education; they want to let kids do cool things and get excited about programming and possibly ramp up into that more formal programming education.
Letting kids manipulate characters from properties to which they've already been exposed is a good way of creating that initial interest. The issue is that assets like Minecraft Steve, or R2D2, or things like that, while obviously loved by no shortage of girls, are still primarily marketed toward boys. Until we can effectively move that needle at a higher, more societal level, I think it's valuable to incorporate media properties targeted toward girls into these kinds of platforms simply in order to engender that initial interest. A kid (regardless of gender) who loves BB8 should be able to use their learn-to-code-platform-of-choice to make BB8 run in a circle. A kid (again, regardless of gender) who loves American Girl should be able to use that same platform to make Julie say something funny.
My company has been doing some work with the Girl Scouts, teaching girls to build games and apps in Augmented Reality, and while the interface/platform itself is sterile and professional (& obviously if you think theming an IDE pink will help "appeal to women," this is an issue), the girls naturally gravitate to characters and assets from the properties to which they are already exposed and are already fans. This includes everything from Minecraft Steve, to Spongebob, to lolcats (which are, apparently, still a thing) to Elsa, and Barbie.
I teach Computing from Years 1 to 11, and amongst the Lower Primary school students (Years 1 to 4) I use Espresso quite a lot. The children love Espresso. It has a variety of characters, and the girls in my classes will happily select characters such as vampires, monsters, cars, trucks. Equally many of the boys will choose rainbows or flowers. The gender divide differences are much more obvious in Secondary, where the students are then feeling societal pressures to conform to certain stereotypes, either consciously or subconsciously.
My daughter is six. I never wanted her to be interested in things that were traditionally gendered - but she just is. I would buy neutral toys, but her eyes would light up when she saw the babies and pink princesses. So, is she wrong to like those things? We have done the minecraft hour of code together, (she likes minecraft too) but if there was an even more 'girly' version I an guarantee that she would be more engaged by it. Of course she is interested in coding because it's interesting, but if it takes some marketing to get her in the door, so what?
Furthermore, I love to buy her books etc such as "Suzy shier engineer", but I wonder why all the books where girls are engineers or inventors or programmers they have to be wearing jumpsuits and glasses and rarely anything pink. I suspect it's because the books are sold based on the biases of the parents. I feel like my daughter gets the message that "You can be a pretty princess girl, or you can be a smart girl". So I say the opposite. Give my daughter some princess engineers in pink dresses please. She recently saw a barbie movie at a friends house (i know) and barbie was coding and it palpably raised her interest in the whole endeavor.
I used to be against "pinkification", I am not against it after having children.
My kids knew what is "for girls" and "for boys" from around two and half - but I did not taught them that. They would actively ask in toys store what is for girls and what is for boys and then wanted only toys "for them". I lied a couple of times to test it and they stopped asking when they figured symbols. Also I have seen kids correct and sometimes mock each other about what is gender proper for who. They willing to have fun with "wrong toys" now, but I had to explain couple of times that it is ok. And also that they should not mock other kids for that.
It does not matter what of it is biological and what not. What matters is that when you paint car or box to pink, it becomes "for girls" for many kids and adults. It makes it not shameful to play with it and it makes them think it is something with potential for them.
I don't like pink, but it is symbol for "for girls" for many people. It is also pretty much any color that is not used used for pretty much anything smart. The association between pink and stupid is partly because that is how I remember it being used whole time while growing up.
The distaste of pinkification is partly because coloring something to pink makes third parties assume it is stupid, but we dont want tech to look stupid. I get that too, but it would be better to break association then ban color.
I agree with this, and hadn't thought of the clear problem in your last paragraph.
I have 3 daughters. They all have at least a slight preference for stereotypical colors, but one will actively shun products she doesn't find frilly enough. Her interest in babies and glitter is borderline militant, and I am certain a lack of bright colors would disengage her.
I can't believe articles like this are comfortable lumping "girls" in a single group with a consistent set of preferences.
> Give my daughter some princess engineers in pink dresses please. She recently saw a barbie movie at a friends house (i know) and barbie was coding and it palpably raised her interest in the whole endeavor.
Precisely. Let kids get political when they're old enough to care about it. Until then can we just feed their imaginations and stop trying to shovel our insecurities onto them?
I think both problems are instances of the same ridiculous thought process.
So one side we push the pink obsession by default onto all girls (I can't begin to explain how much I hate the whole boy-blue girl-pink bullshit we do with babies even before they are born)
On the other, we imagine that non-girly things (tech) are so because they do not signal traditional girly things (hence the jumpsuits and large glasses and all), so if only we made them a little more pink...!
If your girl enjoys pink, awesome! Buy her pink stuff. The problem is not in girls liking pink, the problem is in us peddling irrelevant gendered nonsense onto our kids even before they are old enough to express a choice in that matter.
She's not wrong, but to say "she just is [interested in things that are traditionally gendered]" seems a little incurious. Princesses, pink ponies, and frilly dresses did not exist when modern humans came into being. So liking or disliking those things is almost entirely a matter of socialization and not some kind of biotruth.
While you may have tried to socialize her away from "girly" stuff, peers are often a stronger influence than parents.
This is unnecessarily simplifying. Legos did not exist when we were monkeys, but social groups did.
It's entirely possible that there is an individually-varying biological urge to attach to socially-informed norms, whatever they are at the time.
This comes up a lot with attraction. No, testicles can't possibly be born with an image of Kate Upton imprinted on them, but they certainly can be born with a directive to find and be attracted to socially_valuable_person_of_era
She didn't really have any friends who were girls when she was small. She was just interested in that stuff. Additionally, I have a three year old daughter who is very not interested in dolls and princesses. You would think if it was a matter of socialization, then her little sister would be a prime candidate to be socialized into those preferences. Her little sister is much more interested in building puzzles than playing with dolls. It's actually astounding how much kids preferences seem to materialize on their own. They are these little people, and we think of them as being blank slates, but they are actually not blank slates at all.
Because girls usually loved shiny-but-useless objects. Meanwhile boys preferred work tools. Horse happened to move from work tool to shiny-but-useless thing.
So yes, girls like girly things - home making, looking after family and making nice things they need to get male attention. Meanwhile boys like toys about jobs to provide to family. Or aggressive toys imitating tools to fend off aggressors or attract females.
let’s play a game - since you’re asserting a massively complicated social mechanism that instills these preferences, give us some evidence of its existence rather than just baldly assert it the way its taught in gender studies. elaborate it somehow. show us evidence that it works.
> give us some evidence of its existence rather than just baldly assert it the way its taught in gender studies.
Wait, wait... what? So go out and do a bunch of scientific studies - but don't refer to any of the existing scientific studies because ... reasons. Yeah, that's a really useful way to have a discussion.
The real way we're going to see equity in girls going into computer science/tech is for it to be an academic requirement, or at least an honors-level course in all high schools. In my high school in the 90's, computer science was practically a vo-tech class so none of the smart girls took it - hobbyist boys were the ones with the most experience going into college. I had an engineer dad, was super into computers, and I didn't even think of taking it.
Another approach is for it to become a more acceptable hobby for girls, but the social pressure is strong still for girls in the opposite direction. I think that one's a harder battle in a lot of ways.
Totally agree with you here. I think middle school is actually the prime age to start teaching it but not the drag/drop scratch/block type stuff you see in the lower grades. It should be a requirement just like Math and English.
In my country, it is an obligatory class at the equivalent of the US middle school level (10-14 year old).
However, doing something as complicated as "computing and informatics" (a literal translation of the subject name) that early in the school education just made it absolutely terrible, much worse than the traditional classes were in my school.
I still excelled at it, mostly because of books (the Internet wasn't as widespread as it is today), and was a part of the state-sponsored small contests that test student's knowledge in that subject. Finished first on the municipality level, shared the second position on the regional level, and didn't go to the state level competition (was a bit too far away). That's what made me pursue IT further.
However, all I've ever learned during those four years was:
* Installing a pirated copy of Windows XP on desktops.
* "Blind typing" (typing properly on QWERTY keyboard without looking at the keyboard) and clicking on things in MS Office (2003) to make the document appear as in given screenshot.
* Mashing two malfunctioning desktops together to create a functioning one.
* Very basic programming (mostly if-else statements and loops). In QBASIC (from 1991). In 2008. (edit: This is what the competitions were about.)
My point being: You can still introduce it as an obligatory subject and fuck it up pretty badly. Including myself, two out of 120 kids in that school in my generation continued pursuing IT by joining specialized high schools (also a thing in my country) dedicated to IT. Neither me nor the second kid are female.
So, while I agree that it's a step in the right progress (the one which my country made in the second half of '00s, but fucked up pretty badly in its execution), it's far from being the final step. It brought us the equivalent of nothingness in spreading the IT. The IT is still associated as a "male field", regardless of the fact that the subject is obligatory for everyone in that age range for about 15 years.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Very interesting. What country are you from?
"However, doing something as complicated as "computing and informatics" (a literal translation of the subject name) that early in the school education just made it absolutely terrible, much worse than the traditional classes were in my school."
Oh wow! Yeah, that seems like a little much for middle school. I was thinking more so at the level of teaching them how to code fun stuff in Python or JavaScript. Let's not scare kids away at this age just yet and it sounds like the program your school had did just that :(
"The IT is still associated as a "male field", regardless of the fact that the subject is obligatory for everyone in that age range for about 15 years."
Honestly, I am not even so sure that requiring it will necessarily increase the count of women that go into this field. If anything, it will at least introduce it to more women showing them possible opportunities. I as a women in tech for 20 years have my own theories on why many women don't go into this profession but they are unpopular opinions here.
The main reason I would love to see it included as a main subject is because I want our youth (men and women) to be prepared for the jobs of our future. I truly believe that almost every profession will require programmers or tech specific roles in the very near future and our education system is not preparing our youth for that.
Alright, I'm going to go deeply out of the topic here, but it's necessary in order to give you a full answer, for you to understand my frustration, and for you to understand how fucked up that obligatory subject could really get.
> What country are you from?
Bosnia & Herzegovina.
> I was thinking more so at the level of teaching them how to code fun stuff in Python or JavaScript.
Yup, I am all up for that. I am the first one to applaud and donate to smaller projects that are aiming in that direction.
Meanwhile, the government (on the district level, think: District of Columbia) signs a deal with Microsoft in which Microsoft gives a substantial discount to their education platform, such projects get shoved away, and people are now being taught in other slightly more up-to-date Microsoft-dependent technologies. Of course, none of the licenses are provided to the students themselves to have at home, so piracy is at its peak. In fact, the only cases of prosecution for piracy I've ever heard of inside Bosnia is the prosecution of businesses that can't show Microsoft's licenses when asked for them by the regulators. Once you are being asked for them, you better have the boxes or receipts somewhere in your closet. It doesn't matter if you're using them or not. Good luck convincing the random inspector that your company is not Microsoft-reliant.
In other words, I haven't seen anyone using any non-Microsoft OS before I started messing around with Linux-based operating systems myself when I was 18. To this day, out of all the local people I've ever met personally, I could list on top of my fingers the amount of local people I've seen using non-Microsoft OS (as in Macbooks, the amount of Linux users I've met in person is still 0).
From my time in that middle-school equivalent, I've also went to a IT-specialized high school and an IT-specialized college. Around 90% of all IT-related topics, 90% of them you are simply unable to run on anything not made by Microsoft. The moment I found out I was supposed to start learning server administration exclusively in Microsoft Server was the moment when I quit that college. I've managed to win some smaller fights (like submitting essays in .odt instead of .doc(x) which was listed as "obligatory"), but this was way out of my reach.
So yeah, it's no longer just the ridiculous educational system, it's a ridiculous educational system that's now backed up financially by Microsoft. The only hope of breaking this monopoly is during the negotiations about joining the EU, but realistically, that won't happen any time soon unless something drastic happens.
So yeah, here I am, two years after I've made that decision to quit college, with two years of work experience working with open source exclusively, on a Mozilla-sponsored fellowship, into month four of waiting for the work permit to get the fuck away from this country, writing this comment on HN because I'm technically unemployed if the EU country I'm applying for work permit with doesn't give me a work visa really soon. If it goes well, I will finally break free of the chains possessed by simply being interested in the "wrong thing" in a wrong country. If not, realistically, the best I could do to even have a job in the IT field in my country is to return to Microsoft.
Is there something wrong with the drag and drop approach? I find that working with kids on programming lego robots through their drag and drop approach is fairly engaging to them and does communicate concepts pretty well (loops, arrays, variables and so on). Of course you need to move them to a more "grown up" syntax eventually, but I suspect that comes as they need to solve more complex programs.
I think the drag/drop tools are great for the younger kids but once they reach middle school age they are generally ready for something more.
I periodically teach middle school coding workshops. One of the top questions the kids ask at the start of a new workshop is will they be using scratch or hand coding. They associate scratch with the young kids and want more control by this age.
Scratch of course is a very well known drag and drop coding environment, but it has been used in the UK to produce programs that can achieve A* grades at GCSE. Scratch can handle variable casting, iteration, IF statements and lots more besides. I have a whole bunch of 12 year olds who are all over Scratch, producing great code, and not at all perceiving it as somehow less than Java or Python. In fact last year, my 14 year old Year 10s came second in a Scratch competition in the Middle East, winning Apple Watches. So yes drag and drop tools can be seen as being a tad babyish, but when pushed they can be very effective.
How hard could it be? Make a movie like "Hackers" with a gender balanced cast and a hot, badass female lead. Heck, Angelina Jolie in Hackers was enough to pull me in.
As long as the social pressure provides friction, classes won't make girls much more likely to take up technology - any more than opening up Home Ec to both genders gave us a generation of men choosing to learn to bake.
Do we know if pinkifying works? I mean, of course as a male I find it hard to support increasing the number of purple headings in the world but presumably people do it because they've had success - right? Just because mature, grown women (who have already been selected for liking the paint tech already has enough to learn about it) aren't motivated by pink and flowery stuff doesn't mean it can't be the weird glitch in young girl's brains that toy corporations have optimized themselves to exploit so well.
My daughter loves Legos because of “Lego Friends”. So I think it does work. Just like my son is attracted to things with swords and explosions. The hook matters.
This makes me wonder, have computers inherently been designed as boy toys? I don't support continuing the teaching that girls should like pink things, dresses and flowers, but it does exist quite strongly. So if we assume boys are thought or predisposed to like esthetic X, while girls are thought or predisposed to like esthetic Y. Have computers been designed to esthetic X?
Basically, my point is, are computers gender neutral in their design? Or are they boyified? If they're boyified, then maybe we do need to alter their design, and work to make them more neutral or have girlified versions.
This calls for a full-blown essay at some point, but for now I'll just throw this comment out there.
[Using the terms girl and boy to continue the language of the parent comment; not meaning to be diminutive to anybody.]
Computers are inherently designed as girl toys, and boys are the foreigners in this world.
With the caveat that any statement you make about half the population is going to be wrong about a lot of people, statistically, girls are more risk-averse than boys.
Most of the advancement I've seen in programming over the past few decades has been for the purpose of reducing risk. Universal code reviews, automated tests, TDD, stronger type systems, distributed version control are prime examples off the top of my head.
Certainly there's a place in programming for more than one cognitive style, but it's the risk-averse style that puts the infrastructure in place such that the risk-taking style can create things that aren't a total disaster. So I'd summarize programming as a diverse world with a girlified core.
Parent comment seems to be asking about aesthetics. Is the black brick 'thinkpad' or silver macbook more aesthetic to boys or girls?
However, since we are in topic of risk. Things like TDD and type systems only start to ring a bell when someone is already reasonably invested in computer science. The initial exploration (click all the menu items to see what is there, etc) is a risk seeking behavior.
Part of it is that the computer field grew out of the radio and electronics clubs which were overwhelmingly male.
Even if they were trying their best to be inclusive and open it's really hard to walk into a room for the first time and see that you're the only X in there and want to stick around. You will feel like an outsider for a long time even if you do stick around most likely. Worse, these feelings can amplify any perceived rejection from the community you feel.
Ironically to stick around you have to have a bit of an asshole streak because in the monkey part of your brain you know you don't belong and you have to ignore that and plow forward regardless of what you perceive the others in the group are thinking. This is an area where women are at a disadvantage as they tend to be more empathetic overall.
I don't think computers themselves have been designed that way necessarily, but a much more obvious culprit is the advertising in the 80s and 90s. Computers were strongly marketed as toys for boys. NPR's Planet Money had a very interesting episode on this. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
Yes, pinkifying is not a real term, but the truth is, I was trying to describe the stereotype and couldn't for boys. I thought girls stereotypes are they like pink, flowers, dresses, sparkles, dolls, etc. And then I chocked on boys, I wouldn't be able to go ahead and "masculinize" something, because I wouldn't know what that means. I'm thinking boys like fighting, to argue, the color blue or red, trucks, cars, heavy machinery, computers, video games, etc.
This surprised me. My stereotype of boys is that they like things which leads directly to professions such as politic, business, engineering, policing or war. While my steteotypes for girls would seem to lead to low professional value activities in comparison, like house-wife, florist, artist, hair dresser/makeup artist, care taker. With the exception of fashion and lucrative care taking jobs like doctor, the rest doesn't pay well.
I make nothing of this, I think it might be a telling observation, but I'm not making any argument of it. I do find it intetesting. What would be other people's stereotype for boys vs girls about what we might think they "like"? I think that's a good exercise, and a good place to start better understanding the problems related to them.
Yes, liking cute, pink things is a common girl stereotype.
Liking rough sports, guns, cars, and having a lot of testosterone are male stereotypes, among others.
If you need a visual thing you can do to something to make men like it more, you could paint it with racing stripes or hunter/army camo. It doesn't lend itself to a pithy word easily, but it's the same idea.
I'm not saying it's right to stereotype anyone. I'm saying that it's not eye-opening that it's easy to understand a stereotype about one and then fail to come up with something similar for the other.
I think its definitly not irrelevant though. The fact is, my bias is weaker for boys, at least I have to assume, since I need to think harder to come up with it. If this is true at large, it could be that boys are held to lesser expectations of conformance to a strict set of behaviors and interests.
I also find it interesting how once I do come up with the stereotypes, they do seem to lead right into the current job ratios.
Now, I don't know the cause of the stereotypes, they could be observations of nature, or creations of nurture, but I do find they tell a bit of a story.
Not eye-opening I'll admit, but an interesting detail.
It's a real term. -ify is a productive suffix in English that can combine with nouns and some ajectives to create a verb. N-ify means "make like N, or endow with N, somehow"; Adj-ify is "make Adj".
Dictionaries do not exhaustively list every possible combination of a word with every applicable prefix and suffix.
Also, you rarely see people fretting over the low percentage of males going for primary education jobs. In many ways these jobs are just as or more important than computer programming, but nobody cares that it has such a lopsided gender ratio.
Personally, I don't even care about it, but it makes me pause to consider why I have to be so concerned about the lack of women in CS. Am I being an asshole and trying to shove people into a career they have no interest in?
1) Job availability and remuneration. CS is a high ROI profession currently. It pays well, has lots of open jobs for it, and takes relatively low investment to get into. If it wasn't so, they'd be much less talking about its gender gap.
2) The treatment of the minority gender in a particular field. There might be low males in primary education, but those that are in the field, do they find themselves at a disadvantage? Do they feel like the majority female create a toxic environment for them, making them feel uneasy about working in that field?
But I'll add one more:
3) People in STEM might actually be very open minded and progressive, much more open to talk about issues and much more interested in fixing them, and not letting bias be truth. This might be why you hear about women in stem and their difficulties, while you rarely hear about the difficulties of women in other male dominated fields.
> 2) There might be low males in primary education, but those that are in the field, do they find themselves at a disadvantage?
No, they don't. They are given extra responsibility and promotions much quicker than the women. I think the staff division in our local primary school is something like 4 guys and 25+ women. Everyone loves them.
Is the problem that they're boy-ified in their design? Or that they're boy-ified in the way we refer to them and their users? Boy-ified in our expectations of who will be interested in them. Boy-ified in the pronouns we use to refer to users. Boy-ified in who features in the ads that suggest who's responsible for buying and using them.
Pinkifying to appeal to women...sure, it's probably patronizing and wrong-headed.
Pinkifying to appeal to young girls...absolutely need more of this. Almost every engineer I've ever spoken to on the topic had Legos or some other toy that involves combining building blocks of some sort into a larger whole when they were a child. We absolutely need to pinkify these toys to build engineering instincts in young girls if we want to see them gravitate towards engineering careers in later life.
You might be surprised to learn that girls aren't attracted only to toys that are pink and flowery or related to traditionally feminine pursuits. I find that assumption damaging.
As a girl, my favorite toys were legos, blocks, and the toy cars that sadly were more often gifts to my brother than to me or to us both. Ideally all three together (racing cars down the hallway on ramps built from blocks and lego? Win!)
None of them were pink. None of them were dolls. None of them involved families or housekeeping or kitchens or flowers.
But then, I was one of the lucky ones who didn't have pink things and "pink is for girls" and "girls should play with dolls" pushed on her from a young age.
Just make the toys unisex and be glad when any of your kids play with any of them instead of looking askance at your daughter when she reaches for the legos or your son when he picks up a doll, and they'll be fine. Legos are girls' toys too, regardless of what color they are.
One of the things that I have increasingly come to realize is that one of my daughter's core values is beauty. She loves to make beautiful things and have beauty around her. Yes, her favorite colors are pink and purple. So when we added those colors to the mix of logo colors, it substantially increased her enjoyment in Legos.
So every child is different. I think it is a matter of presenting opportunities to our kids in ways that are most meaningful to them as individuals.
I also was pretty gender-agnostic in my choice of toys as a child, and get annoyed at parents who I assumed pushed "girly" stuff on their kids.
But then I got to know parents who were trying to actively discourage their kids from like princess garbage, but they couldn't stop it because the kids learn from their friends. I'm no child psychologist, but there's probably some age where what their peer group thinks is more important to them than what their parents have introduced at home.
I don't know how to avoid that when having kids myself besides being careful that I'm not plopping them into a school full of girls who are being told which things they should and shouldn't want to play with.
The solution for my parents was to send me to an all-girls school with a feminist bent. That had its own drawbacks in plenty, but the upside was an upbringing relatively free of gender stereotypes.
And talk to them about it. If they're hearing one thing from their friends and another at home, they will experience cognitive dissonance, and they will wonder about it, even if they don't know to ask about it.
Edited to add: pinkification and genderization of toys seems to have accelerated since I was a kid. Entire aisles of toys in pink boxes instead of a single shelf of barbies. The explosion of Disney princesses hasn't helped either. (I remember being a teenager going to see The Little Mermaid and my mom explaining that it was a big deal because it was Disney's first animated feature in decades.)
I think maybe to some degree people are subconsciously frightened that women are now able to wear anything men can wear, do anything men can do. The reaction is to make sure that there are still differentiators between men and women (because, OMG, how can you interact with a person without being able to define you understanding of them based on gender? [never mind that we do it all the time in places like HN]) - and the easiest way to do that is to make sure the girls are pink! That way you can tell them apart!
"Research shows that sales and profits go up when we make girls' toys pink."
"Okay then, make girls' toys pink!"
Anyway, my guess is that whatever strategy would encourage the majority of women to go into programming isn't necessarily something women on hacker news would like, because women on hacker news are part of the self selected minority who already buck gender trends. You don't need pinkification because, if you were the type of person who did, you wouldn't be here.
I'll just note that some of us who might have been most attracted to the profession would be turned off by pinkification, and that we may be harder to recruit into recruiting efforts that we perceive as ghettoizing. I quit a women's organization dedicated to a specific technology because all the meetups they organized seemed to be oriented around manicures.
Someone mentioned above that law and medicine have evened out (or even begun to invert) their gender ratios over the past generation. They didn't do that by pinkifying the profession - by giving little girls pink stethescopes or gavels. They did that by changing expectations of who turns out to be a doctor or lawyer - the expectations of both children who hadn't yet chosen their profession and of the adults who guide their choices; choose whether to admit them into study programs; and eventually hire them.
I'll just note that some of us who might have been most attracted to the profession would be turned off by pinkification, and that we may be harder to recruit into recruiting efforts that we perceive as ghettoizing.
You touched upon something that's critical to the whole issue: the perception of traditionally female stuff as inferior. The feminist movement has come a long way getting women through the door and into traditionally male-dominated fields. What still remains as an enormous challenge is the elevation in status of traditionally female roles and norms.
For as long as we think of silver and black and blue as high status and pink and purple as "ghettoized", we have a problem. Just as we have a problem that nursing and teaching are low status compared to other professions.
For as long as we consider care work to be inferior to business work, women will never be truly free.
Absolutely, I agree with that. But I also think that misses the point that we need to eliminate the notion that pink is girly and blue is boyish - or rather, that there are colors, interests, and pursuits that are masculine and others that are feminine.
That's effectively how Lego Friends came to be. LEGO wanted to expand their market to hit the same market segment as Barbie. After years of market research, focus-testing, and development, they released Friends. It quickly became the fastest-selling line in the company's history.
For reasons that I'm not even going to attempt to speculate upon, a non-trivial number of young girls really like that stuff. Pretending it's not true, or casting judgement on the morality of this won't change the fact that it's effective. If it helps spark children's creativity, imagination, and passion for building things, then that's great in my book.
> You might be surprised to learn that girls aren't attracted only to toys that are pink and flowery or related to traditionally feminine pursuits
Perhaps not all or even most girls, but definitely some are. As long as the gender-neutral versions are available for girls like you were, what's the problem with having more targeted options for the girls that are different? The point is to get these kinds of toys into the hands of girls in whatever way possible so that they don't miss out on this crucial developmental stage.
>> But then, I was one of the lucky ones who didn't have pink things and "pink is for girls" and "girls should play with dolls" pushed on her from a young age.
Personally, I've accepted that it's very hard to convince people of this. It's like Ouija boards and divining rods. People just consistently fail to catch themselves at it. And they often get very upset when you suggest that they might have bestowed their own gender stereotypes upon their children (not least because they believe those stereotypes to be damaging). I've lost count of how many friends have told me how their daughters always make a beeline for the barbies section at the toy store etc.
Well- they're kids. That's how sophisticated their understanding of gender is. What do you expect? We don't think twice about correcting other "natural" behaviours that we consider damaging ("don't talk to strangers", "wash your hands before eating" etc). So why is this "natural" tendency to follow gender stereotypes sacred and unassailable?
But, like I say- I despair of ever being able to get my point across to others about all this. If I ever have kids, we'll see how much better I do. 'Till then I just let it go.
Why didn't other well-respected (better-respected, even) professions—doctor, lawyer, veterinarian—have to do this kind of thing to achieve balance or near-balance (or even swapping balance in favor of women)? Or did they have to do this stuff? IIRC the ratio on those started to swing heavily in the mid-80s, so it'd have to be something that happened around then, or earlier.
Because the professions you listed aren't based on a skill that children develop during play in the same way that engineering is. A lot of engineering is about visualizing how smaller pieces of a larger whole can fit together, even if those pieces are more complex and/or more abstract than the Lego pieces that we give to kids.
The professions you listed primarily rely on memory and pattern recognition which don't differ too much between the sexes.
I too can think of more than a few pink- & flowery-themed events for women in tech that I've seen, but all that I can think of were organized almost entirely by woman who worked or were getting an education in tech. I would be surprised to learn that that trend was substantially atypical. They're weren't being condescending or stereotyping: they were being themselves. I don't see anything wrong with that. The alternative is social pressure that girls who get into tech can't be into other traditionally "girly" things which seems counterproductive and hypocritical.
I think what it's arguing against is the idea that pink is what attracts women. Women are interested in the robots etc and the pink & flowers are a side effect of including women, not a cause.
Let anyone who is interested in the thing, do that thing. And then get the fuck out of that person's way.
This current obsession with gender-asymmetric ratios in various careers is ridiculous. There is absolutely no evidence that everything would be 50/50 man/woman in an ideal(ized) world.
I shouldn't even have to say this, but the smartest programmer I know is a non-cisgender female.
While HollyWood is relentlessly ridicule "nerds" "tech-savvy members of the society" "scientists", some are still believing colors, nouns, wording are the root cause of gender inequality in tech industry.
These people are either maliciously hiding some intentions, or are plain ignorant.
I don't think attempts to improve the aesthetics of coding in order to attract a more diverse audience is in any way a bad thing. Some people just need to chill.
I guess that each market, each country has a different dynamic. For example, here in Brazil, there has always been a good % of women in IT and software. But there was one thing: 99.995% of jobs were ERP development or Novell Netware. I always liked low-level software and systems development, but I kept doing that as a hobby with very occasional consulting in systems development from 1988 to 2005.
Most of the few hobbyists were men as well, some even became lawyers to make a living, so scarce was the work in this area, even for the best. Now that non-ERP software development is the high-paid job and ERP development is drying up because big boys e.g. SAP are eating into the local market, everybody wants a piece of the action.
So I don't feel too bad about gender imbalance in this particular branch. Nobody is preventing anyone from buying an Arduino and/or publish apps on App Store.
I think that's more a misunderstanding about what they're trying to do with the name. Perhaps the misunderstanding they're trying to address with the name.
I can see that, and I think I get what they were going for. But you simply can't choose to complain about using colors to attract women to tech (vs. letting the actual tech stuff be the draw) and then choose to utilize all the "Like a girl" stuff they've gone with. I see so many of these events that are branded "like a girl" "be a girl boss", etc. and it stinks of selective bias.
I would be genuinely interested in what “code like a girl” means in practial terms. Do girls/women code differently than boys/men, and if so, how? Since females are so exceedingly rare in our profession, I haven‘t had the opportunity to find out myself.
It's just a rhetorical device. The phrase "play like a girl" has already been established and associated with various advocacy groups trying to increase sports opportunities for girl who were previously discouraged from participating in the traditionally male activity.
But I think that the original phrase, "(do it) like a man" was meant to contrast with "like a boy", as in "be a mature and skilled adult, not an awkward and timid adolescent". If I'm right about that, then "code like a girl" is humorously ignorant, since "woman" would fit better. Unless this is a children's outreach thing? I dunno about that part.
I disagree that it has anything to do with man vs. boy.
The phrase "play like a girl" is a reaction to "throw like a girl" and "fight like a girl", which meant to do those things in a less than effective way. Now that phrase is being redefined as a statement that girls can do things just fine and doing something like a girl does not mean doing it badly.
Naomi Wu, from Shenzhen, is doing this better.[1] She's become very visible and has a biting wit. The publisher of Make magazine called her a phony, she didn't back down, and he had to apologize.
To the degree that it's an opening to economic opportunity, then yes, why not?
FWIW, truck driving (at least long-haul) is a little different from programming in one important regard: it takes the driver away from their families for days at a time. This is typically more problematic for women than for men, since women are still more likely to be responsible for care of home and family, whether they want to or not. (IMO that's another issue our society needs to address w.r.t. gender equality, but it's a bit tangential to the current topic of discussion.)
By contrast, programming jobs are no more gender-loaded in terms of the lifestyle involved than law jobs are. There's no reason for women to self-select out of them aside from being told that programming isn't for them or being made to feel unwanted.
What about agriculture? That industry has faced labour deficiencies for years, and the need is only growing with tightening controls on migrant labour. Interestingly, worldwide, women are more likely than men to work in agriculture, but in the USA the industry is overwhelmingly dominated by men.
Why isn't there a big push to get women into US agriculture like there is for US tech? Where is the government creating "farming" classes in school like they have done with coding?
I work in agriculture, so it is my industry and my place to work on. But realistically this problem does not seem exclusive to any particular industry, so I'm not sure it even makes sense for a specific industry to try and attack the problem in a way that only applies to that industry. There must be some solution that applies generally? Why not work together?
Write a letter to your elected representative. With current DOT roles anyone who isn't willing to piss in a jug to save a couple minutes is at a severe disadvantage.
I adore @sailorhg's (https://twitter.com/sailorhg) work on femme techy stuff. Her zines aren't the best way for me to learn and her clothes definitely aren't for me! — but they certainly are for some people, and that's super-exciting.
This site is a hypocrite then because less than a third or even a quarter of the articles are about technical subjects. Most of their articles are about social justice.
This is typical for just about every "we need more women in X" campaign that I've seen.
Society does not have an interest -- using "interest" in the legal sense -- in getting girls into tech. But a fair society DOES have an interest in eliminating gender-based barriers should they choose to go into tech.
A note to OP: using baity submission headlines in HN is counterproductive, as it’ll just get the submission quickly flagged. (And per HN rules, the source headline should be changed if the source is baity)
I agree with this, girls that like coding aren't usually very interested in girly stuff. I don't think you can lure feminine girls into coding just by pinkifying it. All of this is just demeaning the profession.
> girls that like coding aren't usually very interested in girly stuff
You might have a causality problem here. For example, my daughter, who is definitely at the girly girl end of the spectrum sees no problem with being a lawyer or a medical doctor. That probably wouldn't have been the case a generation or so ago (at least here in the UK).
> All of this is just demeaning the profession
As the father of said girl, and being acquainted with a lot of her peers, I can reliably say that if our profession became more attractive to them it would not be demeaning the profession in any way whatsoever.
I didn't say they did. But those professions weren't attracting "girls who like girly stuff" either and now they are. So maybe we're not attracting them for similar reasons.
And, fundamentally, what changed in those professions is they accepted that it was them that needed to change to be more attractive, not some failing in girls.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that they're paragons of equality because they aren't. But in the specific question of attracting girls, even ones who like "girly stuff", they have solved that problem admirably.
I'm not sure about the UK, but here in North America, students attending post-secondary schools are predominantly female. The opposite was true a generation ago. Doctors and lawyers typically require a post-secondary degree. Could it be that the rise of women practicing as doctors and lawyers is a result of men not being able to, rather than more women taking interest in the profession?
What's interesting to me is that male dominated fields tend to be those that are a free-for-all, that require no special credentials or vetting. This is not limited to tech, but seen across a wide variety of industries. Does this simply mean that men are more likely to be found in these careers because those are the jobs they are able to do?
In a perfectly free market, where anyone was free to do whatever job they wanted, perhaps we would see an even distribution of genders? But in this very non-free labour marketplace we have, with many artificial barriers to entry, perhaps that is what has lead to this disparity not only in the careers with those barriers, but also those without, rather than any specific gender having a preference for certain types of work?
Girls aisle in toystore is full of pink doctor tools. Our bookstore has "occupations for girls" book and there is doctor and female doctor is regular occurence in kids books/shows. That is how it was during my childhood too.
Where I thought I would be weird for choosing electrotechnics as a profession (and such occupations were only in "for boys" books), I never thought the same about being doctor.
At what level in the IT industry do you feel that this is not the case?
Education (at home, early, primary, secondary, higher?), in the workplace (companies are biased against women?), or somewhere else (conferences, meetups, trainings, etc.)?
It seems that lack of "acceptance" is thrown around to explain this phenomenon, but it's not clear what and where should be improved to change this.
I've seen it personally at all levels of education you list, plus in workplaces, as well as in other places. Now, not in every example of each, but in enough that, while I'm sometimes surprised at the extent, I'm never, anymore, surprised to find it in ant context.
Look at how many people in a discussion like this on HN will simply dismiss low representation as "they must just not be interested" or "why should we care about having equal representation?"
Want more?
How about the cultural expectation that little boys will be more interested in computers than little girls. The stereotypes that suggest that all hackers are male or that girls who are interested in computers in middle or high school will be pariahs among other girls and not welcomed by the boys who are interested in computers.
Or the same stereotypes creating the unconscious biases that result in the teacher being more likely to suggest the Asian boy take the math and CS classes while discouraging the black girl, because Bob just seems more math oriented and she thinks Alice will thrive better in social studies. Those same unconscious biases 5 years later resulting in the man's better fitting the hiring manager's expectation of what a good software developer "is like".
The "booth babes" at conferences and the dudes in communities like this who refuse to acknowledge that that's problematic. The guys who assume that a woman at a tech conference is there as a recruiter or someone's girlfriend. The groping at the conference parties, and the defense of men who make crude sexual jokes about women in what should be a professional setting. The utter lack of women on conference panels on any topic other than diversity in tech.
I haven't seen this in a year or two, but suggestions that tech culture change at all to be less sophomoric and more professional used to result in general outrage that boiled down to "you're impinging on my freedom of speech at work" or "they should just grow thicker skin" or "I was bullied in high school, so I should be able to bully other people now"
The vehement dismissal in technical communities (even more so than in non-technical communities) of women's claims of being harassed or intimidated by men. The foul online cultures that result in women being intimidated, harassed, threatened with rape and murder (after being doxxed so that their addresses are public) for the high crime and misdemeanor of breaking up with a dude and then giving a game a harsh review -- followed by the majority (or at least the highly vocal minority) of the community blaming the woman for the whole thing.
A lot of these things stopped happening in the legal profession, at least, because they began to be perceived as legal liabilities. The medical profession opened to women in part because it could be pitched as a caring profession, which made it acceptably feminine.
The freewheeling culture of startups and large but young tech firms results in an environment where "professionalism" is less valued. That has some positive outcomes (hey, we can wear blue jeans to work!) but also some negative ones (a culture that's more personal, clubby, and clique-y, and where there's less pressure to observe boundaries). This summer, we saw some of the fallout from that, and the entertainment industry is currently reaping the harvest of 100 years of a culture without such boundaries.
What do we do about it? A lot of things.
We try to be more conscious of the expectations we set for our kids, male and female, based on their gender. We find and promote more female role models in the industry, and make our children aware of them.
We create, adhere to, and enforce -- and stop protesting the existence of -- codes of conduct for industry events and for employees (and managers/founders). We hold our peers to a standard of professionalism. We provide our employees with training (as most large law firms do annually) on the topics of bias and harassment, and we educate ourselves and them on our legal obligations in those areas.
We take women seriously and have empathy for them when they point out ways in which they're treated unfairly, and we don't knee-jerk defend the behavior of the men accused. We treat the claims of harassment and of innocence with equal skepticism.
And we do not ever accept malicious doxxing or threats of violence; instead of defending, we ostracize anyone who resorts to such tactics to intimidate women who attempt to participate in computing-centric professions, industries, and communities.
I don't think it's demeaning to the profession. I do think it's demeaning to women to suggest _either_ that a) pink and coding aren't compatible or b) pink is only for women and girls or c) women and girls only or primarily like pink things.
"YOU NEED TO TRY HARDER TO APPEAL TO MINORITY GROUPS."
- 2 seconds later -
"STOP USING STEREOTYPES TO APPEAL TO MINORITY GROUPS, IT'S OFFENSIVE."
I mean, I understand the sentiment, but I can also see why many industry professionals begin to think this sort of thing is a catch-22 where smug criticisms will be levied, regardless of conscientiousness.
> catch-22 where smug criticisms will be levied, regardless of conscientiousness.
This is 90% of online discourse: most people have absolutely nothing to contribute except smug criticism. Trying to satisfy popular opinion online optimizes for mediocrity, cynicism, and least-common-denominator thinking.
If your pinkwashed bootcamp/outreach program/hackathon is getting people engaged who would not otherwise be engaged, then you're doing the right thing. Same for programs that prioritize technology over identity. There's a big audience for both. If people don't like that a group or event is not catering to their very specific idea of what inclusive environments should look like, then they're always free to go somewhere else or do their own thing.
I'm genuinely curious here: how? Isn't appealing to minority groups by definition setting them apart from other groups? If we're not going to genericize all appeals (thus introducing the built in cultural bias of appealing to most people, i.e. the dominant group) don't we have to say "this thing that is unique to your cultural group is why you should be interested"? That sounds like it almost must include some stereotype. That doesn't mean patronizing, but it does mean making some assumptions about the group in question and why they might be interested.
"Isn't appealing to minority groups by definition setting them apart from other groups?"
No, in a world where minority groups are set apart, appealing to them can be as simple as not setting them apart, by no harassing, abusing, discriminating, etc.
You don't need pink office chairs to make an office space welcoming for women. You just need NOT to have catcalls, rapists, abusers, sexist jokes, etc.
The point I'm trying to make is that if we are indeed to engage to appeal to a specific group, we need to make assumptions about that group.
Your example above is a different problem. In that situation we are trying to not be hostile to a specific group. That's really a much easier problem to identify (not solve) because hostile behavior is hostile behavior, no matter who you are. It's incredibly important to solve that problem, but there we really have a universal solutions: treat people with respect, regardless of sex, race, sexual orientation, etc. Build policies that enforce that respect and hopefully build to a cultural shift where respect is assumed.
But "appealing to minority groups" is another problem entirely. We're assuming that we have a problem that is due to some inherent bias in the way our culture has portrayed or encouraged a behavior. In this case that boys are more interested in tech because they got "STEM toys" as kids or that the toys that are available appeal more to boys or that the messaging surrounding tech is unconsciously biased towards boys. None of those problems involve being hostile towards girls. We also assume (correctly or incorrectly) that adjusting that bias could bring a better balance to this area.
That involves targeting a message or policy to a specific group. In that situation we've defined a problem: "girls are not interested in technology to the same extent that boys are" and are presumably trying to say "how do we get girls more interested in technology". I would argue that "don't be hostile" is only part of the problem, it does not address inherent cultural bias. If we assume that bias exists, then we need to make assumptions about girls and build solutions accordingly.
> In that situation we've defined a problem: "girls are not interested in technology to the same extent that boys are"
Are you sure that's the problem? What if you restate it as "at some point in their lives, girls become less interested in technology than boys" or "at some point in their lives, girls' interest in technology declines, unlike boys'"
Now you have very different problems and very different solutions. Why does that interest decline? What is driving it? Could it be a self-propagating, hostile, "boy's club" environment in technology?
Maybe you don't even need to market to them, if they never lose the interest in it.
And based on some data, I believe that my definition of the problem is probably closer to the real problem than yours:
I'm not sure what that data shows us. It shows us that more women get engineering degrees and fewer computer science degrees since 1980? It shows us that more women get degrees period, actually. It's also showing us a snapshot in time: women between the ages of 18-22. That doesn't really address at all the problem of "girls before 18".
Girls have only recently drawn even with boys in attendance in high school stem classes, and still lag quite a bit in computer science. And minorities do even worse [1]. Anecdotaly, my experience also bears this out. The First Robotics clubs in my area (aimed at ages 9-14) are majority boys, despite several teams (including my daughter's school) being coached by female engineers specifically hoping to encourage more girls.
Well, for computer science, that does seem to be the case. But not for engineering, physical sciences or math. And considering that most people are granted a degree before they enter the workforce, I don't believe it can entirely be the workforce culture that's deterring them. So I guess I would argue that it's just as likely to be how we message technology as how we treat women in the workforce, if not both.
Or it could be that computer science (what most people refer as "tech") came to be dominated by the boy's club videogame/nerd culture from the early 80's, which pushed women out.
It goes back to another topic here on HN: I don't know of any other career so dominated by a culture as SWE/tech.
Sure, I think you're probably correct that rampant video game culture probably did begin to alienate women, even back in the eighties, since they saw that computers were mostly being used as tools for violent competition and most women were not very interested in that.
That's where our opinions will probably diverge though, because I also believe boys glean more enjoyment from video games simply because they are biologically-predisposed to enjoy violent / high-stakes competitions more intensely.
It's not just video games, look at the gender ratios in competitive poker, or chess, or debate. All very similar.
Since there seems to be a strong chance that the root of the problem is innate / hormonal / biological it's not an issue that's "easy" to even rationally discuss, let alone solve, as you keep stating throughout the thread.
> video games simply because they are biologically-predisposed to enjoy violent / high-stakes competitions more intensely.
You're making the assumption that all games must be competitive and violent and therefore women will enjoy it less.
That is wrong.
Not only women enjoy video games as much as men, they already outnumber men in gaming in many markets.
Every time you make an assumption, think if that assumption is being driven by gender stereotypes.
"Since there seems to be a strong chance that the root of the problem is innate / hormonal / biological it's not an issue that's "easy" to even rationally discuss, let alone solve, as you keep stating throughout the thread."
No, women liked technology, then they were pushed out by a hostile culture. The problem isn't hormonal or biological, it's cultural.
The problem isn't women not liking violent games, is men treating women like shit.
>Every time you make an assumption, think if that assumption is being driven by gender stereotypes.
I have, and most of the time the stereotypes have some truth to them, however unfortunate it may be.
> The problem isn't hormonal or biological, it's cultural.
Culture doesn't spring into existence from a vacuum, it arises from the aggregation and normalization of the biological impulses and drives of many people.
But how? I'm being serious here. You put anything culturally appropriate into the system and someone is going to call it an offensive stereotype. So you have to make it relevant to the user while not referencing anything specific about them, not an easy problem to solve.
It is possible to include minority groups in a community without pandering or using reductive caricatures. It can be difficult if the community has little familiarity with the actual experiences of those minority groups. In that case, it would be important to seek out people who are from those minority groups, or who at least have a great familiarity with those groups, to direct efforts to grow the community in their direction.
If a person is anxious about being reprimanded for using an offensive stereotype, they do not have the expertise to employ "culturally appropriate" materials and ought to do more research/inquiry or delegate the responsibility of the outreach to somebody else.
As I just mentioned in another post: You don't need pink office chairs to make an environment welcoming for women. You just need not to have catcalls, rapists, abusers, sexist jokes, etc.
[Edit] And for a bonus round: don't focus on culture. If you're interviewing someone for a SWE job, don't ask if they played videogames when they were kids. There is a good chance that they were too poor to afford them, or they never got it as a gift because they were females and people didn't think females would play videogames.
Merely not driving away minority groups isn't enough to fix the imbalances in representation. People don't avoid things because of future negative experiences, they avoid things because they expect to get negative experiences there. Like, if police magically started treating African Americans like they ought to overnight, there's a lot of built-up fear that would still have the African American community avoid interactions with police.
It's not just a behavior problem, but also a marketing problem. You can't fix a marketing problem without, you know, marketing.
That's exactly my point. The fear of the future causes behavioral changes now, not the actual future, which hasn't happened yet and cannot affect your current self.
The only way here to "Win" is not to play the game.
Catering to minorities = good until its not. And that fine line for some is blatant racism/sexism/ageism for others.
Going on merit and projects also has its own downside - the claim there is the disadvantaged don't have a way to prove themselves due to inherent barriers against them. Seems accurate, but again, we have to discuss and not discuss....
Edit: I've seen these arguments and discussions at least a dozen of times on HN, in varying ways. And it all amounts to "Well, we shouldn't do bad, but bad's already being done and we can't fix it alone." Every time, I see very little constructive discussion how to make things better for all - it usually devolves down to low-grade flamewars and simmers up until dang and other mods do something.
So, are there actual, constructive things we employees can do, to make these situations better? I know I try to watch my language, and try to treat everyone with respect and dignity. What else is there to do?
I didn't get into tech because it was interesting, at least not initially. I got into computers because the movie War Games was cool as hell and I wanted to be like Matthew Broderick's character in that movie. I was 5 or 6 when I saw it.
It was only after I got a Commodore 64 that I learned that it was going to be really difficult to do the things in the movie. But the idea that with enough practice I could be like that was very appealing. I don't think girls today have anything similar.
Let's be honest, very few children are that into math or computer science where it becomes an end unto itself. That comes much later. Younger males in the industry today seem to have grown up in the gamer->modder->hacker path that didn't really exist when I was a kid, and certainly doesn't exist for girls today.
And if you're asking the tech industry full of nerds to fix this problem for kids of any gender you're going to get something completely misguided.
Complain to Hollywood. When the military wants to recruit people they don't change to be more appealing, they help make "Top Gun."