The origin of this blog is from a long term desire by me to write about sexism in the tech industry. I am still not sure of my thoughts - such an issue cannot be written about in a flippant manner - so in the meantime I have written about why there are so few women entering careers in tech. I hope you enjoy, and get some small insight from my mullings!

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“It’s not for me”

I have often (half) jokingly said to my female friends when they complain about their job that they should be software engineers, and I always get the above comment back. This idea that software engineering just isn’t for women seems pervasive in society, despite the best efforts of schemes aimed at getting women into this career.

In 2017, a senior software engineer working for Google named James Damore, decided to dedicate his freetime time to writing a 10 page memo for an internal forum arguing against diversity in tech. He argued that women are underrepresented in tech not because they face bias and discrimination in the workplace, but because of inherent psychological differences between men and women. When it leaked it blew up in the media with many commenting on the faulty logic and horrible sentiment.

I did wonder for a while whether he did in fact have a point. I like to give every argument, even if I disagree with it, a fair hearing. But it just created more questions in my mind: what research has been done into this? How can we state this without evidence? He was making this argument based upon pure conjecture. I cannot even comment from my own experience whether women have less ability in software engineering because I have only worked with four other women software engineers in my seven year career. This is such a tiny sample size that one cannot extrapolate much from it. However I can comment on the plethora of male engineers I have worked with. No, they were not all naturally fantastic and talented engineers. Far from it. Many were barely passable, most were OK, and a few excellent. Much like a bell curve distribution you often see for IQ.

In doing some reading into the cause of the lack of women, I came access the blogs of Robert Martin, programmer extraordinaire and author of a billion programming books (perhaps some hyperbole there), where he commented this:

I changed jobs a couple of times in the following years. Looking back on it, I can identify two trends. First, every time I changed jobs the average age of the programmers went down. The thirties and forties gave way to the twenty-somethings. Second, the number of women significantly decreased from one third to one tenth, or less. - The Clean Code Blog

And now we are left with the question of why there are so few women in tech in the present day. It can be slightly put down to gender difference, but not entirely, as that would totally assume we have a system with only one variable affecting the outcome. We do not. We live in a complex society, and an outcome must therefore be attributed to more complex causes. To point at something and say: “This is the cause!” is to be a horse wearing blinkers.

I think now is a good time to inject a story of how I came to be a software engineer. Throughout school there was not a single sign that this would be my career. I didn’t particularly enjoy maths and I didn’t study computing science; I enjoyed history as I was good at it (yes, I chose the path of least laziness). I spent my free time with my nose buried in a book. The only thing I thought about programming is that it was something pale, nerdy boys and men did as that is what the media told me. Not something I would want to do - not ever! I went to university to study History. I found it a huge disappointment; I was bored. I craved creative thinking, rather than tired old essays where you selected only the evidence that supported your theory and crafted an argument out of that.

I finished my degree disappointed and lost. I started looking for post-grad courses in science and I found a conversion course at my university for computing science. Even at this point I still had never written a line of code and had no interest in doing so but things were about to change. One year later, I had written an entire android app of several thousand lines of code, and used a variety of design patterns I had obsessively read about late at night. I had found my passion.

I told my story as I want to illustrate that the world is complex and people have different reasons for their actions. Mine was I never considered I could be a software engineer as the pernicious stereotypes fed to me by the media put me off it. Only a fortuitous set of circumstances led me to discover this career. Of course, this is only one person’s experience, but we cannot deny we have a serious problem with lack of role models and encouragement of women into this career. Take the Big Bang Theory as a perfect example of the idea of everyone in a technical, academic career being a nerd, or pretty much every portrayal of a programmer in every film ever. These shows look harmless but they are subtly insidious in spreading these false stereotypes.

Once we address role models, we also have the problem of creating the interest in women to code. Google’s Director of Education and University Relations Maggie Johnson says:

In general, most young boys build and explore; play with blocks, trains, etc.; and engage in activity and movement. For a typical boy, a computer can be the ultimate toy that allows him to pursue his interests, and this can develop into an intense passion early on. Many girls like to build, play with blocks, etc. too. For the most part, however, girls tend to prefer social interaction. Most girls develop an interest in computing later through social media and YouTubers, girl-focused games, or through math, science and computing courses. They typically do not develop the intense interest in computing at an early age like some boys do – they may never experience that level of interest (Margolis 2003).” - Google AI Blog

Much like most girls, I didn’t prefer using a computer over other styles of playing. I didn’t play computer games so had no need or want to learn basic scripting to mod a game. In fact, I don’t to this day enjoy hacking; I love system design. We need to advertise so much more that tech is an extremely varied field and that there is so much more to it than is portrayed, only then can we attract a more diverse workforce.

I want women to have enjoyable, well paid and challenging careers. Getting more women into tech is going to require a baroque effort with a many pronged attack at stereotypes and discrimination (a topic I don’t want to cover here as it is a pandora’s box). Every person, regardless of gender identity, deserves to have the same opportunity. It is for you.