Why are there so few girls in programming?
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led mike wrote:
I propose that we get you, me and as many of the other female CPians that are interested in this topic to meet in person
And yet in your profile you keep on referring to yourself as "He". Yeah, women do that all the time. :doh: Jeremy Falcon
Dude. Your SLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWW.:-D He wants to hook up with all the programming chicks and hand pick the hotties for 5 days of fun and sun.
"You have an arrow in your butt!" - Fiona:cool:
Welcome to CP in your language. Post the unicode version in My CP Blog [ ^ ] now.People who don't understand how awesome Firefox is have never used CPhog[^]CPhog. The act of using CPhog (Firefox)[^] alone doesn't make Firefox cool. It opens your eyes to the possibilities and then you start looking for other things like CPhog (Firefox)[^] and your eyes are suddenly open to all sorts of useful things all through Firefox. - (Self Quote)
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Dude. Your SLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWW.:-D He wants to hook up with all the programming chicks and hand pick the hotties for 5 days of fun and sun.
"You have an arrow in your butt!" - Fiona:cool:
Welcome to CP in your language. Post the unicode version in My CP Blog [ ^ ] now.People who don't understand how awesome Firefox is have never used CPhog[^]CPhog. The act of using CPhog (Firefox)[^] alone doesn't make Firefox cool. It opens your eyes to the possibilities and then you start looking for other things like CPhog (Firefox)[^] and your eyes are suddenly open to all sorts of useful things all through Firefox. - (Self Quote)
:doh::laugh: Oops. Jeremy Falcon
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That is not meant to suggest I am a girl ;)
"Just about every question you've asked over the last 3-4 days has been "urgent". Perhaps a little planning would be helpful?"
Colin Angus Mackay in the C# forumled mike
led mike wrote:
That is not meant to suggest I am a girl
Well I feel releived. :-D Jeremy Falcon
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apurva kaushal wrote:
but the things are changing rapidly
Yes... In 'Leaps and Bounds' :rose: Vasudevan Deepak Kumar Personal Homepage namespace LavanyaDeepak
Personal Weblog
The World of Deepak and Lavanya
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Okay, I'm a girl and I like programming. I'm not very good at it yet, but I do like it. I've done research on women in science and the number of girls going into "computer" (whether programming, IT, etc.) keeps dropping significantly every year. For those of you with a formal education I'm curious how many girls you had in classes, how they acted (shy? open for discussion?), ethnic diversity (we had a few foreign girls but i was the only "white" girl in most of my classes.) But why do you think so few girls go into programming/computers? Other girls please give your feedback!
I haven't seen many classes, but I remember one girl that was struggling desparately, I always felt she'll never make it, and I was torn between "tell her my opinion so she tries to find something else", and "not telling her because how should I know?" OTOH, a long term acquaintance turned out to be a real code geek after years 'knowing' her (gosh, a girl arguing about C code - I never thought I'd ever meet one, and there she was all the time). At least now I understand some of her personality quirks better. Being from east germany, ethnic diversity in tech jobs is still close to zero.
Some of us walk the memory lane, others plummet into a rabbit hole
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Yes, that's a fact. But why don't they like programming? _____________________________________________________________________________ I don't expect too much, all I want is your vote for Halbsichtigkeit.
Corinna John wrote:
why don't they like programming?
Dunno... :doh: You tell me. :rolleyes: --- With best regards, A Manchester United Fan The Genius of a true fool is that he can mess up a foolproof plan!
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Okay, I'm a girl and I like programming. I'm not very good at it yet, but I do like it. I've done research on women in science and the number of girls going into "computer" (whether programming, IT, etc.) keeps dropping significantly every year. For those of you with a formal education I'm curious how many girls you had in classes, how they acted (shy? open for discussion?), ethnic diversity (we had a few foreign girls but i was the only "white" girl in most of my classes.) But why do you think so few girls go into programming/computers? Other girls please give your feedback!
leckey wrote:
I've done research on women in science and the number of girls going into "computer" (whether programming, IT, etc.) keeps dropping significantly every year.
Maybe if you all didnt spend time researching the stats and doing some programming the numbers would increase ;P PS: joke, not generalizing :)**
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leckey wrote:
how many girls you had in classes
A while back, when I learned the profession Fachinformatiker[^] (German word for somebody who learned an IT job for three years in a company an a school), we were five girls in my class, and about 20 or 25 boys. Two of the girls didn't get it and don't work in IT anymore. Today I'm just about to finish the next part of german IT education, in a few days I'm going to be Techniker für Informatik[^]. When the class started four years ago, we were five girls, two of them left the school during the first year, the third one left in her second year. So we are only two girls (and six boys) who'll leave the school with the full certification. One of the boys wants to go to university. All others are happy to be finished with that stuff. Seven years of IT school seem short, now, when looking back ... but it must have been hard enough to reduce the size of our class from 28 (first day) down to 8 (people you actually did the final exams).
leckey wrote:
why do you think so few girls go into programming
Most of the girls I know have more social and less technical interests, and they have strange ideas about the IT business. They say they want to work with people, or that they don't understand all that tech stuff. Well, an IT worker has a lot to do with people, software is only there to be used by people - anyway, the image of the pale hacker in front of the screen seems to be programmed into girl's minds. Another point is that most of the girls I kno think that programming would be complicated and hard to understand. They are afraid of the "challenge" ... lazy and badly informed are those ladies... Anyway, we cannot force girls to do programming. If they don't like computer, well, let them do the low paid "women's
Corinna John wrote:
Diversity, where???
My class was similar - there was more ethnic diversity in the lecturers than in the students. As I recall the class make up was 90% Scots, 5% English, 5% miscellaneous other English speaking countries.
Corinna John wrote:
Seven years of IT school finally done
Congratulations - I stopped after 4 years of school.
Scottish Developers events: * .NET debugging, tracing and instrumentation by Duncan Edwards Jones and Code Coverage in .NET by Craig Murphy * Developer Day Scotland: are you interested in speaking or attending? My: Website | Blog
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Because nature and nurture conspire against them. Just this week I read a med sci piece on some bit of the brain that lights up like a christmas tree in autistic idiots savant and not at all in women, with blokes in the middle and nerdy engineers lighting up more than usual. That said, of the two (count them, two of forty) women in my computing course fifteen years ago, one was an oxygen thief and the other was so good it was scary. And she was a natural blonde with a radiant smile and a body to die for, with nice perky, oh wait wrong type of website. But you get the gist. I feel that we let down engineers everywhere when we failed to capture and clone her. Imagine, if you will, a world of hot chicks who like pizza, video games, programming computers and building gadgets, rode around on a trailbike... man, she even brewed her own beer! -- modified at 2:04 Thursday 22nd June, 2006
Peter Wone wrote:
one was an oxygen thief
I'm not familiar with that expression - Care to explain?
Scottish Developers events: * .NET debugging, tracing and instrumentation by Duncan Edwards Jones and Code Coverage in .NET by Craig Murphy * Developer Day Scotland: are you interested in speaking or attending? My: Website | Blog
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Okay, I'm a girl and I like programming. I'm not very good at it yet, but I do like it. I've done research on women in science and the number of girls going into "computer" (whether programming, IT, etc.) keeps dropping significantly every year. For those of you with a formal education I'm curious how many girls you had in classes, how they acted (shy? open for discussion?), ethnic diversity (we had a few foreign girls but i was the only "white" girl in most of my classes.) But why do you think so few girls go into programming/computers? Other girls please give your feedback!
Its not that strange, in our western society girls are fostered to think that beeing cool and beautiful is really really important. lots of girls gets breast implants just to fit in with this image of how a girl should be. And beeing a programmer that sits infront of a computer eating burgers and thinking about the fastest way to sort a list of polygons is generally considered geeky, anyone who does that are associated with the steriotype fat geek boy with big glasses. so the steriotypical image of the programming trade is the oposite of the western girls ideal. in our society its uncool for girls to deal with programming, they will be considered oddballs. Im sure things are quite different where those ideals dont exist.. for guys in the western world things are quite different, our ideal is just to be successful, and that just means earn as much money as possible. so Id say its all about culture.. (and I didnt say that _every_ girl/woman cares about those ideals, but very many do..) http://www.puzzleframework.com
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Its not that strange, in our western society girls are fostered to think that beeing cool and beautiful is really really important. lots of girls gets breast implants just to fit in with this image of how a girl should be. And beeing a programmer that sits infront of a computer eating burgers and thinking about the fastest way to sort a list of polygons is generally considered geeky, anyone who does that are associated with the steriotype fat geek boy with big glasses. so the steriotypical image of the programming trade is the oposite of the western girls ideal. in our society its uncool for girls to deal with programming, they will be considered oddballs. Im sure things are quite different where those ideals dont exist.. for guys in the western world things are quite different, our ideal is just to be successful, and that just means earn as much money as possible. so Id say its all about culture.. (and I didnt say that _every_ girl/woman cares about those ideals, but very many do..) http://www.puzzleframework.com
And now, the stranges observation of all: If a girl ignored those rules and became a successful progammer, the other girls forget that she was an uncool outsider. A certain amount of tech skills seem to be accepted as a replacement for perfect looks. I still don't know where this mysterious turning point is, but it exists. :suss: _____________________________________________________________________________ I don't expect too much, all I want is your vote for Halbsichtigkeit.
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Corinna John wrote:
why don't they like programming?
Dunno... :doh: You tell me. :rolleyes: --- With best regards, A Manchester United Fan The Genius of a true fool is that he can mess up a foolproof plan!
Don't know ... I like it. :-D _____________________________________________________________________________ I don't expect too much, all I want is your vote for Halbsichtigkeit.
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Corinna John wrote:
Diversity, where???
My class was similar - there was more ethnic diversity in the lecturers than in the students. As I recall the class make up was 90% Scots, 5% English, 5% miscellaneous other English speaking countries.
Corinna John wrote:
Seven years of IT school finally done
Congratulations - I stopped after 4 years of school.
Scottish Developers events: * .NET debugging, tracing and instrumentation by Duncan Edwards Jones and Code Coverage in .NET by Craig Murphy * Developer Day Scotland: are you interested in speaking or attending? My: Website | Blog
Colin Angus Mackay wrote:
there was more ethnic diversity in the lecturers
That may be because Great Britain and Germany have less ethnical diversity than the US. Less diversity in the overall country must result in less diversity in each class. ;)
Colin Angus Mackay wrote:
I stopped after 4 years of school.
Why? School is fun! You meet other people who are just as strange as you are. :cool: _____________________________________________________________________________ I don't expect too much, all I want is your vote for Halbsichtigkeit.
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Okay, I'm a girl and I like programming. I'm not very good at it yet, but I do like it. I've done research on women in science and the number of girls going into "computer" (whether programming, IT, etc.) keeps dropping significantly every year. For those of you with a formal education I'm curious how many girls you had in classes, how they acted (shy? open for discussion?), ethnic diversity (we had a few foreign girls but i was the only "white" girl in most of my classes.) But why do you think so few girls go into programming/computers? Other girls please give your feedback!
I'm not sure how the trend started, but since this trend is already established, as a girl you'd have to resign yourself to working with male programmers, and the stereotype of the average male programmer probably isn't appealing to most women.
"... This man is obviously a psychotic." "We-he-ell, uh, I'd like to hold off judgement on a thing like that, sir, until all the facts are in." (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)
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leckey wrote:
But why do you think so few girls go into programming/computers?
Because most of them have a life? :laugh: Jeremy Falcon
That made me think of all the geek jokes over the years... The tigress is here :-D
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The other day I had a manager tell me that they were going to hire a young woman that had previously worked at the company. She finished her masters and was lured away to become a consultant but can't live with the travel. The reason they want to hire her back is that they can offer her a lower rate because they believe she is less qualified. From her work that I reviewed I can say she is as qualified as any other programmer working on the projects. I am not saying this is common but if young women believe that they are going to paid less and not respected it could scare them away from the occupation.
Sadly that is universal :sigh: The tigress is here :-D
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That is an interesting question. I propose that we get you, me and as many of the other female CPians that are interested in this topic to meet in person, for about 5 days to discuss the issue.
"Just about every question you've asked over the last 3-4 days has been "urgent". Perhaps a little planning would be helpful?"
Colin Angus Mackay in the C# forumled mike
:laugh: The tigress is here :-D
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Yes, that's a fact. But why don't they like programming? _____________________________________________________________________________ I don't expect too much, all I want is your vote for Halbsichtigkeit.
Men are better at being obessive than women? :rolleyes: The tigress is here :-D
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The numbers are even worse in electrical engineering I remember when I was in school there were 65 guys an 2 to 4 girls in most of my core EE classes. John
Same here. Out of 120 or so in my year, there were only about 5 of us (though I was undercover at the time!). Anna :rose: Currently working mostly on: Visual Lint :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "Be yourself - not what others think you should be" - Marcia Graesch "Anna's just a sexy-looking lesbian tart" - A friend, trying to wind me up. It didn't work.
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Because nature and nurture conspire against them. Just this week I read a med sci piece on some bit of the brain that lights up like a christmas tree in autistic idiots savant and not at all in women, with blokes in the middle and nerdy engineers lighting up more than usual. That said, of the two (count them, two of forty) women in my computing course fifteen years ago, one was an oxygen thief and the other was so good it was scary. And she was a natural blonde with a radiant smile and a body to die for, with nice perky, oh wait wrong type of website. But you get the gist. I feel that we let down engineers everywhere when we failed to capture and clone her. Imagine, if you will, a world of hot chicks who like pizza, video games, programming computers and building gadgets, rode around on a trailbike... man, she even brewed her own beer! -- modified at 2:04 Thursday 22nd June, 2006