Why women stopped coding - what happened in the 80s

[noblegiraffe]

Fascinating graph here of women studying comp sci in the US.

This podcast looks at what happened in the 80s which might have influenced this trend.
www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/17/356944145/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding

The image of geeky men as programmers is manufactured and nothing to do with men being better at tech - most programmers at the beginning were women.

I have to admit to not having researched it fully, but I've always been under the impression that, like for like, investment bank IT pays 3x "normal" IT. Would be delighted to be proved wrong!

slightlyglittered, Did they say why it's so much easier to recruit female candidates in country X rather than the UK?

There are cultural differences at play. The gender differences aren't so marked in countries in Asia, India, Africa - in fact in some countries, it's seen as a good career for girls, because it's clean (unlike agriculture or cleaning or factory work) and comparatively safe. Even the middle east doesn't do so badly, if it's a country where they allow women to work at all. But in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, NZ and much of northern Europe, we've all go the same issues. I wonder if your outsourcing firm would agree with what I've read elsewhere.

Possibly outing myself, but I worked for an investment bank on quite a comfortable salary (they claimed to pay the national average + 10% for professional roles - clerical roles were local average + 10%.) Started as a graduate trainee, and was there a few years, including over Y2K and the dot com boom, which did have a positive effect on salaries at the time, and after the dot com crash, they did take a hit in many places, and payrises/bonuses weren't so generous.

I left to take some time out travelling, then came back and failed to find a job so easily. Ended up working for the public sector doing exactly the same role, but on 50% of the salary, so let's say £20K when I had been on £40K - though still better than the minimum wage I was on on temping, and that was better than having to turn up at the job centre and try and survive on JSA.

A year later, I went back to a multinational, not banking (same role again), and got a 50% rise on the public salary (so 75% of the banking one, about £30K.) I could have probably got more if I'd been less naive about negotiating starting salaries, and talked about banking salary more. However, in the banking and multinational, there are also annual bonuses, private health cover and some other benefits, so the overall package is more just the salary. Also, one of the things I really like about my current job is that I get to talk to people all round the world every day, which just didn't happen in the public sector job, and it's a more dynamic atmosphere, too - it's not just about the money for me, though frankly, if I can get quite a lot more money for the same role, then that is going to go against the lower paid one. I also didn't find the public sector job particularly enlightened about equality and diversity, at least in the techy departments, either, which rather surprised me, but I wouldn't like to say that it will be the same in all public sector IT roles, given the range of organisations that covers. (In fact, I don't really like public sector vs private sector debates for that reason anyway - there are too many different types of employer under both public sector and private sector; it makes more sense to compare company sizes and so on.)

Thank youEBear and Hamuk will definitely go through the info with dd. There used to be a coding club at school but it hasn't carried on this year.

Well, even Barbie says that girls can't code

I was sent an invitation to an event run by Tech Muses today - might also be worth looking at. (I'm otherwise occupied on 13th December, though.)

Just been reading through this thread, and the interesting links from it - while trying to track down a memory leak in an application I'm working on.

A comment from upthread resonated with me:

men tend to like coding for the sake of it whereas women like what can be done with it.

• I don't work in IT, I'm a scientist. I'm one of the era who was introduced to Fortran on cards during a chemistry degree but then fortunately my PhD was a computationally intensive branch and I taught myself enough code to land a job in a fledgeling field. We have a reasonable proportion of women on the development side and probably a majority in customer support/application scientists (who all need to be computer literate to some extent and most happily write perl scripts at very least). So there may be more women 'coders' hidden around the place than CS stats suggest.

I've a yr11 DD who is taking Electronics and Computer science, she'd like to do both at A level but as she'll need 2xmaths and physics the CS to be an engineer the CS will have to be dropped. I guess that's an ok reason! Someone asked how to get girls into STEM subjects... where to begin? Probably helps to have a pair of scientist parents - both as examples and because we could always talk to her about how things worked etc...but even if you're not a STEM person, nowadays with the internet if a small child asks you a techy question you should be able to find out enough to discuss it sensibly. Buy them the good k'nex kits and decent science stuff etc as well as soft toys and nail polish or whatever. And do look at secondary schools carefully - ours does go to a girls' GS which really encourages them in STEM - but if coed you might want to ask about proportions doing various subjects at GCSE and A level.

I was interested that someone thought the decline in girls' interest might be because of the change from CS to IT/ICT - well, maybe the one good thing Gove did was start to reverse that - DD was pretty at ICT but helping the new teacher set up a labful of Raspberry Pis and starting to learn linux and shell scripting is much more fun! (and clearly this is stuff you ask your mum about).

We were talking about it at work today, and about how important it is to get parents on board (which is mentioned upthread), because they do have a massive influence on which careers children go into, because they affect awareness so much - so yes, having STEM parents is important. But as well as awareness, there are careers which are acceptable to parents - one woman said her Indian parents would accept her doing engineering or medicine - but not any other subject. Someone else mentioned that parents didn't want their children applying to certain jobs - if they were in finance, for example, they wanted them to go for the big four accountants, and not another big corporate, even though they all have large finance departments. And IT would be IBM or Oracle or Microsoft - but there are so very many ways and companies to get you into IT roles these days. So we need to get parents to be more open-minded when they advise their children.

(Can't say I think of shell-scripting as fun some days, but that's probably because I'm getting paid for it as a job, and some days everything seems to go wrong!)

I'm a (male) developer, and in the two companies I have worked for I have never met a female developer. However, the mysogynistic culture mentioned by other posters is something I haven't come across (I'm not saying it doesn't exist). Currently I work for a small business and one of the owners is female, sexism would not be tolerated. In my previous role while all of the developers were male a lot of the other, and arguably more important, roles were held by females. For example, a lot of the work I did was implementing statistical models, and these were written by a lady who was the real brains behind it.
I think one of the reasons women are put off computing is the image of "geekiness" that goes with the industry. When I told my wife I was being trained as a programmer she said "You're not going to turn into a geek, are you?" This image doesn't affect reality in my opinion. Programmers are, on the whole, normal people with good personal hygiene! I think if the industry could get rid of this image a career in IT would be more appealing to women.

Agree on making IT more appealing. I remember a recruiting event where I talked to a bunch of young, very bright women who were studying several branches of engineering. All of them told me they wanted to work in Operations, and when I asked why not IT, they all told me "because I like to talk to people".

I work in IT and believe me, I talk to people more than I ever wanted! (introvert)

not all schools were doing computer science anymore, but IT was being taught from Y7 up

This is my memory of what happened too. Some politician said that we didn't need computer science because we could buy existing systems.
It was the same education shake-up that abolished Home Economics in favour of Food Technology.

But there's loads of talking to people in IT! I'm a unix sys admin, and I have to talk to developers, DBAs, network admins, datacentre people, application support, customer services... Some of them are really techy, and you have to get them to talk in ways which are more accessible to others, and some people really aren't very technical at all, so you have to adapt what you say so they can understand - you can't do all that without good communication skills.

I wouldn't have a job without people. If there were no people involved, we'd just have big lumps of metal and wires, and they're too expensive to have running if no one's actually using them. Developers have to talk to people, because there's no point in coding a program which no one will use.

We do need to work on improving the image of IT, and what is involved, because a lot of people are put off IT because of what they think it is, rather than what it actually is.

interesting article in the register today www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/27/the_gender_imbalance_in_it_is_real_ongoing_and_ridiculous/

Another article from the LA Times - making the point that it's not about "nurturing" women, but tackling misogyny:

www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-gardner-women-in-tech-20141207-story.html

I've just been sent this link - 3 female computer scientists at MIT did an "Ask me anything" session on Reddit. It's a bit Lewis's law - all the questions on "why does gender matter" prove why it's matter (alongside all the questions about bras, marriage etc.)

I like that they acknowledge that it's a cultural problem that discourages girls from STEM careers, that the problem includes the leaky pipeline and that there are also issues with technical privilege, implicit bias and imposter syndrome. (I like it, because it basically means they agree with me, and it's always nice to feel I'm thinking along the same lines as far more influential people.)

Ebear

Do not read the comments, do not read the comments (talking about The Register article) - A nice, sensible article, followed by pages of comments from men about how it's not a problem and stop being mean to us (oh, and my wife is a lawyer who earns more anyway)

I agree EBear - there's looooads of politics and talking in IT. Right now I freelance, so I have to find and manage clients (sales, PR etc.) in previous jobs I've managed teams (HR, team-building), and done the worst (and yet very fun for me) job of managing the live environment/quick changes where I literally had to be able to walk into a room and talk to anyone from any part of a big business about either what went wrong, or what they needed to get done quickly.

In fact, of the women I know in IT departments, they often seem to migrate to management roles out of the tech. I wonder if that's often because of a wife-work style thing where they delegate to the woman to organise everything?

Interesting Passmethecrisps, at my daughters school she is the only girl left doing software development and was the only girl who did robotics. When the courses were introduced years ago the exact same effect as what you describe occurred, meteoric fall off for girls applying for the courses in subsequent years. The school thought it was a choice cascade effect, boys reported the new course positively to their gender peers, girls reported negatively. Once that occurred it went into a state of reinforcement where gendered selection inertia, word of mouth and the friends grouping effect had a stranglehold over who would apply.