Jeanette Winterson on why women should code

[ErrolTheDragon]

And design robots...

Girls must code to curb power of sexbot geeks, author says

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sexbot-geeks-will-inherit-the-earth-so-teach-your-daughters-to-code-urges-jeanette-winterson-rjpl3mlnv?shareToken=d8f385c4d7fc6a7d3ace2441d86b9e2b

I think she's spot on. Women were at the forefront of IT and then were freezed out when it became mainstream. In fact I think the lack of women in IT is one of the biggest issues we face. The world is being re- imagined and re-created by men for men.
www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/13/ai-programs-exhibit-racist-and-sexist-biases-research-reveals?

www.forbes.com/sites/adrianbridgwater/2019/01/21/women-leading-in-ai-wlinai-demand-tough-controls-on-discriminatory-algorithms/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2019/02/women-s-work-how-britain-discarded-its-female-computer-programmers

For this to happen, women who can code need to enable women who can't, and that means accepting they can't always pay up front.

Women who have resources need to start doing more to enable other women imo.

Women who have resources need to start doing more to enable other women imo.

Women who can code are trying to help women who can't:

girlswhocode.com/

www.codefirstgirls.org.uk/

learntocodewith.me/posts/13-places-women-learn-code/

code.likeagirl.io/11-resources-for-women-who-want-to-learn-to-code-79ee4ba74f79

www.womenwhocode.com/resources

And if you look at sites like Meetup you'll find local initiatives to get women and girls into coding. The problem isn't women being unwilling to teach other women, it's the bizarre idea that is peddled that women shouldn't want to learn which starts very early, so by the time girls are offered the opportunity they have already decided it isn't for them.

Um this might not necessarily work.

Coding is not that hard and lots of women could easily do it. But it doesn't mean they will end up with power and influence in tech firms.

I do some coding when I feel like it

Tech is the future but coding skills are unlikely to help anyone ride the future wave.

I was a coder in the 80s and 90s and it was easy to do then and the department had lots of women. It became a sigificantly more male dominated environment over the last 20 years, due partly to unrealistic expectations over geographical mobility and long hours away from home - and partly due to attitudes. (I stayed in a different IT role until exiting the company)

Grapefruits has it.

I am not sure coding is going to be a big area for employment in the future. It's easy to offshore and a lot of it will probably be done by machine in the fairly near future.

There is a massive coding skills gap right now and for the foreseeable short term future at least. It won’t be done by machines any time soon and the things being built will still need to be designed by humans even when we do reach the point where machines can code.

Also, anyone who has used offshore development teams knows that they’re far from ideal.

"Coding is not that hard and lots of women could easily do it. "

I worked in coding for a few years. I hated it. My job seemed either utterly impossible or tediously boring. I don't think I'm stupid, but I never found coding to be easy.

Work in a large tech company.

OFfer Statistics + coder + ethics and human behaviours and your sex is Irrelevent at recrui5mnet.

team dependent after that but I have never struggled to move to a good team when fate has thrown me to a bunch of sad guys.

Huge skills shortage especially if you have some breadth, then you will be more valuable than a code guru.

You can have influence if you chose to use it . role models are lacking there however .

And I had part time working when I wanted, and my office hours are flexible.. yes it’s not 4 and I am uk based.

Culture and attitude to work likely to be company dependent though.

I spent 20 years doing it. I think for women who like logic and maths it will not be hard to pick up.

Not feeling like I accrued an immense amount of power and influence doing it though the pay was good.

After really enjoying it to start with, it wound up feeling tedious and sterile. I found it hard to progress as well.

For this to happen, women who can code need to enable women who can't, and that means accepting they can't always pay up front.

Thing is, we've heard this 100 times - do this work for us, unpaid, for exposure, for experience, for stock options. After the 10th grafter has you do a load of work with no income from it you get a bit jaded.

I am not sure coding is going to be a big area for employment in the future. It's easy to offshore and a lot of it will probably be done by machine in the fairly near future.

They've been saying this for as long as I've been old enough to hear it - I remember going to a family party and being told that computers/programs were as good as they needed to be, so we just wouldn't need many programmers in the future.

As to offshoring, as someone that's been in the game for a while, it's fine, but getting more expensive every year, with the regions changing as one prices itself out of the market.

The thing with offshoring and automated programming is you still need someone to decide what to do and how to do it, which has always been the skilled bit of programming. Anyone can follow someone else's instructions to bake a lemon cake, thousands are baked in factories, but someone had to decide that a lemon cake was what was needed, what size it should be, what was needed in order to bake it, what was needed to get it to customers, and what recipe should be used. Machines (and offshore teams, who don't know your business, and are viewed as largely replaceable parts rather than long-term employees) aren't very good at that bit.

Oh, missed a bit - that family party was when I was about 14, and the height of home computing was a 386 with a 20 meg harddrive. I didn't even have a sound card, and cd-drives were the thing of very expensive dreams (in fact, when I was 14, I don't think they were domestically available, it was probably a couple of years later)

There's coding and coding, isn't there.... I write scientific software software, the coding may not necessarily be that hard it's knowing what to code which is the hard part. In my context it's a chemistry PhD and decades of accumulated knowledge. In robotics, it will be other skills sets. The design and engineering issues ... coding is a means to an end.

And as grapefruit indicates, just being in the team doesn't mean your female-friendly designs will be the ones developed and brought to market. But, if we're not involved then our interests won't be properly represented at all.

Ms Winterson isn't entirely wrong, but in this context learning a bit of python is perhaps analogous to telling someone that if they want to write a great book they need to be able to write words.

Speaking as someone who codes in the context of analysing my data - coding badly is relatively straighforward, however, good coders (which I am not one of) are much, much rarer.

Perhaps girls just need to learn a little basic coding so they can manage coders.

People who actually do the coding seem fairly low down the food chain.

Machines (and offshore teams, who don't know your business, and are viewed as largely replaceable parts rather than long-term employees) aren't very good at that bit.

Oh, for sure. But that's kind of the case with most of the automation of jobs, isn't it. There are certain ones that are less likely to be automated, often the higher paid professional ones. It's the masses at the bottom most likely to be replaced in all the industries.

and a lot of it will probably be done by machine in the fairly near future.

How will the machine know what to write?

In terms of getting women's needs met, women need to be involved at the scoping and requirements analysis stages, not the implementation stages. We are about to launch a new service at work and I've been doing requirements analysis for it (which is unusual for me, I'm usually an implementer) and I think I'm the first person in my employer's history to cite the EA2010's protected characteristic of sex as a reason for a software requirement.

and I think I'm the first person in my employer's history to cite the EA2010's protected characteristic of sex as a reason for a software requirement.

And not for sex-linked colour-blindness either, for women, re name-changing on marriage.

Look I think anyone working in a scientific profession really needs to know how to code. Just the same way that they need to be able to write and do mathematics.

I think that being a software developer is different. Effectively you are to coding as an author or journalist is to writing. And there will be lots of other things to think about, how to make the software secure, how to create new versions without breaking existing functionality, how to make it perform properly when lots of people are using it. Making sure it works as expected in different time zones. I could go on but it might not be very exciting!

And not for sex-linked colour-blindness either

Ha... I've had to change code in the past because I could easily distinguish more colours than my non-colour blind male boss at the time.

Spot on, grapefruit.

Surely most STEM degrees include coding - my chemistry BSc did (1980, fortran on cards). DDs engineering degree certainly does, a lot of the internships available are at least partly coding.

Perhaps girls just need to learn a little basic coding so they can manage coders.

No. Women need to be in requirements analysis. Programmers hate being managed by non-programmers and will quickly resort to malicious compliance when they perceive (accurately or otherwise) managerial incompetence. Management need enough technical competence to be able to spot when their instructions are a bad idea, because their subordinates will obey a bad idea to the letter, even if they can see it's bad, if they decide they don't like the manager. There is also a really unpleasant undercurrent of misogyny in some areas of tech, a quick review of the comments under any Slashdot story about the state of misogyny in tech will demonstrate this. A woman who hasn't much or any programming experience and is hired to manage programmers will be perceived as a "diversity hire" and her subordinates will make her life hell.

Making sure it works as expected in different time zones.

:shudders at memories of PostgreSQL, Oracle, and MySQL date and time handling functions: Not kidding, there is a public database just for managing this stuff.