1. OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

Give this article , it would seem that there is a bit of a gender imbalance in the software development scene. Do you agree? Is that a good, bad, or otherwise thing?

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2. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

DerekParnell said...

Give this article , it would seem that there is a bit of a gender imbalance in the software development scene. Do you agree? Is that a good, bad, or otherwise thing?

I agree in general that the article is correct, and I'd agree that it's clearly a bad thing.

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3. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

DerekParnell said...

Give this article , it would seem that there is a bit of a gender imbalance in the software development scene. Do you agree? Is that a good, bad, or otherwise thing?

The stuff in the article is certainly different than my experience. I've been at the same company for over 13 years now (it's pretty technical heavy, though not entirely IT stuff). The senior manager who hired me was a woman. I've worked with plenty of women across various organizations. There are several on my current team, one of whom desperately deserves to be fired, but for some reason works on. Others are superb at what they do.

But it's not a flashy internet company where you have "well known engineers," and there are many people of various ages and experience (lots of retired military and lots of kids right out of school).

I've heard the complaint about no well defined career paths from a lot of IT sorts of folks. That's definitely not a female specific complaint. It's hard to draw serious conclusions from a news story that only interviewed the people making complaints without hearing any other sides.

I've also seen studies that disagree about there even being a shortage of tech workers, so there could be a lot of question begging going on in the article.

That said, it doesn't surprise me at all that there are places that could be (or be perceived as) hostile to women. Hostile work environments are bad no matter who you are.

Matt

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4. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

It's been biased as far back as i can remember. The boys seem to prefer it that way. I have opinions on the matter, but i am pretty sure they are irrelevant. I would expect to be banned for stating them.

Kat

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5. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

mattlewis said...
DerekParnell said...

Give this article , it would seem that there is a bit of a gender imbalance in the software development scene. Do you agree? Is that a good, bad, or otherwise thing?

The stuff in the article is certainly different than my experience.

Same here, although I probably have less experience than you do.

mattlewis said...

I've been at the same company for over 13 years now (it's pretty technical heavy, though not entirely IT stuff).

Ditto.

mattlewis said...

it's not a flashy internet company where you have "well known engineers," and there are many people of various ages and experience (lots of retired military and lots of kids right out of school).

Ditto.

mattlewis said...

I've worked with plenty of women across various organizations.

Ditto.

mattlewis said...

The senior manager who hired me was a woman.

I joined my company after she had departed, but the hiring and head manager position used to be occupied by a woman.

mattlewis said...

There are several on my current team,

Only one here currently. There were several others in the past, but most left on good terms for personal reasons (e.g. one's husband was moving across the country). The one exception was a person who left rather abruptly due to the travelling requirement of the job, and ignored attempts by management to engage this individual on getting rehired (probably with a loosing of the travel requirement).

I.E. I'm not aware of anyone leaving for the reasons discussed in that article (being passed over for promotions, not getting enough work, constantly being required to 'prove oneself' ad nauseum, etc).

mattlewis said...

Others are superb at what they do.

The same is true of every woman I've ever worked with so far. Again, though, small sample size here.

mattlewis said...

I've heard the complaint about no well defined career paths from a lot of IT sorts of folks. That's definitely not a female specific complaint.

Agreed.

mattlewis said...

That said, it doesn't surprise me at all that there are places that could be (or be perceived as) hostile to women. Hostile work environments are bad no matter who you are.

Agreed.

mattlewis said...

It's hard to draw serious conclusions from a news story that only interviewed the people making complaints without hearing any other sides.

I think though that this was one of the points of the article - that there still are places that could be perceived as hostile to women.

I do not agree that this is the only reason why there are so few women in programming. I believe that there are other reasons beyond what the article discusses.

E.g. http://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/mar/31/girls-coding-female-peer-pressure

mattlewis said...

I've also seen studies that disagree about there even being a shortage of tech workers, so there could be a lot of question begging going on in the article.

I've seen that as well, but I think it can be clearly reasoned like this.

There are plently of tech workers, but they tend to be not top rated quality - these are the ones who just want to work hard enough to make some money. Once they reach a sufficient level, they cease to improve - and thus their skills are not as good as they could be.

Then there are those that this techcrunch.com article refers to as "A-listers".

http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/27/write-code-get-paid/

Now I believe that the A-listers are the ones who are really needed, and that is where the shortage is.

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6. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

I think this is more an issue for corporations. FOSS projects seem to have less of an issue when it comes to representation. See http://bvasiles.github.io/papers/chi15.pdf

Also note that the original LA Times article is written from an American perspective. I can easily see the issues discussed in the article being less of an issue in Sweden, for example.

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7. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

jimcbrown said...
mattlewis said...

It's hard to draw serious conclusions from a news story that only interviewed the people making complaints without hearing any other sides.

I think though that this was one of the points of the article - that there still are places that could be perceived as hostile to women.

All of the articles seem to want to paint men who work in the field as sexist. I'm sure some places are like that, but sob stories from "well known engineers" without any hint of investigation are the opposite of persuasive to me. I'm sure an enterprising reporter could find many more such stories from men who felt like they were discriminated against for some reason other than their talent on the job.

Matt

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8. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

mattlewis said...

All of the articles seem to want to paint men who work in the field as sexist.

Er? None of the articles that I provided did so.

mattlewis said...

I'm sure some places are like that, but sob stories from "well known engineers" without any hint of investigation are the opposite of persuasive to me.

I'm sure that the companies questioned were tight lipped about it. Still, I wouldn't say that there was no investigation - the reporters did get some information on big name tech companies (e.g. Google, Facebook) on the percentage of women employed as well as their policies regarding gender and hiring.

mattlewis said...

I'm sure an enterprising reporter could find many more such stories from men who felt like they were discriminated against for some reason other than their talent on the job.

Yes, definitely.

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9. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

jimcbrown said...
mattlewis said...

All of the articles seem to want to paint men who work in the field as sexist.

Er? None of the articles that I provided did so.

You got me. I didn't read any of those. smile

But I've read many along the lines of the article that Derek posted.

jimcbrown said...
mattlewis said...

I'm sure some places are like that, but sob stories from "well known engineers" without any hint of investigation are the opposite of persuasive to me.

I'm sure that the companies questioned were tight lipped about it. Still, I wouldn't say that there was no investigation - the reporters did get some information on big name tech companies (e.g. Google, Facebook) on the percentage of women employed as well as their policies regarding gender and hiring.

Yes, but I didn't see any evidence that they tried to talk to supervisors or other peers. Typically a reporter will say something about how so and so didn't comment or didn't return attempts to contact when they've tried to talk to someone but didn't get anything out of them.

Matt

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10. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

The article says if women leave the field there will be a shortage of workers. That's a hopeful statement. Any shortage of programmers is good news for someone aspiring to be a programmer. Maybe we can get better jobs.

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11. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development


So the score now is

  • three men say there is no bias against women
  • one man suggests it would be good if women were forced out
  • one woman saying there is a problem

Kat

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12. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

katsmeow said...


So the score now is

  • three men say there is no bias against women
  • one man suggests it would be good if women were forced out
  • one woman saying there is a problem

Kat

I hope you aren't counting me in the "no bias against women," because that's not a fair reading of what I said. I said that I haven't witnessed it at my particular company. At several points in my career there, I've been outnumbered and outranked by women. No amount of bias at other companies invalidates what I've seen and experienced.

Matt

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13. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

katsmeow said...

So the score now is

  • three men say there is no bias against women
  • one man suggests it would be good if women were forced out
  • one woman saying there is a problem

My count is more like this:

  • one man asks if there is a problem, but doesn't give out his opinion on the matter (DerekP)
  • one man saying there is a problem (jimcbrown)
  • one man questioning the article, but admitting that workplaces hostile to women could exist (mattlewis)
  • one woman saying there is bias against women (katsmeow)
  • one man suggests it would be good if women were forced out (SDPringle)

That one man saying there is a problem is me:

http://openeuphoria.org/forum/m/127143.wc

mattlewis said...

I hope you aren't counting me in the "no bias against women," because that's not a fair reading of what I said. I said that I haven't witnessed it at my particular company.

That's not all you said. You also claimed that the original article seemed to have problems of its own (e.g. reporters apparently not trying to verify the stories with the anonymous companies).

mattlewis said...

At several points in my career there, I've been outnumbered and outranked by women. No amount of bias at other companies invalidates what I've seen and experienced.

I guess the real question is this: Is there a systematic bias? Is it just a few insignificant places, or does it cover a large swath of corporate America?

While, like mattlewis, I haven't personally seen any examples myself, I wouldn't have been in a position to do so, and I have no problems believing that America still has a significant systematic bias against female coders that covers a large swath of corporate America, and also that this set of affairs is not desirable, and should be rectified somehow.

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14. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

jimcbrown said...
mattlewis said...

I hope you aren't counting me in the "no bias against women," because that's not a fair reading of what I said. I said that I haven't witnessed it at my particular company.

That's not all you said. You also claimed that the original article seemed to have problems of its own (e.g. reporters apparently not trying to verify the stories with the anonymous companies).

Yes, the article might be 100% correct, but the way it is written it looks one sided and uncritical.

jimcbrown said...
mattlewis said...

At several points in my career there, I've been outnumbered and outranked by women. No amount of bias at other companies invalidates what I've seen and experienced.

I guess the real question is this: Is there a systematic bias? Is it just a few insignificant places, or does it cover a large swath of corporate America?

While, like mattlewis, I haven't personally seen any examples myself, I wouldn't have been in a position to do so, and I have no problems believing that America still has a significant systematic bias against female coders that covers a large swath of corporate America, and also that this set of affairs is not desirable, and should be rectified somehow.

It's hard to say. My impression is that the imbalance starts early. For whatever reason, boys seem more interested in programming than girls, on average. I know that some have hypothesized a girl hostile environment, I'm not convinced that's the whole story. Why are women doing so well in life sciences, for instance? As I said, I'm sure there are hostile places, but I think the story is a lot bigger than that.

Matt

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15. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development


After all the polished and well-considered words said up till now in this thread, I think it needs some words from reality.

I can't say that any early-life experiences a girl has will prepare her for the likes of Gamergate.

Nothing prepared me for a man trying to convince me to "date" him by hitting me with a closed fist, at work, and then threatening me with a knife after i exchanged his fist on me with my kick to his crotch. The "grievance procedure" and "chain of command" had totally failed me by that point, i didn't even bother reporting the knife incident. But for the next week i had to look up opcodes instead of simply remembering them.

One day a man who had asked me for help in the stockroom, cross-referencing a part number, pinned my arms to my side from behind, and pointed out i wouldn't dare yell out with the big-wig meeting going on in the next room. He was right, i quietly told him to let go, and then i tossed him over my shoulder thru the double doors, and he landed in the middle of the meeting. There was nothing to report, and nothing happened to him.

At another (non-programming) job, i managed to flip a guy who had my arms pinned from behind in the parking lot, at work, and he still didn't let go till i told him i was going to be bouncing his head off the concrete at the count of three, and being he was upside down at the time, he belived me and let go. Next night he came in with a baseball bat, swung at me, said we were going to the freezer for "fun" as soon as he ripped off the cash register. Wasn't but 20 seconds later i had kicked the cash drawer shut on his fingers, and i was holding his bat to his head. The police found him behind the store doubled over in pain holding his bloody hand, and they recommended i not press charges.

I could go on. Like the time work hired in five guys above my level, instead of promoting me, and inside two years had fired four for gross incompetence and demoted the fifth below me. Or the time out in the field when the male employees of a customer told their boss they would quit if i was there to work on the computer system. Or when a employer said he wouldn't hire me because his wife objected to him working with a woman. Etc. Etc. Etc.

You guys just don't seem to understand how difficult it can be to work among you. I recommend to all women now: document with video, self defense classes, and the appropriate weapons.

Kat

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16. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

katsmeow said...

I can't say that any early-life experiences a girl has will prepare her for the likes of Gamergate.

I have a hard time coming up with any experiences at any age that would make anyone able to prepare for the likes of that.

Now, we could still quibble over the facts here, like trying to come up with some stats that show those harassers are a small minority of individuals. Or that online gamers are a different group of people than those in corporate America.

All of that is besides the point. That is wrong, that is a problem, and something should be done to end it.

katsmeow said...

After all the polished and well-considered words said up till now in this thread, I think it needs some words from reality.

...i tossed him over my shoulder thru the double doors, and he landed in the middle of the meeting...

...i managed to flip a guy who had my arms pinned from behind in the parking lot... i had kicked the cash drawer shut on his fingers, and i was holding his bat to his head...

I can only say that I wished it actually worked out this way in reality.

katsmeow said...

I recommend to all women now: document with video, self defense classes, and the appropriate weapons.

You've gone to a different topic now - from discrimination to actual violence against women in the workplace. I feel that this is probably a lot less common than the original issue (simply because physical violence leaves behind evidence that's a lot harder to hide, so one would expect to hear about it more often), but even a single instance of this happening is one instance too many.

katsmeow said...

You guys just don't seem to understand how difficult it can be to work among you.

Some guys do.

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17. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

katsmeow said...

After all the polished and well-considered words said up till now in this thread, I think it needs some words from reality.

I can definitely say that I've not observed any criminal behavior like that, at work or not, but I certainly would have done something about it.

I'm sorry you've encountered the other stuff, too, but I'm not sure why you think my words weren't "from reality." Neither of our experiences invalidates the other's.

Matt

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18. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

My experience is quite the opposite as well. Where I work, we write custom software (mostly in Java and .NET) to facilitate the company's business (data processing) and among our developers, two are male and five are female. We were up to four men and four women at one point last year, but two of the men have since left. One of the women was just hired to replace one of the men who will also be leaving at the end of this month.

Disclaimer: I am not one of the developers but I do work with them on a daily basis as part of the systems team.

-Greg

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19. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

jimcbrown said...
katsmeow said...

After all the polished and well-considered words said up till now in this thread, I think it needs some words from reality.

...i tossed him over my shoulder thru the double doors, and he landed in the middle of the meeting...

...i managed to flip a guy who had my arms pinned from behind in the parking lot... i had kicked the cash drawer shut on his fingers, and i was holding his bat to his head...

I can only say that I wished it actually worked out this way in reality.

Apparently it does still work this way in reality: Zara Adil, age 21, was clerking the family store Feb 27 2015, when two males attempted to rob it. Within ~20 seconds, she had shot one robber in his shoulder with his own gun, and during the next 20 seconds chased the fleeing robber and took the cash drawer out of his hands twice. It's been in the news, complete with the store security camera video.

Reminds me of some other events, which are't involving co-workers or software.

I dislike a guns a lot, but guns are what men will respect while they don't respect the women holding the gun.

Kat

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20. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

katsmeow said...

I dislike a guns a lot, but guns are what men will respect while they don't respect the women holding the gun.

I like to think that this is another case where only a minority of men are offenders - but of course, the majority of us who are upstanding citizens can - and should - still do more to stop these kind of abuses from happening in the first place.

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21. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150226110454.htm

Teacher prejudices put girls off math, science, study suggests
Date:
February 26, 2015
Source:
American Friends of Tel Aviv University
Summary:
Although higher education has already opened the door to equal opportunities for women and minorities in the US in the math and science professions, a new study suggests that elementary school teachers' unconscious biases significantly influence female students' academic choices later on.

Site has more text, and related urls.

Kat

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22. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

katsmeow said...

And just look at how many women are admin on this site, or ongoing contributing programmers.

We have zero admins on this site who are women, AFAIK. Zero moderators as well.

I'm even not aware of any dev team members who are women.

I've been thinking about this for a while.

I suppose it's possible that we have some unconcious, implicit bias that is causing the skew, as described in http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/19/racism-and-meritocracy/

I admit I'd be surprised if that were the case though - to become a dev all one really has to do is ask. No one who has applied has ever been refused.

This could be a factor of our community size though - FOSS in general has a huge diversity problem. http://readwrite.com/2013/12/11/open-source-diversity/

I don't think we have even 50 individuals who are active on the forums right now.

With mattlewis MIA, we have only three primary admins now: myself, euphoric, and _tom.

We have ghaberek and ChrisB as moderators.

SDPringle is the only actual active dev it seems, though rywilly has been doing a lot of work outside with Redy. (And ghaberek has done a lot of coding with the new IUP library.)

I would agree that having a virtually all-male community here is a problem. I'm not sure yet what to do about it, but we should at least get the conversation going.

Another hiccup, but possibly a good one, is that we may not be able to reliably census our community. For example, we don't know this member's actual name, and it's not clear just from the user id if GreenEuphorian ( http://openeuphoria.org/user/profile/GreenEuphorian.wc ) is a man or a woman. So it could be the case that we have more female members than we realize.

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23. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

jimcbrown said...

to become a dev all one really has to do is ask. No one who has applied has ever been refused.

I wrote a reply. It's being held in "moderation".

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24. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

jimcbrown said...

This could be a factor of our community size though - FOSS in general has a huge diversity problem. http://readwrite.com/2013/12/11/open-source-diversity/

I don't think we have even 50 individuals who are active on the forums right now.

Actually, I can only think of three individuals who were Euphorian coders and also women - and of those, one is no longer active (Junko Miura) and another both left the community and then later passwd away (Judith Evans). http://openeuphoria.org/news/99.wc http://openeuphoria.org/forum/127553.wc#127553 http://openeuphoria.org/forum/102363.wc#102363

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25. Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development

katsmeow said...
jimcbrown said...

to become a dev all one really has to do is ask. No one who has applied has ever been refused.

I wrote a reply. It's being held in "moderation".

Yes, it is. This is because, even though it otherwise fits in fine with the CodeOfConduct, it still is a violation of the peace treaty that ryanj came up with. Specifically, you're not allowed to use the useless_ username anymore.

So the reason it hasn't been released from moderation yet is because there has not been a decision made on what to do about this violation as of yet.

But, my reply to your reply is below.

katsmeow said...
jimcbrown said...

to become a dev all one really has to do is ask. No one who has applied has ever been refused.

Yeas, me being a dev worked out really well. </sarcasm>

Well, the point was that no one who ever applied has ever been refused. Of course, I grant you that not everyone necessarily _WANTS_ to become a dev in the first place. We have a number of prominent users (such as irv and petelomax and andi49 and rkdavis/ukscone) who code in Euphoria but have chosen not to become devs. rkdavis was even offered the choice to become a dev (but never responded to the offer).

katsmeow said...

I was denied ability to edit the wiki, write readmes, write how-tos,

Any ordinary forum users has the ability to do this. You currently have the ability to do this too, if you are so inclined.

Like any user, this ability can be taken away on a per-user basis if it is abused (e.g. by constantly writing wiki articles that violate the CodeOfConduct and ignoring warnings to stop).

katsmeow said...

and moderate this forum.

I don't recall that you ever asked to join the team. That aside, as a practical matter, I have a hard time seeing someone who doesn't fit into the dev team being able to work well with the moderator team.

katsmeow said...

And a good many of my posts here were edited or deleted.

Well, at least you are in good company. So have many others. Even Derek, a full admin here, has likewise expericed such moderation on his posts. E.g.

http://openeuphoria.org/euweb.cgi?module=forum&action=deleted_message&id=126576

http://openeuphoria.org/euweb.cgi?module=forum&action=deleted_message&id=122263

katsmeow said...

The last great target for improving Eu was string execution in the name space and var space of the originating code.

Yes, and I actually did write up some code to that end.

katsmeow said...

It will never happen in Eu,

... and I actually did write up some code to that end.

http://openeuphoria.org/forum/127270.wc#127270

katsmeow said...

If you recall, i quit because of the constant fighting.

In fact, I specifically do not recall this. Back then, there was a lot of converstation, and a lot of passionate argument about people's pet ideas and so on, but not so much actual verbal (or written) fighting.

Today, the only active dev is Shawn. So we can guarantee that there is no more fighting between devs now! (Unless Shawn is into the habit of arguing with himself...)

katsmeow said...

If i was for something, everyone else was against.

Well, not literally true. A counter-example: I was for goto.

katsmeow said...

Eu is dead.

This was the only part that I couldn't refute.

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