I don’t think you’re naive to seek sober and reflective analysis on the lack of women programmers. The thing is though, this is Blender Artists after all. When I read your OP I could almost hear the dull metallic pop of a can of worms opening somewhere.
What we’re seeing here is that society (in developed countries) has not yet completely rid itself of unwanted gender role reinforcement. We may have laws which are intended to prevent discrimination but residual sociocultural attitudes mean that true gender equality will be a work in progress for many years to come. Robust and lasting social change is rarely revolutionary.
I think that the fact there are women programmers at all indicates that things are improving. This improvement will always be too slow for some and too fast for others.
I don’t think programming is something that everyone is suited to regardless of gender which is why I am sceptical of the recent attempts by the UK government to teach programming to more school children in order to address a skills shortage. However, programming as a school science subject may not not be such a bad idea, especially if it can bring in girls who are naturally adept but wouldn’t otherwise have considered the subject.
I don’t understand that. Committing simple fixes or new features that I need myself to a project is a win-win. If I can create a blender addon that solves a problem I have or fix a bug, why should I keep it for me? Nobody will pay for such a simple thing.
I don’t understand how one can be a professional programmer for multiple years without having committed stuff to multiple OSS projects. I don’t say give away stuff that was a lot of work, I talk about simple fixes and simple new features, which every programmer should have created a lot, because no software we use is perfect. Maybe you don’t consider submitting bug fixes as committing to OSS?
Because especially for middleware and programming libraries I often find bugs and then submit fixes. How can you program with libraries without submitting bugfixes? You keep the fixes for yourself and maintain them? Submitting them would be less work for you.
Is that really the reason? I don’t see any reason why “male dominance” would stop women from becoming programmers. I think some people refuse to accept the obvious reason: women are not interested about programming (which is a generalization, but statistics don’t lie (except in that 23% which can’t be true)).
Yes. I think it’s mostly culture and gender roles. I don’t think women are less intelligent, but the reality is that they don’t need to use their brains as men have to.
On the contrary I do, unlike most people when talking about this subject. It’s clear (well, at least to me) that women have different role in most cultures and gender roles are reality no matter how much we keep talking about equality.
Some people in some cultures do expect genders to fit on very specific strictly defined roles; that doesn’t mean those roles are inherent to those genders.
I think it’s less about conforming to social roles or norms, and about abilities, and more about gender-specific interests (although interests are probably a product of gender roles during the course of evolution).
It’s an interesting hypothesis, but where is the control for things like social pressure to behave like your gender is expected to behave, prejudice from family, teachers, colleagues, employers etc and all sorts of other cultural factors?
This recent commercial by Verizon explains very well why “women aren’t interested in science/programming”. I assure you that many women are indeed interested but discouraged very early on from pursuing a carreer where they get to use their minds.
But yes, it is still very hard for any gender to break into a field of work that is dominated by the other sex.
Gender roles are a societal construct. Yes, there are biological differences, but everything we are talking about here is a factor of society. Women, on average, may very well not be interested in pursuing a career programming. But this isn’t coded into their genes, it’s a factor of society. Do you want to spend all day surrounded by socially awkward, nerdy, male programmers? Are all male programmers socially awkward and nerdy? No, but there is a trend towards that. Again, social factors at play.
I just think that you need to step back from “women don’t want to program” and think about why that is. Obviously women are just as capable of being very successful programmers, so why wouldn’t they want to do it? What social factors are influencing people’s decisions about what careers they pursue? Just waving your hand at “gender roles” and saying “that’s just the way it is” misses the point.
Again, gender roles are a societal construct, much like race roles, and only have as much power as society gives them. If you think that it is right that less women are interested in programming, then by all means, continue enforcing that perspective.
I have a friend that works at Activision as a Tools programmer. She’s a black (African American) female and she calls herself a “unicorn” in the field which I thought was funny.
Could you provide some reference for these statements? Because these are quite outdated ideas, which are being slowly but steadily tested by evolutionary psychology, and they turn out to be mostly false.
The thing about “societal constructs” is that they should differ from society to society, because societies differ. As it turns out, there are a lot of cultural universals, that are constant across societies (Donald Brown, Human Universals, 1991). This is one of the bigger arguments in the nature vs nurture debate against the idea of the blank slate (the idea that we are exclusively shaped by our environment, experiences and society).
Those things definitely also play a role - showing traits that are typical for the opposite gender usually makes a person less attractive in the eyes of that gender. But the role of society/parenting/environmental factors is often overestimated (which is a remnant of the idea of the blank slate).
(This is one of my favorite topics of discussion, that’s why I got excited to see it on BA.)
It isn’t that clearcut though; for example, look at famous people (specially in the entertainment business), there are plenty “girly” guys and “boyish” chicks who got enough people of the respective opposite genders attracted to them at least to the point of making it a controversy.
