Because women are smarter. I notice that graph compares Computer Science ($50K-$150K/year), to Medical School ($150K--$1M), Law School ($120K--$1M), and Physical Sciences (???).
Women see the writing on the wall on High School: Med/Law School offer a clear career path to the upper middle class, while CS offers a muddy path at a middle class life.
They also see "rich" old Doctors and Lawyers. They have never seen a "rich" old programmer, because they don't exist. Programmers are washed out by 50, while Doctors are in their prime at 50.
Data: I am an 80's kid. All the smart girls knew to go to med/law school. All the nerdy guys like me wasted time learning 6502 assembly. We are all doing OK, but the women make 2 to 3 times as much as the men.
Law is a middle class profession for most lawyers. Very few lawyers make anywhere near $1M per year. I guess that the number of US attorneys consistently making $1M yearly is in the hundreds or low thousands.
Median salary for lawyers is $113,530. That's a pay most lawyers don't achieve until they are in their late 30s or 40s.
Top 10 percentile is at $187,200.
Most lawyers spend 4 years in college and then 3 years in law school to land a $60,000 dollar job in their late 20s. Then they spend another 5-10 years paying off the student loans. Many programmers make that kind of money in their early 20s without any formal education.
Also, it's too early to say at what age programmers are "done". There were few developers in the 1970's and 1980's and they are now nearing retirement. Let's wait and see how it goes with the bigger generation of developers that are now in their 20s and 30s. My guess is that many of them will continue until retirement.
Programming also seems like a pretty clear path to management (if that's your goal), which is one of the best upper-middle class professions there is. And once you've proven the ability to manage a team it is much easier to translate that into non-technical management, which opens you up to a plethora of different positions, particularly if you have advanced education (e.g. MBA or similar).
Management requires an entirely different skillset than programming, and one that many programmers are not well-suited for.
Management is not about selecting objectively good tools, and it's not about making hard choices or settling disputes. It's about keeping everyone that works for your employer happy, which is, frankly, 95% about the superficial.
A fair number of developers transition to management, but I would not call the path "pretty clear". It is much less clear than for project managers, program managers, etc.
THIS. I love programming, and spent my childhood hacking away on Apple IIs/Amigas/etc., but if I had my teens/twenties to do over again, I would pursue a career in Medicine (couldn't have stomached a career in Law, methinks) while continuing to program as a 'hobby.'
Grass is always greener. If you were a medical professional you'd probably be having the exact same thoughts, wishing you had taken up law or computers, anything to escape from all the blood, broken bones and sick and dying people, day in day out, with no end in sight.
I really question where you are getting your numbers they don't really make sense to me. Second, I will point out that the market for lawyers is completely oversaturated, so if you go to law school unless you went to a top ten law school you may end up working at Starbucks (slight exageration). As far as medicine their is very clear demand but the costs to get their are very high. You have an extra $100K, for 4 years of med school and 3 of residency where you act like a Doctor but get paid shit. You don't start making money until you are 30, while in CS you can be making big buck at 21. Physical Sciences get paid even worse.
You cannot make a argument that women are just taking the more optimal career path and leaving men to do what is left over.
I think the argument is that "big bucks" in CS is relative and the ceiling is much higher in medicine specifically (and to a certain extent law but you're 100% correct about the oversaturation).
Outside of San Francisco and (maybe) NYC, "big bucks" for a programmer with no managerial responsibilities is probably somewhere in the $120-180k range. In my very low cost of living area, it's in the $100-120k range. You just cannot get a job for more than $9-10k/mo in the area doing development. Team leads/tech leads are similarly priced, and it's not until you're managing multiple teams that you're in the area of $150k.
And yes a new doctor will be 5-6 years older and make less than a new programmer. But "big bucks" for a physician is measured in the hundreds of thousands. Anesthesiology tops $430k a year in median salary.[2] It's absolutely a harder, more demanding job, and it starts out much less forgiving. But the ladder extends much, much further and depending on specialty it's hard not to end up solidly upper class regardless of geographic area or cost of living.
The 2012 median annual wage for "Computer programmers" is $72k[0]
The 2012 median annual wage for a lawyer is $114k, with an arguably much more difficult job market[1], but is incredibly close to the top 10% of computer programmers (which is $118k).
The 2012 median annual wage for a physicians is above the maximum reported value of $187,200[2]
It's about the entire cost. If the average wage for a programmer is 72k, but they can make that for 10 years while the future-doctor is living off student loans, that's worth something; at the end of the 10 year training period for the physician, they've made -200k while the programmer has made +720k. If the physician comes out of school and makes the median wage of 187k, at year 20 the programmer will have grossed 1.4 million while the physician has grossed 1.8 million, but the physician also has had to pay down 200k student debt at a rough estimate of a 6% total interest rate (total: 266k), making his 10-year career take home only about 220k more than the programmer.
It's definitely true that doctors make more money over the long run, but if by year 20 (~age 40), the difference is only about 2 years' extra salary, a lot of people would say it's not worth the stress.
Plus if you are smart enough to make good investment decisions while you are young, as a programmer you are pretty much set to retire by the time doctors start making money.
LOL, only if by "investment decisions" you mean "luck into a 1 out of 1000 unicorn startup". I don't know a single programmer retired in their 30s who did it with salary and retail investing.
1. If you are a programmer who can make an above-average salary immediate upon graduating; and
2. If you are able to save an above average amount of that salary; and
3. If you are exceptionally good at traditional investment decisions (stock picking) such that you can consistently beat the market; and
4. You actually decide to use the money from #2 for #3
Then it's possible to retire after a sub-20 year career. In the same sense that it's possible to win the lottery multiple times. Each of the first three points are by definition exceedingly rare as single traits of any one person, let alone all three together.
I've never seen someone with any background in or knowledge of retail investment suggest that anyone start with less than $5,000. That seems to be about the minimum, especially if you're picking stocks where you're almost guaranteed to under-perform the market in the long term.
Even if its not that. It still doesn't mean - "Blows entire salary to smithereens'. Basic knowledge of savings and investments will put you ahead of bulk of the crowd out there.
As an Indian, I don't know much about the US market. But you guys still have index funds, Roth IRA, IRA and real estate to invest in.
In India even cab drivers who made bad real estate decisions have typically reaped X00% returns. People who made intelligent decisions are already retired. Many programmers in early 90's and even 2000's I know are already make big money in rents. And of course that doesn't mean every body did that.
When it comes to savings and investment there really is a binary crowd that I've seen. The first crowd says its just not possible and doesn't even try, the other crowd tries and some how makes it to be known as those "1 in 1000".
You cannot start taking penalty-free distributions from an IRA until you're 59.5 years old. So that's definitely not the way to retire in your 30s.
I've found people who boldly claim you can invest your way to early retirement always speak in vague generalities, and never have specific advice to offer. "Just be smart" and "pick the right funds" but if you press them on exactly what to do with, for example, $1000 in investable income a month in order to retire in 20 years with $5000 a month in income, they tend to come up short on details.
Dealing with mainframes is probably kinda secure job. Dealing with personal computers seems very sensitive to economic fluctuations.
Maybe women just kept doing what they have always done. And men conquered this new front where employment is less certain. Just like with gold rushes in the past. So the news is no news.
While it may have improved I feel like it's still quite low. Outside of the valley and a few other key cities we're still largely considered anti-social dweebs who can't talk to women, have regressive sexist ideologies, are pedantic assholes, etc.
The image of the computer scientist/programmer/data scientist is changing pretty rapidly within the younger generation. STEM degrees garner a lot of respect, especially CS degrees, because everyone has suddenly become obsessed with "intelligence" as an indicator of future success and wealth, to the detriment of professionalism and altruism.
Programming is now cool and desirable - you can see the shifts everywhere in pop culture. Being a nerd or a geek is a badge of pride for many.
Perhaps it is cool - but it is still not a popular major to study. Very, very few of my kids' friends in high school picked a STEM major, even fewer CS. Top 10 high school in Massachusetts (which is No. 1 in the US)
Honest question, what exactly do you mean by your statement? Is it that, when you meet a stranger and tell them your profession, they judge you that way?
Definitely. I've heard several women friends of mine say they usually avoid dating men in IT. I've also personally gone on a date with a woman who said she was pleasantly surprised I could actually hold a conversation with her. I've heard terms like "engineer autism" to refer to the quirky social awkwardness that is associated with men in IT.
What kind of reaction do you think you'd get if your assessment had the opposite outcome? I'm all for brutal honesty, but it should be a two-way street.
'Women' and 'men' are fairly large groups by which to organize people. I don't have a source, but I would wager a guess that there were other men who chose medicine and law(particularly since these graphs never grow above 50%) even though you chose a as. And why did women only start to see the writing on the wall after 1984? (Per the graph).
Compensation figures really have to be adjusted for hours worked, stress levels, work environment, schooling required (and associated opportunity cost of lost income), etc.
On top of that I'd also like to see innate cognitive ability factored in.
My guess is that once all the relevant variables are accounted for there's not much difference between the different professions.
It will boil down to what one likes to do. Because that's going to be what you stick with and develop excellence in over time. Medicine, law, and programming are all pretty radically different field, so whether or not you enjoy the work is really going to matter. Pick one you like and you'll do fine.
Note: The top end in annual comp for doctors and lawyers may be $1M but you really can't compare that to the top end in annual comp for CS because many developers at the top end are compensated in equity - which isn't paid out as income on an annual basis.
that is a good explanation, however it does not explain why women did choose programming as a career path before 1984 - were women less clever/was a high salary less important just before 1984 or was programming a more promising career path? I don't know.
i heard another explanation - that the home computer brought about a shift in how pop culture did perceive programmers, from now on it was a thing for male geeks. Was that because home computers did not have a particularly friendly user interface at that time ? I don't know.
Before that it was like any other white collar office job, after that popular culture became to associate it with you know who. It might be that this image did have some influence on career choices.
Again, these are all guesses because nobody can anything definitive on the subject.
"Uncle" Bob Martin gave an interesting talk in London last night about the need for a professional body for software.
Doctors have the American Medical Association (or BMA here in the UK). Lawyers have the American Bar Association (I think the Law Society is the UK equivalent). They can regulate their profession, ensuring standards, controlling membership through certification, and raising the value/cost of the members.
Perhaps he's right, and we'd benefit from the same in software?
The AMA and the ABA end up performing the function of unions in attempting to guarantee a rough wage floor by artificially constraining supply. One of the ways they do this is by working to ensure that the barriers to entry in the field are artificially high.
I believe that licensing and authoritative standards bodies are inevitable in software engineering, but I think it will radically change the face of the programming job market, removing many of its most attractive qualities. It will be a very dark day, and the end of the era of the self-taught programmer, when something like the American Software Engineering Association gets to set the rules.
I saw him give the same talk in Chicago, and the impression that I got was that the body he was advocating for had nothing to do with salaries. The AMA and the Bar might increase salaries by creating scarcity in their professions, but they aren't salary negotiating organizations like a union.
We don't need a union, but a professional body representing us would do wonders. Merely sorting out the H1B visa mess (not necessarily eliminating) would help salaries.
My wife is an architect (residential) and her clients cannot tell her to take a shortcut which violates the Building Code.
I'd love to be able to say "no" to some stupid, short-sighted requests I get from clients. Without a professional organization behind me - I can't, because I will be deemed "difficult" and lose the business.
Even if your wife thinks it's good idea to violate the building Code in some isolated case, she still can't legally do it.
You're just looking for someone to back you up because you think your client is short-sighted. You'd have equal leverage to your wife's if your software was processing data in a regulated industry and a client asked you to do something against regulations.
1) Medicine and Law are professions, programming is not. You could arguably compare to CS professors, but that's still apples and oranges.
2) It doesn't make any sense to compare (peak, median, whatever) yearly salaries when you have wildly different career paths (e.g. 0 years of school vs. 10+) , debt, etc. What you want is lifetime earnings.
3) Lawyers in general don't make anything like what you think they do. Doctors distribution is also lower than your range suggests.
You are right that some of these professions offer, for a smallish number of people, a clear path to a solid upper middle class salary (and few options outside of that).
Regardless of the reality (which everything I've seen concurs with what you've said), there are a ton of people making decisions for school that are influenced by media, parents, etc. that keep telling them that the safest career path is doctors and lawyers. That's starting to change nowadays, but only just.
I still regularly hear people talk about how cushy and rich all lawyer jobs supposedly are.
It's quite a different story now. You're looking at a ~14 year incubation period before you're making those types of numbers as a physician (bachelors, med school, residency, fellowship), plus having to take on significant debt. An overwhelmingly large number of physicians also report a low quality of life and urge others not to enter the profession.
I'm not sure how it is for lawyers, but I would imagine there is also a significant up front investment before you start making real money (if you ever do). Contrast this with CS where you can make 6 figures right out of college with significantly less pain during the training process.
> I'm not sure how it is for lawyers, but I would imagine there is also a significant up front investment before you start making real money (if you ever do).
Law school alone (ignoring the cost of passing the bar or anything else) is prohibitively expensive for many people.
For 2015-16, Yale law school is $78,000/yr[0], Harvard is $85,000[1] (including an optional $2400 health plan), Columbia is $65,588[2], and Stanford is $54,183[3]. So you're looking at $165-255,000 in fees, expenses and tuition over three years.
The majority of my friends who are attorneys and have taken the bar also spent several months (up to 6-8 but that does not seem to be the norm) doing nothing but studying for it full time. Everyone took out additional loans to cover expenses, or lived with their parents for free. So it's not uncommon to have $150k in just law school student loans when all is said and done.
So the median is still higher for attorneys than for developers, but most attorneys would have student loan obligations in the 1.2-2x median salary range, so often several times more than they're making right out of school.
It was bad enough making $45k as a junior developer with $20k in student loans, I can't imagine making $60k as a junior associate in a similar area with $175k in student loans.
And to add anecdote to anecdata: the girl who was my senior year lab partner in EE spent a few years as an engineer, decided she'd had enough, and is now a physician in Hawaii.
Last time I talked to her, she was quite happy with her choice.
You don't even need to go all the way up to medicine. According to US News and Report "Best Jobs"[1][2], median salaries for developers in San Francisco ($114,400), ostensibly ground zero for the "shortage", are only a whisker higher than they are for dental hygienists ($112,970) and are considerably lower than for registered nurses ($127,670).
[1] go to US News and World Report "Best Jobs" and drill down by salary and region. Alternatively, you can go to the BLS site - which is what the US News numbers are based on.
[2] I'd also like to acknowledge that these numbers "seem" low to me. It's based on BLS data by region, but dev salaries seem higher than this in SF.
I've posted this on HN a few times, and I've realized that I need to qualify this with a few statements.
I have no problem with nurses earning higher salaries than software developers. It's a difficult and vitally important job and nurses deserve their high salaries and high scores on surveys of professional respect.
Yes, programmers have more upside, but check the BLS directly for higher percentile salaries. It isn't until you get to the 90%ile for devs and nurses (in SF) that the devs earn more, and even then, it's only by a whisker. There are also lots of downsides - age related employment issues can get pretty bad for software developers. I do think that nurses have better job stability, experience few age-related employment issues in middle age, and may actually have better job flexibility (they can't wander off and get a cup of coffee whenever they feel like it like most devs can, but many nursing and medical specialties have remarkable options to scale back on work for a period of time, such as having a kid, without severely compromising the long term career path).
Another complicating factor - anyone who reads a book on PHP can call him or herself a "software developer" (though BLS stats base this on people who use the title or something similar on a tax return, I believe). Nursing, on the other hand, requires a degree and formal licensure. So it's not quite apples-to-apples. Then again, we separate out physicians from nurses, whereas we include very high salary devs in that number, so again, it's complicated and difficult to make these comparisons.
Also, these are numbers for San Francisco - nurses do not out earn developers everywhere. However, the higher concentration of devs in SF/Silicon Valley could skew the numbers as well.
I'll stop here, and simply acknowledge that interpreting this data is certainly more complex than simply listing some medians. My real problem is that most analyses of why group X isn't going into profession Y almost never consider the possibility that this may in fact be a highly rational response to market signals. This isn't the only factor, and the social issues NPR mentions are highly relevant. However, we really do need to explore the extent to which a preference for law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentisty, or even dental hygiene over software development may be highly rational.
> median salaries for developers in San Francisco ($114,400), ostensibly ground zero for the "shortage", are only a whisker higher than they are for dental hygienists ($112,970) and are considerably lower than for registered nurses ($127,670).
What are you trying to prove? Nurses are a frequently-identified national shortage. So, unless you are trying to, by comparison, establish that there is also a shortage in dental hygienists (which I have no problem believing), I'm not sure what you are trying to establish.
The NPR report notes that while women continued to enter medicine and law in large numbers, enrollment in computer science abruptly declined, then seeks to explain this through a heavy emphasis on cultural factors. I believe that we should be placing greater consideration on economic factors, and consider that entering computer science may not be economically rational when you consider the other options women now have (though I also do agree that cultural factors play a substantial role as well). I argue out that even nursing and dental hygiene may have better, more predictable economic outcomes than computer science.
Another advantage that dental hygienists and nurses have in terms of employment stability is that their jobs can't be shipped out of the country, unlike those of software developers.
I have daughters and was not able to get them interested in any computer unless it involves games or social media.
But the boys they hang out with are the same way- games only, for the most part.
While I played a lot of games on my computer as a youth, I also spent a lot of time trying to program games. Today, I'm a developer.
Because of kids' fascination with their phones and tablets, and because programming isn't a "normal" thing on computers, I really don't have high hopes for the future of the development community at all, much less for the future of women in this field.
But, getting back to the topic of my daughters, my experience has been that:
1. If given the choice, they would not choose the constructive, mechanical toys I grew up with where they might get into robotics or mechanical engineering (e.g. Thames & Kosmos or Mindstorms) although one enjoyed putting a tin can robot together.
2. They also would not choose the electrical kits to put things together and get into electrical engineering, although I did get a kit and my daughters played with them a few times. It just took too much time and attention to have anything happen, and when it did, it wasn't exciting the way it was for me as a kid- it was boring compared to their phones and tablets.
3. As for development, I was able to show one of my daughters how they could play music by programming in emulator of an old computer, but they had little interest. I was able to get that daughter to work with me to use Scratch to program something for about an hour and she really liked it, but she's not asked about it since.
Today's environment is just not the same. As much as parents who are developers try to get their kids into development, I just see it as a losing battle.
What the world needs is an operating system (or systems) or even an application or set of applications that almost everyone would want to use that require programming in some form or fashion to accomplish everyday tasks better.
But, iOS, Android, OS X, Windows, Linux and most applications that people use and games people play- they don't really work like that so much. You can get by without learning to code as a casual user, and the bar is so high now to create anything that a casual user would actually want to use or play. The closest thing to it really is a spreadsheet application or rules in an email application, and most users barely use those.
I think you're right. Back in the 70s/80s/90s kids had to work at using their computers. In order to play a game in the early 80s I had to hook up a tape recorder, fiddle with the volume, tape a 1kb RAM upgrade to the back of the computer and write some code to start playing a game. In the 90s I had to wrestle with AUTOEXEC.BAT and COMMAND.COM for hours to make DOS recognise my sound card. Technical effort and perseverance was rewarded with gaming pleasure. Or rather technical effort and hard thinking were the only way to make that magical screen light up. These days no effort at all is required, games and media on screens is just ambient. It's a very different situation, it'll be interesting to see how it changes the industry ...
>Or rather technical effort and hard thinking were the only way to make that magical screen light up.
This is crucial. A lot of people seem to be suggesting that because it's easier to get into computers kids are missing out on programming. But in reality it's the other way around - only the people who were wired up for engineering could get into computers previously and nowadays everyone can use them - you can still get into programming and plenty of kids still do - and it's easier than ever (I had no internet when I started coding - only the F1 help manual of QBASIC and my below basic English - what I could have done if I had all these tutorials available today :( ) - they just aren't the only ones in to computers so they aren't as visible as they used to be.
Think of it like this - every kid probably had some electric toy car or some such toy in the last 20-30 years. But not every kid took that car apart to see what cool shit he could do with the electric engine and batteries.
I just tried to think back at how on earth could I have done that without looking it up on the internet. I did it. No doubt about it. Would I be able to do it today? I'm suddenly not happy with this line of thought...
Oh man, that reminds me of the 90s. You used to have this situation where certain games required a certain memory configuration (640K / extended memory).
So the first thing I did that ever resembled programming was a boot script that would give you a menu of which game you wanted to play. It would say "1) Beneath a Steel Sky 2) Dune 2 " etc. And they it would prompt you to put the right CDROM in.
> Oh man, that reminds me of the 90s. You used to have this situation where certain games required a certain memory configuration (640K / extended memory).
Origin games often requires that kind of things... but they were the best games of all on MS-DOS PCs! I remember the time when most people wanted to buy a PC because of Wing Commander.
My one abiding memory of this situation was `dwcfgmg.sys` (Dos and Windows Configuration Manager?) which was the DOS driver for ISA plug n' play devices. I was at that nexus between the "old" world of MS-DOS games where you had to program IRQ and DMA settings for your sound card, and the "new" world of graphical environments and plug n' play.
So as you say, even with 8MB in XMS (or sometimes EMS, depending on the game I think, using EMM 386), the 640k boundary was an issue and I too had the joys of paring down my `autoexec.bat` and `config.sys`
But no `dwcfgmg.sys` and my "plug n' play" soundcard wouldn't work. It was a small driver, but the games of the day seemed to demand the entire 640k at startup or they just wouldn't work :(
So often it was no sound, or no game at all. Oh what I would've given to trade that for manual soundcard configuration.
Yes, those were the times. Using choice for menus, configuration for games that need a lot of conventional memory, putting drivers in HMA (High Memory Area) just to save those few kilobytes. Using QEMM to access XMS/EMS. Also, sound card drivers configuration was a pain. Good times :)
My daughter is 9 and has been fascinated by coding since she was about 6 - initially with Scratch, but she's just moving on to Javascript.
I didn't push it on her at all - she asked me one night what I did for a job, so I showed her a bit of code I'd been doing and she was hooked.
I've also done an after-school club in Scratch for the kids at her school (9 out of the 10 were girls), and they really enjoyed it as well .
Clearly just an anecdote, but the interest is still out there somewhere.
And going back to my childhood in the early 80s, there were a group of us who were into coding. But we were very much the nerdy group - it wasn't as if everyone was a budding programmer back then either.
This is pretty cool. You should be proud of your daughter. Mine is 10 going to 11 in a couple of weeks and I've tried getting her interested in programming but no dice. She just prefers gaming, social media, selfies. I wish she was into it =( but I will respect the fact that her destiny might lie somewhere else (or maybe she is just a late bloomer).
It's never too late. I didn't start programming until I was about 13 (admittedly, I'd only ever seen one computer - an Apple II - before I bought my Spectrum), but I know a lot of people in IT who didn't start until their late teens or beyond.
If you are still keen on getting her interested, have you ever tried something like Scratch? It's very easy to learn and the kids that I've taught it to really seemed to enjoy making silly animations or very simple games with it.
I started my daughter out with Python but she found it too hard, and I think it kinda soured her on programming. I will look into Scratch and see if she will find that a bit more appealing. She recently did a "coding with Minecraft" thing at school, which is very "Scratch"-like, and she enjoyed it a lot.
I have daughters as well. I tried to get them interested in computers, I really did. I tried to show them how they could make web pages with HTML. I tried to show them some basic Ruby to ask them questions on the command line that they could answer (thinking that if I could emulate a social aspect of computers they might become interested).
Nothing I tried worked.
I talked one daughter into taking the AP Comp Sci class in high school this year because I assured her that I would be able to coach her through any problems. The summer before the class, I did my best to start going over basic concepts that she would cover in class - just so she could hit the ground running... she adamantly refused to waste her summer on that subject.
Meanwhile, a neighbor of mine called me because his son had taken up programming their home computer on his own and wanted some advice on languages and projects to pursue.
I don't think I would have ever been interested in creating websites in high school unless I had a purpose for creating them. Mine just happened to be that I needed a place to share the stats from the equipment / weapons on the Star Wars MUD my friends all played, so Geocities was my first entry into running websites.
From there I made a personal website, then eventually started tinkering around with Wordpress which helped with publishing. All the while picking up little tidbits along the way to help make the sites look better. (And of course it was important to customize your myspace page)
Eventually I decided to start officesnapshots.com because it was quite natural to start a website for fun and 8 years later it is my full-time job.
All that said, having a reason to create a website was what got me started.
In a similar way that some parents will fruitlessly try to coax their children into being the sports starts they want/wanted to be, for some children the "digging about in the computer" bug just won't catch. I hope it won't be too disappointing for you... there's a whole world of experiences to explore with your daughters!
I'm on the older edge or in the early middle of the Millennial generation, depending who defines the generation. As such I grew up and grew into technology just as we were getting really immersive operating system UI/UX. I remember fondly the green screen, text-based, 5.25" floppy games we had in elementary school, as well as the immersive film-like experiences today.
Chemistry sets were kinda boring, Couldn't have cared less about my Dad's Erector sets, much to his disappointment. I built a few model cars and a F-14 over a span of 6 months, then those lived in a box never to be heard from again.
And even in the computer... hacking around in the depths of my parents' computers was never the fun thing. But getting into web development was super cool, because it was raw, new, etc. Even as I look around, the companies I find exciting are more often web software vice native OS. I'm learning to appreciate embedded systems and very low level machine management, but it still doesn't have that spark like hacking about in GeoCities did...
What's the raw, new, interesting tech today? I don't wonder if part of it is figuring out what might be the new version of playing with hobby boards or experimenting in system drivers. Even for me, getting a diode wired up to light up as a kid was super boring. But wiring up an iOS app might be super interesting now.
Or, maybe your girls would rather be lawyers or vets or oil rig mechanics. I hear that's part of the fun of parenting :)
my parents tried hard (real, real hard) to get me to play tennis and piano, and refused to let me spend as much time on the computer as i wanted to. guess which i did at 2 in the morning while they were asleep? guess which i dropped like a bad habit as soon as i left the house? and this was in the 90s, when dot com mania was at its height.
newsflash: parents live vicariously through their kids and project all sorts of desires onto them, and it almost never turns out well (i went through a real trouble period that i attribute to their parenting style). seems like a lot of people just forget this once they have children.
it must be biological because you can't explain it otherwise - these are smart people that do this. my parents are both highly educated with graduate degrees. (or.. maybe that explains it)
I have a theory that you'll have a very hard time teaching your kids to be into something if you're not. Kids whose parents play a sport on the weekends or who play music regularly are probably more likely to stick with those things, at least recreationally[1]. Eat your veggies (which probably means you're cooking tasty veggie dishes) and your kids will.
Even values, like "learning is important" may work like this. Bet they'll study better if they see you learning new things, watching you struggle and gradually gain understanding and skills.
"Reading is super important!" says parent who only reads instruction manuals, Facebook, and (maybe) garbage fiction. "You will practice the piano!" says parent who hasn't played a note on an instrument since high school. "Get your ass out of bed and to tennis practice!" says parent who wheezes going up a flight of stairs. "Math is vital to your future success!" says parent who can count the times they've used anything past 8th grade math as an adult on one hand.
Show, don't tell, I guess.
[1] Nearly of people I've encountered who were serious amateur or part-time pro musicians came from families that played music, not families that played no music but insisted their kids take piano lessons, for example.
I think there are two things at play here. The first is that people are predisposed to love and take care of their children (and there's a bunch of associated brain chemistry that helps with that). And the second is that there exist people who don't understand that not everyone is interested in the thing that they are interested in. [This second one seems to be completely uncorrelated with intelligence ... as far as I can tell. Maybe a personality spectrum thing?]
Anyway. If you mix the two together you get people who insist that their children must be exactly like them because otherwise their children would be doomed and that would be unthinkable.
More intelligence (and/or forceful personality / competence) may make the problem worse because clearly you know what you're doing (after all you can describe the thing with such great an articulate words) the problem must be this ungrateful child that doesn't know you're paving a golden path.
I've had some similar anecdotal experiences in an education franchise, where I've found that it's very difficult to convince boys or girls that math, physics, programming, or computer science is fun or worthy. In fact, I have trouble convincing them that any intellectual pursuit is worthy. Kids tend to enjoy "science" more, but only in terms of what appears to them as fun experiment. When you try to explain anything behind it... it's boring. I'm sure it's similar for the robotics programs popping about.
I am also aware that I am just one more adult voice competing for any child's attention, a noise among a chorus of people all with their opinions about what's important. Boys and girls alike question the immediate value of these subjects. They see them as work forced upon them by adults.
Like you, I have also noticed that the boys and girls of today, at least in middle class areas, often have touch-screen devices as their first device. Those are just game machines with tons of advertisements. I am sure those companies know that they are advertising to kids. The kids love the ads because viewing it means an in-game reward. But that's an aside. The main point is that these devices aren't an obvious portal to software or technical interest.
I have noticed that many schools have a small cadre of children who, by some combination of successful grooming by parents or personal inclination, do enjoy technical subjects and technical mastery. I think at some point, the social reinforcement by that small cadre of children overtakes the importance of parental grooming.
> I've had some similar anecdotal experiences in an education franchise, where I've found that it's very difficult to convince boys or girls that math, physics, programming, or computer science is fun or worthy.
I think kids often operate on simple social heuristics. Guess what it means when somebody tells you ad nausem that something is important to you while his tone, body language and whatnot consistently shows that he cares about you learning this infinitely more than you do? Yes, exactly, this is the smell of bullshit. If science really was that important and if you understood science enough to be worth learning from, obviously you'd be using science to improve their lives all the time and they'd immediately start to monkey you. That's how it works.
I think my parents understood this to some degree and didn't try to shove down my throat things I didn't care about, except maybe for religion. Care to guess how far this one went?
While that may have worked with you, I think that approach would sink a lot of kids. Kids need direction because their innate biological scaffolding or propensities could not have anticipated the hotness of some domain of ability. Left on their own, some kids would find learning on their own, and most would sink themselves.
I think religion is an even worse example. I'm pretty sure that religious views are better explained by parents than by a child's personal inclination. I doubt the Christian children of America were Christian because of personal investigation.
I don't remember any children I've met that started to go to church on their own, but I've met some adults that grew up in a non-believing family and then became Christians, but they have been the minority.
I think, as others have said, your parents and everyone else help teach you, in one way or another. I wasn't brought up in a religious house, but we went to church every Sunday through high school, and I personally believe in God. I really became a Christian in high school when I decided for myself it was right for me, though. I went through a long period after that where I fell away from God, but then I came back to Christianity again. After I came back, even when my father and others had doubts, my belief in God has still been intact, and it is one of the things that essentially drives me even when I've had feelings numerous times that life was not worth living or that I was a failure.
I say all of this, because I don't think some of the people here have any Christians actually tell them this sort of thing. Many in the world just think it is some sort of cult full of irrational people that if they only just came to their senses, they'd stop annoying others and waging war. The fact is that religions are not evil, bad, or wrong. It is people that do bad things, not religions. Some religions may call for bad things, in which case, I'd suggest not doing them. That is a personal decision.
I think it's the individual child's (intrinsic and extrinsic) motivations. Case in-point, my eldest daughter (14) is a studious introvert with a strong mastery of Latin and formal logic but loves beauty and wants to be a hairdresser (meh) or Instagram model (barf). Programming and robotics just don't do it for her even though I'm certain she could be good at it.
My middle daughter is wicked smart extrovert with zero patience an excess of confidence and absolutely loves robotics, electronics, Goldiblocks, etc... I'd hate to work with her on a software project because she's so agressive but chances are she'll wind up in STEM.
So that takes care of intrinisic motivation, as for extrinsic, both thought programming was something only nerdy anti-social boys do. In fact boys and girls chastised my middle daughter for liking so called "boy" things like building a trebuchet or going to the comic book store.
If we assume that only a small percentage of children will have both proclivity and potential and that we then also have to play peer-pressure Russian-roulette until they get to college then it's no wonder so few girls are still getting into STEM.
> What the world needs is an operating system (or systems) or even an application or set of applications that almost everyone would want to use that require programming in some form or fashion to accomplish everyday tasks better.
Tangentially related, but this is why I think Emacs is a great... should I say, 'platform'. Maybe not for young children as in the case you talked about with yours, but a quote from one of RMS's talks about Emacs [1] I think shows what I mean:
> The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.
Maybe it was the syntax of lisp (by which I mean the use parentheses/'S-expressions' vs. using other 'strange code-like' symbols such as curly braces or semicolons) was a part of why they didn't realise they were actually programming?
Of course, this will not work today because editing/writing text in anything other than a WYSIWYG word processor interface is too unfamiliar to the average general purpose computer user, and therefore Emacs would too easily 'scare' off most users. But your comment reminded me of this and I thought it would be interesting to mention.
I tend to suspect it's partly Lisp syntax but mostly that the entire environment was far enough removed from what people, including the mentioned secretaries, thought of as "programming", that it didn't register with them that that was what they were doing.
You can see the same thing today with stuff like VBA macros in Excel. I've seen some amazingly complex business logic implemented that way by people who absolutely did not think of themselves as programmers, and indeed tended to respond with bafflement to the suggestion that what they'd done could be described as programming.
Having recently started coaching a FLL Robotics Team on programming, I'd say the modern day version of that is something like LabView. Drag and drop programming. I think anyone with half a logical thought in their head could make something that works with LabView or Mindstorms.
I'm 22 so I'm kind of caught between you and your daughters, but my understanding is that Minecraft is that new "OS" or "application" that is exceedingly fun while teaching programming in the phone/tablet age. It's phenomenal how popular it is among the younger generations...its coming to replace the legos of my (relative) youth.
MSFT is pushing it down the coding/education path as well - they recently launched a Minecraft/Code.org collab - https://code.org/mc - which I'm assuming is slightly more fun than programming a spreadsheet or rules in an email app.
I was preemptively horrified before I clicked your Minecraft link. I taught a summer camp for middle/high school kids that wanted to learn how to make Minecraft mods. It was a disaster.
We specifically put that the kids must have programming experience in a Java-like language before beginning, but all the affluent parents saw was, "Get your kids out of the house for 9 hours a day for an entire week!"
Don't get me wrong: the kids were stoked. They even had some incredible ideas for mods. One kid's idea was that an entire building would generate based on the location of placed bricks, the type of brick, and how high you stacked the bricks. We liked it so much that we built it and gave it to the students to play with. Problem is that only 2 of 30 had any programming experience at all, and Minecraft development (at least back then) was not exactly beginner friendly. I just wasn't possible to teach Java development and Minecraft's library in a week.
I guess my point in all this is to say that I'm glad that they're taking the initiative to make programming more kid-friendly with Minecraft. I hope that they can expand the foundation built by Scratch (loops, conditionals, etc.) to allow kids to see their crazy ideas come to fruition.
Was this at the university camps? I sent my daughter to the gaming sessions and she absolutely loved them. I didn't send her to Minecraft for the reasons you stated :)
After the 2nd day of getting no where, we pretty much just asked for ideas. If they were simple enough, we made and distributed them. There were a couple of enterprising young minds that were doing their damnedest to make their own mods. We helped them as much as we could. Other than that, the kids basically just played Minecraft for a week.
At least one kid did come out of the camp wanting to learn to program. I ran into him and his family one evening a month or so later. They sat next to us in a restaurant, and after excitedly bring up the camp, he told me that he's trying to learn programming on his own.
The problem is you haven't caught up with what computers have become: a utility.
They were a novelty when you were growing up, but they are a utility now. What that means is that people who deal with computers are going to be professionals ranging from the spectrum of architect to plumber: there are more plumbers than architects.
Do you think your plumber had an innate desire to be a plumber? No. They looked at their options, picked one and executed.
That's what the future looks like for computing. So, if your child was always going to be the type to be an architect, they'll be one. Or they'll be a plumber.
I use the plumber analogy all the time, but most programmers I know vehemently resist this notion. I find nothing wrong with being a plumber, and think many of my colleagues would do well in realizing they aren't high flying architects but actually just well compensated plumbers.
Being a plumber is actually a good career. You can't outsource it, you always need them at some point, and the hourly rate is quite high. Maybe you could automate it? At the point tech can automate all aspects of a plumbers job, we'll have automated most jobs (IMHO).
Sure. It's also perfectly fine for a parent to expose his kids to his own interests, in case there might be among them something that will fire the kid's imagination.
Also, after getting girls interested in programming, one of the problems is how to keep them in tech. Currently, over 40% of women leave tech mid-career, which is more than double the quit rate for men (https://keepwomen.com/info/aboutus).
40% attrition is still pretty low compared to most industries though. Compare that to business, finance, law, academia, or teaching. And medicine may have a lower attrition rate, but it's not exactly a great career path these days either.
Even if the tech industry is better for men than for women, it's probably still the best industry for women in absolute terms.
Programming is an industry where taking a 3-4 year gap is career suicide, because of the constantly shifting practices and technologies.
Some women in tech notice this and move away before raising a family crashes their career. Some don't notice this and are forced to shift careers when re-entering the workforce. Both of these outcomes result in a high attrition rate for women programmers. I have no clear solution for this dilemma.
What percentage of women leave other professions they're in? What's the difference in those other professions compared with men in the same profession? 40%/~20% could be good for all I know. 40% doesn't seem too far off from what I've observed in the teaching—which is dominated by women—certainly.
The website you linked is deeply discriminatory and offensive to males in tech.
"Why do women leave tech?: many women leave tech due to working conditions (low salary, no advancement), work-life balance (too much travelling, commuting)
What do women want in the workplace?: flexible working hours, personal development opportunities."
What about the males in tech ? They don't deserve better salary and advancements ? They don't deserve work-life balance, flexible hours ? Why don't we help them too ? Everybody wants to help women who leave while they can and no one cares about the males trapped in low paying races to the bottom with no real alternatives. For the low 75% of tech workers it's not help at all that the top 25% earners are all males from Silicon Valley.
We have Minecraft which had the potential to create legions of people interested in programming, but the reality is that it's an awful awful introduction to programming.
Microsoft could, if they port it to a sensible language and structure, drag in millions of young programmers.
> Microsoft could, if they port it to a sensible language and structure, drag in millions of young programmers.
The first thing I would like them to do is include some form of programming tools with Windows. On a Mac[1], you have Python, Perl, and Ruby available on a default installation, and you get XCode for free from the App Store. A fresh installation of Windows, OTOH, is a barren wasteland in comparison, and the effort it takes to change that is significantly higher.
[1] On GNU/Linux, *BSD you have at least Perl installed, and on most Linux distros Python is part of the base system, too.
Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition is considered a top-notch programming environment... and it's free.
It would be the perfect place to put something with built in programming hooks into Minecraft.
And... there is already too many people putting too much garbage on devices that people don't need... last thing we need is being loaded down with crap - whether Python, perl or Visual Studios - on a default install of Windows.
(Why the F* is Candy Crap included with Windows 10 now? Much less Note and other crap that should be opt-in... not clean install > remove, remove, remove... /rant)
If Candy Crush is installed on your copy of Windows, the OEM got paid for it. A "default" install doesn't have it, although you may see an "ad" for it on the Start Menu which can quickly be removed. Yes, there's way too much colour and movement on the Start Menu in 10.
Color and movement don't bother me since I use a menu replacement ( https://ninite.com/classicstart/ ). I find it less cluttered and, for some strange reason, I have less issues with search.
Purple_hazed, I found a company a couple of months ago that is using the raspberry Pi circuit board to teach kids how to build a computer while playing minecraft. A kickstarter success back in April, they are in Alpha and will be receiving their first shipment of Pipers in the coming weeks. Needless to say, I feel in love with the idea, especially as a computer science girl geek.
Summation: It reintroduces the physical world back into the virtual and makes DIY learning really fun for kids and parents (even moms raved).
It was so compelling, I reached out to the CEO Mark (http://bit.ly/MarkPavlyukovskyy)to see how I could help them make a difference. Mark has an amazing story and reason behind why he created Piper and the team is an ingenious group of savvy hackers. Proof in point, I met with one of the Alpha tester families last week and this is what they had to say:
“Engaging, interactive and fun… It's not like most gaming systems,the whole family can learn how things are processing while playing and having fun.
I would much rather have my son playing Piper vs all of the other consoles we have in our home, anytime!”
Thank you for bringing this to our attention and you can find more info @ playpiper.com
Purple_hazed, I found a company a couple of months ago that is using the raspberry Pi circuit board to teach kids how to build a computer while playing minecraft. A kickstarter success back in April, they are in Alpha and will be receiving their first shipment of Pipers in the coming weeks. Needless to say, I feel in love with the idea, especially as a computer science girl geek.
Summation: It reintroduces the physical world back into the physical and makes DIY learning really fun for kids and parents.
It was so compelling, I reached out to the CEO Mark (http://bit.ly/MarkPavlyukovskyy)to see how I could help them and is why I am making this post today. Mark has an amazing story and reason behind why he created Piper and the team is ingenious. Proof in point, I met with one of the Alpha tester families last week and this is what they had to say:
“Engaging, interactive and fun… It's not like most gaming systems,the whole family can learn how things are processing while playing and having fun.
I would much rather have my son playing Piper vs all of the other consoles we have in our home, anytime!”
Find out more @ playpiper.com, reach out to me if there are further questions too elesemoran@gmail.com
People are faced with any number of ways to distract themselves electronically now. That makes it hard to enforce the environment of necessity that builds traditional skills.
On the other hand, when they do show an interest in something - and you will have to be very patient about figuring out what that is - there is probably an angle to it that involves automation, and thus computing.
Over the course of the next century programming will become a blue collar profession. Children who develop an interest in programming will become about as common as children who are interested in tablesaws or cutting torches.
Programming is more akin to engineering than factory working. Languages are getting simpler and more powerful but programs are getting more complex. 15 years ago a typical developper didn't need to worry about multithreading, connectivity or security. It's fundamentally an intellectual job and will remain.
Outsourcing has its uses, but the majority of programming jobs cannot be oursourced, and with time it will become even less profitable to do.
However, programming any major system today does require extensive knowledge and I dare say a CS degree as well. It's becoming more and more like an engineering discipline, and as such I think we're going to see a shift towards programming being something you need a college degree to perform.
The issue is the "maturity" of programming as a complete field. Not only is it a "young" (decades old vs say construction) but it's changing dramatically year over year - whats asked for today is different that 5 years ago... what's acceptable 10 years ago is a deathtrap today.
With that being said, how can colleges REALLY train? I got trained at my local community college a few years back (2008-2010) in VB and Cobol. How fast can most places REALLY respond to a moving target like this?
Also, a degree is no indication of programming skill... but neither is having a job. You can churn out code, hopping from one place to another, and still be a shitty programmer.
That's one of the biggest issues... How can you REALLY tell what someone is going to produce? There are no consistent certification processes and no consistent measure of what makes a good programmer.
Just like building a skyscraper doesn't require a degree. You don't need a degree to lay bricks, pour cement or assemble rebar. But you do if you're the one designing the structure in the first place.
There is a lot of knowledge to be gained by experience, but sometimes it's useful to have knowledge gained from books, and in particular from books you had no interest reading in the first place (which is the real value of a degree: forcing you to go through a process that includes stuff you like and stuff you dislike).
But goals for students with paths including a variety of subjects both obviously useful and apparently useless seems to be (in practice).
I occasionally come across situations where those useless subjects suddenly contribute something useful for the problem at hand. I would never have studied them by myself unless forced by the goal of finishing college. At the very least, I would have never studied them to any sufficient depth to make them useful.
It's really not obvious when you're studying. I often use knowledge that seemed useless at my time at university, but it has surprisingly come in handy every now and then.
It's not about being dumb. You're taking it personal when no offence is meant. Understanding the difference cache hierarchies, or how you reach consensus in a system without a central authority, or to what degree various normal forms of data affect you, or being able to design a sound and complete DSL, or a lot of other things. That is what you get from a proper CS degree.
Does that mean that you cannot program of design programs? No, but there are people out there with more education better suited to design, say, a large scale medical system where certain guarantees must be given.
North American (Canada to be exact) here. I'm seeing jobs being outsourced by some of our local shops to places like Armenia and Romania. You can hire very competent developers on the cheap (relative to North America, at least). I expect more of this in the future.
The future probably won't be 15 highly educated, highly paid developers working on a simple web app like today. It will be 1 highly educated, highly paid developers guiding 15 lower paid 'blue collar' developers in developing a web app.
I don't really believe in the "blue collar" part but I think engineering may give us a clue. You have a small number of highly educated engineers working on tough problems: aeronautics, complex structural issues, etc. But the average electric or electronic board in a home appliance is not designed by sophisticated engineers, rather by a mid range average university graduate or sometimes even a technician.
But we need the tools to get there. Easy languages, technologies that are immune to basic security risks, and that provide safe ways to do multi-threading easily. Right now we are in the unsustainable position where the tools require skills that too many developers lack. And the result is regular data leaks, corporate systems full of bugs, etc.
A profession can't rely on all of its members to be very smart to deliver quality. But it will be an intellectual profession nevertheless.
That's not the direction it is taking. It will be more like 1 highly paid developer doing everything himself.
When I started working, it took a team of testers, a team of dba, and a team of sysops in addition of the developers to build anything. Nowadays, no only the development team is smaller, but the sysops, dba and testing are the responsibility of those developers too through automated tools. On the client side, there used to be BA and Testers, but nowadays, BA and Testers are often the same persons.
The tshirt from several years ago "I will replace you by a tiny script" has proven quite true. Old job that required qualified people before have been replaced by scripts, not "blue collar" worker. A huge amount a developer entering the market could lower the salaries, but any simplification to the developer role is going to be handled by automated tools, not human.
I'm trying to parse this statement, and what I'm getting is that there is going to be a lot more programmers, and they are going to be overwhelmingly more male than they already are (is that a thing that is possible?).
Have you never been around, or yourself been, a boy child? I can count on no hands the number of boys I knew in my youth, myself included, who were not interested in tablesaws or cutting torches.
> Over the course of the next century programming will become a blue collar profession
more kids than ever have access to computing devices (tablets and smartphones) but very few actually know how to do anything with them at all. I don't see that future you are talking about.
I hope that there won't even be such a profession as programming. Coding must become a basic part of the general literacy, and almost all the professions must include a degree of coding. Programmers should disappear just like scribes did.
1984 was the year that CS majors began to drop off. You're not talking about girls that were begging their parents for a C64. You're talking about girls that were born circa 1962-1966 and after.
Many early programmers in the 1960s and 1970s were women because it was seen as the equivalent of secretarial work, a sector of the office labor that women were confined to due to overt sexism. The profession was then masculinized in overtly sexist ways. If women fled CS, they were fleeing an overtly sexist niche (which both locked them into submissive, secretarial roles as well as undervalued their technical accomplishments).
http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-...
And these toys were marketed almost entirely to men and boys.
That's a pretty bad correlation-is-not-causation slip there. Marketing efforts, especially in new markets tend to take the path of least resistance. If they were marketing to males, it was most likely because males were showing an early interest in those products and likely to be the quickest way to grow marketshare.
My personal experience was that I didn't need anything marketed to me. The K-Mart in my town had a couple of running new computers on an aisle where a friend walked up to them and typed:
10 PRINT "I AM THE GREATEST!"
20 GOTO 10
I think you underestimate serious drive in children (and older) to be not like the other (gender).
You'd be way more reluctant as a young boy to approach computer if everybody knew that computers are what girls play with and all the ads had pink unicorns, stars and sparkle in the background.
I vividly remember times when I was 10 or something and even talking to girls was act of treason against you own boy tribe.
You mean there isn't some large advertiser-driven conspiracy to hold back girls by only marketing the cool stuff to boys? Marketing actually does the things they do only to make money and not push some regressive social agenda? Clearly you haven't been on the Internet lately.
Doesnt intuitively make sense to me... adult women stopped being drawn into the computerfield at the same time that male children began getting computers as gifts? wouldnt their be a distinct lag effect of maybe 5-7 years between when the boys got their computers and entered the work force?
I think the shift probably had more to do with the perception that computer programming was 'important', a lot of the early view on computer programming was driven by the physical interface... women were viewed as suitable for programming because they were historically suitable for typing and secretary work... i think on some level it was being viewed as a form of dictation that was in a bizarre 'shorthand'...
Your intuition around the 5-7 years lag time would seem to line up pretty damn well with the beginning of the computer revolution in the late 70s. What's the problem, exactly?
>By 1982, an estimated 621,000 home computers were in American households, at an average sales price of US$530.
In a country of 220 million people. If we assume about 4 people could access a single computer, then 1,1% of population had access.
So it seems commercials of Apple II and TRS-80 was the thing that compelled women to stay out of the field. Or alternatively getting your hands on dads TRS-80 was incredibly compelling experience to almost every boy out there.
I think it's important to also show the graph of absolute numbers of computer science students. Maybe the absolute numbers will show that the number of female students did not decrease, but rather the numner of male students increased dramatically, making the female share drop.
Really very odd graphs of both male and female students. I haven't seen anything that really explains the peaky total number let alone the ratio profile.
Interestingly the higher degrees seem to be pretty stable in ratio terms. Not sure what they may be indicative of though.
Let's imagine that the number of female students did not decrease. Now the question is, why the boys increased much faster than girls? You can't "angle" that inequality away.
Besides, I wager that the number of students of any gender increased quite significantly in the last decades. So the fact that one gender stagnated in absolute numbers is less interesting than the fact it decreased in relative terms. Absolute numbers would only be interesting if the total stayed relatively constant.
Interesting that there was a dip of both males and females around 1984. So I'm not so sure of the statement above anymore. However, around the year 2000 there's this peak where males do outnumber females by a great deal (even if the number of females joining also increased).
If all these graphs are accurate I'd wonder more about the Y2K rather than 1984...
I feel like that, by 1984, the "this is the sexy future!" vibe that was associated with computers wore off a bit as it became more commercialized and common in people's homes.
I don't believe this narrative of "it's because home computers were marketed only to boys". At least, I would like to see some more evidence for it.
It seems more likely to me that the story starts sooner, there must have been a reason why computers were marketed to boys. Maybe the first home computers were considered part of the electronics hacking scene (radio shack and what not), and that was already more popular with boys? How many women went to the Homebrew computer club were people were trying to create their own computer before you could just buy them off the shelves (people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak)?
Maybe girls saw home computers and didn't like them.
I don't know - but neither do the tellers of the "marketing is at fault" narrative.
The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers... And these... were marketed almost entirely to men and boys.
Great, another travesty for which we have marketing to thank.
The hate towards marketing that is present on HN is almost comical at times.
My experience is that, the more you study how marketing works, the more you realize marketing is about what people already want and try to appeal to that. Sure, big companies like Coca Cola have more sophisticated techniques to make their brands appealing, but still, if you look at Coca Cola's marketing, what they sell is "happiness", which is what people want, and they make the association to their beverage.
From this point of view, there is no "travesty" to thank marketing for. The reality was that probably personal computers were more appealing to men, so it made more sense to spend marketing resources towards them.
Why it was more appealing to them is a good question to ask, and it could be because of many reasons, including culture and society. But marketing probably didn't create that desire, it just used it.
I think you've totally missed the point why people hate marketing. It's not because of a lack of understanding on it's mechanics.
> From this point of view, there is no "travesty" to thank marketing for. The reality was that probably personal computers were more appealing to men, so it made more sense to spend marketing resources towards them. Why it was more appealing to them is a good question to ask, and it could be because of many reasons, including culture and society. But marketing probably didn't create that desire, it just used it.
Marketing is absolutely about the manufacture of desire. Though above you make the connection between Coca-cola and the harmless association of this beverage to "happiness", this is over-simplifying things somewhat. The psychology of the brand, upon which modern consumer society is dependent, and which marketing ruthlessly exploits, is based around the construction of a self solely through conspicuous acts of consumption rather than through human experiences, relationships with friends and family, or other pursuits traditionally considered to be more laudable.
Though arguably it is required in keeping the wheels of capitalism spinning (and by proxy food in our bellies); in reality, marketing is the process of co-opting, subverting, and ultimately extinguishing joy and the human experience.
Marketing only manufactures desire if you interpret desire in the most narrow possible sense as desire for a specific product.
What marketing actually does is make desires concrete and suggest to the audience how that desire can be fulfilled. If you look at one of the most famous examples of successful marketing, diamond marketing created demand for a specific product, but it was only able to do so because the emotional needs the marketers tied their products to were already there and not being adequately met.
The term desire works in a broader sense, as long as you differentiate between a need and a desire.
A need (I guess I'm referring here mostly to needs in the context of those defined by Maslow's Hierarchy) is defined as something that is an absolute; an end state. There is a requirement of truth for something to be a need.
A desire is defined as "a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen". A desire is open to suggestion, to invention and misrepresentation.
Taking your example of the diamond industry: The "needs" being targeted here are pretty much the solid base of the pyramid (sex & shelter, family/stability, love & intimacy). Does a tiny, expensive shiny rock from Sierra Leone provide those needs? No; obviously it is the symbolism of giving to/receiving from someone in the hope that they will provide those needs to you. Did humans manage to satisfy those needs before De Beers came along? I'm pretty sure they did.
The desire for diamonds among the general populace was completely manufactured, whereas the aforementioned needs always existed, and (I strongly suspect) were always being filled before the normalisation of diamond rings as intentions of marriage.
I suppose diamonds (at least in the context of use as jewellery), and the whole story of De Beers are a shining example of commodity fetishism.
> marketing is about what people already want and try to appeal to that.
Like figuring out that people already want not to be talk about behind their backs and ostracized for their flaws, then telling them that they stink (vide halitosis) and appealing to that by selling them unnecessary or potentially harmful fluid to apply orally.
Yes. Well done. Marketing created more than one stupid cultural habit. Why the hate?
That sentiment might be jumping the gun. I was just a kid playing around with a DEC PDP-11 when the TRS-80/Apple ][/Commodore Amiga wave of personal computers hit homes (I wasn't exposed to the earlier, Homebrew Computer Club-era, MITS Altair/Apple I/Heathkit H8 wave of personal computers). I clearly recall IT staffing at the company where the PDP-11 came from heavily staffed by women. However, even the daughters of those women at that time who I got to meet, to the last one, had zero interest in anything having to do with computers. Except maybe for the occasional game that caught their fancy. Usually storyline-driven themes like On-Line Systems aka Sierra Entertainment titles and Pac-Man clones; they rejected all of the dungeon crawlers or shoot-up themes. I recall even as a youngster thinking at the time the displayed gender preferences very odd, as computers to me were neutral territory where neither gender had an obvious physical or social advantage at the outset.
I am guessing that the early marketers likely observed the same emergent social behaviors, and decided to market to where the money was. Meeting hundreds of people in the industry, it is vanishingly rare to find a woman who bugged her parents as a young girl for an early-era home computer; that story is so common among men it is a pedestrian trope. I'd dearly like to know from marketers who were involved in that era to chime in on what kind of market research led them to tilt the early marketing towards men and boys.
My memory of the BBS crowd in the 1980s was that it was something of a mix but definitely skewed male. As someone else said, that's probably the natural outgrown of interest in ham radio, phone phreaking, electronics kits, etc. All of which it's probably fair to say skewed male.
I experienced the same. Even the BBS' that deliberately were set up as social hangouts, which had the greatest ratio of women to men participants, still skewed about 70% male. I never saw it reach parity online, but interestingly, face-to-face parties brought out an evenly-mixed group as BBS users attended with spouses/girlfriends/boyfriends.
I see the current generation computer users' behaviors addressing this imbalance in user population, though not the software development business that produces that utility (lots of hygienic factors adversely impact the majority of jobs in our business now, compared to the state of the business 2+ decades ago).
except that there were countries without such marketing, and the trend is still the same. I doubt that US marketing had any effect on USSR. And keep in mind, that in the USSR there was some push for the women to take "male" jobs and be proud about being e.g. miner or harvester driver.
I've read elsewhere how in the earliest days of computers, men designed the hardware and relegated the programming to women because it was seen as clerical work, albeit advanced clerical work. Because of this, women, such as Grace Hopper, became well established in the field.
The advent of the Apple II and TRS-80 exposed kids (including myself) to computers, and with these machines, programming was the most accessible aspect. You could try to modify the hardware, but then you risked ruining the most expensive piece of equipment in the home. However, you experiment all you wanted with the BASIC prompt, and that's how I learned to program. There is something different about girls and boys such that this kind of tinkering with gadgets appeals much more to boys than girls.
I remember excitedly showing our new Apple II to my cousin who is 6 years older than me, and who had recently finished her CS degree and was working in "data processing." I expected her to have the same gee-whiz reaction I had, but she was not impressed. To her, the Apple II was a silly and expensive toy.
I think that in a way, when myself and other male "Micro Kids" entered the university and professional CS world, we changed the dynamic from a more professional to a more hacker-like culture. Not only did our numbers heavily tilt the gender distribution, but I think we also made the culture less attractive to women.
My cousin, now in her late 50s, is still in IT as a higher-level manager in a large oil and gas firm. Right now, she appears to be spending a lot of time dealing with the logistics of some major office relocations. It is probably the kind of work that many on HN would consider boring, but I am sure it is essential to the smooth operation of a large modern corporation. When I hear her talk about her work, she comes across as being more responsible and practical than her younger male peers, and I don't doubt that's the case.
>There is something different about girls and boys such that this kind of tinkering with gadgets appeals much more to boys than girls.
There is something different about what our culture teaches and signals to girls and boys from the moment they are born such that this kind of tinkering with gadgets appeals much more to boys than girls.
I know my father played a big role in getting me into computers. When I was little, I watched him program, and our whole family played kings quest together. I have fond memories of our computer time, which I think lead me into programming/comp sci. I definitely didn't do cs because I loved math.
I definitely carry his passion and enthusiasm.
While growing up, my mother learned about computers with me too. I'm not sure where family fits in the grand scheme of things, but I think it plays an important role.
>But a lot of computing pioneers, the ones who programmed the first digital computers, were women. And for decades, the number of women in computer science was growing. But in 1984, something changed. The number of women in computer science flattened, and then plunged.
Those statistics kind of refute those lamenting male culture etc for the lack of more women in computer science.
One would imagine the 1969-1984 that the graph shows, the "male culture", bro attitudes, etc were far more imposing that they are in the milenial, PC environments of today. We're talking about the seventies to early eighties, after all!
And yet, there were more women back then than they are now.
(Always suspected the usual explanations weren't the reason. It's not like medicine, law school, finance, etc have much better male cultures than computer science).
Isn't that about the same time when greed driven people started doing such crappy games that adults (women included) stopped playing them altogether? After the market nearly died they had to move games from electronics to child toys but they had then pick either boys toys or girls toys and they went with boys.
Can someone post the TL;DR (uh....TL;DL?) from the podcast here? Looks like a decent discussion going on, but can't tell that anyone actually listened :-)
I'll cop to the fact that I'm just not going to spend the time, though I'm interested in the conclusion(s).
I started Edinburgh University in 1983, and there were about 10% women on the CS course. There were more, I think, on the AI course, but that was in a completely different department.
Because they know better than doing unpaid overtime, keeping up to date in an ever changing industry driven by popularity contests and having to work for free on some open source project because somebody thought that what you do in your free time is somehow more relevant CV wise than what you actually do for a living.
I wouldn't worry much anyway. We won't be seeing many of those articles once the bubble bursts.
> But in 1984, something changed. The number of women in computer science flattened, and then plunged.
So did the number of men. Bachelor's degrees in CS peaked in the US with 27k men, 15k women in 1985-86. Then they dropped by 1993-94 to 17.5k men, 7k women, and then started going back up. By 2002-04, they both had reached new peaks of 44.5k men, 15.5k women.
There's something going on here that is more complicated than what is captured in that sex ratio graph.
A lot of indian women are taking to coding/programming career. Currently, the estimate of number of women programmers in india is about 1,00,000. They are expected to grow to 2,00,00 in less than 10 years.
Not to be nitpicky, but you probably want to review how you typed those numbers. The second is smaller than the first, and the commas are not grouping the zeroes in groups of three.
I suppose you mean either 10^5 or 10^6, but I'm not sure which.
But it still doesn't make sense, because if you remove the commas from 1,00,000 and 2,00,00 you end up with 100000 versus 20000. Based on the examples in your link I'm assuming that the last figure should be 2,00,000. In the examples all the high number always end with three zeros.
Wow, I did not know about this. Thank you for the link.
As sibling poster points out though, there still ought to be an error in the numbers as written, as the second is smaller than the first, but the context of the text implies that it should be larger.
Every female applicant for a programming position I've encountered or seen brought in for an interview have been either Indian or Chinese. Analyst and project management positions have had much more diverse female populations in comparison. But that's just anecdotal, I know.
Yeah, that's because these days starting a new company has become hip.
A job in a large company brings visions of a hall full of clerks these days. So more and more men think of starting companies as the new way to get the kick out of this profession.
Maybe it's actually the time that men became more interested in software.
The first programmers were mostly females because men in STEM were probably more interested in physics and hardware. This is entirely a hunch on my part, but even the term "soft-ware" sounds almost derogatory.
Imagine if math was called a soft science? Why, it's all imaginary!
I think the term "soft science" is some derogatory towards fields like social sciences.
I find it interesting the transition towards physical sciences and away from computer science in the late 1980s. At that time, my mother, who was educated and worked in chemistry, started working at home as a programmer. It was a very good job that allowed her to work remotely most of the time and set her own schedule.
The field was rapidly changing, far more so than other fields, maybe it changed into something that women were less interested in? There are fields that arguably men have reduced interest in that are over-represented with females, for example health care, clinical psychology, fashion etc. I'm pretty sure that's not a bad thing, as long as those men and women with more divergent interests compared to the average are free to move laterally.
I cannot stand this argument, it holds no water. Or rather as much water as the famous FSM graph linking number of pirates to global warming.
I was interested in computers since early teens, without even seeing one in person, just reading in magazines. I've got a real opportunity to spend some time with them only in university, and the same applies to my classmates. So no one was given computer as a gift/toy, no one saw any ads for them. Guess who got interested in programming and who did not.
Certainly a horrible ad. But it is for buying a machine. If such ads were the culprit, women shouldn't be driving cars either? I don't know what the ads were like at the time, but I am pretty sure they made similar ads for cars. Also not sure what kind of ads were targeted at women. It's pretty common to this day, although cheap, to just mix a random product with the claim "will make you more attractive to the opposite sex".
Wasn't it also the case that at first operating computers was deemed a task for secretaries, and then the perception changed?
I suppose they could have shown ads of secretaries being loved by their bosses because they work so efficiently thanks to their shiny new computers.
Women see the writing on the wall on High School: Med/Law School offer a clear career path to the upper middle class, while CS offers a muddy path at a middle class life.
They also see "rich" old Doctors and Lawyers. They have never seen a "rich" old programmer, because they don't exist. Programmers are washed out by 50, while Doctors are in their prime at 50.
Data: I am an 80's kid. All the smart girls knew to go to med/law school. All the nerdy guys like me wasted time learning 6502 assembly. We are all doing OK, but the women make 2 to 3 times as much as the men.