Link: What is turning women off coding?

Following from are women in tech really in tech we have:

Some things to think about before you exhort everyone to code by Miriam Posner

Which points out the important cultural aspect of why it is that women are often not coders.

If you are not a woman in tech, and wonder why there are so few... this article is for you.

So is this recent article on the recent "brogramming" phenomenon: Brogramming: just one of the girls by addabirnir from Skillcrush

She points out that "brogramming" has its intentions in the right place: it is just trying to inject some appeal into coding... but is doing so in a blatantly misogynistic fashion. (eg "without brogramming, bros might just feel like...one of the girls") and thereby alienating the very few women who are trying to break into this industry.

The important take-home message from her is "you don’t need to alienate anyone to make yourself comfortable"

Also of very distinct interest is the NYT article about Wikipedia's serious gender imbalance, which also points the finger strongly at geek culture - which is extremely male, and can be very uncomfortable for a woman.

Speaking personally on this subject, it took me a good ten years before I figured out the rules for getting along in geek society. My feminine upbringing was with an entirely different, incompatible culture. I can well understand that the serious culture shock would be offputting to the point where many women might not even want to bother continuing.

Again, I'd recommend reading all these article to get a glimpse into why this is the case.

Are "Women in tech" really in tech?

Anneke Jong has posted an interesting article called why we need to rethink women in tech, which points out the real reason for the seeming disparity in numbers of "women in tech" comes about due to the definition of "in tech" being used.

She explains that while several recent articles are applauding the increase of "women in tech" - these numbers are gathered from women who are, in essence, working in tech-adjacent roles (eg marketing and PR for IT firms, or tech-bloggers such as herself), rather than actually having coding skills - which would be the definition of "technical" for those working in the industry.

As a coder-girl myself, I can see her point. There has indeed been a great uptake of "women in tech"... but the increase of actually technically-competent women is much slower.

While the figures quoted in media seem good at first glance - they aren't telling the full story of the gender imbalance. Anneke makes a great comparison with the music industry: "Imagine your disappointment if only a third of the 'Top Women in Music' were musicians."

This is not to say there has been no progress over the last twenty years. When I began my Comp Sci degree, I was one of only seven women in a class of 220, which was no uncommon at the time - whereas now the proportion is closer to 1 in 10... but that is still a far cry from 50%

The article, of course, offers no solutions - because generating interest for computing (or maths, for that matter) in women is still one of the Hard Problems facing education... but it's a good discussion of the problem, and worth a read.

Link: How to avoid ghetto jobs

A great post on women 2.0 about how to avoid what she terms "pink ghetto" jobs. These are jobs that are just as bad for men as for women, and are often the first job or two you fall into as a new graduate. eg unpaid internships, poorly-organised, unfunded startups and those dead-end jobs where you end up maintaining monstrous legacy code on very low pay, rather than learning new skills.

The article takes a good look at how to spot the duds, and how to find better employment options.

I've fallen into the trap of several of these myself, over the years. From the "100% equity (but the product is totally unsaleable and we didn't bother to research that before you spent 23 man-days working on it)", to the poorly-paid legacy-code maintainer (plus guilt trips to keep me on even after having three months of unpaid invoices), to a job for a "web developer" (that actually mainly works on resetting our customer's forgotten passwords). So - it's definitely worth knowing how to spot these trucks coming before they run over you and leave you in the dust, bleeding financially.

Have you had any experiences of ghetto jobs yourself?

Silicon Stilettos

I just went to a great meetup. Silicon Stilettos is a networking meetup aimed at business women in the IT industry.

I went along last night and loved it. It was a great way to catch up with like-minded women in the industry, and hopefully learn a few tips and tricks from them, and share my own experience.

Despite it being an IT industry Do, I seemed to be the only actual developer in the lot - but that didn't surprise me at all. Even after decades of equal-rights, I still find that even with the small number of women in the IT world, that majority of them tend to be in marketing or PR, which played out amongst this group. But that's fine - after all, if I wanted to learn yet more IT stuff, I could go for linuxchix, GirlGeekDinners or any one of the non-female-only[1] user groups I attend already. So it was great to see a different side of the IT industry - and there were certainly a few women there that were quite savvy in the field.

The best chat was about social media as it pertains to IT PR, how big corporates still haven't realised they should do it, and how those that realise they should don't know how to get started. Mainly because they're so used to hiding behind their corporate brand-projection that it's hard for them to dredge up a real, unique and human voice, which is what is needed for social media to actually be genuine and appealing.

Often, big companies try to continue the sort of push-style marketing they're used to, just dropping it into twitter/facebook as though that was how to win over the social media crowd. They couldn't be more wrong, of course. Social media demands a real and genuine connection with people, and you can't do that by braying about how good you are.

A lot of companies still don't get the "conversation" part of the equation and fail to understand that at least one half of a conversation should be devoted to really listening to the other person[2]. Failing to pay attention can lead to serious problems quicker than you think. One of the women spoke about some kerfuffle that happened over facebook/twitter when someone at nestle was obviously having a bad day. Clearly, social media can also go horribly horribly wrong...

So, I think the meetup wa a resounding success, and I'm really looking forward to the next one.

Notes

1
Why go to an all-women group? Well - that's hard to answer without offending people, but I'll try. It's not that I don't like co-ed groups - I'm not terrified of men. Being in an industry so obviously dominated by them means I've gotten pretty used to hanging around with them... but there are still cultural differences between the sexes (in an on-average way, and I'm sure entirely due to different upbringing). While it's great to do the mixed-thing it can also be good to get amongst other women too.

Being an expat I can immediately see similarities with hanging out with others from my own country. It's not that I don't want to assimilate - I spend > 95% of my time hanging around with locals... but it's also nice now and then to get together with other Aussies and bitch about how crap the NHS is compared with Medicare (for example). :)

The expectations and culture are simply different. For one thing, I noticed that most of the attendees had one small drink and I wasn't the only one leaving before 9 to get home. Being used to IT get-togethers where you get funny looks if you don't have a second or third drink and get a sense that you're just "not up to it" if you don't hang around until way past 10 (regardless of it being a school-night)... this came as a breath of fresh air. Seems like these other women also have a life... :)

2
It still surprises me that companies don't get this. After all, The Cluetrain Manifesto was written a decade ago, and folks like Seth Godin are doing their best to get the message out every which way they can. Yet I still see big companies pushing the same rhetoric out as though they could just transcribe their traditional TV-ads or print-media brochure-ware onto the web. They remind me of those obnoxious types that will talk over the top of everyone at dinner but only ever talk about how good they are, without realising that the adage of "show don't tell" isn't limited to novel-writing.