Why aren’t there more women programmers?

Wondering why it’s so difficult to convince more women to go into tech? Maybe you’re asking the wrong question.

Here’s an exercise. Think about what you did today. Imagine that you were solving a problem at work.

  • If it seemed like an intractable problem, and every time you thought you’d found the solution, it turned out that this approach was critically flawed and you had to backtrack…
  • If half of the time you spent was wasted because of misleading or missing documentation…
  • If you searched Google for answers and found others who had the same problem, and their question is more than 5 years old, and nobody has proposed a solution…
  • And you were eventually able to find the source of the problem through a process of elimination that might as well just be called trial-and-error…
  • And in the end the cause was something quite trivial, located in such a way as to maximize the amount of other code you have to rewrite to fix it…

If this sounds like your normal workday, you might be a programmer.

You’re asking the wrong question. The real question is

Why are there so many men in tech?

4 Responses to “Why aren’t there more women programmers?”

  1. mxbishop Says:

    A lot of being a successful programmer is having adequate logical problem-solving skills, persistence in the face of many frustrations, and a joy of getting code working properly. People who start out in tech, but do not have these requisite traits, quickly move on to program management, marketing, sales, documentation, training, or leaving tech altogether. It’s probably still true that women from a young age are not taught basic problem solving skills, or develop a deep appreciation for smoothly operating machinery, which leaves them at a huge disadvantage later on when they select programming as their career choice. I personally attribute my career in programming to my affinity for math in high school and college. Without that foundation, it’s doubtful I could have succeeded as much as I did.

  2. mxbishop Says:

    Another comment that begs the question about why people would want to go into tech. There’s really, a lot (and I mean vast quantities) of bad code out there. Today’s example (and I mean this as a single instance, of a world replete with crappy software) is IE tabs. They used to work. That is, I could be looking at a web page, and then launch a new tab to look at something else, and then (drumroll) come back to the original tab and continue. Not anymore. MS broke something (probably in an update) that prevents IE tabs from working properly in Win7. Come back to the original tab, and the IE session freezes. Start Task Manager, kill IE. Repeat.

    The problem is, if I’m a programmer, and I seek employment, I will undoubtedly be given a project to work on that includes fixing someone else’s terrible, pathetic code. The proverbial smelly bag that is someone’s else’s giant software mess. Since most companies do not actually care about software quality all that much (they say they do, but they actually don’t) it’s a terrible existence for a programmer that wants to write new code for a project he/she thinks is worthy. Most of the time, you’re stuck with the smelly bag. And that sucks. Of course, the pay is generally better than flipping burgers, but the mental anguish takes its toll.

  3. tekHedd Says:

    Worst is when the terrible, pathetic code sometimes turns out to be something I wrote. :)

  4. mxbishop Says:

    Good point. It’s good practice to always bury a remorseful comment in the code somewhere that says: Impossibly big kludge here, need to analyze this module for serious memory leaks before the production release!

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