Having been a developer, manager, and director in the software world for 4 decades, I've seen an anemic level of women developers. This not only hasn't changed, the numbers have gone down. I explore it from various vantage points: physiological, psy...
I worked in the software world, spanning 5 decades as a developer, manager, and director. I wrote a helluva lot of code, hired so many people, and even fired a few. In the decades from the 80s up to now, thanks in part to Moore's Law, globalization, and other dynamics, the world of software changed dramatically, in almost every area, except one:
The percentage of women as software developers. Though it fluctuates yearly, analyses show that approximately 15-22% of software engineers are women (1).
In fact, a startling statistic states that the number of women graduating with Computer Science degrees has dropped from 35% to 18% (2)
These meager numbers have remained fairly steady or worsened over those 40+ years (2.1). I could practically count on both hands the number of women developers I worked with over the years.
Numerous articles have been written on the subject and in recent years major attempts have been made to inspire young women to enter not only the software field, but any STEM field, In this article, I'd like to describe my experience in this area and offer some possible reasons why this is so. And by doing so, take aim at a few sexist assumptions.
Lack of Diversity in Engineering pre-Millennium, From Personal Experience
As a child of the 50s and 60s, it was certainly and not so subtly communicated to me the role of gender via my parents, the Flintstones, Ozzie and Harriet, etc. – women in the home, men at the office or in the field. The onset of feminism in the 60s changed that radically, but collective attitudes, held deep in the personal and collective unconscious, die a long slow death, and I don't believe we've made it just yet. I remember one day driving with my dad, talking about my sister's future, when he stated that he didn't believe 'that women should have careers'. That was so shocking that I remember it to this day. He was old school in so many ways.
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In 1972, I entered engineering school, Clarkson College (now University) up in the sticks of northern NY State. Being a purely technical college, it was basically a huge sausage factory – about 2000 men and approximately 13 women (fortunately for us lonely boys, down the road, Potsdam State had an almost opposite demographic). Out of those 13 women, only 2-3 were in computer science.
Being an almost completely male realm, this has to weigh upon a prospective female candidate – walking into a class or lab full of men, one's unconscious mind must trigger, 'wow, this is not my tribe!'. Probably the converse is true, but in a man's world there's also the danger of vicious verbal assault or even sexual assault.
In the almost all-male computer lab at Clarkson College, I remember one hanging on the wall: a Playboy Playmate's centerfold re-creation done in ascii characters on the old green and white computer paper. It impressed me so much – did the author manually draw the characters or did he write a program to do that? In either case, it was a perfect replica of that playmate and her pose. Now, the few women were using that lab had to put up with that and probably a lot more, which underscores the obstacles that they had to face.
