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Let me start out by saying that the weekend at the first Cocoaconf  was thoroughly inspiring and very well worth my time. It lived up to its reputation as a technical conference – hands-on tutorials, code walkthrough of various concepts and even the keynote address by Daniel Steinberg   was a very entertaining spin on Objective-C.  It was a community where people were eager to share their knowledge and to learn from each other.  Bill Dudney spent time reviewing a pesky bug that I was facing and gave me some useful pointers – how great is that!

And now to the curious subject of this blog:-

In this congregation of approximately 80 techies, I noticed that there were only four women (including myself) attending the conference.  Of course this wouldn’t be the first time that there was a stark disparity in the number of women and men at a technical conference.  Attendees of the recent Apple WWDC 2011 mentioned to me that there were probably a dozen or so women among several thousand attendees!  Conferences aside, the number of men in development related roles have significantly outnumbered women in all the companies that I’ve worked for.  I’m generally the lone woman in a technical meeting. To be clear, I’m talking specifically about roles that involve programing and building software. I’m not talking about management related roles in technology organizations where there are many women making significant inroads. I’m not including the designers (web, graphics etc) , technical writers either. I’m talking about folks who develop. So why is there a significant shortage of women in this area? It definitely isn’t true that women can’t program, and I don’t believe that it something to do with our genetic makeup, so what is the reason.

I’ve pondered over this topic many times in the past but it was rekindled over the weekend at Cocoaconf when I noticed that nothing much has changed over the years in this regard.  I chatted about this with some of the men who attended the conference and it was interesting to get their perspective on this as well.  This is a summary of  my thoughts-

It is no secret that the number of women pursuing a Computer Science /Engineering degree is still very small (and some reports indicate that its dwindling).   So why aren’t women inclined to pursue this degree in the first place? Is it because (judging by the fact that there aren’t many women in this area), they perceive this as a “guy thing” and automatically assume that this would be something they wouldn’t enjoy? Or does this start much earlier during elementary and middle school, where summer camps related to topics like “ Building Robots” and “programing” are mostly attended by boys which dissuades even the girls who are interested in such topics (or over-protective parents of girls) from participating in  such camps?

Even the women who enter the industry as a developer tend to switch to non-development or non-technical roles/jobs within a few years. Is it because women inherently prefer to work in roles which involve more “socializing” such as management, marketing,  sales? As a developer, one does not have to interact a whole lot with others- you are pretty much in your office/cube for most part (well- there is “pair programing” but that’s not for everyone).  Some women have indicated that they switched careers because “it was hard to keep up”.  Like many other jobs these days, programing is not a traditional “9 to 5 job”. Technology changes at a rapid phase and in order to do well, one needs to constantly upgrade their skills.  There is continuous learning required. This may require spending evenings and weekends learning the new skill. Depending on the demands of the family, that is not always feasible, especially for women.  Some women have indicated that switching to management related roles was essential to climb up the corporate ladder within their company. I disagree with that.  Most companies offer separate management and technical tracks. One can be in a position of significant influence even while serving a purely technical role.  

A very interesting point that was raised by some one and with which I agree, is the men in development roles tend to possess traits which may not appeal to many women.  They are generally “arrogant” ,”brash” or “over confident” . Hold on- let me explain this a bit.  As developers, we can’t just “give up” on bugs. We are adamant about fighting them and proving that our code works.  Developers are not necessarily the most social people and many tend to lack “people skills”- we are not shy about "calling a spade a spade". Very often, developers tend to trivialize a complex task.  For instance, even if fixing a problem took a lot of time /effort, men tend to downplay the effort and claim that “Oh that was so easy. Figured it out in no time ”.  This may be intimidating to women who may have lower self-confidence in their programing abilities to begin with.

 Being in a development job may need women to be willing to primarily interact with men.  For many women, this would mean stepping out of ones comfort zone . While this is not a requirement to do well as a developer, it certainly helps to be able to network with fellow developers at the workplace and at conferences- one learns a lot in the process.  On the flip side, many male developers do not openly welcome women into their discussions for fear of being misunderstood. Of course if there were sufficient women in these roles to begin with, there wouldn’t be this issue!

Women tend to discuss family matters more often than for instance, the latest gadget or the cool stuff that they discovered while hacking into their new gadget.  Sure- men probably discuss sports a lot as well but they also talk a lot more about technology, even if they are not directly working in that space. There is nothing wrong in discussing family, but my point here being that we are influenced a lot by our company.

 I’ve not covered all the factors in this blog and that was not my intent. I’m sure that there are many more reasons and it is probably a complex combination of all of the above factors.

One of the pioneering programmers was Lady Ada Lovelace. It is sad not to see more women following her legacy.

 

 

 

 

Tags: cocoaconf, WOmen in computing, Women in technology