Bridging The Tech Gender Gap

from the where-are-all-the-women dept

Ask any programmer or computer science major about the number of women in their field, and you will undoubtedly arrive at the same conclusion: computer programming is dominated by males. In the past, attempts like female-only computer camps have been made to attract women to the field, but to this date, nothing seems to have helped.

Well, some computer science researchers postulate that the design of software itself may contribute to the male-bias seen in computer programming. In an experiment, participants were asked to find and fix errors in a spreadsheet. Researchers found that men were more likely to use advanced "debugging" features of the software, whereas women were more likely to edit formulas one by one. Then, they introduced a differently designed debugging tool that was specifically designed to appeal to women. Unsurprisingly, women used the debugging tool more. While this is valuable research, it does seem a bit obvious. Software needs to be designed to better suit the entire userbase, and if a large set of people are not using the software properly, then improvements definitely need to be made. These differences may exist not only across genders, but across cultures, socioeconomic levels and ages. But, to automatically think that software design causes the dearth of female programmers could be a stretch. That said, the gender gap is clearly an issue, and the more quickly we figure out the cause the better.

Perhaps there is a causal relationship in the 'stupid' male geek culture that exists in the profession. As Sir Tim Berners-Lee points out, programming culture can alienate people from working in the profession, particularly women. In one example, an academic who went through a sex change submitted the same academic papers to a research facility under both identities: the papers from a man were accepted, but the ones from a woman were rejected. The gender gap is not an insurmountable issue, computer science graduates in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand are around 50 percent women; in the US, more women are entering universities than men right now, so now is a great time to figure out if we need to balance this tech divide. I'm sure engineer dudes everywhere would appreciate some more smart women amongst their midst.

Filed Under: women programming