Why are there so few female software engineers?
Nov24,2013
Why are there so few female software engineers?
I’m quite certain that male genitalia have nothing to do with the ability to write code. However, based on the number of female software engineers, there is clearly a problem. However, adding penises to women isn’t the answer. I just want to be clear on that, whether we’re talking biology or the behavioral expectations for women in the workplace.
Thankfully, correlation is not causation. What also correlates is that boys and girls are raised with different social circumstances and context and somehow many, many more boys end up with whatever it is that is necessary to endure the learning curve of becoming a software engineer, and far, far fewer of the girls get or experience or receive whatever it is. This is a bias that filters women out of my field, and I think of that as an epic failure.
I think the unreasonable disparity in gender participation in software engineering is a downstream effect of this very early bias, whatever it is. I think it gains strength and the disparity increases over time because this bias is compounded and self-reinforcing. Were it not, I think more women would have overcome their initial deprivation of whatever it is.
I can only speculate on what supports a young person to begin learning about software engineering, or what discourages them. But, I went through it myself and I remember the mind-set that drove me to continue, that got me through the agonizing algorithms, the baffling bugs and the confusing constructs and an entire alliterated alphabet of barriers to success. It was pretty easy for me. It isn’t for most people and I don’t think I am that special. But, the disincentives to learn software engineering were not in my life, and instead, there were lots of incentives for me.
It was so natural for me to become a software engineer that I cannot even imagine what else I could have done with my life. It was so straightforward for me to choose this path that it was as though life had set up roadsigns for me. I’m grateful for that clarity in my life. But, I’m an anglo-saxon male of Jewish decent, born to a feminist mother and a father who was a math teacher. It would be hard for me to imagine a better set of advantages in our modern world if one wanted to end up being a software engineer. I was lucky.
I’m interested in leveling the playing field so one doesn’t require as much luck to succeed. It isn’t just software engineering I care about. I care about the conditions that lead to this disparity in gender distribution among software engineers because I think it is a proxy for the essence of the struggle for equal treatment and equal pay for women in the entire business world. It isn’t just about learning to control computers; it is about the freedom to become who we are and reach our potential without being intentionally indoctrinated with and intrinsically useless value system that inspire life-long fears and interferes with future success in business.
We’re failing our girls and we can do better.
Please forgive the length of this blog entry. This isn’t a simple problem. And, of course it is all just my opinion. I’ve written about my own personal experience becoming a software engineer as a single data point. One man’s experience. Can it be useful in undoing the disparity? That is my hope.
I think the incentives fall into a few broad areas:
Kids love to play. I love to play too -- I still do. When I am at my best my work feels like play. I like to make things -- I get real satisfaction both from the process of their creation as well as from their completion. When I was a child I had the luxury of time to play.
It wasn’t until I was about 12 years old when I began to have access to programmable devices. At first it was just a programmable calculator, but in 9th grade I had access to an actual computer (a PDP10) which had a simple operating system and the BASIC programming language installed. It was easy to learn, but by then I was already given all the advantages I’d need to succeed. I thought it was no big deal to learn about this computer. It was also no big deal when I took a class on Fortran at a community college while I was in eleventh grade. The class and language were for so easy for me that I couldn’t understand why anyone else in the class was having a hard time. Truly, I’m not that smart. That isn’t it. If that was all that was required, there would be about as many female software engineers as male software engineers, because the intelligence required for software engineering isn’t unevenly distributed the way that the industry seems to be. Men are not smarter than women nor better suited to software engineering for any reason I can imagine.
For me, the calculator or the computer was a frontier world in which I could create anything I could think of, until I consumed all of the computers resources, which became surprisingly difficult to do even when I was first learning to program. The first thing I ran into was that larger programs were harder to write than smaller ones. So, the notion of filling a computer with a single program was as elusive then when 64K of memory was *a lot* as it is now when some computers have 100,000 times as much memory.
This new world felt infinite to me. And, since I could create anything of which I could think, I felt all-powerful in this infinite world.
To put this into context, I did not feel powerful in my life as a child. I was that kid who got picked on because he succeeded in school and was far too trusting and naive. I had the added complexity of being a committed pacifist, even at a very young age. I could not behave brutally to another, and so I became a victim unless I could evade. This was something at which I became quite adept as a matter of perceived survival and avoidance of suffering.
I found solitude comforting and peaceful so the fact that it would take many hours of working alone to become a software engineer was perceived by me as a natural benefit, not a cost to be paid or a discomfort endured.
Being a victim of bullying also left me feeling powerless. The circumstances of my home life only reinforced those feelings. Like many children I felt powerless to change the conflict between my parents and it slowly bored holes into my soul that have never been filled.
Feeling powerless was very uncomfortable for me… isn’t it for everyone? I needed some way to feel some kind of personal power. That was the essence of why I like to create things: it made me feel like I had some power. I didn’t think about it in these terms then, but the power I felt was the power to do battle with Chaos and sometimes win. Before I ever touched a programmable device I created things with construction sets (Fischer Technik) and built small stick-and-tissue rubber-band-powered model airplanes. These things gave me regular feelings of accomplishment. Occasionally I would manage to build a plane that could take off the ground, fly, and land. Most had to be hand-launched for a short flight and a one-point landing.
But, only when I began to write software was I able to create larger things that were not limited by my meager funds, small hands or the size of my workspace. I could imagine something large and make it and not only was my thinking the only limiting factor, but nobody around me even knew what I was doing, so I had no fear that they would come over and kick down my house of cards.
This hiding my creativity in plain sight was liberating for me, because it was the ultimate evasion: I could not be bullied. My creations were invisible and so was I when I was writing software, sitting someplace safe.
When I went to college at Caltech I found out that I was a terrible student and that I had sailed through high school with all As and one B had more to do with the fact that school was easy and my parents had prepared me well for it than any particular skill at being a good student. The only class at Caltech I enjoyed or in which I was anything but mediocre was digital electronics, which I understood fairly well.
But, I was miserable because I realized that my childhood dream of becoming an Aeronautical Engineer and designing real airplanes was evaporating before my eyes. I developed many loner habits, like exploring the steam tunnels under campus and staying up to watch the sun rise on top of a tall building and listening to Los Angeles waking up and the highways filling.
At that dark time in my life I found that all students had free access to the computer center and that I could just walk in and write software and store programs in my account. So, I did. It became my escape when I should have been studying. I wrote software to create villages for Dungeons and Dragons, complete with leaders, a style of government, shops and owners, with characteristics for all these imagined people a player might encounter. I typed in lists from various Judges Guild booklets and created software that produced volumes of reference materials for a game I loved to play.
Actually, I passed all my classes. The freshman year at Caltech was pass/fail only. After my freshman year ended I requested a leave of absence (knowing that I had no intention of ever going back).
Again, I was in an environment where I felt I could not succeed, and writing software was the only way I could feel successful and powerful. It was my only relief from the crushing reality of the proof of my inadequacy at just about everything else, or so I felt.
Programming provided me:
To me a computer was fair and unbiased. My peers were not. I simply had to be correct and the computer would comply. It was neither capricious nor frustrated, neither an ally nor an enemy. It was reliable and honest and faithful, like a good pet, with bugs, but no fleas.
I didn’t know it then, but there was a very strong correlation between computer rooms and safety for me. In high school the computer room was inside the math department. My father worked in the math department and was very close by. It was probably the safest place on campus for me, whether there had been a computer in the room or not.
At the local community college where I learned Fortran I would sit in their computer room to work on my assignments. I was a skinny kid from high school in college class, and not a simple class. Nobody picked on me. I didn’t know why, but it was obvious that the people around me valued me because I was doing well in the class. They didn’t despise me for it. I suppose that peer pressure would not allow them to bully me, because a college student who feels a need to bully a much younger high school student would meet with resistance from their own social group. So, that computer room was safe too.
The computer room at Caltech was also a refuge. Caltech didn’t actually teach any courses in software at the time, or I might have stayed. Instead, students were allowed to use computers in their work if they needed to. Strictly speaking I didn’t need to write software for any of my classes. I didn’t need to create Dungeons and Dragons villages for an assignment. But, my happiness demanded it. The only people in the computer room were people who needed to use a computer or wanted to use a computer, but either way they were either too focused on their work or too like me to be a problem for me. And, Caltech had an honor code that limited the abuse one student might inflict upon another. It wasn’t perfect, but it was fairly effective: you shall not take unfair advantage of another.
Benefits fall into a few categories, such as:
I never made money with computers until I left college, but knowing about computers gave me access to computers, even if only because I knew I could ask for access to them. When I was just learning about programming there was no payoff in terms of social position or influence over others. That all came later.
Instead, the main benefits to me at the time were feelings:
I liked myself when I was writing software. Occasionally other programmers would see what I had done and their honest appreciation was nourishing in a way little else ever was. It was respect. It is obvious I got a lot of my self-esteem from being a programmer but I didn’t know that at the time. It wasn’t a strength I recognized. It was just a safe place to go. A blank place in which I could compose a tiny slice of happiness that nobody else could tear down. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t real to anyone but me: neither was my happiness or sadness.
I received a huge benefit simply by creating software. It didn’t even matter what it was doing. All that mattered was writing code that worked. All that mattered was getting the computer to follow my instructions and perform for me.
Once I left college I got a job as a programmer. The interview was to write a small program to parse a date in a string. There were about 10 people in the computer room during the interview. Only half were still there when I looked up after writing the program. I was one of three people hired that day. My salary worked out to $5/hr.
One of the two owners was an MIT graduate and he saw Caltech on my resume and wanted me in that room of ten people. He ended up being my mentor and teaching me about software engineering for four years. He’d come in once every few days with a multi-sheet carbon paper form on a clipboard. In front of me he’d write down the command line for a unix utility and perhaps list the options and a one-liner about each.
He often seemed surprised when I asked for the next one, but not displeased.
After three months of delivering one program after another, the two owners invited me into their office for a meeting. There they told me they could not be more pleased with my work and they were going to give me a raise, to $12/hr. Not only that, but the raise was going to be retroactive from the day I was hired. Needless to say I was floored and for one of the first times ever it began to dawn on me that people valued me for what I could do with a computer. They treated me with deference, this 19 year-old kid with an oversized beard trying so hard to look old enough to be in the workplace. Yes, of course I had impostor syndrome, but with each successful program I wrote I felt less like an impostor and more like someone with a job to do and the skills to do it. I began to believe there was no program I could not write; however, I later learned this was not the case. Still, for a while, I felt I had no limits.
My income exceeded my needs and suddenly I was young and relatively rich from my own perspective. I could afford to buy toys and tools, to eat out almost every night. Money was not a problem for me, especially coming from modest middle-class roots. I didn’t have expensive tastes so I always felt rich.
The material rewards didn’t end with money. I was granted influence and power to make some kinds of choices. Because of the deference I received from management, other programmers respected me. It gave me a social standing -- a position that others would have liked if they could achieve it. It happened at every job I ever held. I felt privileged.
Ultimately nothing succeeds like success and being a successful software engineer made me feel more and more personally powerful. Money and time and skills meant my life was pretty easy. After a while I felt like I could take care of myself and I didn’t need anyone’s help, nor was I vulnerable to someone taking away what I had achieved for myself.
I felt like that world was telling me that I was adequate and the money I receive for writing software was the proof.
Being a software engineer provided me with what I needed.
I was lucky. I didn’t feel or perceive many disincentives.
First and foremost, this blank space in which we create software is foreign and unfamiliar and people don’t start out understanding it. It is for some people a daunting task to get past the blankness of it. What can be done here? What exists here? What am I or my thoughts here? This existential crisis is real. And, depending on how someone deals with it they may simply abandon this formless void for the comfort and familiarity of their own physical reality, where things seem obvious.
To begin, one must be able to cross the desert of ignorance to find a first oasis of understanding some things about the blank space. If someone cannot make it across this expanse, the chance of being a programmer will perish. This desert sucks the confidence out of someone like a real desert draws out water from our bodies. If we don’t find an oasis of understanding it is only a matter of time before we give up.
This journey is inward. So, if someone isn’t experienced in inward journeys, this may be more difficult. It has to be an inward journey because it is ourselves who must learn to program if we are to be able to program. Others can teach, but it is up to each of us to learn, or not. We must have the will to keep trying until we understand. This kind of determination can certainly be inspired by genuine need, but it is more natural for young people to try many things and explore them less deeply.
I think one must begin the journey when one is young because learning to communicate with a computer is like learning any other language and we seem to learn languages more easily when we are young.
Some of the important personal characteristics that I think indicate a better chance of success include:
Lacking these makes the journey harder. So, influences in one’s life that undermine these characteristics can be reasonably expected to undermine someone’s chances of becoming a software engineer.
Stop telling girls they are pretty. This is poisoning their future by implicitly defining how they are valued. It pollutes their sense of values with artificially imposed external values that have little practical use in their future lives. Women’s sexuality isn’t in jeopardy if they are not indoctrinated to value being pretty over being smart. Their sexual identity is no more at risk than a boys might be if he is not called handsome.
Kids want praise. They’ll follow where it leads. It helps define their primitive understanding of the social contract for acceptance into their community. If we value kids for what they do, they’ll want to do more. Kids can game the system easily. But, there is no way to game making something -- one either does or doesn’t. So, praise for creating things is real, whereas praise for staying out of trouble isn’t as real because it is only trouble of which the parent is aware that the child has avoided.
The beauty and clothing industry is replete with examples of how the “girls should be pretty” value system is reinforced. What one can make doesn’t depend on being pretty. What one can think and say is independent of one’s hair style or blemishes. We set the value system as parents and as a society and we brainwash girls and women into this proxy value system that is disempowering and interferes with success later in life.
To value kids for what they think, praise their questions as much as their answers. The ability to form questions and pursue answers is the fundamental talent that must be developed to succeed as a software engineer. Say “That is an excellent question” whether you know the answer or not. Reveal your own question and answer skills by speaking them aloud for kids to hear. Demonstrate inquisitiveness. Demonstrate that not knowing answers is OK. Demonstrate how one searches for answers, and how one copes when the answers don’t come.
Thinking is more than questions and answers, of course, but to become a software engineer this is a crucial skill: to ask and answer and feel no fear while doing so.
The disincentives would be to value aesthetics or behaviors that do not translate to personal growth and independence. Praise for appearance makes appearance what matters to a child. Praise for behaving like stereotypes of boys and girls isn’t helpful. Ignoring or criticizing what kids create discourages creation.
The less a child is valued for what they do and think, the less they will do and think. If they feel harmed when others observe what they do and think, they may not immediately respond this way, but they take on a value system that will last a long time: thinking and creating is a risk instead of a relief.
We have a few fundamental ways of coping with the unexpected:
I think it is probably natural to feel fear. Perhaps it is related to primitive instincts for survival. The challenge is find ways to find wonder in the unexpected.
One way to meet this challenge is to contain an unexpected experience within something safe, to minimize fear. For example, taking apart a broken clock might involve something unexpected, like the fact that there are no gears inside, or it is mostly empty, or it has many parts that don’t move. But, the clock was already broken: it cannot be broken any further -- there is nothing to lose by taking it apart and learning about it. I wonder what these parts do? I wonder how it works? It is clear one’s survival doesn’t depend on knowing these things It is obvious even to a child that this probably doesn’t matter much. So, it is safe to have a feeling other than fear. Wonder sings with a quiet voice; our fears must be silent if we are to hear the song.
Chances are good that ambivalence is the next reaction after fear. Kids might not care enough to wonder. So, take apart something they find more interesting. Ask questions. Look things up on the internet. Ask kids what they think. Ask why they think what they think. Every question can be questioned. Every answer can be questioned. Questions are the doorways to wonder. If we don’t make questions relevant and plentiful, wonder won’t be accessible. Without wonder, everything unexpected is fearful or uninteresting or frustrating. Without wonder I can’t imagine how someone could become a software engineer.
The disincentives would be anything that links the unexpected to fear. Kids fear criticism, negative judgments and being embarrassed. Display those behaviors around the unexpected and they will learn to fear it quickly.
How do we characterize the unknown? Is it a barrier? Or is it a frontier?
The quickest way to ensure that it is a barrier is to punish someone for what they don’t know. Punishment doesn’t have to be a spanking. It can also be the lack of praise. Kids are nourished by praise. It is how they learn the social contract with society and their family. With no effort at all the unknown becomes a barrier when kids are praised only for what they know. But, that doesn’t mean we should praise ignorance. Instead, we should model and praise the imagination about the unknown. We can show them that we also don’t know and we can wonder aloud about it. We can wonder aloud what we might be able to do or be in this frontier.
Frontiers favor self-starters. Frontiers are a lot harder for someone who expects to already have a structure to follow. So, we can model how to invent structure. We can model how to cope when there is no structure. We can talk about priorities. We can talk about needs vs. wants. We can help kids understand that frontiers come with opportunities. Yes, there are dangers too, but we inevitably learn about these and beyond ensuring personal safety, we probably don’t need to work very hard for kids to understand the dangers of a frontier. We do have to work harder for them to understand the joy and freedom of a frontier.
When kids see the unknown as a barrier and we don’t interfere or challenge that belief, it is reinforced. It is important to create circumstances where kids are not judged by success or failure of an effort, but for trying. It is important to praise trying new things and for making it easy for kids not to dwell or worry about outcomes all the time. Outcomes matter sometimes; we can help them understand when that is and when that isn’t.
The disincentives would be anything that makes the unknown seem like a barrier. For example, using a child’s ignorance to control them. “You can’t have that toy, you don’t know how to use it!” What are they supposed to say? “Yes I do!” If they had confidence they’d say “I’ll learn then.” They won’t get that confidence until they’ve been given the chance to try and seen that they can learn.
Another way to turn the unknown into a barrier is by asking questions a child can’t answer and then taking actions as a consequence of their failure to answer correctly. Adults can always win at this game, because they are judge and jury and executioner. It isn’t a game, just a power grab. And, the message it sends to kids is that the unknown is a dangerous weapon that can be used against them. Why would any child imagine it would be fun or interesting to enter the unknown when it always seems they get the raw end of the deal?
Kids have lots of opinions. They may have a hard time telling the difference between facts and assessments, but they are full of assessments and judgments. If we expect them later in life to endure being the only one who believes something and still stick with their beliefs, this will require that they value their own judgments more than those from other people. To value one’s own beliefs we must feel free to have them.
Kids have a unique experience. They will know things nobody else knows. They see things their own way. So long as we understand the difference between facts and beliefs, we can give them room to have their beliefs. It is when we impose our beliefs as facts that we send the message that their personal judgments aren’t as important. They learn to doubt themselves this way.
This translates to the workplace; managers become proxies for parents. It can trigger us to doubt our beliefs and adopt theirs. This isn’t always a good idea. To succeed in business we need the best of our combined thinking, not uniform groupthink. The best of our combined thinking requires people to speak up when they see things differently. They won’t if they don’t see their own differing beliefs as valuable. If they are trained to only feel comfortable when conforming we don’t get the benefit of their wisdom when we need them to speak up.
We can’t make kids have our taste, but then again, they can’t make us have their tastes either, so it is probably fair. Only, as adults we’re implicitly in control and right in their minds, so they might perceive disagreement as being told they are wrong, or at least fear of being wrong (to be met perhaps with defiance and denial); whereas we might think we are just offering a balancing opinion or exploring with them. We think we’re discussing it; they feel bad and wrong.
We can accept their beliefs without overriding them with our own.
When it is safe to hold one’s own beliefs, beliefs can guide us. When we lose faith in our own beliefs we look to others for guidance. It isn’t safe to hold one’s own beliefs when we are persecuted or ridiculed for them. Children’s beliefs are some of the most fragile of human contracts. It requires effort not to trample them.`
The disincentives would be events that send the message that one’s own judgments are unimportant, wrong, silly or misguided. When an adult learns of a child’s beliefs, their response either creates this kind of disincentive or not. It takes care to make a safe harbor for beliefs. Say “I understand” not “Is that what you really believe?” Say “Nobody really knows” not “that’s impossible” unless it really is something that can be known or demonstrated, in which case take it out of the world of belief into the world of fact.
I would have graduated from Caltech in 1984 if I had stayed. George Orwell’s dystopian novel was to have taken place in that year. He wrote:
Each child is a chance for the world to be a better place. By reimagining ourselves in a way that allows both boys and girls to develop their creative skills and sense of personal power we equip them both for success in life and in business, if that is their choice. We owe it to them to give them an equal chance in whatever they do, if we can. At the very least, we should not be the reason a child is set up to fail later in life. We are everyone who isn’t the child. We fight with ourselves to define who the child is and what they can and should think. We fight over what they will be allowed to learn in school and who should teach them. We fight over them because we want the best for our children. Ignorance often has the loudest voice. What is a child to think? How will they discover their nature with such a din? How will they know which voices to trust and which are feeding them the sugar-coated pablum of failure.
The fact that women are often unprepared for the business world is a reflection of how we have raised girls. We consistently take actions that interfere with developing the skills and perspectives needed for success in the workplace. The cumulative effect is that women lag in pay and compete less favorably for positions in companies, because they have started at a disadvantage. Industry moves like a standing wave. Materials come in and products go out, but the women continue to be paid less and compete less favorably. The standing wave keeps them there. The company doesn’t change. It perceives nothing wrong or any incentive to change.
The goal should not be to make women more like men. I cannot see how that would improve diversity of opinions or perspectives. It would only improve the diversity of body parts. It is, in essence, gaming the system to meet the letter of the concept of diversity in business, and not the spirit. The goal is not just to balance the numbers of body parts: the goal is to be a better business. A better business is one that can take all relevant ideas into consideration when making important decisions. It means being able to dip into the well of wisdom comprised by the diversity of people. Making women like men is the opposite of that (as if you could do such a thing even if that is what you wanted).
Instead, to level the playing field I think men need to be held accountable for having characteristics that women often find intuitive, such as collaboration, creating a safe space for disagreement, and working in teams. Domineering behavior would need to be managed as a behavioral problem to be improved. Women might find they do much better in a performance evaluation if men and women are fairly compared on these criteria in addition to the quality of their completed work. Whereas, if being domineering is valued, women stand practically no chance of success because when they exhibit the same behavior they are viewed negatively where men would have been viewed positively.
Evening the playing field may mean changing the game. I don’t mean to imply that new rules should be imposed on companies from some kind of authority. This must clearly be a change that each company chooses and makes on their own, or not. The only real incentive companies respect is money. They are mainly interested in making profits and they know that changes almost always cost money, so they are intrinsically not interested in changing things that they perceive to be working. They probably want to spend their time and money changing other things they see as more important to them.
Instead, I think there is only one way that companies will feel incented to value diversity: failure.
There is only one language that a company is sure to understand: sales. The lack of sales dooms a company. If customers buy products that do not reflect diversity in their workforce, there is no incentive for companies to have a diverse workforce. But, how could you possibly know whether a company was diverse, or trying to become more so?
You could imagine collecting data and making it available to consumers. That would just politicize commerce. The star-bellied sneeches would buy their products only from star stores, and so on. It might actually serve to consolidate positional thinking about diversity in the workplace, which might further delay a time when diverse workplaces are the norm.
You could imagine a certification that companies could earn for having or working toward a diverse workforce. They could print it on their packaging. But, it is a journey to transform a workforce and takes a long time. It might be too difficult to qualify and thus it would discourage companies to even begin. The market might reject it. It is easy to sow the seeds of suspicion when you control the media, and money controls the media. Businesses, coincidentally, have money. They could work to mock and undermine the certification. I think it would be just another pitched battle with an entrenched enemy who wins simply by delaying, because they like the status quo. It seems unnecessarily quixotic to me.
No, the argument must be made that diversity is more profitable than its opposite. And, this argument must usually be made to men who don’t believe it.
Perhaps I can help. If not me, who?
What is the opposite of diverse workforce? A uniform one? I would call the opposite “monolithic” because I think its success is premised on the notion that if everyone is very similar the company will operate well. This, I believe is based on the discomfort we feel when we ask for help from someone else.
If asking for help is hard to do, people will fall back on what they know. If everyone is aligned on what normal operating procedures are in a company, and asking for help is hard, you can expect those procedures to remain unchanged for longer because nobody wants to risk changing them. The only change that happens is triggered from above in the hierarchy and everyone else conforms. It is easy to explain and easy for people to know how to participate. The only problem is that it lacks an easy way for people’s different ideas and perspectives to positively affect outcomes. Monolithic companies are often consisted in delivery, but consistency is only valuable when excellence is delivered. Otherwise a consistently inferior job is being done, and the social structure of the company ensures it won’t get better soon. Do we honestly expect the top management of a company to have all of the good ideas? To have the breadth of perspective and information to understand what is right in all cases? We can expect it, but it isn’t honest.
You can imagine a person who invents a widget. She makes it in her garage and sells it. Suddenly she can’t make them fast enough. She is making more than enough money so she hires someone and trains them to do what she had been doing. Then, more employees, and more. Her success increases and she’s running a big company. There is a handbook all new employees read that still features some of the techniques she originated. All the employees building widgets do so to her standards.
I call this a monolithic business because each person is expected to think and work the way the owner wants them to. Businesses like this self-select for people who fit the mold. Diversity isn’t considered a strength here and people are rewarded for how well they conform. It doesn’t matter what the ratio of genitals is in a monolithic company, it is a place where diversity is not only not celebrated, it is discouraged.
By contrast, a company that values diversity must create opportunities for diversity to matter. Some things can only be done one way, or so we believe. With others there are choices. If we have clear, objective goals for assignments we open the door to diverse methods of achieving success. If we withhold transparency in acceptance criteria we instead drive diversity away because the only possible defense to any performance question is “I’m doing it the same way everyone else does.” Without transparency in acceptance criteria, any superior can change the goals, even after the work is completed, to capriciously select success or failure for their subordinate. Without transparency we are vulnerable and we behave differently when we feel that way.
To create opportunity for diversity a company must focus on essential requirements, functional specifications, clear acceptance criteria and people must be given an opportunity to be creative, which means it has to be OK to make some kinds of mistakes in some contexts. Truly ok, not just somewhat less pissed off. Selecting the right time for trying something new is perhaps a decision best made collaboratively.
If a company rewards and values innovation it supports diversity by creating an incentive to think differently.
I think women are overall less-prepared to succeed in a monolithic business than in a diverse one. I think choices and activities that reinforce the monolithic nature of a business are intrinsically anti-diverse and therefore make it harder for women to succeed.
I think the converse is equally true. I think men are less prepared to succeed in a diverse business than a monolithic one. I think choices and activities that reinforce the diverse nature of a business are intrinsically anti-monolithic and therefore make it harder for men to succeed. Men seem to more easily accept hierarchies, and a monolithic business is built on these. A diverse business may have a flatter management structure. It may frustrate someone who relies on hierarchies to define them.
I think that is what it looks like to level the playing field. A level playing field means more people are competing with each other. It wouldn’t feel the same way it did before it was level. It would feel disorienting to everyone for a while, but that doesn’t make unleveling the field better. A level field can become the status quo and feel normal too, given the chance.
Diversity is not a guarantee of success in business. But, with diversity an organization can have more choices. Choice is power, survival and the opportunity for success.
A monolithic business reduces its choices. If that is not a compelling enough reason to move toward diversity, then it would seem that a company serves the fears of its leaders more than the needs of its customers. That is bound to be bad for business.
I think there are so few female software engineers because girls are systematically trained to value things that end up interfering with their chances of success. The cumulative effect of this discourages girls from learning about programming. If they don’t start to learn until later in life they may not be able to catch up to their peers who started many years earlier.
I think the tendency for businesses to be monolithic and for women’s strengths to be undervalued in the workplace reduces women’s chances of success, drags down their pay and slows their promotions. It un-levels the playing field and sends the discouraging message that the business world is hostile to women.
The lack of transparency in software projects means that even if a woman managed to join an engineering team, she would still face the monumental task of learning about the project. Any differences in the ease with which men share information with men vs. how men share information with women would directly affect the likelihood of her learning what she needed to succeed. The odds are stacked against her if there is insufficient transparency to permit her to learn what she needs to succeed without depending on anyone to provide that information to her. If she can learn it without depending on someone, she can succeed if she is ready for success.
I think there are other reasons too:
Any one or few of these reasons may be enough to make a girl or woman choose a different path. It is as though success demanded passage through an overwhelming gauntlet. One of these challenges will probably be victorious and discourage someone from continuing the path toward being a software engineer.
And so if we seek diversity in software engineering we must begin with girls who aren’t pretty. They’re smart. They aren’t good; they’re clever. They aren’t obedient; they’re the captains of their own worlds. Rewarded for independence, creativity and process girls will have the self-confidence to learn software engineering. Entering a fair and balanced workplace with transparent software projects they’ll be as successful as their skills merit. The status quo will be their ally, not their barrier to success. Their own success will be a role model to the next generation of girls.
Until then, we have a lot of work to do. Businesses must adopt transparency and work to diversify their workforce. We can all help shift away from useless values for girls toward values that matter. Girls and women don’t need to change or be changed; we need to get out of their way and stop interfering with their chances of success. Then let nature take its course. I believe this will increase happiness and success in our world for both men and women.
Thank you for reading this. Want to do more to help or want to learn more? Here are some resources:
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I’m quite certain that male genitalia have nothing to do with the ability to write code. However, based on the number of female software engineers, there is clearly a problem. However, adding penises to women isn’t the answer. I just want to be clear on that, whether we’re talking biology or the behavioral expectations for women in the workplace.
Thankfully, correlation is not causation. What also correlates is that boys and girls are raised with different social circumstances and context and somehow many, many more boys end up with whatever it is that is necessary to endure the learning curve of becoming a software engineer, and far, far fewer of the girls get or experience or receive whatever it is. This is a bias that filters women out of my field, and I think of that as an epic failure.
I think the unreasonable disparity in gender participation in software engineering is a downstream effect of this very early bias, whatever it is. I think it gains strength and the disparity increases over time because this bias is compounded and self-reinforcing. Were it not, I think more women would have overcome their initial deprivation of whatever it is.
I can only speculate on what supports a young person to begin learning about software engineering, or what discourages them. But, I went through it myself and I remember the mind-set that drove me to continue, that got me through the agonizing algorithms, the baffling bugs and the confusing constructs and an entire alliterated alphabet of barriers to success. It was pretty easy for me. It isn’t for most people and I don’t think I am that special. But, the disincentives to learn software engineering were not in my life, and instead, there were lots of incentives for me.
It was so natural for me to become a software engineer that I cannot even imagine what else I could have done with my life. It was so straightforward for me to choose this path that it was as though life had set up roadsigns for me. I’m grateful for that clarity in my life. But, I’m an anglo-saxon male of Jewish decent, born to a feminist mother and a father who was a math teacher. It would be hard for me to imagine a better set of advantages in our modern world if one wanted to end up being a software engineer. I was lucky.
I’m interested in leveling the playing field so one doesn’t require as much luck to succeed. It isn’t just software engineering I care about. I care about the conditions that lead to this disparity in gender distribution among software engineers because I think it is a proxy for the essence of the struggle for equal treatment and equal pay for women in the entire business world. It isn’t just about learning to control computers; it is about the freedom to become who we are and reach our potential without being intentionally indoctrinated with and intrinsically useless value system that inspire life-long fears and interferes with future success in business.
We’re failing our girls and we can do better.
Please forgive the length of this blog entry. This isn’t a simple problem. And, of course it is all just my opinion. I’ve written about my own personal experience becoming a software engineer as a single data point. One man’s experience. Can it be useful in undoing the disparity? That is my hope.
Incentives to Learn To Control Computers
I think the incentives fall into a few broad areas:
- the desire to be free to play and create
- escape from harm and the development of personal power
- acquisition of benefits and development of self-esteem
The Desire to be Free to Play and Create
Kids love to play. I love to play too -- I still do. When I am at my best my work feels like play. I like to make things -- I get real satisfaction both from the process of their creation as well as from their completion. When I was a child I had the luxury of time to play.
It wasn’t until I was about 12 years old when I began to have access to programmable devices. At first it was just a programmable calculator, but in 9th grade I had access to an actual computer (a PDP10) which had a simple operating system and the BASIC programming language installed. It was easy to learn, but by then I was already given all the advantages I’d need to succeed. I thought it was no big deal to learn about this computer. It was also no big deal when I took a class on Fortran at a community college while I was in eleventh grade. The class and language were for so easy for me that I couldn’t understand why anyone else in the class was having a hard time. Truly, I’m not that smart. That isn’t it. If that was all that was required, there would be about as many female software engineers as male software engineers, because the intelligence required for software engineering isn’t unevenly distributed the way that the industry seems to be. Men are not smarter than women nor better suited to software engineering for any reason I can imagine.
For me, the calculator or the computer was a frontier world in which I could create anything I could think of, until I consumed all of the computers resources, which became surprisingly difficult to do even when I was first learning to program. The first thing I ran into was that larger programs were harder to write than smaller ones. So, the notion of filling a computer with a single program was as elusive then when 64K of memory was *a lot* as it is now when some computers have 100,000 times as much memory.
This new world felt infinite to me. And, since I could create anything of which I could think, I felt all-powerful in this infinite world.
Escape from Harm and the Development of Personal Power
To put this into context, I did not feel powerful in my life as a child. I was that kid who got picked on because he succeeded in school and was far too trusting and naive. I had the added complexity of being a committed pacifist, even at a very young age. I could not behave brutally to another, and so I became a victim unless I could evade. This was something at which I became quite adept as a matter of perceived survival and avoidance of suffering.
I found solitude comforting and peaceful so the fact that it would take many hours of working alone to become a software engineer was perceived by me as a natural benefit, not a cost to be paid or a discomfort endured.
Being a victim of bullying also left me feeling powerless. The circumstances of my home life only reinforced those feelings. Like many children I felt powerless to change the conflict between my parents and it slowly bored holes into my soul that have never been filled.
Feeling powerless was very uncomfortable for me… isn’t it for everyone? I needed some way to feel some kind of personal power. That was the essence of why I like to create things: it made me feel like I had some power. I didn’t think about it in these terms then, but the power I felt was the power to do battle with Chaos and sometimes win. Before I ever touched a programmable device I created things with construction sets (Fischer Technik) and built small stick-and-tissue rubber-band-powered model airplanes. These things gave me regular feelings of accomplishment. Occasionally I would manage to build a plane that could take off the ground, fly, and land. Most had to be hand-launched for a short flight and a one-point landing.
But, only when I began to write software was I able to create larger things that were not limited by my meager funds, small hands or the size of my workspace. I could imagine something large and make it and not only was my thinking the only limiting factor, but nobody around me even knew what I was doing, so I had no fear that they would come over and kick down my house of cards.
This hiding my creativity in plain sight was liberating for me, because it was the ultimate evasion: I could not be bullied. My creations were invisible and so was I when I was writing software, sitting someplace safe.
The combination of feeling safe and being very personally powerful was so alluring to me that it became my secret refuge.
When I went to college at Caltech I found out that I was a terrible student and that I had sailed through high school with all As and one B had more to do with the fact that school was easy and my parents had prepared me well for it than any particular skill at being a good student. The only class at Caltech I enjoyed or in which I was anything but mediocre was digital electronics, which I understood fairly well.
But, I was miserable because I realized that my childhood dream of becoming an Aeronautical Engineer and designing real airplanes was evaporating before my eyes. I developed many loner habits, like exploring the steam tunnels under campus and staying up to watch the sun rise on top of a tall building and listening to Los Angeles waking up and the highways filling.
At that dark time in my life I found that all students had free access to the computer center and that I could just walk in and write software and store programs in my account. So, I did. It became my escape when I should have been studying. I wrote software to create villages for Dungeons and Dragons, complete with leaders, a style of government, shops and owners, with characteristics for all these imagined people a player might encounter. I typed in lists from various Judges Guild booklets and created software that produced volumes of reference materials for a game I loved to play.
So, I wrote software and flamed out of college.
Actually, I passed all my classes. The freshman year at Caltech was pass/fail only. After my freshman year ended I requested a leave of absence (knowing that I had no intention of ever going back).
Again, I was in an environment where I felt I could not succeed, and writing software was the only way I could feel successful and powerful. It was my only relief from the crushing reality of the proof of my inadequacy at just about everything else, or so I felt.
Programming provided me:
- a place to be powerful
- a place to create freely, without people telling me what I could and could not do
- a desire to be build things
- a place to solve perceived problems, to feel like I could do something about things that mattered to me
- a place to feel safe and whole
- a way to feel successful
- a way to feel productive and have a sense of purpose
- a refuge from my own disappointments about myself
- a place to lose track of time and where painful thoughts could not take the foreground in my mind
To me a computer was fair and unbiased. My peers were not. I simply had to be correct and the computer would comply. It was neither capricious nor frustrated, neither an ally nor an enemy. It was reliable and honest and faithful, like a good pet, with bugs, but no fleas.
I didn’t know it then, but there was a very strong correlation between computer rooms and safety for me. In high school the computer room was inside the math department. My father worked in the math department and was very close by. It was probably the safest place on campus for me, whether there had been a computer in the room or not.
At the local community college where I learned Fortran I would sit in their computer room to work on my assignments. I was a skinny kid from high school in college class, and not a simple class. Nobody picked on me. I didn’t know why, but it was obvious that the people around me valued me because I was doing well in the class. They didn’t despise me for it. I suppose that peer pressure would not allow them to bully me, because a college student who feels a need to bully a much younger high school student would meet with resistance from their own social group. So, that computer room was safe too.
The computer room at Caltech was also a refuge. Caltech didn’t actually teach any courses in software at the time, or I might have stayed. Instead, students were allowed to use computers in their work if they needed to. Strictly speaking I didn’t need to write software for any of my classes. I didn’t need to create Dungeons and Dragons villages for an assignment. But, my happiness demanded it. The only people in the computer room were people who needed to use a computer or wanted to use a computer, but either way they were either too focused on their work or too like me to be a problem for me. And, Caltech had an honor code that limited the abuse one student might inflict upon another. It wasn’t perfect, but it was fairly effective: you shall not take unfair advantage of another.
Acquisition of Benefits and Development of Self-esteem
Benefits fall into a few categories, such as:
- material (money, equipment)
- feelings
- social position
- personal power
- influence
I never made money with computers until I left college, but knowing about computers gave me access to computers, even if only because I knew I could ask for access to them. When I was just learning about programming there was no payoff in terms of social position or influence over others. That all came later.
Instead, the main benefits to me at the time were feelings:
- it made me feel powerful
- it made me feel competent
- it made me feel glad to have a mind
- it made me feel safe
- it made me feel peaceful
- it made me feel like an adult
I liked myself when I was writing software. Occasionally other programmers would see what I had done and their honest appreciation was nourishing in a way little else ever was. It was respect. It is obvious I got a lot of my self-esteem from being a programmer but I didn’t know that at the time. It wasn’t a strength I recognized. It was just a safe place to go. A blank place in which I could compose a tiny slice of happiness that nobody else could tear down. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t real to anyone but me: neither was my happiness or sadness.
I received a huge benefit simply by creating software. It didn’t even matter what it was doing. All that mattered was writing code that worked. All that mattered was getting the computer to follow my instructions and perform for me.
Once I left college I got a job as a programmer. The interview was to write a small program to parse a date in a string. There were about 10 people in the computer room during the interview. Only half were still there when I looked up after writing the program. I was one of three people hired that day. My salary worked out to $5/hr.
One of the two owners was an MIT graduate and he saw Caltech on my resume and wanted me in that room of ten people. He ended up being my mentor and teaching me about software engineering for four years. He’d come in once every few days with a multi-sheet carbon paper form on a clipboard. In front of me he’d write down the command line for a unix utility and perhaps list the options and a one-liner about each.
Then, I’d write that program over the next few days.
He often seemed surprised when I asked for the next one, but not displeased.
After three months of delivering one program after another, the two owners invited me into their office for a meeting. There they told me they could not be more pleased with my work and they were going to give me a raise, to $12/hr. Not only that, but the raise was going to be retroactive from the day I was hired. Needless to say I was floored and for one of the first times ever it began to dawn on me that people valued me for what I could do with a computer. They treated me with deference, this 19 year-old kid with an oversized beard trying so hard to look old enough to be in the workplace. Yes, of course I had impostor syndrome, but with each successful program I wrote I felt less like an impostor and more like someone with a job to do and the skills to do it. I began to believe there was no program I could not write; however, I later learned this was not the case. Still, for a while, I felt I had no limits.
My income exceeded my needs and suddenly I was young and relatively rich from my own perspective. I could afford to buy toys and tools, to eat out almost every night. Money was not a problem for me, especially coming from modest middle-class roots. I didn’t have expensive tastes so I always felt rich.
The material rewards didn’t end with money. I was granted influence and power to make some kinds of choices. Because of the deference I received from management, other programmers respected me. It gave me a social standing -- a position that others would have liked if they could achieve it. It happened at every job I ever held. I felt privileged.
Ultimately nothing succeeds like success and being a successful software engineer made me feel more and more personally powerful. Money and time and skills meant my life was pretty easy. After a while I felt like I could take care of myself and I didn’t need anyone’s help, nor was I vulnerable to someone taking away what I had achieved for myself.
This is the essence of self-esteem: that we feel adequate.
I felt like that world was telling me that I was adequate and the money I receive for writing software was the proof.
Being a software engineer provided me with what I needed.
The Disincentives to Learn Coding
I was lucky. I didn’t feel or perceive many disincentives.
First and foremost, this blank space in which we create software is foreign and unfamiliar and people don’t start out understanding it. It is for some people a daunting task to get past the blankness of it. What can be done here? What exists here? What am I or my thoughts here? This existential crisis is real. And, depending on how someone deals with it they may simply abandon this formless void for the comfort and familiarity of their own physical reality, where things seem obvious.
To begin, one must be able to cross the desert of ignorance to find a first oasis of understanding some things about the blank space. If someone cannot make it across this expanse, the chance of being a programmer will perish. This desert sucks the confidence out of someone like a real desert draws out water from our bodies. If we don’t find an oasis of understanding it is only a matter of time before we give up.
This journey is inward. So, if someone isn’t experienced in inward journeys, this may be more difficult. It has to be an inward journey because it is ourselves who must learn to program if we are to be able to program. Others can teach, but it is up to each of us to learn, or not. We must have the will to keep trying until we understand. This kind of determination can certainly be inspired by genuine need, but it is more natural for young people to try many things and explore them less deeply.
I think one must begin the journey when one is young because learning to communicate with a computer is like learning any other language and we seem to learn languages more easily when we are young.
Some of the important personal characteristics that I think indicate a better chance of success include:
- a desire to be valued for we can do and think
- a predisposition to see the unexpected as interesting instead of a failure
- a predisposition to see the unknown as a frontier and not a barrier
- a predisposition to rely on our own judgment and not to simply take the word of others if it doesn’t agree with our own beliefs
- a desire to set goals for oneself and meet or exceed them
- an ability to derive joy and self-esteem from the inward journey itself
Lacking these makes the journey harder. So, influences in one’s life that undermine these characteristics can be reasonably expected to undermine someone’s chances of becoming a software engineer.
A Desire to be Valued for What we Do and Think
Stop telling girls they are pretty. This is poisoning their future by implicitly defining how they are valued. It pollutes their sense of values with artificially imposed external values that have little practical use in their future lives. Women’s sexuality isn’t in jeopardy if they are not indoctrinated to value being pretty over being smart. Their sexual identity is no more at risk than a boys might be if he is not called handsome.
Kids want praise. They’ll follow where it leads. It helps define their primitive understanding of the social contract for acceptance into their community. If we value kids for what they do, they’ll want to do more. Kids can game the system easily. But, there is no way to game making something -- one either does or doesn’t. So, praise for creating things is real, whereas praise for staying out of trouble isn’t as real because it is only trouble of which the parent is aware that the child has avoided.
The beauty and clothing industry is replete with examples of how the “girls should be pretty” value system is reinforced. What one can make doesn’t depend on being pretty. What one can think and say is independent of one’s hair style or blemishes. We set the value system as parents and as a society and we brainwash girls and women into this proxy value system that is disempowering and interferes with success later in life.
To value kids for what they think, praise their questions as much as their answers. The ability to form questions and pursue answers is the fundamental talent that must be developed to succeed as a software engineer. Say “That is an excellent question” whether you know the answer or not. Reveal your own question and answer skills by speaking them aloud for kids to hear. Demonstrate inquisitiveness. Demonstrate that not knowing answers is OK. Demonstrate how one searches for answers, and how one copes when the answers don’t come.
Thinking is more than questions and answers, of course, but to become a software engineer this is a crucial skill: to ask and answer and feel no fear while doing so.
The disincentives would be to value aesthetics or behaviors that do not translate to personal growth and independence. Praise for appearance makes appearance what matters to a child. Praise for behaving like stereotypes of boys and girls isn’t helpful. Ignoring or criticizing what kids create discourages creation.
The less a child is valued for what they do and think, the less they will do and think. If they feel harmed when others observe what they do and think, they may not immediately respond this way, but they take on a value system that will last a long time: thinking and creating is a risk instead of a relief.
See the Unexpected as Interesting
We have a few fundamental ways of coping with the unexpected:
- Fear
- Ambivalence
- Wonder
I think it is probably natural to feel fear. Perhaps it is related to primitive instincts for survival. The challenge is find ways to find wonder in the unexpected.
One way to meet this challenge is to contain an unexpected experience within something safe, to minimize fear. For example, taking apart a broken clock might involve something unexpected, like the fact that there are no gears inside, or it is mostly empty, or it has many parts that don’t move. But, the clock was already broken: it cannot be broken any further -- there is nothing to lose by taking it apart and learning about it. I wonder what these parts do? I wonder how it works? It is clear one’s survival doesn’t depend on knowing these things It is obvious even to a child that this probably doesn’t matter much. So, it is safe to have a feeling other than fear. Wonder sings with a quiet voice; our fears must be silent if we are to hear the song.
Chances are good that ambivalence is the next reaction after fear. Kids might not care enough to wonder. So, take apart something they find more interesting. Ask questions. Look things up on the internet. Ask kids what they think. Ask why they think what they think. Every question can be questioned. Every answer can be questioned. Questions are the doorways to wonder. If we don’t make questions relevant and plentiful, wonder won’t be accessible. Without wonder, everything unexpected is fearful or uninteresting or frustrating. Without wonder I can’t imagine how someone could become a software engineer.
The disincentives would be anything that links the unexpected to fear. Kids fear criticism, negative judgments and being embarrassed. Display those behaviors around the unexpected and they will learn to fear it quickly.
The Unknown is a Frontier and not a Barrier
How do we characterize the unknown? Is it a barrier? Or is it a frontier?
The quickest way to ensure that it is a barrier is to punish someone for what they don’t know. Punishment doesn’t have to be a spanking. It can also be the lack of praise. Kids are nourished by praise. It is how they learn the social contract with society and their family. With no effort at all the unknown becomes a barrier when kids are praised only for what they know. But, that doesn’t mean we should praise ignorance. Instead, we should model and praise the imagination about the unknown. We can show them that we also don’t know and we can wonder aloud about it. We can wonder aloud what we might be able to do or be in this frontier.
Frontiers favor self-starters. Frontiers are a lot harder for someone who expects to already have a structure to follow. So, we can model how to invent structure. We can model how to cope when there is no structure. We can talk about priorities. We can talk about needs vs. wants. We can help kids understand that frontiers come with opportunities. Yes, there are dangers too, but we inevitably learn about these and beyond ensuring personal safety, we probably don’t need to work very hard for kids to understand the dangers of a frontier. We do have to work harder for them to understand the joy and freedom of a frontier.
How much effort do we put into teaching kids the dangers of conforming to society’s expectations?
When kids see the unknown as a barrier and we don’t interfere or challenge that belief, it is reinforced. It is important to create circumstances where kids are not judged by success or failure of an effort, but for trying. It is important to praise trying new things and for making it easy for kids not to dwell or worry about outcomes all the time. Outcomes matter sometimes; we can help them understand when that is and when that isn’t.
The disincentives would be anything that makes the unknown seem like a barrier. For example, using a child’s ignorance to control them. “You can’t have that toy, you don’t know how to use it!” What are they supposed to say? “Yes I do!” If they had confidence they’d say “I’ll learn then.” They won’t get that confidence until they’ve been given the chance to try and seen that they can learn.
Another way to turn the unknown into a barrier is by asking questions a child can’t answer and then taking actions as a consequence of their failure to answer correctly. Adults can always win at this game, because they are judge and jury and executioner. It isn’t a game, just a power grab. And, the message it sends to kids is that the unknown is a dangerous weapon that can be used against them. Why would any child imagine it would be fun or interesting to enter the unknown when it always seems they get the raw end of the deal?
Valuing Personal Judgment
Kids have lots of opinions. They may have a hard time telling the difference between facts and assessments, but they are full of assessments and judgments. If we expect them later in life to endure being the only one who believes something and still stick with their beliefs, this will require that they value their own judgments more than those from other people. To value one’s own beliefs we must feel free to have them.
Kids have a unique experience. They will know things nobody else knows. They see things their own way. So long as we understand the difference between facts and beliefs, we can give them room to have their beliefs. It is when we impose our beliefs as facts that we send the message that their personal judgments aren’t as important. They learn to doubt themselves this way.
This translates to the workplace; managers become proxies for parents. It can trigger us to doubt our beliefs and adopt theirs. This isn’t always a good idea. To succeed in business we need the best of our combined thinking, not uniform groupthink. The best of our combined thinking requires people to speak up when they see things differently. They won’t if they don’t see their own differing beliefs as valuable. If they are trained to only feel comfortable when conforming we don’t get the benefit of their wisdom when we need them to speak up.
We can’t make kids have our taste, but then again, they can’t make us have their tastes either, so it is probably fair. Only, as adults we’re implicitly in control and right in their minds, so they might perceive disagreement as being told they are wrong, or at least fear of being wrong (to be met perhaps with defiance and denial); whereas we might think we are just offering a balancing opinion or exploring with them. We think we’re discussing it; they feel bad and wrong.
We can accept their beliefs without overriding them with our own.
When it is safe to hold one’s own beliefs, beliefs can guide us. When we lose faith in our own beliefs we look to others for guidance. It isn’t safe to hold one’s own beliefs when we are persecuted or ridiculed for them. Children’s beliefs are some of the most fragile of human contracts. It requires effort not to trample them.`
The disincentives would be events that send the message that one’s own judgments are unimportant, wrong, silly or misguided. When an adult learns of a child’s beliefs, their response either creates this kind of disincentive or not. It takes care to make a safe harbor for beliefs. Say “I understand” not “Is that what you really believe?” Say “Nobody really knows” not “that’s impossible” unless it really is something that can be known or demonstrated, in which case take it out of the world of belief into the world of fact.
Make it real, or let it be.
Reimagining Ourselves
I would have graduated from Caltech in 1984 if I had stayed. George Orwell’s dystopian novel was to have taken place in that year. He wrote:
He who controls the past, controls the future.
Each child is a chance for the world to be a better place. By reimagining ourselves in a way that allows both boys and girls to develop their creative skills and sense of personal power we equip them both for success in life and in business, if that is their choice. We owe it to them to give them an equal chance in whatever they do, if we can. At the very least, we should not be the reason a child is set up to fail later in life. We are everyone who isn’t the child. We fight with ourselves to define who the child is and what they can and should think. We fight over what they will be allowed to learn in school and who should teach them. We fight over them because we want the best for our children. Ignorance often has the loudest voice. What is a child to think? How will they discover their nature with such a din? How will they know which voices to trust and which are feeding them the sugar-coated pablum of failure.
The fact that women are often unprepared for the business world is a reflection of how we have raised girls. We consistently take actions that interfere with developing the skills and perspectives needed for success in the workplace. The cumulative effect is that women lag in pay and compete less favorably for positions in companies, because they have started at a disadvantage. Industry moves like a standing wave. Materials come in and products go out, but the women continue to be paid less and compete less favorably. The standing wave keeps them there. The company doesn’t change. It perceives nothing wrong or any incentive to change.
The goal should not be to make women more like men. I cannot see how that would improve diversity of opinions or perspectives. It would only improve the diversity of body parts. It is, in essence, gaming the system to meet the letter of the concept of diversity in business, and not the spirit. The goal is not just to balance the numbers of body parts: the goal is to be a better business. A better business is one that can take all relevant ideas into consideration when making important decisions. It means being able to dip into the well of wisdom comprised by the diversity of people. Making women like men is the opposite of that (as if you could do such a thing even if that is what you wanted).
Instead, to level the playing field I think men need to be held accountable for having characteristics that women often find intuitive, such as collaboration, creating a safe space for disagreement, and working in teams. Domineering behavior would need to be managed as a behavioral problem to be improved. Women might find they do much better in a performance evaluation if men and women are fairly compared on these criteria in addition to the quality of their completed work. Whereas, if being domineering is valued, women stand practically no chance of success because when they exhibit the same behavior they are viewed negatively where men would have been viewed positively.
Evening the playing field may mean changing the game. I don’t mean to imply that new rules should be imposed on companies from some kind of authority. This must clearly be a change that each company chooses and makes on their own, or not. The only real incentive companies respect is money. They are mainly interested in making profits and they know that changes almost always cost money, so they are intrinsically not interested in changing things that they perceive to be working. They probably want to spend their time and money changing other things they see as more important to them.
Instead, I think there is only one way that companies will feel incented to value diversity: failure.
There is only one language that a company is sure to understand: sales. The lack of sales dooms a company. If customers buy products that do not reflect diversity in their workforce, there is no incentive for companies to have a diverse workforce. But, how could you possibly know whether a company was diverse, or trying to become more so?
You could imagine collecting data and making it available to consumers. That would just politicize commerce. The star-bellied sneeches would buy their products only from star stores, and so on. It might actually serve to consolidate positional thinking about diversity in the workplace, which might further delay a time when diverse workplaces are the norm.
You could imagine a certification that companies could earn for having or working toward a diverse workforce. They could print it on their packaging. But, it is a journey to transform a workforce and takes a long time. It might be too difficult to qualify and thus it would discourage companies to even begin. The market might reject it. It is easy to sow the seeds of suspicion when you control the media, and money controls the media. Businesses, coincidentally, have money. They could work to mock and undermine the certification. I think it would be just another pitched battle with an entrenched enemy who wins simply by delaying, because they like the status quo. It seems unnecessarily quixotic to me.
No, the argument must be made that diversity is more profitable than its opposite. And, this argument must usually be made to men who don’t believe it.
Perhaps I can help. If not me, who?
Relating Diversity to Success
A diverse workforce is intrinsically a better competitor as a combined team because a wider range of options and information exists from which to choose the best for any situation.- A diverse workforce is intrinsically resistant to groupthink and standing waves because how we react to change and repeating patterns also varies among us
- A diverse workforce means that ideas must make sense from a broader range of perspectives.
- A diverse workforce raises the bar for acceptance of ideas and at the same time increases the average value of ideas vetted this way.
- Multiple perspectives are more likely to notice a low-functioning process or person
- Ideas vetted by diverse people should improve the chances of good outcomes. Nothing succeeds like success.
What is the opposite of diverse workforce? A uniform one? I would call the opposite “monolithic” because I think its success is premised on the notion that if everyone is very similar the company will operate well. This, I believe is based on the discomfort we feel when we ask for help from someone else.
If asking for help is hard to do, people will fall back on what they know. If everyone is aligned on what normal operating procedures are in a company, and asking for help is hard, you can expect those procedures to remain unchanged for longer because nobody wants to risk changing them. The only change that happens is triggered from above in the hierarchy and everyone else conforms. It is easy to explain and easy for people to know how to participate. The only problem is that it lacks an easy way for people’s different ideas and perspectives to positively affect outcomes. Monolithic companies are often consisted in delivery, but consistency is only valuable when excellence is delivered. Otherwise a consistently inferior job is being done, and the social structure of the company ensures it won’t get better soon. Do we honestly expect the top management of a company to have all of the good ideas? To have the breadth of perspective and information to understand what is right in all cases? We can expect it, but it isn’t honest.
You can imagine a person who invents a widget. She makes it in her garage and sells it. Suddenly she can’t make them fast enough. She is making more than enough money so she hires someone and trains them to do what she had been doing. Then, more employees, and more. Her success increases and she’s running a big company. There is a handbook all new employees read that still features some of the techniques she originated. All the employees building widgets do so to her standards.
I call this a monolithic business because each person is expected to think and work the way the owner wants them to. Businesses like this self-select for people who fit the mold. Diversity isn’t considered a strength here and people are rewarded for how well they conform. It doesn’t matter what the ratio of genitals is in a monolithic company, it is a place where diversity is not only not celebrated, it is discouraged.
By contrast, a company that values diversity must create opportunities for diversity to matter. Some things can only be done one way, or so we believe. With others there are choices. If we have clear, objective goals for assignments we open the door to diverse methods of achieving success. If we withhold transparency in acceptance criteria we instead drive diversity away because the only possible defense to any performance question is “I’m doing it the same way everyone else does.” Without transparency in acceptance criteria, any superior can change the goals, even after the work is completed, to capriciously select success or failure for their subordinate. Without transparency we are vulnerable and we behave differently when we feel that way.
To create opportunity for diversity a company must focus on essential requirements, functional specifications, clear acceptance criteria and people must be given an opportunity to be creative, which means it has to be OK to make some kinds of mistakes in some contexts. Truly ok, not just somewhat less pissed off. Selecting the right time for trying something new is perhaps a decision best made collaboratively.
If a company rewards and values innovation it supports diversity by creating an incentive to think differently.
I think women are overall less-prepared to succeed in a monolithic business than in a diverse one. I think choices and activities that reinforce the monolithic nature of a business are intrinsically anti-diverse and therefore make it harder for women to succeed.
I think the converse is equally true. I think men are less prepared to succeed in a diverse business than a monolithic one. I think choices and activities that reinforce the diverse nature of a business are intrinsically anti-monolithic and therefore make it harder for men to succeed. Men seem to more easily accept hierarchies, and a monolithic business is built on these. A diverse business may have a flatter management structure. It may frustrate someone who relies on hierarchies to define them.
I think that is what it looks like to level the playing field. A level playing field means more people are competing with each other. It wouldn’t feel the same way it did before it was level. It would feel disorienting to everyone for a while, but that doesn’t make unleveling the field better. A level field can become the status quo and feel normal too, given the chance.
Diversity is not a guarantee of success in business. But, with diversity an organization can have more choices. Choice is power, survival and the opportunity for success.
A monolithic business reduces its choices. If that is not a compelling enough reason to move toward diversity, then it would seem that a company serves the fears of its leaders more than the needs of its customers. That is bound to be bad for business.
Why so Few Female Software Engineers?
I think there are so few female software engineers because girls are systematically trained to value things that end up interfering with their chances of success. The cumulative effect of this discourages girls from learning about programming. If they don’t start to learn until later in life they may not be able to catch up to their peers who started many years earlier.
I think the tendency for businesses to be monolithic and for women’s strengths to be undervalued in the workplace reduces women’s chances of success, drags down their pay and slows their promotions. It un-levels the playing field and sends the discouraging message that the business world is hostile to women.
The lack of transparency in software projects means that even if a woman managed to join an engineering team, she would still face the monumental task of learning about the project. Any differences in the ease with which men share information with men vs. how men share information with women would directly affect the likelihood of her learning what she needed to succeed. The odds are stacked against her if there is insufficient transparency to permit her to learn what she needs to succeed without depending on anyone to provide that information to her. If she can learn it without depending on someone, she can succeed if she is ready for success.
I think there are other reasons too:
- A lack of role models and coaching for girls to become engineers
- A long history of raising girls with useless or inferior value systems
- The useless value system droned into girls is reinforced by the immense women’s products industries committed to exploiting every conceivable fear and insecurity a girl or woman might have
- A useless or inferior value system fails to benefit women more often, and with suffering comes fear and the need for control to push away such harm
- Men and women who display the same emotional states are not perceived similarly by men: women who display control are punished while men are admired. As women attempt to progress in business or as engineers this disparity of perception by men isn’t helpful to women.
Any one or few of these reasons may be enough to make a girl or woman choose a different path. It is as though success demanded passage through an overwhelming gauntlet. One of these challenges will probably be victorious and discourage someone from continuing the path toward being a software engineer.
And so if we seek diversity in software engineering we must begin with girls who aren’t pretty. They’re smart. They aren’t good; they’re clever. They aren’t obedient; they’re the captains of their own worlds. Rewarded for independence, creativity and process girls will have the self-confidence to learn software engineering. Entering a fair and balanced workplace with transparent software projects they’ll be as successful as their skills merit. The status quo will be their ally, not their barrier to success. Their own success will be a role model to the next generation of girls.
Until then, we have a lot of work to do. Businesses must adopt transparency and work to diversify their workforce. We can all help shift away from useless values for girls toward values that matter. Girls and women don’t need to change or be changed; we need to get out of their way and stop interfering with their chances of success. Then let nature take its course. I believe this will increase happiness and success in our world for both men and women.
Resources
Thank you for reading this. Want to do more to help or want to learn more? Here are some resources:
- A Mighty Girl
- Girls Globe
- Association for Women in Science
- National Center for Women & Information Technology
Here’s more reading: