A Boys Club?

Submitted by Bevan on Thu, 28 Jan 2010 - 7:00am

You don't have to go very far to see the extent to which women are underrepresented in the IT industry - especially as software developers. Recently, I've started to ponder the reasons why - and, to quote Walt Kelly: We have met the enemy, and he is us

At TechEd 2009 in New Zealand, one of the industry vendors exhibiting on the floor decided that the best and most appropriate way to entice people to attend their stand was to hire a team of booth babes to walk around the conference centre. For the duration of the event, pairs of beautiful young women wandered around, wearing undersized uniforms emblazoned "Follow me to [vendor]"

The reactions of my fellow TechEd geeks were, in my mind, a little disappointing. Many didn't see a problem, and most were content to enjoy the "eye candy" being paraded before them. To their credit, a few did comment on the lack of matching booth boy eye candy.

In the December 2009 issue of the Communications of the ACM, Mark Guzdial comments:

It's easy to pick the "best and brightest" who look like us, act like us, and learn like us. The challenge is to identify the students who are even brighter and better than us, but don't look like us, act like us, or learn like us.

Mark's comment has set me to thinking - without intending to do so, has the software development industry become a kind of worldwide Boys Club? Are we failing to hire women onto our teams, women who are better than us, just because they're different? I suspect the answer might be "yes".

Comments

by Stephen Denne - 9:10am, Fri 29 Jan 2010

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I think that a sense of our industry being a boys club is more due to a historical lack of interest from women than from any perpetuating factors, and that the interest levels are changing.

I watched Randy Pausch's "last lecture" the other day, and he commented that restricting his students VR projects to not include shooting violence nor porn, left a large number of 19 year old boys fresh out of ideas. A large portion of the historical gaming industry seems to me to hold much more interest for boys than for girls, with a flow on effect of more boys than girls getting interested in computers in general.

That lecture also mentioned "Storytelling Alice" as being a very effective tool for teaching middle school girls how to program.

Assuming the generalisation of women being more talkative than men, I suspect the massive rise in social aspects of computer use will see a rise in interest in programming from women.

In twenty years time, us boys will be struggling to use Visual Studio's natural communication interface, and falling behind in productivity.