Dangerous Ideas

I read a lot of programming blogs regularly, and subscribe to several feeds on Smalltalk. I think that’s how I came across an article on Ted Leung’s blog about how he and his wife are teaching their daughters to program using Smalltalk (they started with Python). I thought Julie Leung’s article on their daughters learning programming was even more interesting. I thought these articles were great because I think the lack of women programmers is one of our culture’s great ills (not that we have any shortage of ills, mind you), and it’s great to read stories about parents encouraging their girls to learn programming at a young age. Secondarily, it was great to hear how well Squeak Smalltalk and Stéphane Ducasse’s “Squeak: Learn Programming with Robots” are working as teaching tools. I loved where Julie wrote:

Abigail’s stopped hugging the book, but I do hope she and her sisters continue to enjoy programming.

Hugging the book! That’s great!

Julie started her article with a link to an article on misbehaving.net that in turn lined to a writeup on Grand Text Auto on a talk by Hanna Wallach on women and computing (how’s that for indirection?). Some stuff that came out of that talk:

• Women make up 28% of programmers in the proprietary software world, but only 1.5% in the FOSS world.

• Men first get computers when they’re 15 on average; women don’t get their first computers until they’re 20.

Julie also writes about the passion that many programmers find for their art:

Most of all I want my daughters, like Elliot, to have a passion for discovery, creativity, logic and design, and to love learning, whether it is Squeak or Python or a language or book yet to be written.

I hope that there are more parents like the Leungs who are encouraging their daughters to learn programming at a young age! And that more parents follow Jill of misbehaving.net’s advice: “Buy your daughters computers!”.

If this happens, it’ll go a long ways to having more young women interested in programming and computer science as they enter college, or have that skill to apply to whatever they do. But what do we do about keeping women in computer programming positions? Back in the 1980s, we had a lot of women in CS programs in college. We’ve slid downhill a lot since those days, and not just in FOSS (I have doubts about that 28% figure in proprietary programming – it’s certainly far from true at most Bay Area companies I’ve seen). While encouraging intial interest in programming is a big problem, retaining women in the field of programming after they’ve started working professionally seems to be an even bigger problem.

I know some very successful women programmers. But I also know many who have dropped out of the field entirely. Not because of lack of interest, but because they felt there were so many barriers at work. In fact, of the female programmers I’ve worked with, I think fully half are now doing something other than programming.

The reasons aren’t mysterious, and there’s a long list that includes:

• Child care is a problem in this country (and others). Both in that it’s not as valued as it should be, and also that it falls unevenly on women. As bad as it is at most companies, it’s even worse for FOSS projects – I don’t know of any FOSS projects that include child care collectives (although that would be really interesting to see!).

• Discrimination and harrassment. Things have gotten better over the years, but this is still a big problem. In FOSS, it’s even worse, because there is no HR or other department to intervene when something happens. There’s always the community, but … well, not all communities are friendly to women programmers.

• Unintentional discrimination and exclusion. It’s just weird being the only one (or few) of anything in a large group. And given the strict gender divisions in so many aspects of our society, being the only woman, or one of a few women, in a group of men can be troubling even if no one means you ill.

How do we address these and other issues? I’m not sure, but one thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of women (myself included) have struck out on their own. Starting your own company is a great way to have control over your future (no more consternation about who gets the promotion, ‘cause you’re the boss!). And maybe it’s also a good way to start companies that will be women-friendly as they become bigger (of course, there’s no need to grow super big – it’d be great if there were tens of thousands of small women-owned, women-friendly companies flourishing).

So, parents, in addition to buying your daughters computers, maybe teach them something about starting their own businesses!

As for FOSS … it’s so great to hear that people like Hanna are making strides in the quest to make established FOSS projects like Debian more women-friendly, via efforts like Debian Women. Those efforts are important, and I look forward to seeing how they develop.

But I’d also really like to see more FOSS projects get started by women. I think it’s easier to start out with gender equity than to try to achieve it after a project has become established in a very uneven way. I don’t know of many FOSS projects that were founded by women – I’d love to hear of any, though, especially ones where groups of women are involved. And, if I ever find the time, maybe start one …