Why aren’t there more women programmers?
December 15th, 2016Wondering why it’s so difficult to convince more women to go into tech? Maybe you’re asking the wrong question.
Here’s an exercise. Think about what you did today. Imagine that you were solving a problem at work.
- If it seemed like an intractable problem, and every time you thought you’d found the solution, it turned out that this approach was critically flawed and you had to backtrack…
- If half of the time you spent was wasted because of misleading or missing documentation…
- If you searched Google for answers and found others who had the same problem, and their question is more than 5 years old, and nobody has proposed a solution…
- And you were eventually able to find the source of the problem through a process of elimination that might as well just be called trial-and-error…
- And in the end the cause was something quite trivial, located in such a way as to maximize the amount of other code you have to rewrite to fix it…
If this sounds like your normal workday, you might be a programmer.
You’re asking the wrong question. The real question is
Why are there so many men in tech?