What can Stack Overflow do to persuade female programmers to participate more? [closed]

Question

I know a lot of female programmers, and I know there are a good number of them out there.

But I don't recall ever having one of my questions answered by, nor have I ever answered a question by a female programmer here at Stack Overflow.

Now I mostly deal in the Delphi tag, and that may make a difference. But I've got the feeling there is something about the programming social network that Stack Overflow is, along with its form of mini-competition (via reputation) that turns most ladies off.

When I go down the first few pages of top users by rep, there is nary a lady to be found.

Go over to Quantcast and look up Stack Overflow. Go down to the Demographics, and you'll see that a full 20% of the visits are by females. So they are here, lurking and using the wonderful info that Stack Overflow provides.

Then why aren't there more of them participating, both with questions and answers?

What can Stack Overflow do to persuade female programmers to participate more?

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So after a dozen downvotes offset by a dozen upvotes, and accusations by many that I am a bigot, the bottom line seems to be that Stack Overflow appeals to males more than females.

This is my observation and I believe a proper analysis would support the hypotheses that a much higher percentage of male programmers use Stack Overflow than the percentage of female programmers.

Assuming that is the case, then Stack Overflow is geared more towards the male psyche than the female. If so, I again ask, what can they do about that?

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This question was asked in StackOverflow Meta on November 20, 2009. It was made Community Wiki. It was asked in a constructive manner and should be considered an appropriate question for Meta.

Yet it was closed over two years after it was asked as "not constructive" after more than 40 upvotes and 10 favorites and 16 answers.

Now it resides here on Meta StackExchange, still closed. I just shake my head.

Answer 1

Well, this is a good question, whether or not it's related to Stack Overflow (which it is). I had a bit to think about this due to Technorati Open Id juju being awful, and I still haven't come up with a reasonable answer for all women, so I can only answer for myself.

This isn't the first time I've thought of this, my question/answer ratio on SO is DEPLORABLE. The answer is there is NO appeal for me in answering questions. Sure, the game is fun, but I feel like I have a lot on my plate. My hobbies during my down time involve shoes, the gym, and things of the sort (thus doing my share in fulfilling sexual stereotypes).

I WILL answer if I am on and happen to see a question that I know the answer to. However, I don't go looking for them, really.

I think the answer is it doesn't entertain me and I don't find much fulfillment in it. I do try to contribute to the community in other ways, however, so I am returning the effort I am asking for.

Answer 2

Does the religion/gender/color/socioeconomic status of the person answering your question really matter?

NO, nor should it EVER.

To add to the discussion about "female programmer participation":

Name/Avatar does not always define gender. My avatar depicts a white woman, and my name says 'Heather', but how do you really know I'm not a guy? For all you know I named my SO profile in honor of my girlfriend, and I think she's hot so I put her as my avatar

(That is indeed me and my name is indeed Heather, but you see my point.)

Sexism still exists. We aren't in some magical post-feminist era where sexism is a thing of the past. People who think feminism is no longer necessary can have a chat with a client of mine who once refused to let me help her with a software problem on software that I WROTE, and instead insisted on speaking to the "head programmer man". Upon telling this wondrous client that I was the "head programmer" for the software she was using, she laughed in disbelief. Or you can talk to the IT "professional" who told me I needed to go back to playing with my Barbie dolls after I suggested he look into a proper client/server environment after all of the problems they had with their Windows 98 "server". Male coworker tells this guy the exact. same. thing., and he listens and takes note. Granted, these situations are in a vast minority of clients I deal with, but shit like this never happens to my male coworker.

Women are still perceived as lightweights Between myself and my male coworker (who is also a dev), less is expected of me than him. Frequently he gets passed more complicated issues that I could handle just as easily. Some of my coworkers express surprise when they ask him about an issue and he replies "Heather fixed it". It has taken me four years to shift the dynamic in this office where both of us devs are regarded about equally for problems. This may or may not have had anything to do with my gender, but this has happened to me before at other places of employment.

Answer 3

How do you know they aren't participating? A huge number of SO users don't use their real names, so you actually have no idea.

Why don't we see more women on SO? I think mostly because there are so few programmers. In my university computer science classes, I think they were about 10% female.

Why are there so few women entering the programming fields? I don't really know. Some other countries (India and China in particular) seem to have a much higher percentage of women in science and engineering. In my graduating class, there was only one other white woman. They say that it's just not emotionally appealing, girls aren't as interested in math and logic, but meh, it's always been fun to me, so what do I know? Apparently I am my own island.

But even so, maybe we should be seeing more women on SO than we do. Okay, so back to there being a lot of pseudonym here. So why is that? For me, because I can. Because I don't care about anything but the code, so if I can get away with using a picture of my dearly departed cat and a nickname, why the heck not?

_{Disclaimer: I've been drinking.}

Answer 4

@Kip, I'm aiming this at you.

Answer 5

Stack Overflow isn't a social network.

But what does it matter if the user answering your question or asking for help is a female or not? For all you know, the females could be using non-gender specific avatars/names as well as males using female names.

They are already on this site. But maybe they're just not datafied by Quantserve. (How does it get that data anyhow? The only proper looking stat on there is the income level.)

Answer 6

Why is only 1 football owner black?

Take a minority (like blacks in America (12.8%) or women in programming) and apply another minority (football team owners or active users of Stack Overflow). At this point, you're may not even have a statistically valid sample, but whatever you have is skewed to a certain degree by the filtering. So what I'm getting at it how do you know it's not random noise?

Now, perhaps you want to take Jeff's approach that he stresses on the podcast so often: 'Programmers love games', they 'love rules', they 'love numbers'. If you want to take that approach, the question (or perhaps the conclusion drawn but that's definitely not the scientific method at work) is that women don't seem to be as drawn to the 'game' aspect of Stack Overflow as men. Which might be the case. Are there any scientific studies about women preferring or not preferring RPGs in a different skew than men? Might be relevant.

And that case might be true, but it also might not. All that said... maybe they're out building something?

Answer 7

I think that this question suffers from a hidden premise, and I wish it would just go away.

Assume, for the moment, that the unproven factual assertion at the core of the question is true: that women are underrepresented here.

The unspoken assumption is that this is necessarily a bad thing, in need of a remedy. A further assumption is that discussion here is a useful way to achieve a remedy.

To make the jump from 'women are underrepresented' to 'this is a bad thing,' there's a critical missing data set: an understanding of why women are underrepresented. (Perhaps needless to say, this understanding would be essential to any attempt to change the situation.)

You cannot possibly get an answer to the why question here. Who is here? Guys, women who choose to show up, and for all we know 25 agents of the Jovian secret service, tapping into satellite links. Who isn't here? The women who choose not to be here. And those women are the only people who can shed any light on their motivations. All the comments, answers, and comments on answers here are just guesses.

If someone managed to collect a representative sample of women in the profession, and ask them, the predominant answer might be, 'meh, games don't appeal to me.' Or, contrarywise, it might be 'I see too much sexist behavior here, it doesn't feel safe.'

The response of the management and community would be, I hope, dramatically different.

Absent this information, this question floats in a vacuum, attracting dumb jokes and well-intentioned speculation. Any time spent here could be better spent flagging actual instances of antisocial behavior.

Answer 8

I voted to close this question as "blatantly offensive." I was the only vote in that category.

Why do I consider this blatantly offensive? Because S[OFU] are not social networking sites. That's what Twitter and MySpace and Facebook and LinkedIn are for. S[OFU] is a collection of Q&A sites. You want meet people, go there. You want your questions answered, you come here. I don't care if the person on the other side of the question (or answer) is a man, a woman, or an asexual single-celled organism. I care about the content on the sites.

I'm also offended by Quantcast's presence in this discussion. With no specified methodology, all they're doing is making wild guesses about the audience here. They have no better knowledge than we. As others have said, you can't go by user names. Not only may men be hiding behind female names, but the opposite may well be true, too.

Finally, I'm offended by this question because it ignores the 800 pound gorilla in the room: The deeper question isn't how to get more women on the Trilogy, the deeper question -- and a much harder one -- is how to get more women into IT to begin with. How do we make this career attractive to young women, such that they want to pursue IT-related degrees and enter this field?

I'm not happy with the demographics of IT; I doubt many of us really are. When it comes down to it, IT is still a very male-dominated field.

So how do we get more women onto the Trilogy? Get more women into IT. As they (like all of us) need help or feel the need to help others, they will naturally gravitate toward the premier Q&A sites.

Answer 9

I believe the question was "What can Stack Overflow do to persuade female programmers to participate more?"

The answer is to value women's contributions as highly as men's, that is, on their worth and not who made them, and not tolerate misogynistic comments.

I don't think Stack Overflow has much trouble in that respect: what kind of evidence is there that female participants are being disrespected? I can't say I've seen any here - I've seen a fair bit elsewhere.

Answer 10

In regards to the demographics presented by Quantcast, I did a bit of searching around and found that according to the Computing Research Association about 26% of Bachelor of Computer Science degrees between 1994 and 2004 where awarded to women. Thus, it could be that the 20% demographic is almost exactly what you would expect it to be, considering Stack Overflow is a very computer programming centric site.

So this kind of leads to the question of what sort of numbers do you expect to so? Are you anticipating that the demographics should be roughly 50/50 with an even split between men and women? I would argue that you aren't going to see an even split on narrow focus sites in a lot of different industries.

However, if the question is what can we do to encourage more women to want to pursue an career in software development, then that is an open question that there still doesn't seem to be a good answer to.

Answer 11

The problem is there are not that many females in the field to begin with. And thus, I don't think Stack Overflow stands to benefit much by persuading females.

I certainly didn't need a push from them ;)

Answer 12

What can Stack Overflow do to persuade homosexual programmers to participate more?

What can Stack Overflow do to persuade Jewish programmers to participate more?

What can Stack Overflow do to persuade black programmers to participate more?

What can Stack Overflow do to persuade female programmers to participate more?

Nothing. Please stop being a bigot.

Answer 13

Did you ever hear about getting more men in female dominated fields? No.

Did you ever hear of getting more females into male dominated fields? Yes.

Why? The inherent assumption is they are weak and oppressed and need to be saved.. They can't do it on their own and need special help. Maybe the industry is not a specific gender friendly (ironically, that is, supposedly not sexist -- An assumption that in the given setup, girls can't adapt and thrive).

I suck at advanced mathematics = I suck
I suck at making money = I suck
Random girl sucks at computers = Something wrong with the industry

Oh, get over it. If they're good enough, they'll do it on their own.

Yes, by the way, if you get your reverse-sexist glasses off, the top three rank pages on Stack Overflow are filled with guys - ideals are something, facts are something else.

(You may now downvote.)

Answer 14

Because women take more time to search the information and there are fewer occasions that they actually think they should ask a new question on SO :P As for the answers, maybe they think it's better to wait and see what others have to say before offering a solution.