Ketan's Musings

With all love and respect to my sisters in product management, marketing, sales, finance, HR, 50 years of IT history strongly suggests that technology companies will ever continue to be founded by entrepreneurs from engineering backgrounds; and if women never become engineers in sufficient numbers, they will disproportionately fail to experience the upper end of the range of IT outcomes.

Further, it’s impossible to calculate the opportunity cost to IT ventures due to insufficient diversity of backgrounds, ideas, and modes of thought; but as the end consumer of our work becomes increasingly female, these costs must be rising.

However, no one can have failed to notice that despite all the efforts of a great many brilliant, motivated, and determined individuals and groups to support women in technology, Google, Yahoo, MS, IITs, Stanford and Berkeley – there are still not nearly as many working female engineers as there are males.

And when it comes to female tech entrepreneurs from an engineering background I believe the ratio is even more skewed, although I do not know a definitive number. Finally, when you count the women who head venture-backed businesses – which is an arbitrary distinction except as it highlights the availability of capital and other resources which can ease the crushing burden of starting a business – it is indeed a lonely little group.

The point of this article is not to wring my hands and whine about the status. Nor do I plan to propose computer science education as the long-term solution to the gender imbalance problem, because far better-qualified people than I are already working along those lines. Instead I focus on a well-known but little-studied phenomenon in the technology industry – particularly in the newer, more experimental, startup-driven subdomains – and in the Open-Source movement. That of lack of self-taught female software engineers.

Everyone in professional or Open-Source software development has worked with countless male colleagues who are essentially self-taught, somewhat lacking formal training in computer science. In the perhaps less glamorous areas of the software development lifecycle – QA, build and release, documentation, i18n (translation), metrics, DBA, etc. – a lot of people I’ve ever worked with, or known directly, or indirectly, have lacked formal qualifications (which in many cases don’t exist anyway). These self-motivated male engineers run the gamut of quality, from the best of the best to the truly sub-par; but it is incontestable that there are a relatively large number of them, and that they form an important part of the technology ecosystem. But everyone seems to agree – and certainly it has been my experience – that there is no correspondingly large pool of female professional and Open-Source engineers without formal training.

Why does this gender gap in software engineers exist? Could it be bridged through some sort of organized effort? Would such an effort be ethically troubling or bad for the profession in some other way? What opportunities might be lost if we continue to do nothing about the gender disparity in software engineering, or simply wait for long-term educational efforts to take root at some unspecified future date? For those who care about women in the technology industry, I would argue that these questions should be very pressing and our ignorance of their answers should be equally troubling.

I’m not much on speculating about social problems, but if I were forced into diagnostic mode about the lack of self-taught female software engineers, I’d probably put the following rationales at the top of my list (in no particular order):

• Almost all of the male engineers I know report childhood experience “playing” with computers. I also had this experience, as did most of the female engineers I know; but non-engineer women seem far less likely to have done so.
• If Programming classes started with social software rather than math problems and competitive games, more women might discover an unexpected interest.
• Women seem to be disproportionately attracted to careers where they feel they can help others – for instance medicine (which of course requires rigorous, highly competitive scientific training), teaching — rather than careers that promise high pay or entrepreneurial possibility.
• Male self-taught engineers often begin working with computers as a hobby – for instance, legions of Open-Source devotees (including myself) began this way. Women seem less inclined to learn programming just for fun, and more likely to see it as simply a job (to be fair, many self-taught male engineers also seem to primarily see their work as a job rather than a personal passion).
• Women often seem to gain self-confidence by pursuing institutional affiliations, credentials, and clear career goals – rather than simply pushing forward as “lone wolves” driven by individual curiosity.

I have really struggled with these objections, because as an individual I don’t necessarily disagree with them at a philosophical level. But, those are pretty abstract principles of fairness to hold up against the realities of business and life. I hear from managers who say that they would love to get more female engineers. I also hear from intelligent, motivated, practical women who want jobs – or better jobs – but need help. Sometimes all they really need is a critique of their resume, or an introduction inside a particular company. But sometimes they need someone to see them for the valuable engineer they could be, and say, “You’re so good at analyzing this type of problem and finding a solution… Have you ever considered a career as a [QA engineer | release engineer | sysadmin | metrics analyst | DBA | webdev | etc.]? I will train you.” I enjoy helping out as much as I can personally, but we would get economies of scale if all the interested parties of IT could combine our efforts and institutionalize the method by which women without CS degrees could be turned into contributing members of engineering teams.

There’s a survey that notes that 93% of Linux users are male.