The Cranky Product Manager had the pleasure of attending Business of Software 2010 last week. Yes, she was there, but incognito. It was a fascinating conference, chock full of interesting speakers and lots of learning. Seth Godin was there. He’s wicked awesome!
The attendees were mostly technical founders of small software companies. Many were pre-venture financing, but many (most?) had no interest in venture financing and were bootstrapping. All were interested in learning how to build a thriving software business – whether the goal be building the next Microsoft, getting acquired, or just having a thriving business that funds a great lifestyle.
The Cranky Product Manager has a lot to write about this conference – it triggered a lot of new thinking for her. Hopefully, there will be a few more blog posts. (Let’s see if she gets around to it.)
But here’s an observation that struck her, powerfully, as soon as she arrived:
White Dudes Everywhere, As Far As The Eye Could See
About 85% of the ~300 attendees were white guys of all ages. Of the remaining 15%, about half were non-white guys, and half were women.
Where were all the NON-WHITE guys?
In Silicon Valley, the Cranky Product Manager is used to working with a LOT more Asian guys and Indian guys, in both technical and business roles. In fact, at many companies in this area, she’s often found herself to be the only white one in the room.
Is this ridiculous skew an artifact of the conference being in Boston? Or, well, ….what other explanations are there? The Cranky Product Manager is truly puzzled. In this respect, she does not believe the demographics of this crowd reflect the racial makeup of most software startups.
Where were all the WOMEN?
The Cranky Product Manager has truly NEVER been in such an overwhelmingly male crowd. Seriously. She even went to a Random Institute of Technology in the 90s, majored in Computer Science, took Physics, and was in Army ROTC. Yet she has never experienced such a sausage-fest. The line for the men’s room snaked down the hall, while the women’s room had copious empty stalls!
The Cranky Product Manager was again puzzled, and tempted to dismiss this as an aberration – not reflective of the true demographics of our industry.
But then she thought again and realized that in her experience at software companies, the percentage of women has been declining for years now. In fact, she suspects that the highest percentage of women in the software industry was probably around 2001 and has been on a downhill slide ever since. Her suspicions are further confirmed by the National Science Foundation, who found that the proportion of women studying computer science has decreased from 37 percent in 1985 to 19 percent today. A huge drop of nearly 50%!
Fascinating, however, was the absolute conviction of many conference attendees (especially the younger guys) that there were far more women in the software field today than 10 years ago. This just ain’t so, but perhaps each generation’s default assumption is that they are more socially equitable than the previous generation. (kids today, tsk tsk…)
All this got the Cranky Product Manager thinking: what happened to all the women? Why is it getting worse?
The Typical “Why So Few Women” Theories
TechCrunch has been publishing a lot of articles that theorize on why so few software startups are founded by women. Many apply these theories to software in general – startup or not. The typical reasons given for women’s poor representation include the following:
- Women prefer to focus on family & children instead of career, and software startups are too demanding to do both adequately
- There aren’t enough women majoring in computer science fields in college
- Parents, and society as a whole, discourage their daughters from studying computer science.
- And the often-thought-but-infrequently-verbalized-because-the-speaker-would-be-evicerated idea that women are just not as smart as men when it comes to computers.
A lot of these theories just don’t hold together from the Cranky Product Manager’s point of view, especially when you consider that there are now fewer women in software than ten years ago. Something changed.
For #1 “Focus on families over career” – Has the situation for women really changed so much in the past 10 years? Are we really accepting a statement that far less women are interested in their careers today than 10 years ago? Further, this statement would seem to affect any demanding field, not just tech. Yet, the percentage of doctors and lawyers (extremely demanding professions) that are female has increased substantially in the same time.
For #4 “Women aren’t as good at tech” - The Cranky Product Manager isn’t going to step in that one. It might be true for all she knows, but she still thinks it is obvious that the most brilliant women will bring more to the software field than average men. Mean ability might differ, but the ability distribution within each gender are wide, and the gender curves overlap mightily.
For #2 “Not enough female CS majors” – Is this a cause or an effect? Is it related to #3? If the opportunities for women in tech are not that great, then it stands to reason that the number of women majoring in it would decrease over time.
For #3 “Parental & societal discouragement” – Well, maybe this is the real culprit: that parents and society at large discourage our girls. The Cranky Product Manager believes that there is something here. But as a parent herself, she doubts that is because parents assume that their girls are too dumb for software, or that software is too unfeminine. Instead, her intuition (no stats to back this) is that parents might discourage girls from the software business because, well, it just isn’t that hospitable to women.
Now, the Cranky Product Manager hadn’t really thought about this “inherent inhospitable-ish-ness-ity” before. It’s not something that the Cranky Product Manager necessarily feels as she works day-to-day in this industry. Virtually all of the men she’s ever worked with are open-minded, are committed to equality in the workplace, and very much want to harness the intellect of top-performing women for their own gain.
(Not that the Cranky Product Manager hasn’t experienced some outright sexism. She has. Maybe in a future post she’ll tell some stories.)
But maybe there is something else that makes this industry inhospitable to women — something more structural than personal in nature.
The Cranky Product Manager admits her thoughts are only partially formed on this point, and she hopes to consider it more fully and post on it later. But here is one (maybe minor) idea about “systemic inhospitability” to women in the software industry: the prevalence of “frat house culture.”
Frat House “Culture”
Too many software start-ups attempt to develop a so-called “corporate culture” based on frat house living. Beer bashes, video games, foos-ball tables, pickup basketball teams, free soda, fantasy sport leagues, mandatory scavenger hunts and team-building nonsense (inevitably on the weekend), etc. Oh yeah, did we mention the beer? FREE BEER! Now THAT’S a WICKED AWESOME COMPANY CULTURE!
The dude from Atlassian, Scott Farquhar, spent a lot of time at Biz of Software describing how awesome their culture was because of all these “perks” or whatever. No thanks. (This is not meant to bash Scott: he raised many other interesting points about starting successful software companies.)
From the Cranky Product Manager’s female (and older) vantage point, this all seems so stunted and sad. Like a geeky 11-year-old boy’s idea of paradise. She knows that many women don’t fit into such “cultures” (they were never meant to, after all) and never quite feel at home in them. The Cranky Product Manager knows she never really did, although she played along.
Maybe if instead of aspiring to this type of immature fantasy, software companies could attract and retain more top-performing women with better support for families and for having a life outside of work? Just an idea.
How about more equitable parental leave policies – not just for pregnant women, but also for Dads and adoptive parents? If you improve Dads’ ability to contribute at home, you will TOTALLY improve lives for the professional women who married them. Or maybe offer more help with finding and paying for quality childcare? Especially options for childcare when the kid is sick, or if you want us (Moms and Dads alike) to travel out of town at the last minute.
Conclusion
Hah! Fooled you. There is no conclusion here. The Cranky Product Manager has no ground-breaking ideas or anything. It occurs to her that the few ideas she proposed are very mom-centric, and don’t explain how to attract and retain the women without kids.
Maybe you have some better ideas? Please contribute them in the comments! (Hopefully, they are ideas that are not out of reach for startup companies.)
And this post doesn’t explore whether it is even essential to attract and retain top-quality women anyway. Maybe it isn’t. The software industry as a whole (plus that douchebag Michael Arrington) certainly acts like it isn’t much of a priority. The Cranky Product Manager intuitively thinks it is important, but aside from her own self-interest she doesn’t really have a lot of proof.
What do you think?
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Is it just that women aren't interested in attending events like these or are the truly fewer women PMs? http://bit.ly/cSwHhJ
There were more women in Silicon Valley in the 80s than now. One company I worked at had about 1/3 women engineers and managers. But this was before modern startup “culture” innovations like cramped cubicles instead of offices, insane deadlines and crushing workloads. Young unmarried men and married men with stay at home wives are both more likely to tolerate working all the time than women are. So I think cause of the decline in the number of women is a small, unconcious bias on the part of (nearly always male) hiring managers for employees who are going to fit in to the working all the time culture.
Truth be told: even the Great Crankyness is not as emancipated as she thinks. She confesses to wearing a skit and makeup. And I won’t be caught dead in either.
People are social creatures. We try to be the same as the group we’re in and different from other groups we’de like to dissociate with. It starts when we’re babies as our parents pick our babyclothes and decorate our rooms. Parents want their kids to fit in, and the most obvious group to fit in is gender based.
As kids try to find their identity they look at what seems to be normal. So basically it is group psychology that prevents us from true emancipation.
It takes a lot of guts to be different. I bet the Great Crankyness has been called names just because she was being emancipated.
So women tend to do girly things and men do what guys do for the most part, simply because it’s easier.
Ever wonder why for the most part women do the cooking at home, but all chefs in restaurants seem to be male? Can’t be because they are better at it. I think it’s because men are taught to be more authorative while women tend to be more social.
Even in the Netherlands where it’s quite normal for both men and women to work part time (I have a “daddy-day” and my wife has a “mommy-day”), things are not equal. A lot of woman I know ideally like to work no more than 20-30 hours a week. That doesn’t help their careers.
So when men do the hiring they think to themselves: will she get pregnant and be gone for months at a time? Will she want to work less afterward? They don’t even consider these things when they hire expecting fathers.
Also the bad economy doesn’t help. In the Netherlands, child care has become more expensive because the government is less willing to chip in. The result: Women quit their jobs (not men!) because working part time simply isn’t paying enough when you take the cost of daycare into account.
My guess is that these past years both men and women weren’t too preoccupied with being emancipated. So things fall back into their “natural” state, which isn’t nessecarily all that natural to begin with.
#1 one reason for hiring female: 50% of your potential customer base is that weird skirt wearing variety. It would be real silly indeed to ignore that annoying fact. Maybe hire one or two to find out what they think? Hell, they seem to understand our own variety better as well. :)
Crany Product Manager (@crankypm) on women in software & "frat house culture": http://crankypm.com/2010/10/biz-software-women-software/
RT @lemay: Crany Product Manager (@crankypm) on women in software & "frat house culture": http://crankypm.com/2010/10/biz-software-women …
@crankypm on women in software & "frat house culture": http://bit.ly/aN16Te (IME, it is a *huge* problem at startups for many reasons)
Interesting post! I was a co-founder in two venture backed companies, and we had women engineers in both. One of the companies had a female co-founder. Neither company had a “frat house” culture. Well… at least I didn’t think so. We had a professional atmoshpere during the work day. We did provide opportunities to blow off steam, and these may have been more male oriented, now that I reflect on it. (More likely to have a video game tourney than a knitting bee, that’s for certain.)
There have never enough women in engineering, which I have always believed was from a lack of interest in the profession. There won’t be female engineers if there aren’t many graduating from college, and there won’t be many graduating from college if they aren’t taking heavy math and science courses in high school. When I was in high school it was probably 80/20 male/female. I wonder what it is now?
I’m a bit suprised you threw out number 4 as a possibility. Many of the best engineers I’ve ever worked with are women (both in software and hardware), and unfortunately all of the worst ones were men.
Lastly, I wonder if we went to the same “Random Institute of Technology”, although clearly not at the same time, as when I was there in the dark ages there were NO women.
While the Cranky Product Manager does not know the exact breakdown of girls in advanced math and science classes in high school, she does know that
1) 48% of the class of 2013 is women, at her alma mater, Random Institute of Technology.
2) For every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same.
3) In 2001, at least, in California, girls enrolled in high school science and math classes at a higher rate than boys.
http://www.ppic.org/main/pressrelease.asp?i=309 . The same article pointed out, however, that a huge discrepancy still exists for computer science specifically.
Via the College Board: 49% of US High School students that sat for the 2010 AP Calculus exam were girls. For the AP Biology test, 58% were girls. 47% girls for AP Chemistry. 35% for AP Physics.
But for the AP Computer Science Exam – girls are a mere 19%.
So, indeed, girls ARE taking heavy math and science subjects in High School. But not computer science.
See http://apreport.collegeboard.org/report-downloads for more.
Biz of Software 2010, Women In Software & Frat House “Culture” http://dld.bz/2ypj
While the Cranky Product Manager does not know the exact breakdown of girls in advanced math and science classes in high school, she does know that
1) 48% of the class of 2013 is women, at her alma mater, Random Institute of Technology.
2) For every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same.
3) In 2001, at least, in California, girls enrolled in high school science and math classes at a higher rate than boys.
http://www.ppic.org/main/pressrelease.asp?i=309 . The same article pointed out, however, that a huge discrepancy still exists for computer science specifically.
The Cranky PM has a point about the industry's, "Frat House Culture" – our office of 100% dudes is case in point. http://bit.ly/dyaNqh
As a woman in the software industry, I can tell you that proving that I can write software just as well as, if not better than, a man is a never ending battle. I’m only as good as my last line of code. After 13 years in the industry, when I start a new gig I have the inevitable first few months of incredulous looks and insults until I intellectually castrate and severely punish my superiors for their doubts with my dazzling and unending displays of brilliance.
In contrast, I’ve worked with male “talkers” who could not code to save their lives and there is an almost opposite effect — they usually have to do many, many horrendous acts of coding incompetence before the same “superiors” will acknowledge that the person they hired is a useless buffoon.
I’m not going to stop trying to change the minds of people around me, but as the industry gets less and less challenging and the business layer in most companies gets more involved with staffing and technology decisions, it becomes less interesting to me, and I imagine to most women. Do I wish I had gone to medical school? You bet. I never wanted to be in a field where I would be fighting these battles. My ivy league education would have put to better use elsewhere (I’m just sayin’).
Kudos for writing the article. I’m sorry it’s 3 down on my search results for “women in software” on google. I had to read through a blog entry by some guy on the subcontinent who believes that women aren’t smart enough to be geeks before I found this article. Makes me thinking we women in the industry need to organize and do something about this.
Your observations and recommendations are spot on.
I worked in software engineering for over 15 years. One day I threw off the golden handcuffs to become a preschool teacher. My family and friends would ask me how I liked my new career. My response: “I’m still working with two-year olds.”
I believe the decline in the number of women in the software industry began during the DOT COM era with the burst of web development. At the onset of this period, most female engineers were coming from universities. But coding for the web was new and curriculum hadn’t caught up. Education took a back seat to real world experience, and as IPO fever spread, the ranks were filled with self-proclaimed “gurus” – mostly young male hacks who’d learned coding on the streets.
The resulting influx of 20-something males created a workaholic environment that was unfriendly and uninviting to women: man caves that thrived on caffeine, salt and sugar. In a short time, if you were over 30 – or a woman – you were too old or too out of touch, or just too uncool.
I took some years off to raise kids, came back, and am stunned at how few women I see in the office compared to before. Where did they all go?
Maybe the industry and all the coders in it were young and childless back then but as time went by the women dropped out while the men continued…
All that said I have yet to see any sexism. There are some dorky jokes followed by “sorry” in my direction but never any harm intended.
I think Krush hit it on the head. This isn’t about the software industry being less interesting to women, this is about the software industry being less interesting in general. I’ve been in the game for 16 years and its not anywhere near as fun as it was 10 years ago. There is no real innovation anymore, just re-branding and re-spinning the same technology. The bloom is off the rose, which is frankly why this blog exists. I don’t see a site called “The Cranky Oncologist” (that’s a tough tough job they should be cranky). Maybe women were just smart enough to realize this years ago.
Just wanted to point out to you one very practical way this can be changed. Teach women somewhere other than CS programs:
http://workshops.railsbridge.org/
Less than two years ago, the San Francisco Ruby Meetup routinely drew just one or two women to an event of 50 people or more. Female attendance at regional conferences hovered at 3%.
Twelve workshops and six hundred students later, meetups now routinely draw 15-20% women.
What a great idea! I love it, and so glad that you are seeing success with it.
Don’t be surprised if I attend one of your workshops someday. I would love to learn Ruby (and Python and Map-Reduce and more about security and many other technical topics) in a female-dominated group.
I think some of these symptoms are American specific and not global, but the numbers in Israel are not much different.
However, most of the start-up’s in the world are in USA, Israel and Texas :)
Having free beer and strippers at work is an American concept I never understood, in software or in any other business, unless it is the Soprano’s line of business.
It is not “Start-Up” culture. I’m not sure if ti is a culture at all.
I try to hire as many smart and bright women software developers as possible. In general, they are much easier to manage than immature counter males.
Unfortunately , as it comes to team leaders the number is reduced drastically and even further at the group manager level.
Here is another theory. Many man don’t like software development anymore after 10 years and try to move to other fields ( music, theater, HR ). Most of the man I know have returned to Hi-Tech after couple of years.
To some extent, they returned because they had no choice. The salaries are much higher. Most of left women developers that left Hi-Tech did not return. That does not explain everything , but it is another angle.
RT @crankypm: Very interesting discussion of Women In Software & Frat House "Culture" ##prodmgmt http://bit.ly/aRfK0k. Same in Israel?
Congrats 2 @crankypm who wrote a better article abt women in software http://bit.ly/aN16Te than the NYTimes put out http://nyti.ms/knoj71
Nytimes on lack of women coders http://ow.ly/1tRDzZ. Similar to views crankypm expressed here: http://ow.ly/1tRE60
#FF Truly great article on Women & Frat House Culture in IT by @crankypm http://t.co/E4deAjw H/T @shpantzer | this is why we have @WSPDC
#FF Truly great article on Women & Frat House Culture in IT by @crankypm http://t.co/E4deAjw H/T @shpantzer | this is why we have @WSPDC
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