Final Analysis: Code Talkers

Ever hear a guy tell another guy he throws like a girl? Runs like a girl?

For male competitors in this rough-and-tumble world, its one of the earliest insults we encounter. And, I suppose, one of the earliest motivators. Not a particularly positive one, but popular and effective, at least when I was a kid. The message is as subtle as a fastball to the forehead: Feminine traits mean a lack of toughness. A lack of aggressiveness. A lack of team-oriented manliness.

This sort of thinking, while possibly applicable on a playing field populated exclusively by males, eventually found its way into corporations and held them back for decades as they gradually accepted women into the workforce but not necessarily into the club.

So is there such a thing as programming like a girl? Do Ruby on Rails and JavaScript perform differently in the hands of female software engineers?

In a National Public Radio piece that aired last October, technology correspondent Steve Henn noted, as we do in the story on women programmers on page 34 of this issue, that the gap between the number of male and female computer programmers wasnt always as large as is it is today. But in 1984, Henn reported, something changed. The percentage of women in computer science flattened, and then plunged, even as the share of women in other technical and professional fields kept rising.

As Karen West reports in our cover story this month, a spirited effort to close the gap has begun through initiatives like Code Fellows and Ada Developers Academy. The push is particularly vigorous in the Puget Sound region, where the shortage of qualified software programmers has become acute.

Ironically, what soured girls on pursuing careers in programming may be the very thing that owes its existence to programming language: the computer. The share of women in computer science started falling, Henn reported, at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers.

The NPR story noted that these early computers werent much more than toys things you could play Pong on but they were marketed almost exclusively to men and boys.

This idea that computers are for boys became a narrative, Henn asserted. It became the story we told ourselves about the computing revolution. It helped define who geeks were, and it created techie culture.

And girls werent a part of it.

Theres not a lot of scientific evidence to support Henns thesis. But its certainly plausible. We are a nation of consumers, after all, and most of us are induced to consume what the practitioners of persuasive communication whether through outright advertising or via peer pressure want us to consume.

The good news is that this trend will change. Any parent knows that girls today are just as interested in and adept at understanding smartphones and tablets and computers as boys are. The many efforts being made to engage girls and young women in software coding are gaining momentum, and educators across the country recognize that the need for women in programming has become an economic imperative.

The bad news is that we have lost a generation of potential programmers to a mindset that dissuaded women from pursuing careers in computer programming, ostensibly because we let marketers drive the agenda. The effort to repatriate women into the programming trade faces the same sort of challenges they faced in breaking into corporate America in the first place.

Heres hoping that we can skip the insult phase and quickly embrace a time when you code like a girl is considered a
compliment.

John Levesque is the managing editor of Seattle Business magazine.