How We Can Get More Women into Development
Without getting into the whole debate about pipelines, parenting, nature vs. nurture, affirmative action and all the rest, here are some factors. We don’t know the why of all of these, although there’s no shortage of speculation and opinion. I reserve the right to delete comments that are hostile and/or not constructive.
1. Invite women. “It seems like women are waiting for an engraved invitation,” a developer once said to me. People who have been disinvited in the past may be hesitant to invite themselves and be accused of crashing the party and thrown out. I don’t believe this is most people’s experience today, but any knowledge of history plus just a few current bad experiences spreading through social networks will make any numeric minority hesitant to risk a foray into what might look like unwelcoming territory. Invite. An open door will make all the difference.
2. Meet professional parents’ needs. Recipe for workplace success for employees and companies alike:
- Good child care parents can afford.
- Good child care parents can afford.
- Don’t punish people for having babies and being good parents by deep-sixing their careers and expelling their collective talent from the workplace.
- Also, good child care parents can afford.
Today, men also want a life and time with their families. Maintaining the business patterns and practices of a hundred, two hundred years ago does not serve today’s employees at any level, male or female, and research (such as this) have shown it hurts companies’ bottom line measurably to treat employees as though they have no other life than work, no other personal connections but their coworkers.
3. When interviewing women, add to the qualifications they actually state. Watch this illuminating video from RailsConf ’09. Women are very very cautious about declaring their qualifications lest someone call them out. We have a lot of Impostor Syndrome. So we tend to understate our true qualifications, where a man might do a week’s reading on a new subject and then put it on his resume and start applying for manager positions in his new area. (I say that mostly tongue in cheek.)
What this means for you, if you want to hire a woman developer: If you find one whose resume and interview show that she has the basic qualifications for the job, then she’s probably very well qualified indeed for the position. One problem in this area is that hiring managers may have developed a habit of taking a candidate’s presentation of his qualifications with a grain of salt. If hiring managers do this with women job candidates, they’ll end up with a poor and inaccurate perception of women developers. Many women are so careful not to overstate their real qualifications that they may understate them. Don’t miss out on the great employee you are looking to hire.
4. If her new work area is filled with unreconstructed, backwardly mobile individuals, tell her before she takes the job. If you paint a glowing picture of the company and its achievements and its talented staff, and she takes the job and finds herself fending off gropers, averting her eyes daily from the comics and posters in the coffee room, or trying to find words to respond to icky emails — well, it’s not good to find oneself not in possession of needed knowledge. Level with her up front, and don’t assume it will stop her from taking the job. Corollary: The development community is filled with talented individuals of all kinds, so it’s no longer necessary to hire people who can’t play well with others because you can’t find both “talent” and “team player” in the same individual. Use this book for such business ailments, wherever it’s needed.
5. Start early. There are programs out there for children of various ages, usually school-related, introducing them to basic programming and removing the intimidation factor for young beginners. Girls-only programs are a plus for school-aged girls. If you don’t know of one, or there isn’t one for your child, consider taking it on as a special project at your child’s school for a quarter, a semester, a year. Kids love this! And why not? It’s fun! And it has a super cool factor with kids.
In going back to school for a development degree, I’ve met enthusiastic, supportive developers of both sexes. Several have spent considerable chunks of their limited time tutoring me in new languages. I had a mental picture of the development world as a bunch of twenty-something guys playing first-person shooter games, trash-talking women, and not showering. This is the unfortunate and inaccurate stereotype. True, some people still cling to the comfortable fit of stereotype, but the reality is that men in development are so often great people all around and don’t fit the stereotype. We all have more fun with a mix of people in development, and that’s what it’s about for so many of us — it’s fun. We love doing it. It’s an exciting time for anyone to get into development.
