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Hey brogrammer, let's crush some code
For women in computer science, Silicon Valley's startup world is still a very male place. And one character stands out: The brogrammer.
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Kai Ryssdal: There's a pretty stark gender gap in technology companies, from the top all the way through the ranks. Part of that's because women don't go into computer science at the same rate men do. But part of it's because once they do, women realize they don't like it all that much. Not the work -- the culture.
Marketplace's Queena Kim introduces us to the brogrammer.
Queena Kim: Meet the Brogammer: part programmer, part fraternity brother. He used to be a geek, now he’s all about beer ‘n’ chicks and the gym.
Tasneem Raja is the interactive editor for Mother Jones online.
Tasneem Raja: Brogrammers are really macho, they have spiky hair, they drink a lot of cheap beer and bag the hottest girls.
Raja recently encountered the species at the South by Southwest Interactive conference when she dropped into a session on how to get a job at a startup. It was by Matt Van Horn, the vice president for business development at the social network Path.
Raja: And so he’s up there talking about this “nudie” calendar that he sent these guys at Digg.
Digg’s the site where Van Horn got his first online job.
Raja: And next he uses the word “gang bang” to describe an interview style.
Raja says at this point, a few women head for the door, but that doesn’t deter Van Horn.
Raja: He told another story about how his fraternity’s recruitment strategy was totally designed to help attract the hottest girls on campus.
Now Raja walks out and fires off this tweet:
Raja: "Biz dev vp of Path just cracked lame jokes about nudie calendars... and gang bang... cue early exit."
The tweet gets retweeted and retweeted. And the responses fell into two camps. The outraged -- and a second group, made up mostly of women in tech, who said:
Raja: Duh, this is nothing new I hear this all the time.
Christy Nicol: One of the problems with computer science is that you have this really homogenous group and no one is challenging each other.
That’s Christy Nicol a software engineer in Seattle.
Nicol: Someone says, I thought it was funny, it was just a joke. The person next to him -- who’s probably a lot like him -- says, “Oh yeah, it was just a joke.” And they say oh we must be right we agree and they move on.
Maria Klawe is the president of Harvey Mudd College, where she’s been pushing to get more women into computer science.
Maria Klawe: Especially in startups you’ll find that there are very few women and a pretty male-centric culture.
How centric? At last count, women made up 20 percent of programmers. Women at startups say that brogrammers have always existed in one form or another. What’s different this time around is that the sexist comments once made to the bro at the next desk -- they’re being blogged, put on discussion boards and on social networks.
Like this tweet (see right) from a programmer at Twitter. The tweet reads: “Learning how babies are made.” Under it, a photo of his company’s “Sexual Harassment Awareness and Prevention” pamphlet.
Twitter declined to comment on the tweet. But Vic Schachter is an employment lawyer and he says these situations can be tricky for social networks. After all they practically exist to blur the lines between public and private.
Vic Schachter: These companies believe in an open, frank conversation and in fact in some cases, I’ve heard some people say, “Privacy, get over it.”
As for the Path executive who sent out the nudie calendar, he didn’t get over his bro-moment so easily. He ended up on CNN’s website apologizing. The news quickly made it to Twitter.
In San Francisco, I’m Queena Kim for Marketplace.
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Seems to me like any male dominated industry is going to be like this. Ask a woman who works at a civil engineering firm if it's much different there. The only difference, I think, is that more jock-type males are moving into the software industry because there are a lot of jobs and money there for "adequate" programmers. Modern programming languages have made "adequate" programming easier and accessible to people who are below the top 2% IQ-range. I'm willing to bet that at least a majority of "superstar" coders who are doing the real cutting edge stuff are still pretty nerdy and brainy types, with better manners.
I am a 49 year old male software engineer with 25 years in the profession. Married. Two children: a daughter and a son.
At our tech company, we recently had to endure our harassment training refresher course. It was brutal. As I sat through the training, I remember thinking "This is 2012 and we *still* need this type of training??? REALLY???" Frankly, it was insulting to me as I watched fake, over the top harassment scenarios played out on the screen.
Then, I listened to this report on Marketplace and it was like a punch in the gut; it made me realize that, yes, we *still* need Harassment training in 2012.
How sad. How very sad.
Please start treating each other with respect. Please.
The "really" part should be why should we subject everyone to such insulting and patronizing training, you might as well subject every employee to a day of "don't molest the children" training, you know..just in case!
Whats sad is the lack of reality in these reports, it just gets back to a dirty practice of stereotyping geeks, and it just looks like an excuse to nerd bash again.
A few anecdotal reports means nothing. If anything geeks/nerds are less likely to harass than any other group of people, this report was just poorly put together.
I've worked in IT for many years, and the "brogrammer"--or whatever his equivalent in the tech support branch is called--definitely exists. In my experience, he is not hateful toward women, at least not overtly. I'm glad to report I've never encountered issues like that. Instead, he is ... well, gross. It is almost as if he got emotionally stuck in junior high.
For a while, my company had 2 main PC support teams, one in City A and one in City B. City B was an all-female team, and we would cut up and carry on sometimes. We learned the all-male team in City A, however, had a different way of expressing humor. One popular game they had was farting contests. That's right. The goal was to see who could drive everyone else out of the lab the fastest. And these were not kids. These were supposedly mature 30- and 40-somethings.
Our poor manager, who was more accustomed to the female City B team, opined of the City A team once: "I gotta get more girls on that team."
I found this article offensive to it's core. The writer wrapped up a very ugly group of offensive people and implied that they represent the majority. Thank goodness I don't fall for the same methodology or I would think all writers spew out whatever they think will grab attention at the expense of investigation and not a factual coverage of the real issues. It's bad enough developers must contend with the public image of half naked Go Daddy girls representing the wisdom and architecture that is required for their field but now this!
Does this type of behavior still exist in a corporate environment? Unfortunately yes but in my years of working as a programmer/developer I have never seen such obscene behavior from neither my male nor my female counterparts.
This article takes away from what I would have otherwise considered an unbiased, factual news source. I would have expected something like this on Fox!
Yea it reeked of nerd bashing.
Imagine if we turned it around and just claimed all public radio employees were likely arrogant intolerant lefty types that sneered at anyone with technical or financial skill, and thus have to label these folks as inept nerds or frat boys.
There is no research at all showing nerds to be more sexist than anyone else.
Anyways the whole issue is questionable. Why fixate on tech's gender imbalance, what about all the other professions where women dominate? Clearly the only possible reason men don't choose those professions is that the women in those jobs are deeply sexist, one must assume from the logic of the story, that is the only possible explaination.
So happy to see this being spoken about openly. Most forms of tech are tainted by this problem in one way or another. I would venture to say that the highest concentration of this issue can be found in the game development industry. Not only is immaturity and a certain level of misogyny rewarded nearly as often as productivity and innovative thinking - but the culture is often reinforced by the very products being created (thanks, albeit in part, to public demand).
I fear as long as sex and sexism sells it will be difficult, to say the least, to achieve a boost in maturity and respect for women among game developers - and by extension their brogrammer cousins from the tech world at large should "hardcore" gaming be prevalent among their ranks.
How many women are hardcore gamers?
I know you have to pretend its 50/50 to complain, but again, look at the failure of the WNBA, just because some women think its a good idea for other women to have these interests doesn't mean they will in reality.
The charge of sexism is completely unfounded, and tiresome, and just reeks of nerd bashing, and in the end, male bashing.
Obviously people have been working in the wrong places and allowing such nonsense. I've been a male software engineer for 25 years now (mostly in Silicon Valley), and if the places I had worked were that way, I would have been looking for a different job. All the groups in which I have worked would not stand for this sort of behavior. Most of them had a number of women as part of the team, often in positions of management. I'm not claiming that such behavior doesn't exist - at one company where I worked the group of engineers in the hardware group did seem to be that way. But it by no means is as pervasive as this and other recent reports try to make it sound.
Basically you like I have never seen what this story claims.
I wouldn't even give it the benefit of the doubt as you do. There is simply no evidence that sexism is more prevalent in the tech community, they rely on nothing other than the gender imbalance to come to that simplistic conclusion.
It fits the popular narrative of the asperger geek and such stereotypes, a cheap and easy story. But if gender imbalance is enough to claim that sexism is afoot, than professions dominated by women should be automatically claimed to be sexist against men.
Its just poor logic.
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