“If, in your opinion, a woman can be a blacksmith,
then why not a man be a pedicurist?
She forges, he saws, a wonderful couple! ”
To the film “Take care of women”I have been reading Habr of the year since 2009. Over the past few years, on the eve of March 8, there has been a wave of publications, special projects, megaposts and other formats about women in the IT field. They all drown as one for equality, literally shouting that all developers are the same, the woman in IT is well done, and Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton are icons of the IT world, which have proved everything to everyone. But, as you know, if there is noise around a problem, this indicates one thing - in spite of all these one-day manifestos, there is a problem.The way they look at the gender problem in IT looks rather narrow and usually comes down to discussing the thesis “Can a woman program?” This is not even one side of the coin, it is just one piece of a complex psychophysiological and mental mosaic. Let's discuss.Are the oldies here? Who will tell in the comments why this article is illustrated by such a KDPV?Why does this question exist?
The problem of equality between men and women in professions has ancient roots that go back to the time of the first industrial revolution, and then, depending on the country, relate to the most important historical events and intersect with sociocultural types (a woman in the war, a woman in the rear, a woman in science, a woman in medicine etc.). Accordingly, the problem arose not together with information technologies, but long before them, and our industry has become only one of the small questions of a huge layer of research on the place of women in the labor sphere. 5 :) — , , . .
, Android Junior Developer
---
IT 7 . , IT .
, Art Team Lead
---
, :)
, Backend Developer
---
, 6 , PHP Elixir-. ,
, Backend Developer
You can throw a white coat on yourself, put your sword forward and say that the question itself is monstrous, and a woman has long been equal to a man in almost everything. But no, friends, this is impossible to do - for a number of completely heterogeneous reasons, the question will always exist.- , : , , , , , … , : , 1, - -, , ( « » ). , , , , — -. .
- — , , - , (). — , , -, , , , , -, . , , , , . — «» .
- , , , : , , . , ( ), , - , . , .
- , — , , . , « » ( , !), , , , . . — :
In general, I propose first of all to separate the concepts of gender and gender. Gender is a physiological concept, the objective biology of our organisms; gender is a set of socio-cultural and psychological criteria that determine a person’s affiliation with a man or woman. This is partly why in foreign studies the word “sex” (biological gender) was replaced by “gender” (social gender), because any person can indicate that he is a man, woman or non-gender (in terms of attitude). And researchers often make a remark that “respondents consider themselves to be ...” In Russia, this is not yet available, but problems related to gender as a social gender exist. . .
, Backend Developer
---
— , IT-. , "".
, Backend-
---
code; eat; sleep; repeat;
, C++ backend dev
---
— , . , .
, Data Engineer
---
4 , ! ! :)
, Frontend Developer
Women in IT: well, IT and IT professionals
According to the Stack Overflow report, in 2016, the share of women in development was 5.8%, while the compilers give the following remark: “The results of our survey demonstrate significant inequality in technology among men and women. In fact, we know that women make up a larger share of developers than our study suggests. According to Quantcast, about 12% of Stack Overflow readers are women. We also know that this survey does not represent people in countries where there is a high probability that a woman will be a developer (South Korea, India and China). ” Here are the top majors in which women work (in fact, the list is much longer):And this is an interesting schedule: the distribution of men and women by the duration of their experience in the IT field:You can see that women prevail among beginners. And it was 2016, which means that there has been a trend towards an increase in the number of women in IT. Check it out.We open the report of 2019. Women in statistics are already 7.9%. Women have the largest representation as front-end developers, designers, data researchers, data analysts, QA or test developers, scientists and educators. For three years, this is not stunning, but indicative and qualitative growth. And, we think, the growth rate in the coming years will grow.But what are we all about Stack Overflow? Just last week with a special projectby March 8, we collected our statistics on Habré. 462 girls unsubscribed to us - it is their quotes that adorn this article (in total we received 307 impressive and inspiring "notes"). Here are the specialist girls we have:Moreover, among the respondents there were 3 CEOs of IT companies, 4 DevOps, 3 system administrators and many specialists with lead and senior prefixes. By the way, feminists used on the strength of 20 interviewed girls, the rest simply indicated their specialty as is. There were also several girls who, in a commentary to the survey, said that they had grown out of humanitarian specialties - which sometimes proves that all our limitations are sociocultural in nature and whether or not to be in IT is a matter of desire and quite a bit of ability, interest in the work itself ( I hope you feel that IT is not romance and pure creativity for you, but painstaking and sometimes routine work?).- , 17 . . .
, IT analyst
---
— , IT. .
, Product manager
---
— , , 180 <3
, QA
Indeed, a girl can find herself literally in any IT field: from HR and translations to full-stack development and DevOps. In general, it all depends on interest, craving for the basics of one direction or another (someone likes mathematics, someone people, someone algorithms, someone glands) and education. By the way, in Russia there are many communities of women in development who hold their meetings, conferences, sections at general festivals, etc. And I can’t say whether it’s good or bad, because such separation and circulation of slogans like GRL PWR emphasize the fact that girls in IT are still a separate phenomenon. So why do this if you just can prove your professionalism, as everyone in companies and at conferences does? For example, I had to hear absolutely stunning reports of women speakers at the conferences of Oleg Bunin (HighLoad ++, RIT ++), JUG.RU, at GDG events. And what does science say?
If you try to look into the differences between men and women as workers and social individuals without a psychological and clinical background, the abyss of obscurantism will look you in the eye. You will read fierce stories about the "small female" brain, special exclusively female hormones, male aggression and primitive instincts in office life.There are two opposing opinions about the root causes of such a clear gender bias in IT:- Some explain this by the purely physiological differences between men and women: a different hormonal background (here there are stories about PMS, “female perseverance”) and different brain structures in adult men and women
- Others argue that gender bias is a product of cultural perception, when girls are taught that math and programming succeeds and suits boys better.
I tried to figure out if the male brain is really different from the female one and came to the funny conclusion that both camps are wrong.Next, I will give a brief retelling of an article from the journal Stanford Medicine about the physiological differences between the male and female brain and how this affects their behavior.Fact 1: stereotyped male and female behavior is not a cultural product. At least not entirely
In 1998, a scientist from the California Institute of Technology Niaro Shah began a study of how the male brain differs from the female and how it affects behavior. At that time, the neurobiological community was inclined to the idea that the whole difference in human behavior is due to cultural characteristics. Scientists who study animals have rarely even taken female rodent studies, fearing that cyclical changes in their reproductive hormones will mix data and affect results.For those who thought otherwise, there is a special term “neurosexism”. He was accused of scientists who fell victim to stereotypes or made hasty conclusions that men differ from women more biologically than culturally.Nevertheless, data from animal studies, cross-cultural studies, natural experiments, and brain research (which have made significant advances in technology over the past 15 years) have shown real, if not huge, differences in the brain structure of males and females and these differences could contribute to a significant difference in behavior and consciousness.Just a few years before Shah began his research on the differences between the brains of men and women, Diane Halpern, PhD and the past president of the American Psychological Association, began writing the first edition of her famous academic work Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities. She noted that animal research papers have steadily generated reports of neuroanatomical and behavioral differences related to gender, but most of these books mostly collected dust in university libraries. Social psychologists smashed the principle of any fundamental cognitive differences between men and women.In the preface to the first edition, Halpern writes:At that time, it seemed obvious to me that any differences in the thought processes between a man and a woman were the result of socialization, cultural values and errors in research, prejudices and prejudices. ... After considering kilometers of articles in scientific journals and many books ... my opinion has changed.
Why? Why is so much evidence pointing to the biological basis of the difference in cognitive abilities of men and women ignored? Halpern asked. Findings from animal studies resonate with the fact that the difference based on the field is attributed to people. And these findings begin to accumulate.In a study in which 34 macaques took part, males preferred strictly cars with wheels rather than plush toys, while females liked bears. It would be difficult to argue, taking the arguments that the macaque parents bought them the wrong toys and the monkey community makes the boys play with trucks. A very recent study found that boys and girls from 9 to 17 months - the age when children show little sign of awareness of their gender or the gender of other children - show significant differences in preferences, choosing stereotypically "boyish" and "girlish" toys.Halper and her assistants cataloged many behavioral differences and arrived at the following conclusions:- The average woman has several times stronger verbal abilities than the average man. Female ability to perceive and write text on average exceeds male.
- Women overtake men in tests for fine coordination and speed of perception.
- They are also more adept at extracting information from long-term memory.
Meanwhile, the average man:- Can juggle objects in working memory faster.
- It has a much stronger ability for visual-spatial orientation: for example, it visualizes better how a complex two or three-dimensional object rotates in space
- Better determine how many degrees in angle
- Better keep track of a moving subject.
- Better hit the projectile at the target.
Comparative studies of humans and rats show that females tend to rely on pointers, while males usually prefer the “navigation method”: they determine the position of the object, calculating the direction and distance traveled.Fact 2: the male and female brains are really arranged and work differently
Neurobiology proves that the human brain is an organ that is different in different sexes and with clear anatomical differences in neural structures and is accompanied by psychological differences.
says professor of neurobiology and behavior, california institute doctor Larry Cahill.Brain imaging studies have found that these differences go far beyond the reproductive sphere, Cahill says. By making adjustments for brain size (the male is larger), the female hippocampus (a critical department for learning and remembering) is larger than the male and works differently. At the same time, the tonsil associated with experiencing emotions and remembering emotional experience is more common in men. And it also works differently, as Cahill's research proved.In 2000, Cahill scanned the brains of men and women who were shown different videos: both very repulsive and emotionally neutral. It was expected that unpleasant frames will trigger strong negative emotions and, therefore, are imprinted in the amygdala, a structure resembling an almond seed in the cerebral hemisphere. Tonsil activity during viewing, as expected, predicted the subject’s ability to recall watched clips. But for women, this relationship was observed only in the left tonsil, and for men - only in the right.It turned out that women retain stronger and vivid memories of emotional events than men. They extract emotional memories from memory faster and what they remember is richer and stronger charged. If, as it is likely, the tonsil is related to depression and anxiety, any attempt to analyze the male and female brains in the same way to test vulnerability to depression is doomed to failure, due to a simple misunderstanding of where the left is and where is the right.Another interesting fact: two hemispheres of a woman’s brain communicate with each other much more than men’s. In a 2014 study, University of Pennsylvania scientists observed the brains of 428 young men and 521 young women — an unusually large sample — and found that women’s brains regularly showed more powerful coordination between the hemispheres, while the male brain was better coordinated with local regions of the brain. This conclusion is confirmation of the results of smaller studies published earlier and goes closely with the observation that the corpus callosum - a rope of white matter that crosses and connects the hemispheres - is more in women and the female brain is usually more symmetrical than the male one.Many of these cognitive differences appear rather early. Already at 2-3 months of age, children of different sexes show a significant difference in the ability to spatial visualization.This difference in the brain should draw a tangible behavioral difference, says Cahill. Many studies show that this is so, sometimes with significant medical consequences in the treatment and course of diseases.In a 2017 study, JAMA Psychiatry magazineexamined the brain of 98 people with autism spectrum disorders from 8 to 22 years old. Both groups consisted of the same number of female and male subjects. The result confirmed an earlier study that the pattern of differences in the thickness of the cerebral cortex differed between men and women. But most of the women with the disorder had different thicknesses of the cerebral cortex, close to the thickness of the cortex of a healthy person.Otherwise they say having a typically male brain structure, no matter whether you are a boy or a girl, is a significant risk of developing autism. By definition, this means that more boys' brains have a similar profile and this helps explain the four to five-fold predominance of boys with autism spectrum disorder than girls.Fact 3: hormones really play a big role, but not the way you thought
But why are the male and female brains different?There is one big reason - throughout life, fuel with very different additives flows through the brains of men and women: sex steroid hormones. In female mammals, the main additives are several representatives of a number of molecules called estrogens, together with another molecule called progesterone; in males, testosterone and slightly similar androgens.It is an important fact that a male fetus that normally develops in the uterus receives large strokes of a burst of testosterone, constantly thus forming not only parts of its body and proportion, but also the brain. (genetic defects that interfere with the effect of testosterone on the development of the boy’s cells also make his body more feminine. Femininity is our “basic human equipment”)In general, parts of the brain that differ in size in men and women (such as the amygdala and hypothalamus) tend to have particularly high concentrations of sex hormone receptors.Another key variable in the composition of men versus women stems from sex chromosomes, which is one of 23 pairs of human chromosomes in each cell. Basically, women have 2 X chromosomes paired, while men have one X and one Y. A gene with a Y chromosome is responsible for a cascade of events leading to the development of the brain and body to male characteristics. Some other genes on the Y chromosome can also affect psychology and consciousness. . IT , .
, QA
---
, -, HTML Academy web-. , !
,
---
:)
,
---
, .
, iOS-
What do you say?
Habrovka girls and IT professionals, tell your stories in the comments.