Are women better developers than men?

If you follow the available literature (euh, eufemism for women tabloids), women are better in all kind of things and men suck at every one of them.
I’m getting pretty fed up with all those stupid women are better at … statements.

*knock knock*

Woman speaking.

Well, I’m affraid I have to go for Rob’s comment on this one. Just got back from a conference on ostracism and social exclusion at work and… yep, there it was again: women basically think themselves to be better at anything, ànd despite all these talents they are treated so badly within various kinds of work environments. Hearing those wonderful things about ‘my’ kind, I modestly keep in mind that women also tend to think that they are better qualified than other women… while being so much worse of compared to those other ‘bitches’. Stereotype thinking, don’t you just love it?

Now, regarding IT and programming: I’m no IT Lady nor program chick. I am however bussiness consultant (as women really are better in thàt area, mwah) and during my experiences with IT(C) members I was constantly confronted with a major question-offer unbalance in the work population. Take a monkey that loves to either look at a pc screen or earn good bucks, teach it how to use simple codes and… tada… there is it, the latest member of the IT(C) community. So what makes you think women would be recruited otherwise?

The only female developer that I’ve ever had the opportunity to actually work with was very talented. I don’t think this topic has anything to do with inherent gender differences, but that it’s more of a sociological thing.

Moreover, Davy, I do get your point. My only concern is that you are counting the wrong odds to answer this question… a questions which is (as in other domains of competence and gender) very hard to answer as we simply cannot get rid of the obvious bias factors (see Max). So, let’s all just stick to the exciting camp of believers, and let’s all have the wisdom to not approach talent and competence from a gender perspective, in one way or the other (untill the real scientific geeks have found a way to correctly analyze this)

you should check some of the comments on the original article… my favourite is “Sometimes the code sheds a lot of light on the comments.” by some guy named Nimrod

I’m not convinced that woman are better or worse coders, but the argument of helpfull comments does not make any sense to me.

Some real life examples…
Written by a woman btw.


// Delete the population list of MUs
delete pPopulationOfMUs;



// As we work with CAP objectives we define a map of product families counters
// (the key is the product family index) giving us the total amount of time or weight
// (current stocks) that has been scheduled so far for each product family.
map C;

could just be

map mapProductFamilyStockScheduledSoFar;


Another nice comment, but if one wants to know what st and et are you’d have to browse to the definition and read the appropriate comment.

// Create the unavailable period corresponding to the job (with zero elasticity)
// and update the working period set
CPOSPeriod job(st, et, 0, false);


I admit it, I’m a showoff. I like to be clever, and I aim to be considered clever too. But writing cryptic code is not clever in my book.
I get a kick out of writing code that reads like a Salinger novel, instead of reading like the latest legislation on Statutory Instruments of the Scottish Parliament for instance.
In my company the 50% of the woman are good coders… there’s two of them.

Another aspect of the matter is that there are women with male-like brain structure. Often they are the ones that end up as engineers.

Based on studies I have read and heard about, I think that the male brain is better suited for solving complex abstract problems, while the female one is better in for example empathy (hence the comments) among others. That does not decide anything of course.

Another factor sometimes forgotten is that judging how good a developer is should usually be done in a team, because that is how developers work most of the time. Writing cryptic code is really bad when working in a team, but also backfires on most one man projects, so that should not be considered good coding in my opinion. Understanding it may be a good feature however

Comments and forcing people to write them is another thing that can create huge debates. The article stated that they plan to do that, and they talk about it like it was obviously good. There are successfull methodologies that discourage comment wrinting and instead try to focus on creating readable code. I’m not saying that all comments are bad but many of them can be useless.

Finally I would like to add that this seems to be the kind of question that when answered, creates more problems than it solves. Most importantly, it creates a basis for prejudice, even when the study does not show a big difference. People tend to remember the winner and not how much she/he won with.