Are women better developers than men?
Posted by Davy Brion on June 16th, 2008
A coworker just pointed out the following article. This is something i’m pretty interested in. Let’s just get to the two most important quotes from the article:
“Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They’ll intersperse their code with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it. The code becomes a type of “roadmap” for others who might want to alter it or add to it later”
and…
“Men, on the other hand, have no such pretenses. They try to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code. They try to obfuscate things in the code and don’t leave clear directions for people using it later.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if this was actually true, to be honest. Allthough there are always exceptions of course (no pun intended). But how many of us have been confronted with cryptic code with hardly any comments to clarify the code? How likely was it that that code was written by a male developer? Since there aren’t that many female developers, i’d say the odds are pretty high it was written by a guy. Now, i don’t believe men write crappy code on purpose though. But considering how common crappy code really is, while keeping in mind that most developers are male, and that women in general think differently than men, is it really that hard to believe that women might actually be better at this?
The subject of female programmers is one that is occasionaly brought up among male developers. And you’ll very often hear them say “i’ve never known one who was good at coding”. I’ve even heard some developers claim that it is impossible for women to be good at coding. Most of them simply don’t believe in it. Me, honestly, i don’t know… i know a lot of male programmers, but i really don’t know a lot of them that are actually good. I would guess that only 10% of male developers is actually good. I obviously have no studies or facts or figures to back that up, it’s just a guesstimate based on the total numbers of coders i’ve met so far. But if you think about that, it’s not at all unlikely that the percentage of good programmers could actually be higher among women. I mean come on, 10%?! That shouldn’t be hard to beat. If only there were more female programmers we might actually be able to get some real data on all of this. But until then, put me in the ‘believer’-camp 
June 16th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
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.
June 16th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
I normally don’t get into those kind of statements. But hey, when it comes to coding we do suck (in general) so who knows… i can’t imagine them doing much worse
June 16th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
*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?
June 16th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
i have no reason to think that the training or recruiting would be different… I just don’t believe that women are inherently worse at developing software than men are, which seems to be a pretty common belief among many developers.
June 16th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
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.
June 16th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
yea that’s probably true
June 17th, 2008 at 5:05 am
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)
June 17th, 2008 at 6:57 am
well, i’m not really trying to answer the question… my ‘belief’ is just based on a “hmm, makes sense” gut feeling
June 17th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
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
June 17th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Trits:
I totally agree.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
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.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
yea i’m not a big fan of comments either… comments are great when you need to clarify why you’re doing something in a certain way or fashion and you can’t express it through the code itself. In most other cases, they’re just noise
July 3rd, 2008 at 12:56 am
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.
January 14th, 2009 at 10:02 pm
I disagree entirely. Though it is a really nice sentiment!!!! I feel that good developers put no emotion at all in their code, except for love.
If you care about your code you’re doing what’s best for the code. Not what’s best for the next programmer that comes along.
Comments that tell the next programmer what the code is doing are for people that think other programmers are idiots and wont be able to read the code themselves.
Comments are for hacks.