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From: eravin@dasys1.UUCP (Ed Ravin)
Newsgroups: comp.society
Subject: Re: programming and gender
Message-ID: <2138@hplabsc.HP.COM>
Date: Mon, 29-Jun-87 19:47:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: hplabsc.2138
Posted: Mon Jun 29 19:47:35 1987
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With regard to the male vs. female computer programming style discussion...

I spent two years of my college life grading students programs at the
State University at Albany, and I remember observing some of the
male/female differences in programming style.  The biggest difference
was neatness and comments: the men often wrote programs that looked
like a tornado had gone through (badly spelt and inconsistent
comments, varying case (this was Pascal, so it didn't matter), etc),
while the women almost never did this (the work looked like it had
been proofread at least once and there were almost always halfway
decent comments).

One possibility is that the women were being more conscientious and
attentive to the course requirements, either because they were better
motivated or had less experience on computers than the men did and
therefore less bad habits.  Another viewpoint might be that they were
paying more attention and working harder because they needed to offset
the disadvantage of studying in a field where our culture
traditionally discourages women from pursuing (like chess or just about
any "hard" science).

All of the programs were done by computer science students, most of
them majors.  (which is a more consistent sample than the one described
in the original article)

However, when I got into the "real" world, at my first job, none of
the women programmers exhibited any of those characteristics.  These
were all women who had been working in the field for at least three
years.  Some of them weren't neat at all, some wrote cryptic code
doing ten things at once, some hardly bothered with comments.  Others
were paragon programmers, who wrote the cleanest and most reliable
code in the entire company.  When digging into other people's code I
saw none of the "gender-specific" stuff described above (and in DT's
article).

So maybe the "difference" is really just in one's background, and
disappears as soon as the women "catch up" in experience and
expertise.  This could be contrasted with the writing styles of
science fiction authors, where the women for the most part write
differently from the men, the more experienced women even more so.

Disclaimer: this is all exceedingly unscientific, and like much of
human communication, may be nothing but an exercise in making the
world fit in with one's preconceived notions.  Other people's viewoints,
responses or flames welcome.

- -
Ed Ravin                                  eravin@dasys1.uucp