The thing is, I always wince when I get the question about sexism in CS.  While I do generally think that things are better than they were when I started, when the question comes up in a public forum, someone inevitably comes in and attempts to disprove anything that you might say about improvements in the overall environment.

Let’s take a handful of comments from a single anonymous commenter in that thread:

• “Be careful – don’t hire women.”
• “this is the trouble that women cause and I therefore try to avoid hiring them for any roles where one requires steady temperament”
• “If you are making a consumer product, evidently 50% of your market is going to be women and so it would be good to have a proxy customer.”
• “most women bench less when it comes to intelligence”
• “There are exceptional women, but on average, they are not the right candidate for a job that requires analytical skills.”
• “men are typically better informed, more ambitious and more self confident than most women”
• “the women were uber-stupid”
• Women have “an overarching lack of understanding and a willing to understand. There is also a lack of self-confidence that they’ll be able to figure it out.”

On one hand, it’s nice to have examples to prove my point that a lot of sexism is grounded in ignorance and immaturity.  On the other hand, it’s disheartening to have so many examples.

This brings up another point about sexism in CS.  It’s not enough for women to be good engineers.  And it’s not enough for men to simply be not sexist.  Both of these are necessary, but they’re not sufficient.  There have to be men who are willing to stand up when they hear other men make sexist statements or engage in sexist behavior and say that it’s wrong and unacceptable.  Thankfully, there have been men who have been commenting in the thread about the misogyny, which does help improve the situation.  It makes it feel like I’m not the only one who’s willing to say that this guy’s comments are sexist and baseless.

If you’re going to go read the whole comments thread, gird yourself for unsubstantiated rumor and anecdotes without attribution or context from the anonymous commenter.  His comments could constitute a whole course in how to not debate.  However, for each point that he’s raised, I’ve spent some time doing research to see if his points are ones that are borne out by the data.  After all, I am a researcher and thus a data-driven kind of person.  The thread (sorry for the length!) has resulted in me learning some things about the gender gap, so I suppose we can consider that to be a silver lining in this cloud¹.

Some of the most interesting things that I’ve found as a result of answering his comments are as follows:

• Diversity Matters from the University of Michigan – There’s a fair body of work that has been done by researchers at UMich, and it is collected here.  The research therein is about diversity in general, and is not specific to either gender or software engineering.  It’s a good launching point for learning more.
• “Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance” and the supporting online material by Hyde et al, which considers the gender gap in math scores.  The supporting online material discusses the differences in SAT scores in particular.

I find the research about the gender gap in STEM² to be interesting.  The gender gap is real, and there are a lot of reasons behind it.  Sexism is only one of the reasons, but it might just be the one that’s hardest to root out.  In the interim, my original advice to women who are experiencing this sexism in CS stands: find your tribe, find the men who aren’t sexist, and find the courage to get yourself out of a bad situation.  It does get better.  Don’t let someone like an anonymous commenter on the internet keep it from getting better for you.