Stereotype Priming and Women in Tech/Entrepreneurship

At tech and entrepreneurship conferences, I'm often approached by people to who want to show support for women like myself, or to talk about the role of women in the respective fields. More often this is done by other women, or by extremely supportive men who also believe in gender balance.

These people are always very well meaning, but I don't think what they’re doing is optimal.

Stereotype threat is a well-studied topic that talks about how the mere presence of a negative stereotype can cause anxiety and hinder performance. Priming or reminding someone of the stereotype makes it worse. Even a simple questionnaire regarding one's race and gender completed prior to writing a standardized test affects performance of stereotypically disadvantaged groups. Paraphrasing Cordelia Fine's reports on the many ways this priming happens in the context of gender (Delusions of Gender, pp. 7-8):

...if something reminds a woman of her gender while she is undertaking a task in which women are regarded as less capable, her own negative gender stereotypes might be activated.

This is not to say that we shouldn't talk about the representation of women in certain fields -- just that a private conversation at a conference isn't the best setting. People go to conferences to learn and to network. It is not a good place to have a lowered confidence, or to subconsciously feel uncertain about one's abilities.

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Why women may be thought of as bad programmers

I got my first tech-related internship back in the summer of 2009. The position was a very competitive one with a company in the heart of San Francisco. While I was ecstatic, I was also confused.

I hadn’t done very well on the interview. I screwed up the first question about dropping two eggs from a 100-story building (couldn’t get away from thinking binary search), and messed up a different question about the number of bits required to store some large number (mixed up “bits” and “bytes” and tried to calculated log_2 in my head, only to get it wrong).

Nor did I have much experience. I had barely heard of a version control system, had never really gotten accustomed to the command prompt, and hadn’t even written a single line of production code (well... beyond my silly tournament signup page, which refused to let you sign up if you had an underscore in your email).

Needless to say I probably left very bad first impressions on my coworkers. I was the silly little girl asking questions like, “What was that command you use to get into that other machine?”

So, here’s the hypothesis: companies want to hire more female programmers, either because they are constantly accused of being sexist or because they actually value having a gender-balanced team. So they lower the hiring bar for women, and end up letting in people who may not be as experienced. The rest of the team only sees that a woman was hired and she has very little experience as a programmer, and concludes that women are bad programmers.

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