“STILL AROUND”: Experiences and Survival Strategies of Veteran Women Software Developers
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The intersection of ageism and sexism can create a hostile environment for veteran software developers belonging to marginalized genders. In this study, we conducted 14 interviews to examine the experiences of people at this intersection, primarily women, in order to discover the strategies they employed in order to successfully remain in the field. We identified 283 codes, which fell into three main categories: Strategies, Experiences, and Perception. Several strategies we identified, such as (Deliberately) Not Trying to Look Younger, were not previously described in the software engineering literature. We found that, in some companies, older women developers are recognized as having particular value, further strengthening the known benefits of diversity in the workforce. Based on the experiences and strategies, we suggest organizations employing software developers to consider the benefits of hiring veteran women software developers. For example, companies can draw upon the life experiences of older women developers in order to better understand the needs of customers from a similar demographic. While we recognize that many of the strategies employed by our study participants are a response to systemic issues, we still consider that, in the short-term, there is benefit in describing these strategies for developers who are experiencing such issues today. This paper is a joint work with Sterre van Breukelen, Ann Barcomb and Sebastian Baltes Preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.03723
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“STILL AROUND”: Experiences and Survival Strategies of Veteran Women Software Developers
- 1. “STILL AROUND”: EXPERIENCES AND SURVIVAL STRATEGIES OF VETERAN WOMEN SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS Sterre van Breukelen Ann Barcomb Sebastian Baltes Alexander Serebrenik Eindhoven University of Technology University of Calgary University of Adelaide Eindhoven University of Technology The Netherlands Canada Australia The Netherlands
- 3. Tokyo. Japan. 1997. Peter Marlow Foundation Photographer Member of
- 4. RQ1. What age- and gender-specific experiences have veteran software developers of marginalized genders had in their careers? RQ2. What strategies have veteran software developers of marginalized genders adopted that they perceive as contributing to their survival in software engineering?
- 5. van Breukelen, Barcomb, Baltes, Serebrenik "STILL AROUND": Experiences and Survival Strategies of Veteran Women Software Developers. 45th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2023
- 6. Baltes, Park, Serebrenik. Is 40 the new 60? How popular media portrays the employability of older software developers, IEEE Software, 37(6):26-31, 2020
- 7. Greta Hoffman from Pexels
- 10. A company approached me. . . They were like ‘our ideal candidate would be a Woman of Color [who has] also survived a stroke’. —Elliot As I approached menopause, there was another shift of just this contempt, because you’re not even a sexually available female. And there’s ‘No, I don’t even have an interest in having sex with you and so why would I ever listen to you?‘ You’re going to try and tell me I’m wrong and you’re unattractive.’ So it got worse.. —Emery + -
- 12. All those young guys don’t want their mom programming with them, their grandmother, on the other hand. —Dani
Editor's Notes
- Good morning, Alexander and I are going to present our paper on experiences and survival strategies of veteran women software developers. This is joint work with Sterre and Ann. Sterre was a master’s student at TU Eindhoven who we supervised together. This research has been triggered by a tweet of Tracy Chou. She is one of Time's 12 Women of the Year (2022), a software engineer and advocate for diversity in technology-related fields. Her tweet alludes to the negative experiences and rarity of older women who are still active in the field of software development. While recent years have seen growing research attention to diversity in software engineering, and both age and gender have been studied independently, the experiences of veteran women and non-binary people who have remained in the software industry have been rarely considered.
- It is worth looking at the continuation of Tracy’s tweet. She mentions being 10 years in tech, loving software engineering, but hating the environment, and being told that there’s no sexism and that she’s only projecting it to her environment. This is what motivated us to study and better understand the specific experiences of veteran women software developers. Gaslighting is the subjective experience of having one's reality repeatedly questioned by another.
- Indeed, veteran women find themselves at the intersection of ageism and sexism: Software developers are overwhelmingly younger men, considering what we know about developer demographics from surveys. Besides well-established sexism in the field of software engineering, statements such as Mark Zuckerberg’s famous quote that “Young people are just smarter” point to ageism in the industry.
- It is important to understand that experiences of individuals on the intersection of diversity aspects cannot be reduced to combinations of individual aspects. For example, Ross et al. have observed that the experiences of Black women differ from those of Black men and of non-Black women: “a smaller percentage of Black women reported being introduced to CS by a family member or a friend (17% and 3%, respectively) than was the case for non-Black women (24% and 10%, respectively) and Black men (21% and 9%, respectively).” Moreover, Black women do not necessarily know whether their negative experiences should be attributed to their gender or their race. Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the concept of intersectionality, arguing that diversity aspects are not mutually exclusive but intersecting, implying that one should be acutely aware of different challenges experienced by people at the intersection of multiple diversity aspects. Monique Ross, Zahra Hazari, Gerhard Sonnert, Philip M. Sadler: The Intersection of Being Black and Being a Woman: Examining the Effect of Social Computing Relationships on Computer Science Career Choice. ACM Trans. Comput. Educ. 20(2): 9:1-9:15 (2020)
- Hence, our research questions were:… In your research questions and sampling approach, we included all marginalized genders, but our participants identified as women plus one non-binary person who identified as woman for most of their career. Hence our results focus on women, while our research questions are broader.
- We started with Twitter users participating in the before-mentioned thread, then checked their self-identified gender based on Twitter profiles and websites. We looked for pronouns and gendered terms (e.g., “mother”). Then sent a screening survey to all users with public contact details that were not men. To the 39 respondents, we then applied our our filtering criteria based on age, experience, still working in industry, and self-identified gender.
- To this end we have conducted a series of interviews with veteran women. We started with participants in the aforementioned thread. To identify women among the participants we looked into pronouns used on their profiles and gendered terms (such as ‘mother’).
- All these strategies have been proposed for “older developers”, but how old is old? Still, even the highest number, 50+ years, which is a common threshold in scientific papers [6], is far away from a typical retirement age in industrialized countries.
- Previous research has shown that 40 is the threshold when developers are starting to be seen as old, so we have reused the same threshold in the current study. We further operationalized ‘older’ as having at least 18 years of experience in the software industry, based on a typical career including school and university.
- To evaluate the stability of our findings, we also included three participants that, while not strictly belonging to the target demographics, might share experiences and strategies with other interviewees. One participant slightly younger, one who left the industry, and one identified as non-binary. The answers of those participants were in line with the other feedback we got from our interviews. In total, we have conducted 14 interviews until reaching saturation.
- Now Alexander is going to take over for the results. Overview of Sterre’s findings: strategies, experiences and perception. Of course, I do not expect you to see all the details. older women, who are sometimes unsure of whether the negative experiences were because of their gender or their age. There were not many Positive experiences related to age and gender, although Being a Role Model and More Opportunities Due to Gender and Age were found. One participant described how companies specifically looking to develop products aimed at her demographic led to opportunities: “A company approached me and said they were in the business, they wanted to make an app that would help predict who would have a stroke. . . They were like ‘our ideal candidate would be a Woman of Color [who has] also survived a stroke.’ ” Negative experiences were far more common, such as Seen as Non/less Technical , which has also been widely observed in the literature. We found that Gender Related Strategies contained the most strategies, with eight separate categories and 308 code segments. The categories were: Against Gender Bias Strategies, Career Related Strategies, Changing Work Environment, Changing Your Appearance, Communication Methods, Ignoring Situations, Traditionally Feminine, and Traditionally Masculine. Of these, Against Gender Bias Strategies was the largest category, with 70 code segments and eight subcodes, such as Backing Other Women Up
- Here we see the part of the sunburst related to experiences. We see many things that we have expected in relation to gender (e,g., sexism) and age (e.g., being considered behind on tech or too expensive). What is important is that intervieweesare sometimes unsure of whether the negative experiences were because of their gender or their age.
- Here we see the part of the sunburst related to experiences. older women, who are sometimes unsure of whether the negative experiences were because of their gender or their age. Please take time to read he quotes.
- On this slide we see strategies that the interviewees have implemented to survive. Some of the age-related strategies such as leveraging experience, or teaching new techniques have been discussed before; similarly exposing biases and backing up other women have been discussed in the literature. I would like to highlight a one of the strategies related to the intersection of gender and age.
- Dani’s quote suggests that age might be considered a positive after a certain point. At least when discussing programming with young men. Additionally, it might give some idea of how aging affects women within the industry. Dani’s quote suggests that when women are middle-aged, they are considered mothers, and when they are elderly, they are grandmothers. This highlights how women are thought of as motherly figures, which is seen in other strategies and experiences. This is also an example of the most diverse subcategory “Standing against bias”.
- So what does this all mean? Organisations should invest in creating a good working environment and a positive atmosphere, investing older developers of marginalized genders with sense of control of their work and their careers, supporting their promotion, assigning tasks and paying them on par with men. While these recommendations are true for any employer, they are even more pertinent for software engineering given the scarcity of older women and non-binary people in this industry. Moreover, specifically in case of software engineering the inclusion of developers who are more representative of the population ensures that the software can meet the needs of society as a whole.
- Developers themselves can move to a different work environment (e.g., by starting their company, moving to a different company, becoming consultant or manager) or try to change their work environment (e.g., by unionizing, standing up against gender bias or carving new opportunities for themselves). Changing appearance is one of the commonly mentioned but profoundly problematic strategies.
- So to summarise: we have tried to understand the experiences of veteran women, and recall that ‘veteran’ is 40 or older. We have conducted a series of interviews. We made several recommendations both to organisations and to veteran women developing software. We recognise that these recommendations are merely band aid solutions applied to systemic issues; however, we hope that in short-term they might help developers to survive in the industry.