Title: Editorial

When I sit down to write one of these editorials I try to stir your brain cells. When I first started to write them I was hoping to stimulate others the way that John Campbell stirred me in his editorials for Astounding Science Fiction (later metamorphosed into Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact). I will never have either his talent or his audience, but like him I have some unpopular views. I do not mind rational disagreement but I resent flat out denial. I will listen to your views as long as you will grant me the right to disagree.

Over the last dozen years we have had a growing domination by the new fundamentalist religion of political correctness which seeks to deny us the option of disagreeing. If I want to consider the possibility that men, in general, might be better programmers than women, I am clearly a sexist pig. According to the PC doctrine, the massive dominance of men in programming proves that the software industry oppresses women. The dominance of women in sales and marketing is taken as further evidence that men are oppressing women.

PC people have decided they know what the problem is; their minds are closed. They are bigots because they hold onto beliefs without any regard to facts. Indeed they flatly refuse to consider that there might be any other explanation. No doubt the PC community believes that men do not become pregnant but force women to is also a form of oppression.

There has been a long running debate in education of nurture versus nature. In other words is it your genes or your upbrining that makes you waht you are. The rational answer is a bit of both. Sometimes the same end result can be achieved either way. Blindness (sorry, visually challenged) can be the result of a genetic fault, an accident or a disease.

Now let me look at a few reported facts. Brain scans show that you can 95% accurately identify the sex of a test subject from the pattern of brain activity that shows when the subject does particular things. Other evidence shows that most women can happily multi-task up to five things at a time while most men cannot focus on even two things simultaneously. On the other hand most men score much more highly on visual manipulation tests than do most women. What is interesting is that the exceptional cases are largely consistent. The person you identify as female on a brain scan happily passes a multi-tasking test regardless as to biological gender. The woman who shows male characteristic brain activity also exhibits male levels of success in spatial manipulation tests. Quite apart from the obvious physical differences between the sexes that allow us to unambiguously classify most humans as male or female, there also seems to be another classification that largely and consistently classifies human beings into two groups. The results of the two classifications are very close but not identical. There are tentative ideas as to how these differences come about (related to testosterone concentrations in the foetal brain versus the rest of the body) but that is not important here. What is important is that there appears to be two types of brain that human beings may have. Type A brains exhibit good multi-tasking, high quality language skills and poor spatial manipulation, type B brains are good at single processing, good at spatial manipulation, have poor language skills. For whatever reason type A brains are largely found in those who have two X-chromosomes and type B in those that have an X and a Y chromosome. Those with type A brains make good carers, communicators etc., while those with type B do not. If being PC causes you to deny this then you are into irrational belief structures not science.

Now I want to rephrase my question. What is there about programming that seems to attract those with type B brains? I am pretty sure that those with type B brains prefer most computer games because these require spatial manipulation coupled with aggression (another characteristic of type B brains) but why actual programming? Is it something to do with programming per se? If so, then we should accept that there will always be a percentage of good female programmers and a much higher number of good male ones. Good programmers will tend to have poor skills, they will never be suitable baby-minders etc. Notice that I did not say male in that last sentence. A good female programmer will probably share those same deficiencies with her male colleagues. Now, if you do not think it is inherent in the process of programming we will have to look elsewhere. Perhaps it is the structure of the most widely used computing languages. Not unreasonable as most computing languages were designed by men and so will be in a form that men are happy with. A pity we cannot go back and test Grace Hopper (creator of COBOL) to see which type of brain she had, but I would bet that it was a type B.

It would certainly be interesting to get some brain scan results for a wide sample of programmers and see if there is any coherence in the results. It would also be interesting to look at areas in computing where the sex distribution is the other way round. Are there any computing languages where women have a significantly higher presence? How do the brain types distribute in such cases. What about programming methodologies? Do they impact on the predominance of type B brains over type A? I do not know the answers but until we are allowed to ask the question and think about the implications we can make no progress. If successful programming requires a type B brain then it is utterly futile to seek an equal balance of men and women in programming. If type A brains can program just as well as type B then we have a sex discrimination problem.

Now one thing crosses my mind, how good are type A brains at handling multi-tasking program design and implementation? All the current methodologies are aimed at getting us poor apes to be able to cope with thinking about multi-tasking with a single-tasking brain. Perhaps we need to get a group of talented type A brains to design a language and methodology for multi-task programming. The biggest drawback is that the current experts will not be able to cope with the results because they will think wrongly.

You do not have to agree with me but I think it is worth considering that current software development requires a way of thought that comes much naturally to most men and only a few women. I think we need to focus on helping people to fulfil themselves and that means helping those burdened with excessive testosterone to manage their behaviour appropriately rather than trying to convert into what they are not. Yes, it is true that most men can only think of one thing (at a time), but it is also true that most women struggle with map-reading, so match the natural skills to the jobs. Respect people for being good at what they do but do not make them discontent because of the things they cannot do.