On a recent Acela ride from New York to Boston, when I wasn’t remarking on my good fortune at not having derailed, I read two articles from what seems to be American journalism’s deep well of “Women can’t succeed in the workforce” pieces.
The first was from the sub-well of “Women yearn to sit at a desk for 30 years and stare at a computer (until they’ve outlived their utility to employers) but men are preventing them from taking these programming jobs.” “A big documentary on Silicon Valley’s sexism problem” (Claire Suddath, Bloomberg Business, May 14, 2015) says that
Gender equality in Silicon Valley isn’t just an altruistic ideal but a way for women to start earning fair wages. According to a 2014 White House report, more than 1 million jobs will be created in computing and related fields by 2020; less than 1 percent of those will go to American women. The average salary for a Bay Area software engineer is about $130,000, says San Francisco placement firm Riviera Partners. “I really think this is a Rosie the Riveter moment,” says Jocelyn Goldfein, a director of engineering at Facebook. “The jobs are here, and we don’t have the people to fill them.”
The ADP Paycheck Calculator says that $130,000 in California works out to $82,000 per year after taxes. That is enough to cover the median rent ($43,740 per year) on a Palo Alto apartment but there won’t be a huge amount left over after paying for a car, food, etc. Why would anyone, male or female, be desperate to go through years of training to take an all-consuming job where the income was just 2X the cost of an apartment near the job?
[Related: “Women in Science” — asking if it is possible that bright hardworking women are able to find better jobs than academic science.]
The second was “While at War, Female Soldiers Fight to Belong” (Benedict Carey, New York Times, May 24, 2015), concentrating on Lt. Courtney Wilson. Here’s what the Times implies is the typical experience of being a female U.S. Army officer:
In the months to come, that sense of exclusion would deepen into depression. Halfway through her deployment, she sent an email to a friend at home saying she was determined not to kill herself.
The psychic distress is measurable. More than 38 percent of women report depressive symptoms after deployment,
Women are 10 times more likely than men to have reported serious sexual harassment.
“She experienced depression and panic attacks after being deployed to Afghanistan.”
http://www.goarmy.com/benefits/money/basic-pay-active-duty-soldiers.html shows that a lieutenant earns roughly $55,000 per year (taxable). On a strictly economic basis that hardly seems worth the aggravation and mental anguish described, not to mention the potential for combat risk (though if one reaches the rank of four-star general, Bloomberg says that cash may follow).
“Women in Science” focuses on the professions as an alternative to seeking an academic science faculty job. The theory being that anyone capable of getting a PhD in science and doing work interesting enough to make it at a top academic institution would be likely to have an above-average career as a medical specialist. Compared to the above jobs, however, it might be enough simply to have sex with an above-average medical specialist. Consider the person who goes into Manhattan and has sex with a doctor or dentist earning $360,000 per year. Under New York law, if custody of the resulting child can be obtained, this results in a 21-year tax-free cash flow of $61,200 per year (17 percent of pre-tax income; about $1.3 million total). That’s plainly more than the Army lieutenant’s $55,000/year pre-tax income. If the recipient of the $61,200/year decides to live in the artists’ community of Beacon, New York, for example, where the average rent is less than half of what it costs in Silicon Valley, the child support profiteer will enjoy a better lifestyle than the Silicon Valley software engineer. [Note that the child support revenue can be doubled or tripled with additional children.]
Given the ever-present alternative of child support, if the journalists’ portrayals of life in the workforce are accurate, can waged employment be an economically rational choice for American women of childbearing age?
more than 1 million jobs will be created in computing and related fields by 2020; less than 1 percent of those will go to American women.
More than 50% of those jobs will go to H-1B immigrants.
less than 1 percent of those will go to American women.
Should read: American women will seek almost none of those jobs.
Hi Phil,
I’m not entirely convinced that the child support profiteer could enjoy a better lifestyle than a Silicon Valley software engineer at the income level you mentioned. Even though I don’t have any children, and haven’t taken the time to research child care expenses at the moment, I have a suspicion that $61,200/year ($5,100/month) won’t result in the same disposable income/time after expenses.
For the first four years, If you assume basic living expenses of rent, food, utilities (including internet), transportation, misc., etc., then add in the extra expense in diapers, baby clothing, formula, whatever else, and the opportunity cost of having to look after the child 24/7, I don’t see the equivalent lifestyle.
If you try to factor in day care, babysitters, or a full-time nanny to reduce the time commitment, you start reducing disposable income even more. A cursory search for some of these costs could range from $1,000 to $3,000 a month depending on the level of care (day care vs full-time nanny).
Specifically, how do you see the financials and free-time break-down to provide equivalence? Am I missing something?
I forgot to add that I’m assuming the profiteer wants to avoid having to work a full-time job. Of course, if she will continue to work, it all works out. Is that what I missed? 😀
Bob: The idea that a single child costs a significant fraction of $61,200/year is not supported by the fact that people whose after-tax income is less than $61,200 often have more than one child and yet are not on public assistance. See https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2014/12/03/family-law-reform-conference-report/ for UCLA Econ professor Bill Comanor’s analysis of what married couples actually do spend on children.
[And, separately, if a child support plaintiff wishes to park a child in day care prior to the availability of government-provided free day care (a.k.a. “K-12 school”), it is typically for a judge to order the defendant to pay for that above and beyond the child support cashflow.]
Your $130k salary number sounds really low given the recent talent shortage and higher compensations that have resulted. You also should consider total comp and not salary, as many SWEs get a fair chunk of compensation in non salary (bonus 401k etc.).
Palo Alto rents are insane. Fortunately most employers are not in Palo Alto. Most of my engineer friends are currently paying 2-3k/month rent in Mountain View or Sunnyvale.
Chris: If you look at the original posting you’ll see that “Your $130k salary number” is a quote from the Bloomberg Business article (based on data from a placement firm). http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm says that the median pay nationwide for a software developer is $93,350. Thus it does not seem implausible that the median in Silicon Valley is $130,000/year.
How is it that you might be familiar with people who get paid more? People who get paid above-median incomes tend to be more prominent and work for more prominent firms than people who get paid below-median incomes, just as startups that succeed tend to be more prominent in the public’s mind than startups that fail (example: try to name 100 other microcomputer companies that started around the same time as Apple and Microsoft).
Is it possible to rent an apartment on El Camino in Sunnyvale for less than the median number in Palo Alto? Plainly it would be, just as it would be possible even in Palo Alto to rent an apartment for less than the median number. On the other hand, we can circle back to the original posting and ask “Why would anyone, male or female, want to study for years and then work 60 hours/week in order to live in an apartment complex on El Camino in Sunnyvale?” (or maybe across one of the bridges and then take one of the employer-supplied hour-long bus rides to work)
Not to disagree with any of your points – but I wish someone would undertake (and publicize the results of) a survey to determine how many of the women who actually _take_ programming jobs (“software engineer”) are still doing that job 5 years later … not to mention 10. I’ve met one (one!) in my very long career.
Those few women who start in programming exit it fast. There are three routes I know of: becoming management, and becoming a program manager (i.e., a project manager). At least it used to be the case – in the 90s – that women in programming jobs were promoted fast to lead and then engineering management – much faster than men, because companies were desperate to show that women could succeed. I worked for a couple of women in management roles who were promoted from programmer, back then. I haven’t seen it recently though, not sure why.
But it could have to do with the second route: Leaving programming to do something else with a technical component – typically project management of software projects. The several women I’ve known who’ve done that _all_ said they liked working with programmers/engineers but hated programming. Those women advance to management too, eventually, but not via programming.
(The third route I don’t know much about but surely exists: Leaving engineering work altogether.)
For at least the last 25 years, companies bend over backwards to hire women into programming jobs, giving candidates every benefit of every doubt during the hiring process. That still yields very few women programmer employees because there are very few women applicants. And then they don’t stay programmers.
In San Francisco, the median salary for a dental hygenist is $112,970, for a software developer, $114,400, and for a registered nurse, $127.670.
The regional median salary summary comes US News Best Jobs, which uses BLS data. I’ll admit the salary for programmers in SF does sound a bit low. It’s higher in San Jose. However, they are reporting the median, and my guess is that programming salaries have a wider distribution than for nursing or dental hygiene as well (though if you start to include nurse practitioners in specialty fields, salaries can be very high).
Programmers have flexibility in the sense that they can usually go get a cup of coffee whenever they like, but they have very poor “career stability” in the sense that they can’t scale back on work in response to life events without harming their overall career progress. One attractive feature of dental hygiene or nursing is that you can scale back on work (or leave the workforce entirely) for a few years and re-enter the field later full time (this is also true of many medical specialty fields, such as radiology, that of course pay vastly more). This is much harder to do in programming, and my guess is that age-related employment issues are greater among programmers than dental hygienists.
I’m not trying to say that there are no good reasons to be a programmer, nor do I have any problem at all with good pay for nurses or dental hygienists. In fact, I’d encourage men to take a second look at these health-related occupations that require only a BA or AA degree (or even just some community college). If you’d like good pay, flexibility, less age discrimination, and the approval of your peers (nurses poll high in occupational prestige), and you don’t want the debt or long grind of med school, there may be excellent opportunities for men in nursing or dental hygiene.
Jeff: Thanks for the data. Around the same time as I wrote the posting we had a visit from some cousins. The wife is in the second half of her 60s working as an entertainment lawyer. She prepares contracts using contract law knowledge that she gained 40 years ago and that is still valid. Her value to clients is higher than it was 20 or 30 years ago, despite her age and lack of energy, because her Rolodex is larger now. I think that it is very unlikely that she could still be working in the software industry at her age (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2015/04/30/mit-alumni-in-their-50s/ ). Thus even if programming paid more than lawyering (in her case it almost definitely would not have!), her lifetime income from being a lawyer is much higher because she was able to continue working for at least an additional 15 years.
As you noted, she has also enjoyed flexibility in her career. She took on fewer clients when her children were young, scaled up as they got older, scaled back when she developed some health issues, scaled back up as those were resolved.
Right now I have got an 18-year-old intern. He has passed three programming courses: AP CS in high school, Python programming in high school, intro CS/Java at Harvard. At age 18 his skills are already obsolete because so much needs to be done in CSS and JavaScript, languages that he does not know. He will have to invest a lot of unpaid time to learn these languages if he wants to earn a wage.
@Philg: “At age 18 his skills are already obsolete because so much needs to be done in CSS and JavaScript, languages that he does not know.” Why so much focus on language specific skill in programming is something bugs me. What happened to problem solving skills? Understanding what scales and what not? Figuring out the best way to write code that will last past its age? And so on and so fort.
With regards to “women as programmers” I work for a large company (think Oracle, IBM, etc.) and I can tell you we have women all over the map who are programmers. However, they are 95% foreigners vs. American (living here in the US or abroad). Some are better then me and others are so-so. Like others have said in this post, in my company we also have a lot of women who are managers, the majority of them (up to 98%) are American, and were moved up to fill a gap and to balance the “papers”.
George: I’m sure that he has had 13 years of praise for his problem-solving skills, starting in K and continuing through 12. Sadly Google Chrome seems more interested in syntactically correct CSS and JavaScript. Hence my focus on his knowledge of these languages. As Al Drake said to the MIT student in an applied math course who complained about losing credit on an exam due to a sign error, “sometimes a sign error means the rocket goes down instead of up.”
“He has passed three programming courses: AP CS in high school, Python
programming in high school, intro CS/Java at Harvard. At age 18 his skills are already obsolete because so much needs to be done in CSS and JavaScript,
languages that he does not know. He will have to invest a lot of unpaid time to learn these languages if he wants to earn a wage.”
No, Philip — your intern’s (server-side) skills are not obsolete; they’re just not the (client-side) skills you happen to need at the moment. If he continues to develop them, his skills should enable him to do reasonably well as a back-end developer, the sort who might never be asked to write any CSS or Javascript.
You might have him ramp up on front-end issues or you might find a front-end person to help with your client-side issues as they come up and put your intern on back-end tasks that might be more in line with what he knows and/or is interested in. For example, from your description of his endeavors, it appears he hasn’t yet been exposed to databases, a back-end area that is quite important and one that you are well-equipped to supervise/mentor him in, assuming you have tasks in that vein to assign him.
David: The idea that a beginner programmer should do a tiny piece of a larger project (e.g., write two lines of SQL code and one Java procedure, then rely on more experienced team members to work those into a full system) is not that I have found to be effective in developing software engineers. I like to give beginners small projects where they can do the whole project. That means that even someone who aspires to be a back-end programmer will have to learn a little something about CSS, HTML, JavaScript, etc. See http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/ for example.
“I like to give beginners small projects where they can do the whole project. That means that even someone who aspires to be a back-end programmer will have to learn a little something about CSS, HTML, JavaScript, etc.”
Fair enough. And it’s likely that back-end developers will pick up at least a bit of front-end knowledge and vice versa — and it’s a good thing that they do, even if it’s only so they can speak intelligently with their counterparts about issues crossing the front/back boundary or to be able to read/debug their code in a pinch, etc. Your intern apparently didn’t get to do this till now, probably because he’s learning software-related skills in school and CS courses do not generally focus on front-end skills.
(And, even had he taken a web-focused course like Harvard’s CS50, he would’ve only gotten a taste — I doubt any college course would teach the vagaries of browser compatibility issues any more than I’d expect you to teach students in a database course the various ways in which RDBMS’s extend and/or violate the ANSI SQL standard. A lot of this stuff is learned by doing or by taking in reports from more advanced practioners in books, blogs and videos of conference presentations.)
So, as you pointed out earlier, someone like your intern may need to take some time to learn skills he doesn’t know — at times as part of his job, at times on his own — but continuing education is the lot of software-engineers.
But none of this means his skill-set is obsolete, just incomplete. And not fatally so.