My students are always so excited that they’re “learning to code” when I teach them HTML and CSS, the basic building blocks of web pages. And I’m happy for them; it’s exhilarating to see, for the first time, how the web is built. Increasingly, though, I feel the need to warn them: the technology sector, like any other labor market, is a ruthless stratifier. And learning to code, no matter how good they get at it, won’t gain them entrance to a club run by people who don’t look like them.
this article equivocates between prejudice based on identity politics and prejudice based on actual ability, the much feared meritocracy.
But here’s the problem: the technology industry enforces a distinct gender hierarchy between front-end and back-end development. Women are typecast as front-end developers, while men work on the back end – where they generally earn significantly more money than their front-end counterparts.
well, I’m sure there’s no actual reason for that and it must be sexism. These jobs are exactly equivalent.
“the technology industry enforces” is doing a lot of work in this sentence.
I’ve done both frontend-ish and backend-ish work at the same company and I think the entire frontend/backend dichotomy is the wrong way to think about web development.
to some extent it’s an artifact of the current client/server paradigm, but there definitely is a difference between the UI and the underlying model.
This was so long ago it might not apply, but when I did webdev, I did front end rather than backend because i was able to teach myself front end and get good at it. When I tried to learn backend stuff myself it was too much for me to pick up while doing other work.
It was less “boo hoo I’m a girl” and more “shit, i’ve reached the point where I can’t really learn this quickly without taking an actual class. I can’t teach myself Perl fast enough to be useful.”
Doesn’t this article suggest getting women to learn how to code isn’t the be-all-end-all of getting them good paying CS jobs and that requires more formal education and/or extensive mentorship?
We can teach women to code, but that just creates another problem
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