JavaScript is for Girls
Miriam Posner · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2017
Unedited version of an article published in the spring 2017 edition of LOGIC Magazine (https://logicmag.io/) JavaScript is for Girls by Miriam Posner Technology has a gender problem, as everyone knows. The underrepresentation of women in technical fields has spawned legions of TED talks, SxSW panels, and women-friendly coding bootcamps. I’ve participated in some of these get-women-to- code workshops myself, and I sometimes encourage my students to get involved. Recently, though, I’ve noticed something strange: the women who are so assiduously learning to code seem to be devaluing certain tech roles simply by occupying them. It’s not always obvious to outsiders, but the term “technology sector” is a catch-all for a large array of distinct jobs. Of course there are PR, HR, and management roles. But even if we confine ourselves to web development, technical people often distinguish among “front-end,” “back-end,” and “full-stack” development. The partition between the two “ends” is the web itself. There are people who design and implement what you see in your web browser, there are people who do the programming that works behind the scenes, and there are people who do it all. In practice, the distinction is murky: some developers refer to everything user-facing as the front end, including databases and applications, and some developers use front- end to mean only what the user sees. But while the line shifts depending on who you’re talking to, most developers acknowledge its existence. I spoke to a number of developers who confirmed something I’d sensed: for some time, the technology industry has enforced a distinct hierarchy between front-end and back-end development. Front-end dev work isn’t real engineering, the story goes. Real programmers work on the back end, with serious programming languages. Women are often typecast as front-end developers, specializing in the somehow more feminine work of design, user experience, and front-end coding. Are women really more likely to be front-end developers? Numbers are hard to pin down. Most studies consider the tech sector as a single entity, with software engineers lumped together with HR professionals. A 2016 StackOverflow user survey showed that front-end jobs —“Designer,” “Quality Assurance,” and “Front-End Web Developer” — were indeed the top three titles held by women in the tech industry, although that survey itself has some problems. We need better numbers, as feminist developers have been saying for years, but it also doesn’t seem like a huge stretch to take developers at their word when they say that front-end development is understood to occupy the girlier end of the tech spectrum. Front-end developers, importantly, make about $30,000 less than people in back-end jobs like devops engineers, according to the salary aggregation site Glassdoor.