代码的世界里，没有性别

2月16日，大年初五，一则与“年”无关的微博话题登上热搜——

一位网友在整理奶奶的遗物时，无意中发现一张背面写满代码的照片。他无法理解其中的含义，便将照片发到网上求助。

在众人的努力下，这段“密码文”最终被成功破译，三行数字表达的只有一句话——

“信任与爱就是我对你永远的态度。”

跨越年代，网友们被这简单却极具冲击力的“代码式浪漫”感动了，围绕着代码与爱的话题讨论开来。

在随之衍生而来的微博话题#如何利用代码表白#下，涌现了各式各样的回答——

值得注意的是，在这个话题下，也有女性程序员加入讨论——

她们的加入，让女程序员这个平常似乎不容易被注意到的群体出现在公众面前，也让网友们对这个话题的讨论，从单向的表达变成了双向的互动。

在许多人的观念中，常被调侃为“码农”的程序员们，是一个有着清晰画像的群体：

不修边幅的发型，万年不变的格子衬衫，还有一双可以走天下的人字拖……

这样的群体画像，常常让人们忽略了一个事实——

其实在编程的世界里，还有一群写代码的女孩们。

Are women poorer in logical thinking than men? For a long time, the answer to this question would have been a "yes." 

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01

“喜欢就去做”

27岁的刘丽君是北京一家科技公司的人工智能算法工程师。

从高中时起就擅长理科的她，大学选择了自动化专业。尽管父母希望她成为一名医生或老师，但强烈的好奇心还是把她引向了不同的方向——

“因为自动化嘛，我感觉它代表未来的高科技。”

毕业三年后，她成了一名人们口中的“女程序员”，每天泡在代码中，思考的常常是诸如“怎样通过算法加速降低人工成本”之类的硬核问题。

作为公司开发部门中唯一一名女生，刘丽君承认有“孤独”的时候。但她始终是充满自信的，对这份工作的投入也不比任何人少——

“大家觉得女性逻辑思维比男性差一点，但真的有报告或研究这样证明吗？不管标签定义得多么广泛，都是带有偏见的。”

"But is there a study or report that can justify this gender gap? No," said Liu Lijun, a 27-year-old software developer at a Beijing-based startup applying AI to education.

With a degree in automation and control engineering, Liu has been good at STEM subjects since high school. Though her parents expected her to become a teacher or doctor, she chose to be a coder upon graduating three years ago. "In my department, I'm the only girl. Sometimes I feel like an 'aberration' with all male colleagues and mentors around," said the Natural Language Programming (NLP) engineer during an interview with CGTN.

26岁的崔晨曦也是一名女程序员，目前在阿里巴巴做数据库的工程质量管理。

和刘丽君一样，怀着对理工科、对计算机技术的兴趣，崔晨曦在毕业后选择了这份能够带给她“挑战和自豪感”的工作。

谈起身边为数不多的女程序员，她骄傲地说——

“我身边有很多清华北大博士毕业的女程序员，她们是‘部门之光’，做得特别特别好。”

不过，作为部门里的“少数派”，她也面临着和刘丽君一样的烦恼。比如，和身边的男同事一起聚餐时，她常常觉得自己难以融入。

尽管如此，她仍然觉得对于一份职业而言，性别不是最重要的，“喜欢就去做”——

“我觉得任何基于性别的标签都是比较刻板化的。不管是男程序员还是女程序员，大家工作中都是非常积极努力的，靠自己的能力创造出一片天地。没有人说因为我是个女生，就可以付出得比别人少而获得相应的成果。”

Cui Chenxi, nearly the same age as Liu, works at the data engineering and quality assurance department at China's e-commerce giant Alibaba. Among the hundreds of employees in her department, the number of women is in the single digits. "There's a certain bias against women in the workplace. Sometimes male colleagues would ask me to buy fruit or order food for meetings," she grinned.

There is a clear gap when it comes to the expectations of STEM jobs for men and women. For instance, employers usually underestimate women's logical reasoning and skills. Similarly, when parents focus more on intellect for boys and appearances for girls, this speaks to the deeper values that a society holds.

These ingrained stereotypes led men to be the preferred choice of IT firms. In China, women accounted for roughly 18 percent of all coders in 2020, an increase of up to 70 percent from 2018, according to statistics released by Liepin, the country's largest high-end talent recruitment site, and tech giant Tencent.

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02

“家庭与事业的永久博弈”

2020年10月，腾讯联合猎聘发布的《中国女性程序员职场力大数据报告》显示：

过去三年间，女性程序员的增长比例近70%，平均月薪达到1.5万元，其中00后女生更愿意成为程序员。

尽管如此，但就目前而言，中国女程序员在整个行业的占比仍不到20%，且越往管理层走，人越少。

董晶是少数在这个领域走得比较远的女性之一，37岁的她目前已经是行业的领航员：

中国科学院自动化研究所副研究员、中国人工智能学会理事、中国图象图形学学会副秘书长、国际电气电子工程师学会亚太区执委、硕士生导师……

"We've seen more and more women joining the computer-science industry but most of them are enrolled in support or administrative divisions. The proportion of women in scientific research remains disproportionally low," said Dong Jing, a veteran computer scientist at the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The 37-year-old associate researcher and master tutor has developed an established career at the country's top science academy for a decade. She was the only female PhD in her class who chose to take on frontline R&D work upon graduation and is now the only woman in a 17-people center for research on intelligence perception and computing. She has earned many prestigious titles for female programmers. Dong is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the first Chinese woman to be appointed as the institute's Women in Engineering regional coordinator.

抛开那些闪亮的头衔，董晶还是两个男孩的妈妈，是一名常常在家庭与事业中面临两难的、投身科研的技术工作者——

“像我们中心的话，有17位所编的职工，但只有我一个人是女性科研一线人员……对于大部分女性，职业生涯发展阶段都有一个转折点，就是在结婚、寻找配偶之后她们要经历组建新的家庭、生儿育女这样一个阶段，这对她们职业的挑战是很大的，不仅限于工科和科技女性。因为她们要把很大的精力投入到家庭中，投入到子女养育的这个过程当中。”

而对于立志投身科研的技术女性来说，这样的挑战只会更大——

“真正要做科研的话，需要有源源不断的投入，源源不断的创造力。科研对终身学习、终身投入的要求是很高的。有很多职业它是允许有这样一个中断期的，但是科研的话，如果你中断了，很有可能你的科研生涯就会从此中断。”

Behind these accomplishments is her relentless effort to be on par with her male counterparts. "A computer-science project requires persistent commitment. You have to throw yourself in it, accumulating experience and know-how," Dong, a mother of two, told CGTN. "For many professions, you can take a hiatus, but your career could end if you take a break in your research." The fast-moving tech industry means that time off for a pregnancy could irreparably damage a woman's career.

现在，对董晶来说，“这边在开着项目研讨会，那边孩子没有人接”的生活状态仍是常态。

她在过去人生的各个阶段都曾犹豫过，思考该向事业或家庭的哪一端倾斜。最终，她选择了更难的那条路。科研事业和家庭责任，她决定哪样都不放弃，不断在社会的各种角色中寻找平衡点，不断为之挣扎、为之努力——

“过30左右那道坎的时候深思熟虑过，要不要从科研一线退下来，或者说（从事）指导教学工作，动过各种各样的心思。但是最后综合考虑我认为，这个职业带给我的不是负担，从长远看的话应该是终生的投入和人生的投资。对于孩子，不是说我们必须要二选一，通过自己的一些有效的配置，一些努力，我们还是能达到一个非常好的目标。现在我自己觉得生活和工作平衡得还行。当然还是有所愧疚，但我认为还是可以做到很好。”

What's more, the impression that "women in coding are a bunch of sexless nerds" is also keeping women away from the industry. Unsurprisingly, most mentors in tech are male, and thus make up most of the judges for various tech competitions.

So does all this mean that women can't make good coders? History begs to differ. In the mid-19th century, women were pioneers in programming while males in the industry were largely viewed as "aberrations." That was a time when programming wasn't consider the high-status work as it is today, but rather secondary, painstaking scut work.

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03

“代码没有性别”

尽管编程领域如今看起来像是男性主导的领地，但纵观计算机技术发展史，很难绕开几位女性的名字。

Ada Lovelace

1842年，著名英国诗人拜伦之女、被誉为“数字女王”的阿达•洛芙莱斯（Ada Lovelace）编写了首款电脑程序，成为人类历史上第一位计算机程序员。

Born over 200 years ago, Ada Lovelace is considered the first computer programmer. The daughter of the English poet Lord Byron, Lovelace didn't get to know her famous father personally, but she made a name for herself when she took an interest in a machine designed by Charles Babbage that could do mathematics. She is credited for writing the first algorithm for this gigantic calculator. She saw the potential for the machine to not only manipulate numbers, but also to serve as a tool that could expand human imagination one day.

Grace Hopper

1945年，美国海军将军格蕾丝•赫柏（Grace Hopper）、耶鲁大学首个数学系女博士，在经历一次偶然的计算机故障事件后，成为第一个将原本普普通通的词汇——“bug”（小虫）变成计算机行业专业术语的人；不仅如此，1959年，赫柏成功研制出人类历史上第一个商用编程语言COBOL，而COBOL语言最重要的特征是语法与英文接近，可以让不懂电脑的人也能看懂程序。

Margaret Hamilton

20世纪60年代，负责给“阿波罗11号”登月项目计算机制导系统写源代码的美国计算机科学家、系统工程师玛格丽特•汉密尔顿（Margaret Hamilton），在艰难的时期里为人类成功登月做出了不可磨灭的贡献。后来有人这样评价她：“没有玛格丽特•汉密尔顿，就没有阿姆斯特朗的一小步和人类的一大步。”

For a more contemporary figure, look no further than the mathematician Grace Hopper, a rear admiral for the U.S. Navy. She coined the term "bug" to refer to computer errors and wrote the first compiler that could translate a programming language in English into machine code. Hopper was known for her gutsy no-nonsense attitude, which fit her image as a trailblazer in the mid-20th century.

Zhang Qixia, among China's first female coders, wrote the code that calculated the trajectories of China's first ever satellite – Dongfanghong 1, which was launched on April 24, 1970. /Xinhua

此外，还有被称作“中国第一位女程序员”的张绮霞——中国第一颗人造卫星的地面跟踪，主要程序就是出自她的手笔。

……

作为推动计算机行业发展的重要力量之一，她们为这个领域做出的先驱性贡献不应被遗忘。

Throughout the early 1980s, nearly 40 percent of graduates with degrees in computer science were women in the U.S.

Across the Pacific, a woman named Zhang Qixia wrote the code that calculated the trajectories of China's first ever satellite. At the age of 29, she took part in compiling the country's first book on software engineering. Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was neither BASIC nor COBOL. She wrote code and modified instructions on punch cards without "bugs."

In recent decades, computer science and software engineering has become the domain of boys and men due to the influence of cultural perceptions as well as the prestige attached to the profession. Gradually internet companies, predicated on what they consider "meritocracies," have indirectly closed their doors to women, forgetting that much of the trailblazing work owe their origins to female programmers.

At Google and Facebook, only one in five coders are women; at Twitter, the percentage is lower: 15 percent; other tech firms in Silicon Valley have similar austere gender imbalances.

In China, the internet boom kicked in much later but have expanded rapidly. Some 4,000 startups were established every day on average in 2015, attracting talents from various scientific fields.

The women at NASA were known as "human computers." Their attention to detail and precision on top of their mathematical abilities helped the space agency achieve great things, such as Margaret Hamilton, whose calculations helped put the first human on the moon in 1969. Then there's Katherine Johnson, who helped the first Americans go to space despite facing the dual challenges of being a woman and black during that era.

如今，放眼世界，女程序员仍是行业中的少数：

在谷歌和脸书公司，男女程序员的性别比例为5:1；在推特公司，女程序员所占比例更是只有15%。

但随着时代的进步和技术的更迭，编程语言与科技世界已向所有人敞开大门。作为通过知识和努力去换取成果的职业之一，“程序员”一词所附带的性别色彩也必将随时间而慢慢褪去。

事实上，多数人选择从事这份职业，仅仅是出于“喜欢就去做”的初心。

正如IT界那句人人朗朗上口的“名言”——

"Talk is cheap. Show me the code."（“废话少说，放码过来。”）

他们抛开外界标签，为自己所热爱之事而投入奉献，并从中收获尊严与快乐——

在这样的代码世界里，没有性别。

"Women are born resilient and sensitive," said Dong. "We would pay more attention to details and the connections among them, as well as subtle ripple effects of a phenomenon." Personalities play a very important role in the field of science. Men assume leadership roles because they are generally more charismatic and aggressive, while women are prone to help the marginalized, she added.

A female perspective is badly needed in the industry that drives the future forward. "For instance, when a female engineer among us brought her kid to go shopping, she found women would bring their children to go shopping and always take pictures with their smartphones. So it's this real-life experience that gave us an inspiration of measuring interior air quality," Dong told CGTN about one project she participated in. "So we developed a network of sensors to monitor the air inside a mall. All the users need to do is upload the data from their phones or handheld sensors to a platform that would allow us to monitor air quality in real-time." The platform built by a bunch of female techies have been quite popular with young mothers since its launch. Plus, most female students are fast learners, she observes. She would admit more women as her students than other tutors. 

"The era of AI is here. This tech explosion calls for a greater need of coders, so it's time that internet firms enroll in more women," Liu grinned. Liu is very proud of herself, especially whenever she finds a way to lower costs by creating faster algorithms.

As for the future of women in coding and the wider science field, the Chinese government has instituted a national policy allocating funding to encourage young women aged 38 or under to pursue STEM careers, and 35 or below for men, with the disparity giving leeway to women who want to get pregnant and have children.

While this is a good start from the top, Dong Jing thinks cultural change is necessary. She said that she wants to serve as a role model for girls, not only as an accomplished professional in the industry but as an example of the different ways that females can contribute to society on an equal footing with men. "The intrinsic satisfaction we derive from the profession transcends gender boundaries."

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