There’s something really quite interesting about the iPhone-focused sessions we’ve attended here at WWDC; they have a demographic distribution which we have never, ever, seen anything even remotely akin to in over 20 years in professional programming.
Specifically, as we write this, we’re sitting on the side platform at “Controls, Views, and Animation on iPhone”, which is a pretty solidly geeky session even as the general run here goes, and of the four people immediately adjacent, two, that’s 50%, are women.
Those of you who have never been to a programming conference are, perhaps, thinking “yeah, women are 50% of the population, so they’re 50% of your neighbours, and why would that merit a post?”
On the other hand, those of you who have actually been to a programming conference before — well, you probably just figure we’re flat out lying. That would indeed be the rational response, as normally at these conferences, well, let’s put it this way, the pretend women — not that there’s anything wrong with that! — outnumber the biological women by a significant multiple. WWDC is noticeably less imbalanced than your typical Microsoft conference in that regard, and way less imbalanced than any Linux conference in that regard, but even in our comparatively-enlightened Apple world, the number of women in any engineering session could historically be most accurately quantified as “rounding error”. But here in the iPhone programming sessions, there’s an utterly unprecedented number of women. And generally attractive women, no less.
Looks like The Babe Theory of Political Movements applies to programming platforms as well … it’s just that until the iPhone came along, there never was a platform that qualified. Be interesting to see if these anecdotal observations of ours turn out to portend a statistically significant difference in iPhone programmer demographics from the general industry, won’t it now?
