There’s a heated debate today that was kicked off by the venerable Jeff Atwood in his blog post “Please Don’t Learn to Code”, which was promptly followed up by Sasha Greif with “Please Learn to Code”. Sasha is the designer behind Code Year, a project by Codecademy to promote coding to the masses.

I think the great divide comes down to what coding actually means. Jeff refers to coding as coding for a living, whereas Sasha takes coding to mean learning some basics and building a web page.

Most commenters on Jeff’s blog and Hacker News have disagreed with Jeff, generally on the premise that the people aren’t learning to code to be a professional programmer, but rather knowing how to code is increasingly becoming a type of literacy.

But again, what is “coding”? Knowing how to write FizzBuzz in their programming language of choice? There are professional programmers that cannot correctly do seemingly simple programming exercises like this, and Jeff refers to this group when he says “[…] most people who already call themselves programmers can’t even code” to support the argument that adding mediocre programmers to the workforce is not a good thing.

The other camp contends that learning to code teaches people how computers work, and that it empowers people to be creators, sentiments I agree with and have written about in previous posts.

But Sasha goes on to say that another goal is “letting people know that learning to code is not that hard, and that if they put their mind to it they have a high chance of succeeding.”

And I think it is this sentiment that Jeff really takes issue with. Because coding is hard. One of Jeff’s old posts cites research that boils down to this: “the act of programming seems literally unteachable to a sizable subset of incoming computer science students.” If half the motivated students that have voluntarily chosen to study computer science cannot grasp assignment and iteration in the first year, is it reasonable to assume everyone should?

I have heard from many people who said they tried learning how to code, but it was too hard, and they eventually gave up. Maybe for the majority of people, the time required to really understand how to code is simply not worthwhile.

So perhaps it’s more useful to teach everyone computer literacy, how the technologies we rely on every day actually work, like the Internet. The reason I think people should learn coding is so they can see that technology is not static. You can change it and create things that do what you want. But perhaps teaching people about variables is not necessary to impart this. More and more, there are wysiwyg editors that allow people to create things that used to require coding. ifttt.com is a great example. The important thing is that you know how to solve problems with technology. Perhaps the new generation of digital natives already know this intrinsically anyway.

This is a version of the lightning talk I gave at the Women Who Code Meet Up last month. It’s in the context of why start up founders should code, but can be applied to anyone on a small tech start up team.

1. Understand what is actually going on

So you have validated your business idea, now you need to build it. When you code, you learn how long things take to implement. You know what’s hard to do, what’s not, what can be done with the team you have, what skills you lack and need to hire for. You have a much deeper understanding of how things work, and if your livelihood depends on running a business on top of all this code, then you should understand how the underlying technology works, and where the risks are.

I think especially for female entrepreneurs, being able to code lends a lot of credibility, which is pretty important when you want to be taken seriously by people you’re trying to extract money from.

2. Discovering opportunities

The novelist E.M. Forster wrote “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”

I think this applies to coding in the same way that you don’t really know how things will work out until you actually attempt to build it. It is only in the process of building that certain revelations appear. This is how companies often end up becoming successful not with their original idea, but with a byproduct that they built while implementing their original idea. When you code you learn about abstraction. You can separate the underlying technology from the current application. You can see how the technology can be adapted and used in other ways. When you’re removed from the process of building, you will miss opportunities that only emerge during the building process.

3. Dealing with failure

This came to me recently when I was particularly frustrated with trying to fix a bug all day. Coding often involves long periods of time when you don’t feel like you’re making any progress because you’re stuck on trying to solve a unique problem. You’re trying all these different ways to solve it, but you’re failing a lot along the way. This is very similar to getting a start up off the ground. You’re trying all these things in the hopes of making a break through, but a lot of these things won’t work out. When you code, you’re already used to that, so I think it’s easier to push ahead in the face of countless obstacles, because you have built up this trust that you will find a way to solve it, or a work-around (which could end up being the better solution!).

4. Getting stuff done

Coding or hacking is a frame of mind, and you will get more stuff done faster, which is what start ups are all about. You can create tools that will help you, even if your main role isn’t a programmer. Let’s say you’re in marketing, you can make your own demos and prototypes of new features to validate with potential customers, or integrate better analytics tools to improve metrics gathering. There are so many tedious tasks that could be improved with software, if only the people that had to do these tasks knew how to code.

My very first co-op job when I was a first-year student was at a roofing company, where I was tasked with manually copying thousands of slides of training material from Word documents into a new system. Instead of doing that, I wrote a parser that could fairly reliably extract the data from the documents and insert it directly into the database of the new system. I then had the rest of my work term essentially free.

5. Finding a co-founder

There are a lot of people looking for this mythical technical co-founder that will realize their product vision and get them funded. I think the time could be better spent learning how to code, and making a prototype of your product idea on your own. This way you can test out the technical feasibility yourself, and learn a lot along the way that is also transferable to future projects. You are also much more likely to attract a good technical co-founder this way.

There are now a lot of tools and communities that help beginners learn to code, so there’s no excuse not to start. However, I do want to stress that coding is something you have to continually do. Because coding is hard and that’s the only way to be good at it. It’s not like learning how to bike. You don’t learn to code and then that’s just something you know how to do. This is why I specifically didn’t want to title this post about learning to code. Many professional developers, especially women, stop coding after a few years, usually after entering management or other sectors. I believe coding is valuable to do continuously if you want to start a technology company some day.

You’re probably frustrated by Stop SOPA Day today, your work is going slow because Wikipedia is blacked out, and you can’t amuse yourself because Reddit is out too, and you’ve already signed Google’s petition, what’s left to do? You can read about another reason to despise the big media companies (if trying to censor the Internet wasn’t reason enough).

I finally watched the Sundance documentary MissRepresentation. Everyone should watch this. Girls, boys, women, and men.

MissRepresentation covers a wide range of cultural issues focused on mass media’s pervasive objectification of girls and women, the widespread under-representation and outright dismissal of women leaders in the media, and mass media’s societal impact on both women and men.

This documentary is a sobering reminder of just how powerful and pervasive media is, and its chilling effects on girls’ and women’s sense of self-worth, and on what men are taught to value in women. Basically, that as a woman, it doesn’t matter what you have accomplished, you will be judged on your appearance first and foremost. If you’re not “beautiful”, you will be derided and ignored, and if you are, you will be objectified and dismissed. And what’s considered beautiful is the media’s very narrow definition lifted from a shallow teenage male fantasy.

Beyond just socializing girls from a young age that only their looks matter, the effects of prevalent sexual and violent imagery in the media are profound. The stats of the increasing percentage of women with eating disorders and who suffer from sexual violence in America are sobering on their own, but combined with how many very young girls are now included in these numbers, it is truly shocking.

We are so media-saturated that it’s difficult to distance oneself from the non-stop bombardment of how we’re supposed to look, what we’re supposed to like, and what we’re supposed to want to be. So I don’t blame people who don’t think it’s a problem that women only hold 17% of seats in the House of Representatives (the US is 90th in the world when it comes to women in national legislatures), 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs or - a topic dear to me - less than 10% in fields like computer science and most disciplines of engineering. Even a little blog like mine attracts comments like this: “Why do you “obviously want to see more women in tech and entrepreneurship”? Do you also “obviously want to see more women in prison or homeless”?”

The skeptics say it’s not a problem because this isn’t what women actually want. Women don’t actually want to lead, don’t want to be CEO, don’t want to learn math/science/technology, etc. Women are just more suited to being nurses, vets, and working in beauty salons, or how about just staying at home. But stop and ask yourself is it learned behavior? The documentary goes into more depth on the history of advertising-sponsored TV shows that were designed to show that there was only one role for the happy woman - the stay-at-home mom. But a particularly telling quote from the movie is that the number of girls and boys who want to be President of the United States is the same at the age of 7 (a whopping 30%!), but sadly for girls, this number rapidly diminishes to almost nothing by the time they reach 15.

What’s really sad is that there have been so many gains made by women everywhere you look, in education, in pay, in management, and so many amazing women doing amazing things, and yet the media is bent on perpetuating this fun-house mirror image of the world, where women’s boobs and ass get enlarged and the brain shrunk.

You can’t be what you can’t see.

Watch the film, visit MissRepresentation.org to learn more about media literacy, and be a role model to girls and women.

Side Note: I will be mentoring a team of high school girls as part of the Technovation Challenge over the next 9 weeks to build a mobile app. It’s a great way to be a role model for girls at a crucial age, and I encourage more women to get involved!

Be the change you want to see.

It’s not easy hailing a cab in San Francisco, a city that seems to have a perpetual shortage of taxis, but it’s almost an impossibility the night of New Year’s Eve.

So it was almost bordering on religious fervor when we ran towards a glowing taxi sign, and determined it was not a mirage, but a true empty cab.

But the ecstasy was short lived, as another guy had run ahead of us.

Joy returned to our hearts when the taxi passed right by the guy and stopped in front of us waving us in. The other guy came running up demanding to know why the cab driver didn’t stop for him.

When the possibility of sharing a cab was nixed by the driver threatening to drive away without anyone, we quickly piled in leaving the guy behind.

As we drove away, the cabbie explained: “I didn’t pick him up because he’s wearing a stupid hat”.

Long story short: don’t dress like Kevin Federline if you want a ride.

Happy New Year!

Lego is at it again: trying to make Lego appeal to girls. The introduction of “Lego Friends” should be good news right? With evidence that Lego is a gateway to science and engineering, and that playing with Lego improves spatial, mathematical, and fine motor skills, surely this will help with the gender imbalance in STEM? Yet my first reaction was a cringe.

Let me begin with a little history. My love affair with Lego began when I was 7. That was the year I moved to Germany, the largest European market for Lego. The Economist reports that in Germany last year, building sets account for 13.4% of all toy sales, compared to 9.7% for dolls. Contrast that to Spain, where dolls account for 16.8% of toy sales. Is it a coincidence that Germany is strong in engineering? I think toys are a harbinger of mainstream culture.

Back in 1992, Lego had an amazing series aimed at girls, called Paradisa. I had the pimpin’ pool house, complete with a convertible and my own pool boy, and Dolphin Point, a lighthouse with an ice cream parlor. But the best part about these sets was that they gave me the building blocks to design and build my own houses, because what mansion doesn’t need a spiral staircase and huge glass windows? These were pieces you can’t get from the castle and spaceship sets. Just seeing pictures of these sets makes me want to fly home, find the giant box of Legos in my parents’ basement, and play again.

So when Lego discontinued Paradisa, I was devastated. What was even more distressing was that Lego then introduced another series for girls, called Belville. I was immediately turned off by the large awkward figurines, which wouldn’t fit into my houses, and lack of reusable Lego building blocks. Belville was heavy on accessories and light on building material (aka real Lego). I didn’t want to groom plastic horses, I wanted to build cool stuff!

Little did I know, Belville wouldn’t be the worst offence. I was outraged 10 years later, well past my prime Lego playing years, at the introduction of Clikits. I remember thinking WTF, this isn’t even LEGO! Clikits are dinky little plastic flowers and bits to stick on to purses and picture frames. How lame can this get?

So now you understand why I meet the news of Lego’s latest foray with trepidation.

It’s hard to miss that Lego has focused its marketing exclusively on boys for the past decade. There are ever grander sets of castles, spaceships, and robots, all in the “boy’s aisle”. Even the more unisex Lego City sets tilt towards police and fire station paraphernalia, which is okay, but they don’t come with any girl heads! I liked Paradisa because they always had girl heads with stylish ponytails, not the ugly bright red flip hair in regular sets. But it is with the introduction of more and more specialized pieces and movie franchise tie-ins, I feel like the special magic of making your own creation is being drained out of Lego.

Nonetheless, I am somewhat encouraged by the fact that Lego has refocused itself on its core product, and has spent years doing research with home visits and observing kids at play, to design its new product. While the colors and preference for veterinary clinics are reinforcing gender stereotypes, and I’m not wild about the new figurines (apparently the only thing you can change is the hair, vs the traditional figurines which were totally interchangeable), I think it’s important that girls are at least playing with Lego. On this point, I agree with Lise Eliot, neuroscientist and the author of Pink Brain Blue Brain, a survey of scientific papers on gender differences in children. As she puts it: “If it takes color-coding or ponies and hairdressers to get girls playing with Lego, I’ll put up with it, at least for now, because it’s just so good for little girls’ brains”.

The book Influence cites a study where it took just a 23 minute video of an anti-social child appropriately integrating into a group of other children shown to antisocial preschoolers, for these kids to become socially integrated, and even becoming social leaders in some cases. So I think perhaps it will be the $40 million marketing budget that Lego is putting up to launch Lego Friends that will do the trick. Hopefully once girls see ads of other girls like them happily playing with Lego, they will stop thinking it’s a toy “just for boys” or tomboys. Because Lego at its heart is truly one of the most gender-neutral toys ever.

Even now as a childless adult, I can’t walk past a Lego store without going in to take a peek, and so it was with great delight when I discovered the Lego Creator Beach House last year. Despite the ages 8 -12 label and a $45 price tag (for a bunch of plastic, but it has skylights that open!), I brought it home with great enthusiasm and immediately set to work building the different versions. Of course that was just the pre-requisite to what I was really after, building my custom dream house.

I hope Lego will go back to its roots and provide more building blocks like the Creator series that let the children’s (and adults!) creativity shape the play. Because it is this act of building, creating and unstructured play that forges the creativity, problem solving and other skills that will make great engineers down the road. It’s not about following a blueprint, it’s about creating your own. I want my future kids to have the same experience playing with Lego as I did.

I can post to Tumblr, which automatically posts to Twitter, which posts to Facebook, allowing me to post to banned sites in China. I can also read banned Tumblr blogs in my stream as long as I’m following them. Seriously China? You’re banning Accidental Chinese Hipsters? Seriously? Anyway, there you go. Might be useful on a future trip behind the great firewall without the hassle of setting up a VPN.

Edit: Apparently all of Tumblr is blocked, but the iPhone app was working for me.

An Inc. article was posted a few weeks ago provocatively titled “The Case Against the All-Male Start-up”, and the same story appeared in Business Insider under “TRUTH: Women-Led Startups Have Fewer Failures”. The article cites a recent study conducted by Illuminate Ventures (registration required to download), which itself references and summarizes a wide body of other research. Notably, that women-led tech companies are less capital intensive, and have fewer failures.

After these articles were posted, there was an outpouring of tweets and shares that were along the lines of “Women rule!”. Although not explicitly stated, there was an undertone that this study is proof that women are good (or even better) at running tech companies. But if you read the study, it actually attributes this success to gender diversity. Ostensibly, the more women the better.

However, no one (that I’ve seen so far) has attributed this success to the women themselves. Not women in general, but these particular women, who had to overcome stereotypes and differential treatment, in order to lead their companies to success.

According to the Kauffman Foundation, female entrepreneurs only receive 4% to 9% of available venture capital, while the number of women-led businesses was 28% (2002). We can safely assume that the successes referred to in the study (successful IPO or M&A exit of $50M+) by and large had to raise VC money. So these women, on top of an already gruelling process of pitching and due diligence, had to overcome additional obstacles, including investor bias. So wouldn’t it make sense that this additional selection, though unfair, means that only the very best women are able to get funding and grow their businesses to successful exits? Viewed like this, the study results are not surprising.

I can draw a parallel to women in male-dominated fields of study, e.g. computer science and engineering. In my own experience and in research, female students have higher grade averages as a group compared to male students. I don’t think in this case anyone would argue women are better at being computer scientists or engineers, or that this is somehow due to gender diversity. I think it’s just the small percentage of women that stick it out have to be smarter and more resilient, otherwise they would be filtered out by the additional obstacles.

To me, the additional selection imposed on women through overt and subtle stereotypes, biases, and differential treatment contributes to fewer women in male-dominated fields, like running a tech start up, but it also results in higher quality. This is analogous to survival of the fittest.

I started writing this post when the article first came out, but I hesitated these past weeks, because I expect my view to be unpopular. This view runs counter to the rah-rah enthusiasm for the articles that are making a blanket statement of women == good for tech start ups. Nonetheless, I think the findings of this study are best explained by the achievements of the people running the start ups, who happen to be women. This is a more logical conclusion than women are better at making tech start ups succeed, and in my opinion a much more significant contributing factor than gender diversity.