In September 2017, three former Google employees took the company to court for gender-based pay discrimination. One of them stated: “Google pays back-end engineers more than front-end engineers and gives them easier access to promotions. Among the teams observed at Google, almost all back-end engineers are men. Almost all front-end engineers are women.”
I actually know more women front-end developers than men, which made me want to look into this distinction and especially its repercussions, because who says “dominant” in a field, also says “dominated”.
First, a few explanations on how a website is built.
When one is developed, two types of developers are involved: front-end and back-end. The front-end takes care of the elements we see when we navigate: color, font, animations when we open a link, etc. The back-end takes care of the content. The back-end takes care of the non-visible elements: newsletter database management, site hosting, CMS creation, etc.
In the early days of the web, there was no distinction between back-end and front-end. Developers did both. Now, in 2018, the profession has become more professional and specialized, and the distinction exists. There are front-ends on one side and back-ends on the other.
With this separation has come a distinction in the perception of these professions within the programming community.
Beware, big clichés on the horizon…
Back-ends are perceived as the real developers, the ones who get their hands dirty because they do the dirty work. They get their hands under the hood, they pull their hair out on real complex problems that are essential. Without them, a website wouldn’t see the light of day.
Whereas front-end developers aren’t really developers at all. They just make things look pretty. They never pull their hair out, because their job wouldn’t be that complicated. They’re just advanced Photoshop users.
This different vision of the professions is simply a continuation of the mechanism that drove women out of IT in the 1980s. As a reminder, women were heavily involved in software development, and men in computer development. But there came a time when the potential of software became huge and “cool”, and that’s when men arrived in force. taking women out of the field.
Let’s go back to our time, when men have once again appropriated something that seems “cool”, i.e. the back-end, leaving the front-end to women.
In an article in The Guardian, Miriam Posner reminds us that back-enders are seen as Steve Wozniak-like geniuses, profoundly brilliant, rather associative and often misunderstood, in the pure tradition of the martyrs of computing history we like to remember.
And of course, how are front-ends viewed? Well, it’s quite the opposite, and just as full of clichés. Back-end developers often attribute front-end expertise not to technical mastery but to feel, to a kind of magic, to softness… fuzzy things that women are supposed to excel at. I’d like to make it clear that this is obviously not true. If you’ve ever dabbled in programming, you know that it often involves mathematics, logic and having a structured mind.
The consequence being that, if there are women in IT, we then imagine, as a matter of course, that they will be front-end developers. Melissa McEwen recounts that “at techno events, people often assume I’m a front-end developer. I’m sure it’s not because of the way I dress. I’m pretty sure it’s because I’m a woman.”
Why is it a problem that women are front-end and men are back-end?
The most important point is that back-end jobs pay better than front-end jobs. The median salary for a front-end is $68,000, while a back-end is around $72,000.
The problem with confining women to front-end jobs is that we’re keeping them in the same circle they’re already in, not giving them the opportunity to get out and therefore not giving them access to higher salaries.
<irony>We’re making life really easy for them!</irony>
