Thread by @betsythemuffin

HTML+CSS dev vs JS-first dev Discourse MUST take into account how gender & seniority intersect or they WILL be harmful.

The divide between how senior women engs frame it and how newer women frame this is NOT a coincidence, and is ESSENTIAL to understanding the debate.

Thread.

If someone is a front-end specialist or a full-stack engineer with non-BS front-end skills, and they've been in the field 7 or more years, they probably learned front-end a) informally, and b) HTML- and CSS-first.

If that someone is a woman, and they do not have a CS degree, then they got into the field either through web production & CMS administration (ie informal front-end), or because they had a front-end-heavy web portfolio to show off. That's how this worked pre-bootcamps.

Front-end women without CS degrees got shat on and underpaid for not being "real" developers. (I literally became a full-stack developer to escape that.) The fact that HTML and CSS were not "real" languages (no definition of "real" was ever provided) was always the excuse.

Every. single. female engineer I know who has that time-span of front-end experience has experienced that phenomenon. Every. single. one.

We CANNOT take CSS-in-JS vs separate-file CSS outside of that context, because "CSS isn't a real language" is the common rallying cry.

At this point, JS-heavy web development was 90% the province of horrifying enterprisey apps churned out by places that a) would never in a million years dream of hiring an informally educated woman b) gave 0 shits about accessibility & semantics.

Then a few different things happened:

1. Bootstrap made it possible to make semi-attractive websites without knowing CSS, or learning HTML thoroughly.
2. "Full-stack" engineers (Rails engineers armed with Bootstrap) started writing a lot of JavaScript.

This was juuuuust before the first bootcamp wave hit. Most of these "full-stack" engineers (back-end engineers who Bootstrap empowered) were white dudes. (Not all of them had CS degrees, but white male privilege means that people assumed that regardless!)

So:

1. JS became more important within front-end
2. CSS became even less valued
3. the gender divide became more pronounced
4. and started to have even bigger impacts on folks' careers.

Every senior front-end woman out there lived through this and many of us found it traumatic.

AT THE SAME TIME, bootcamps began giving people, including women, formal on-ramps into the field. "Hello Real Company, look at this GeoCities site I made for my aunt's restaurant" stopped being the major way women earned their first $ for computering.

Front-end was still considered "female," and so bootcamp women were shunted towards it -- but the version they were being formally taught was a version that centered "CSS frameworks" and JavaScript over traditional semantics-first, CSS-centered approaches!

I'm not from that generation of female developers, so I can't speak to their experiences in as nuanced a way, but from listening to them it seems like THEY have been shat on in turn for ... JavaScript suddenly being a girly language now????

Given my experience, it is SO WEIRD to me seeing the JavaScript community begin to identify with the idea that they are good at gender because they have so many junior- and mid-women who are shat on for JS... but a lot of people sincerely believe this, especially those women.

In that context, "HTML and CSS first" doesn't seem nearly as gendered, it just seems like elitism. BECAUSE INTERSECTIONALITY, BOTH PERSPECTIVES CAN BE RELEVANT.

I don't want to devalue the experiences of female React developers who are pro-CSS-in-JS. They are, just like my trad-CSS self before them, promoting the one technology that they were allowed to get a first dev job in and anchoring on the requirements of shops that it suits well.

But I do think that men who aren't aware of this history should a) learn it and b) shut the heck up about CSS-in-JS unless and until they learn to use the cascade well. Because whether or not they realize it, they are perpetuating tropes that STILL harm ALL women in front-end.

b/c the history of web development is that the SECOND a technology turns into something that gets women into the field rather than gatekeeping them out, it turns into a bad technology that only fake developers would ever use. No tech (even CSS-in-JS) is immune.

(See also: PHP.)