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Girls not Going into CS
An anonymous reader writes "The Times has an article about what you already know: few girls go on to be IT women. For example, the 2001 AP exam in computer science drew 19,000 boys and just 2,400 girls. Information technology, despite its relative youth, has been far slower to approach gender equality than law or medicine, fields which decades ago overtly excluded women. The problem is not lack of smarts: Girls statistically outperform boys overall in grade school and make up 57% of college graduates, margins that are growing to the point that some colleges are toying with affirmative action for men."
If the girls are smart enough to get in, but just don't choose to, why do we want to persuade them? All descrimination is bad, positive descrimination is included.
Girls in general just aren't as strong in analytical thinking as guys are. Simple as that.
But most people are taught to pretend they don't know this (even though it's so damn obvious) because when we were all in grade school, our teachers taught us that "everyone is equal".
Sure... and that's why the NBA is full of Black people.
eTrade SUCKS
As pointed out by some already, statistics tend to show that men do better in mathematics.
In addition, I've also seen some state one reason for this gender disparity is that fields such as law and medicine have much more human involvement. Computer science, however, is frequently detached, sometimes to the point of seeming human hostile. And, you'll pardon the stereotypical thinking, but it seems that women tend to gravitate towards jobs which involve significant human involvement. An emphasis on human factors engineering and interface design might make computer science programs more attractive to those looking for a more human-centered job, male or female.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
... that there might also be fewer girls interested in CS?. Just because fewer girls apply for CS degrees does not automatically mean that there is some sort of bias against women in CS programs. One possible reason for this could be that despite recent progress, CS/MIS/IT work is still seen as relatively geeky. And in my honest experience, females (especially younger ones) seem more influenced by social pressures 'n wut-not than guys are. It could be that this geeky image that still surrounds our job field is also hampering the influx of women into the field. Just a hypothesis... but it feels true.
At any rate... I know very few girls in the CS program at my skool. But those few girls that enroll are treated as well, if not better, than the guys in the program (we're all happy to have women around... duh!).
/dev/random
Hm. It's a damn shame; girls not going into computer science are missing out on endless opportunities. The opportunity to enter an already glutted job market. The opportunity to have your skills derided or just plain ignored by your superiors at work. The opportunity to join legions of online communities of their underpaid, lonely, insecure male counterparts.
The point I'm trying to make is, there are very few women in the garbage collection or plumbing industries either. But almost noone considers this a terrible sign of gender inequity propagating itself through the ages.
Computer science is ostensibly a highly-skilled profession which can lead you on to great pay and excellent opportunities, but I think we're approaching (may have already hit) a reckoning in the field: we're being viewed more and more as an essential service, not a "core competency." That is, just like electricians or others who are also technically expert but whose use is minimized to keep expenses down. And who get very little respect within the organization except for the 15 minutes after they fix a problem.
Anyway, I'm not trying to make this a huge polemic against the treatment of information workers, but the point is, maybe it's becoming a field women don't WANT to be a part of, and for good reason. Maybe the college girl who pursues sales or marketing or preps for an MBA isn't afraid of the tech jargon and male braggadocio in CS; maybe she just thinks it's a boring field leading to crappy jobs. And that's maybe not a horribly innaccurate way to think anymore.
What are we talking about, CS or IT? CS is the study of computers. IT is the study of Technology when related to Business and Information Systems. Of course the two disciplines share some commonality. For example, IT requires certain aspects of CS because many IT positions require programming proficiency. However, I don't expect someone who is in IT to code up a simple OS or a basic language and compiler just as I don't expect someone in CS to design and develop a solution for a national call center's contact management.
So, are girls not interested in CS, IT, or both?
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
It strikes me that it's precisely what we enjoy so much about messing about with technology that drives girls away from the whole scene.
Never mind the fact that a guy over 30 with a tech job is a total (marriage-minded) babe magnet, a fifteen year old student is where the attitudes are formed.
People who have no idea about computing and who are dragged into our department for some cross-concept work (e.g. SMS marketing initiatives) are more than a little surprised by the decent cars, good haircuts and sharp cufflinks we're building a rep for...(just joking - but the point is valid - there are deliberately no visible geeks in the team - but we are there...)
.A fifteen year old sees the "spods, geeks and wierdos with alternate lifestyles" that dominate the only computers in the school. Forget about seeing the career, most people pick their degree for a mix of reasons - social life being at least in the top ten. Take a look at civil engineering degrees as an corroborating example.
Until the initial salaries rise far enough that women/girls want it even though the image is bad (e.g. lawyers), then there'll be no change in the situation. Then you'll see an avalanche.
Pimping my Karma Whore since 1847.
Perhaps girls don't go in to Comp. Sci. because they have no interest in it?
I'm in electrical engineering and the same "problem" is here. Meanwhile my school has nursing, fashion design, and early childhood education degrees; the majority (85% or more) of individuals in those programs are girls/women: yet there is no preceived "shortage" of male nurses. Why is that? I'll leave the answer as an excercise to the reader.
The same thing occurs in the specialization of surgery in medical school: there is a "shortage" of female surgens. Perhaps the real answer is that women aren't interested in surgery as much as (say) pediatrics. Want to know a secret? There are more female pediatricians then there are male pediatricians: there's an imbalance! Quick! Enforce quotas!
If there are x spots available in a program, let the people who are interested in that program, and qualify, get those x spots.
Anything else is stupidity.
I've gotten sick of defending myself and my gender time and time again, but I'll do so one last time. Just because most people on slashdot is male doesn't make me male, just as having most people on slashdot be of a certain race or nationality or religion doesn't assure that any single individual shares those characteristics. But I can cope, since in the greater scheme of things, it's no big deal that a few ACs continue to have their doubts.
There is a bigger problem, though. Go ahead and look at my previous comments. Nearly every one of them has one or five AC replies to the effect of "suck my dick" or "I want to fuck you in the ass". Throughout history, female authors have been denied recognition for their work, because it was commonly assumed that women were incapable of creating what they created. And throughout history, women have been spat upon, threatened, battered, and gangraped by the same men you'll find here on slashdot. For all I know, you yourself are one of those same ACs.
Ask yourself what you gain by contributing to this climate of fear and hate. Ask yourself that question when you scurry off for your nightly porn fix. Ask yourself that question when you insult and harass people on slashdot.
Yes, I AM female. Dammit.
-- Anne Marie
I just graduated from a small Christian school wish a CS degree. The school is about 65% women, but out of 50 CS students, there's only 2 females. Our main professor is female, and she's talked with us about these sorts of things. One thing that we found out was that the majority of the guys got into CS because they played computer games as kids, and then wanted to learn how to make them. Both of the girls (and the prof) got into CS for love of math and logic. So the moral of the story is if we can get young girls hooked on computer games (ex. The Sims), then we've got a good inroad to get more into CS.
I'd say that doesn't just apply to girls. I'm in the third year of a CS degree (though taking some time off to work) and I'd say that a good 80% of the class has no idea why they're there. And had no idea of what CS was about when they signed up for it, but were probably expecting something like the bird courses from high school, or possibly an easy route to a three-figure salary.
Lets face it, most of these people shouldn't be in CS. CS entry rates should be a lot lower than they are, at least if we want the job market to get better and the field to advance. And most of the women who do get through tend to be the ones who like coding, software design, etc. and are good at it.
Well, fellow gay stud nerds. Being gay this is good news. Now if we could just get geeks to work out more..
You're absolutely right that IT and CS are largely unrelated.
In 22 years of post-college IT and software development work, I've only ever had to use higher math once (the "winding number" problem, for HTML image-map random polygons), and a one-day web search found me everything I couldn't remember. But IT as practiced in the last 10 years isn't even that close to CS - I know large numbers of MIS folks who can't program at all. And their work doesn't suffer from that! Much of "IT" these days is software installation and trouble-shooting. The same thing happened in the late 1980s in the mainframe world, so it shouldn't be any surprise.
On the flip side, Comp Sci is an academic discipline, like physics, philosophy and mathematics. The primary goal of undergraduate CS departments at the university level (ignoring community colleges etc.) is the production of graduate students, who will eventually become researchers in the field. Their goal is not generally to create COBOL or VB programmers for business applications. In many universities, that's a function of the business schools.
Statements like that make me cringe... Generally such statements are soon followed by "investigations into discrimination" and "affirmative action policies".
Of course, everybody on the planet ought to know by now that if girls don't feel like doing something (such as going into IT, with long hours, no overtime, etc) then all the policies ever written ain't gonna make them change their minds. And that's perfectly fine with me.
What really irritates me are the idiots that set rules like, "you must employ equal ratios of men, women, white, black, yellow, straight, gay, able-bodied, disabled, etc", because rules like that can lead to companies being forced to lower job requirements to be able to attract the correct ratios.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying that there aren't any "men, women, white, black, yellow, straight, gay, able-bodied, disabled, etc" smart enough to hold down good IT jobs, I'm saying that just because not enough minorities are employed may mean that the rules are fucked up... It doesn't necessarily mean that employers are deliberately discouraging minorities, or anything sinister like that.
Of course, there are almost certainly some employers that do discriminate, but there are cases where that's absolutely necessary. For example, a person confined to an electric wheelchair probably didn't ought to be a liontamer... Similarly, a blind person might have a lot of difficulty working with microscopes in a lab...
Amen, brother! I've been programming professionally for 22 years and hiring programmers for about half that. In that time, I've learned that the sole indicator of a programmer's skill or likely success is how their eyes light up when geeking out. Programming can be taught, and journeyman programmers can be created, but genuinely creative and gifted programmers are born.
Girls do not like doing anything that involves concentrating on one single thing for long periods. They like to switch from one thought to another, and keep many balls up in the air at one time.
The fact is, the nature of the subject, and anything else requiring in-depth knowledge, will not appeal to most girls, just like armed robbery doesn't appeal to most girls.
Contary to the teaching of the Women's Liberation Movement, women are not men with oranges up their jumpers - they are actually different.
Reality is not politially correct
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Actually, I don't. I think it's a ridiculous and annoying concept that someone should obtain a free passage simply because of heritage, gender, disability, etc. Sure, it's one way around obnoxious stereotypes... But it's not a method that I'd want to take.
-Sara
Think about it for a second. What the principle of Affirmative Action basically says is that in order to discourage or curtail discrimination against one group of people, discrimination will be exacted on another group. In other words, it is okay to discriminate against one group but not another. There is one word for that: hypocritical.
I'd imagine the majority of the CS crowd were fairly high performers in school, but I honestly don't see too many of them being validictorians and such. They tend to put doing exciting activies above their studies NOT related to computer science. We're typically not a well rounded bunch when it comes to academics. Personally my home libary is greatly biased because of this. I've got books one:
The ratio to tech books to other is 5:1, if not more lopsided too. Face is, CS people tend to only ever concentrate at one thing at a given time. Women just aren't wired this way, which is why hanging out with "CS creeps" doesn't appeal to many of them.
Just my two cents anyway. My last job had 3 women in a company of about 16. One was a programmmer, the other to were hired as programmers but moved into management positions because they got so sick of programming. My current job has erhm... 2 women out of 25 in technical positions. It's just a different type of person that likes to do this stuff, and women don't find it appealing. Fine by me.
Yes but white males already get a free pass, so why shouldnt their competition get the same?
I see your point, but why should you have to work twice as hard and be twice as educated to get the same job and same salary as a white male?
And then even if you get this salary, white males who you work with will not respect you as an equal.
Its not about a handout, but what other way is there to make things equal? Its not like you'd get a fair salary without affirmative action, in fact most places wouldnt even hire you assuming because you are a woman that you somehow just are less qualified.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
i dunno. i'm female. i'm in IT. i'm a straight up geek girl. (and omg, i have a life)
i started my love for computers and math on my very own when i was less than 10 years old. the largest influences on that were my engineer father who helped me with math when i was young and the purchase of our first computer.
i knew it was what i wanted to do. i never questioned it. my relationship was with the computers and not with other people. especially since i was self-taught. i never felt that i was not 'allowed'. i never felt any different from any guy out there. computers were what i wanted to do and being around other women was not a big deal. oh, and the 'reputation' or whatever of being associated with computer geeks? so what. like i said, my relationship was with the computers.
maybe it's because in grade school, instead of people telling me "no, you can't hack it because you're a girl," i got "no, you can't hack it because you're too young." (i had already skipped a grade and was taking courses a year ahead of my classmates.) all my administration fights in highschool were because i maxed out my math&cs&science courses junior year. not because i am female.
frankly, it wasn't until reflection years later that i realized that i was the only girl in those courses. it wasn't until significantly after the fact that i realized (after being told) that i was the "only hot cs major in our class".
after college, i managed the internal network and had three direct reports. all guys. i worked closely with the network ops team. guess what? all guys. it was never an issue.
i don't notice. i don't care. my sex has never held me back. i knew what i was good at and i was going to do it. if someone is going to be an idiot and assume that i don't know anything because i'm female, well, too bad for them. as an aside, honestly, i've only been a victim of true sex-discrimination less than five times over the course of my life. ("no, listen *miss*, i need to speak to a *TECHNICIAN*") i just feel that when we stop thinking of ourselves as 'different' or deserving of more attention because we're female, we'll get the 'acceptance' that we're looking for. and as i've never felt any different from the guys i was taking these classes with or working with, i've always felt accepted.
who knows? maybe it really is just a lack-of-interest thing that keeps women out of IT/CS, but i see that more starting from a very young age and not necessarily majorly influenced by highschool/college teachers. though, this is only my personal experience. i don't see a lot of the discrimination that i hear other women complain about...
That's bollocks.
Wander by your friendly neighborhood math department some time and take a look at the male/female ratio there. At least at the schools that I've been to, the math departments seem to sport something like a 60%:40% male:female ratio.
--
Judging from the observed (in)competency of hundreds of college graduates, I'd say that anything requiring in-depth knowledge doesn't appeal to most boys, either.
FreeBSD - the power to serve.
This is not to meant as an insult...
But if you can't handle the straight forward logic required to get through a few high level math classes, what makes you think that mastering a complex algorithm is going to be easy?
Math courses are rarely more complicated than figuring out a quicksort or Djiktras spanning tree algorithms. Futher, math is actually easier since you need only convince a human that you know what you are doing, whereas a computer requires that every little nitpicky detail be exactly right.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
My wife and I are working on it; we have at least two of three daughters who are very much into computers and learning to program. The oldest is only 13, though, so no requests for dates -- Daddy and Mommy can be very protective ;)
What do we present to our young women as role models? Britney Spears! Barbie! Sex in the City! Even TV sci-fi fails; women are either kick-ass warriors or love slaves. Even when a woman *is* an engineer (as in Firefly), she comes off as a bit odd and disconnected from her peers.
Learning programming is critical to success in any scientific or engineering field. Office monkeys can get by knowing basic applications -- but to be involved in the leading edge of technology, understanding computers is essential.
All about me
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." -Dijkstra
This can also be applied to programming itself. If you are going to call Computer Science a SCIENCE, it is important to recognize that what we are really learning about is the theories and discovery of how to do things. As far as the implementation goes, the programming, that is the trivial part.
Browsing through this thread should give anyone a pretty good sense of why women might not be going into the field.
./ guy knows what she experienced better than she does.)
Could it be connected to the fact that anytime the gender disparity issue gets raised, the reaction on the part of men is to reply with old sexist jokes and pathetic rationalizations ("women just aren't wired for computers")?
Then, if some amazingly brave woman actually has the courage to relate her experiences with sexism in CS departments (I noticed one -- thank you neuroticia), the thanks she gets is accusations of paranoia (becuase obviously some blowhard
Even a man relating the experiences of a woman he knew in CS being stalked gets met with claims that women are just being too oversensitive.
There isn't one simple explanation for why women aren't going into computers, but it might have something to do with men's total lack of restraint in making blatantly sexist and obnoxious comments whenever the subject is raised.
Red All Over: Rambling Missives from an Aspiring Revolutionary
With the gross swings in fortunes in the IT job market, overtly hostile actions of the US government towards the profession (ie H1-B and the Fair Labor Standards Act exemption for hourly paid programmers) and poor treatment by employers in general, why would any intelligent individual want to make a career of IT?
The declining enrollments plus the rejection of the field by anyone with any ability to interact with others on a person to person basis (i.e. NOT INTJ Myers-Brigg) spell continuing turmoil for this as a profession.
I have already told my children that there is no future in technology careers in the US... they are looking at humanities, not sciences as the road to a happy future.
You know what? There's no problem with this. It might be a combination of upbringing, interests, abilities, whatever. There are fewer girls in CS. Big deal. There are fewer guys majoring in English. Is that really a problem? As for why the number of girls in CS has been dropping, I might hazard to guess that some of them who were in it before were in it just because they thought they would get a good job. Girls (maybe) care more about financial success vs. pursuing true interests more than guys.
What I find just as intriguing is what it's not a factor of. For example, the disparity exists regardless of skill. I've encountered far fewer I'm-not-worthy walk-on-water ultimate-credibility women programmers than men, and I've encountered far fewer dead-weight don't-upload-now just-keep-the-team-in-pizza women programmers than men as well. No matter how I look at it, I can't finger a cause. Neither can anyone else, men or women, theorist or practical. Lots of people have interesting theories, but nothing is jumping out on this one - and we've been scratching our heads about it for years.
My thoughts are to not dwell on the cause, that perhaps the reasons behind it are far more ingrained than anything that affirmative action is going to be able to address. All you male/female couples living together for years and settled into comfortable patterns - who does most of the cooking? And who pulls the dishwasher out and crawls behind it when it starts leaking? Similar disparate ratios appear. What affirmative action program can affect basic ingrained patterns? It's just not gonna happen, folks. We will NEVER have a 50/50 ratio of men and women programmers, period.
And that's okay! It's not important to try to "correct" that. It ain't broke. What IS important, however, is to work to minimize the artificial barriers in the form of expectations and prejudices that are produced by these disparities. That needs to be the focus of any kind of affirmative action programs. Education and enlightenment should be a priority. There certainly do exist women who, when the dishwasher starts leaking, immediately grab a flathead screwdriver and rummage around in the 3rd drawer down for a hose clamp, and for the sake of the industry and the economy, it's important to give them room to fix the dishwasher.
No, at this point in time you are correct. A 3 figure salary is what most CS and IT grads can expect at the moment. Has anyone stopped to think that the reason girls are staying away from CS/IT is that 1) the industry has collapsed and has stayed down the toilet since the dot.com crash, and 2) there's a lot more interesting and meaningful careers out there apart from working 80 hour weeks writing some fucking pointless piece of code for some fucking pointless company. Maybe they're just smarter than us.
"I tend to go into "deep hack" mode rather easily, where I'm doing a task and all my attention is on that task. ...
My wife does not seem to have deep hack mode. Her brain always multitasks."
This is something else that comes into it: it's starting to become apparent that high-functioning autism (Asperger's Syndrome) can make people very good coders, for exactly the reason you describe. (Tried to find the Wired article from last year or so about this, but no dice.)
Autism is three to four times as likely to hit males as females.
So there may be something to the idea that men genetically concentrate better. But, if that's the case, there's also something to the notion that women are naturally better with social subtleties and communication.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
The problem is that this whole stupid article makes the blanket assumption that 'gender equality' in the field would somehow make women more interested in IT.
They had this same stupid idea about welding after the movie "Flashdance" and unsurprisingly few women want to lift heavy things all day or turn wrenches in auto shops.
In space, no one can hear you moo.
Has anyone ever considered that maybe the reason there are few women in CS (or any other occupation or field of endeavor, for that matter) are because, for whatever reason, they simply don't WANT to?
"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
RE:
Girls do not like doing anything that involves concentrating on one single thing for long periods. They like to switch from one thought to another, and keep many balls up in the air at one time.
This has not been my experience in the industry (20 years) or as a physics teacher (8 yrs). It appears ot me that women are better than men at staying on task and completing it especially if it's tedious. They are also good at juggling many things. Men are better at focusing completely on something they find interesting to the exclusion of everything else.
I believe the reason this appears is that in general women feel duty and responsibility much more strongly than men and most especially when they are young. I don't know anything about "girls" in the workplace.
Give a group of men and women 6 things to do at once, and the women will try to do them all and the men will pick the most interesting (or profitable) and stick with that one. The result is that the guys finish "something" first and that's what is noticed while the women plug away in the background finshing the rest.
These are generalities. I have seen those favored women non-completers who drifted from project to project, getting the "idea" credit, and then moving on to something new before the project got to the grunt work and doomed reality phase. And they also appeared to have the combination of ample breasts and excessive friendliness. I know guys who are exactly the same way, but their attributes are good golf scores, good-ol-boy networking, and tireless agression towards those not in the group.
Furthermore, I'd like to state that it's mostly a matter of perception. That while generalities are often based upon common observation, small differences get exaggerated into labels. The differences in ability to focus and multitask among the group of all women goes from women who can easily do both to women who can do neither. The point is the the variation among the members of the group "women" is much greater than the difference between women-as-a-group and men-as-a-group.
What about perception? Those people who think women are useless will only notice the 1/100 who is the drifting fluff and never see the 99 who are grinding away in the background. Those who think all men are are agressive baboons and good-ol-boys (good-ol-baboons?) will only notice those guys to the exclusion of the others.
When people get to be the boss, they assign people to tasks according to their perception and thus increase the appearance of the generalization to others.
By-the-way, this idea:
observation->
generalization->
selective perception->
strengthened belief in generalization->
enforce generalization onto others
is a general problem in science, politics, race relations, religious conflicts, and family disputes.
I think girls are more scared off by the rampant superiority complexes in IT than anything else. I can't talk to the head IT worker here because he thinks I'm stupid. I asked for an address (for my laptop) on the company network and he replied, "So you'll need that for a computer?" I couldn't help but choke back a grimace. I also have friends in engineering degrees who speak degradingly of "pretty girls in engineering", who can never be truly intelligent or have a good reason to be in their degree.
;)
I really feel for the girls who have posted in this thread and seriously love (and are good at!) what they do. I think I would have followed an IT path myself if I hadn't been bloody-mindedly convinced that I could make a career out of drawing (and I have). But even though art is viewed as a "feminine" field, I'd say illustration is not - I am the only girl in my section at work. In the history of my company I've been the only female artist to stay for a significant period, and the second female artist ever.
In every part of my life, I'm clashing with guys who are convinced that they must be more intelligent than me by default, because I am female. Whether they are or not is not something I care about, but that attitude itself stinks. Any comment along the lines of "you're good, for a girl" is not a compliment, it's a hideous insult. It's easier to sit in the corner and let them think I'm a stupid Mac user than it is to try and convince them that I am not deficient just because I have ovaries. Believe me, I try, but sometimes it's just not worth the effort.
By the way, if any of you have the presence of mind to admit that girls can do what you can do, and not place barriers on a girl because you think she's good-looking, you may actually get lucky. Girls who are dedicated to what they do tend to appreciate the same quality in their geek boys.
No, the real news is that the number of male nurses is increasing, gradually, and that there is a looming nursing shortage. More men would be welcomed, but many are turned off the inferior pay characteristic of female-dominated fields, and the supposed social stigma of being insufficiently masculine.. Maybe more men should be encouraged to apply?
Why must a gender difference be evidence of overt or covert discrimination? In my opinion, the CS gender differential comes from differences in hardware, rather than software. Drop me in the "nature" bin on this question: I think that women, on average, differ from men in such a way that they are less likely to be interested in computer science. I could get into why I believe this, but it's all anecdotal, and wouldn't convince anybody who didn't already agree with me.
Note that this in no way justifies discrimination against women. This discrimination is still clearly a reality, and must ultimately be eradicated root and branch. It is wrong to prejudge individuals by the group they belong to, not, as extreme "nurturists" would hold, because there are no differences among groups, but because respect for ones fellow humans requires that we treat them as equals. I.e., equality of opportunity is a matter of ethics, and ethical principles shouldn't be held hostage to questions of animal biology.
For those who wish to wring their hands about this gender discrepancy, must every field be split, 50/50 (well, 51/49)? Is the only possible "just" society one where soldiers, professional athletes, nurses, artists, even rapists, thieves and murderers, are exactly as likely to be male as female? What if the average woman doesn't care very much about computers, or artillery, or how to hotwire cars, not because of Barbie, or because their math teacher didn't call on them in seventh grade, but because she simply finds other things more interesting? If such women exist, discrimination "on behalf" of women in many male-dominated fields would ultimately make women less happy. It would, by definition, divert women who would otherwise be happier doing something else into male-dominated careers, to satisfy some sort of mathematical imperative of justice.
That is why I'm very leary of those who would rush to affirmative action-ize CS. You might not side with me on the "nature" side of this question; but regardless, I think the nature/nurture debate in this case is too far from resolution to be sure whether such programs are a net benefit or harm to womankind.