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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.
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.
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... 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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
"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.
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