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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."
Worth a look is this article written by a girl doing CS at the university of kent.
is that most women simply aren't intersted in IT. It's pretty obvious to me. How many of you found it beneficial to expound on the virtues of open source software or the beauty of TCP/IP structure during a date? Probably not many.
That's not to say that they can't be good at it, though. It seems that women will study harder and get better grades, but its gonna be guys hanging out after class discussing the stuff in the pub because they have a genuine interest. Just my two cents.
It's all going according to
> All descrimination is bad, positive descrimination is included.
True, but you might want to investigate why this is so. Perhaps there is something inhibiting them to make a free choice.
Dave
The real problem, IMO, is that there seems to be a couple of guys in any given CS class who seriously cannot handle women, and who one way or the other make life hell for the women in the class. Some are just plain creeps, some are always trying to upstage them, some seem convinced that women in CS get through just because they're given preferential treatment. My sis used to get comments like "Geez, you're smart for a girl" at least once a semester -- that's a pretty shitty thing to say; if you think it's a compliment, it's not.
Then there are the usual stalker types who get their jollies sending out creepy emails and eyeballing girls in the class -- my friend decided to work rather than go to grad school at Madison because this happened *twice* (on the level of restrining order), fer chrissake.
Granted this is just anecdotal and two people does not a study make. But say what you want about societal pressures on girls not to be scientific or a predisposition against math, what I've seen drive them away is a hostile environment that doesn't seem to exist in most other fields.
What can we do to fix it? I just don't know. When they bothered my sister, the solution was obvious but definately not constructive. My friend used the law to help her (restraining orders and all), but that didn't seem to help in the overall scheme of things either -- who needs that sort of pressure while taking 400-level CS courses?
Anyhow, that's the problem as I see it. I don't have a good solution, but it's something we *must* work on.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Computer science is lonely, i hate that feeling you get on a friday evening when your stuck in a basement lab debugging on your own. The only difference between boys and girls in CS is that girls realise that its going to be like this _before_ they choose their degree where as us guys dont realise until half way through the second year that actually, human company can be more interesting than assembly language.
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I think part of the problem is that male geeks tend to have a bit of a superiority complex as a generalization, and that same is not true for female engineers, so they tend to feel like they are not as good as the guys simply because all the guys make them feel as such. It's not really inviting
I would say that the environment is not one to be condusive to a female. Let alone the hormone factor.
A very appropriate comic.
I think that much like females outperforming males in elementary school they also do so in engineering programs. I knew a few Engineers at school that could kick any guys but in what they did.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
I think that has something to do with it.
Laws are for people with no friends.
I happen to agree, this whole mess reminds of this. That is to say, political correctness and 'equality' have gone too far in today's society.
"Computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes" (Edsgar Dijkstra)
Actually, in my experience, the large drop-out rate in CS is partly based on the expection of people. They think, they are going to play with computers, but they aren't. They are going to play with ideas and information.
In other languages (French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish) CS is dubbed as "information science".
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
The article was mentioning something about THE IMAGE of IT industry and I think that it is one of the biggest reasons why not many women go into IT. Ms. Fiorina does not fit into the stereo typical image of IT person, but I look at her as a businesswoman (good sharp one, of course) not as an IT person; many others, I'm guessing, view her as a businesswoman as well. So the image of IT industry (mostly geeky looking pale extra thin or chubby men) hasn't really changed much. Hmmm... yet another reason why we have to think about what Mr. B. G. is doing to the whole IT industry.
A lot of this discussion is extremely frustrating. There are so many stereotypes ("Girls aren't as good at math..." "They don't like computers anyway..." "They're just NOT INTERESTED") that are the precise reason that the ratios are so low. How do you know? How many women have you talked to that fit these stereotypes? And have you ever thought *why* some might not be interested? I never owned a set of Legos or an Erector Set as a kid -- plenty of Barbies, though. Computer classes at my high school taught word processing and spreadsheets (at an all-female school... clearly teaching us all we ever needed to know in our future careers as... secretaries?). I'm currently arguing with them right now about updating our technology AND math and science curricula after they drastically cut back on them, thereby screwing over anyone who had any desire of entering such fields in college. It's not encouraged at all. The only reason I'm in ECE (with a CS concentration) right now is because practically by accident my high school ended up with a FIRST robotics team and I fell in love with the programming and wiring. Without it, despite my ability and interest in computers, I probably would have ended up a humanities major just because it never would have occurred to me that engineering or CS was something I was really interested in.
And don't make assumptions on what women do or do not want. I am perfectly willing to stay up all night coding surviving only on caffeine. I buy clothing based on whether or not I can carry my Leatherman in a pocket. I have attended many a Warcraft III LAN party with my boyfriend and his roommates. I build my own computers, run Linux, and for God's sake, I read Slashdot. ('Nuff said..) And I'm not unique -- I got to Olin College of Engineering, which has a 50-50 male to female ratio, and there are plenty of chicks there just like me.
Just keep in mind that it's very much a matter of exposure. For example, one girl in my class had never had any programming experience and only went into engineering on a whim, but loved our first CS class so much she soon after taught herself Perl in order to keep the college Quote Board organized. Another girl who had been considering journalism instead of engineering went crazy with her first introduction to CAD modelling and power tools. It's just that so many of the girls there had never seen any of this before, didn't realize it was out there, and only by some fortunate chance ended up finding it in college.
But please don't assume that women aren't interested. Think of it instead is that a lot of them just don't know what they're missing.
I am one of those ultra-rare cases. ;) Life is interesting. Out of 40 people at my previous job with a programming consulting company I could count the number of women there on one hand. One was the secretary, one was an accountant, one was in marketing and web design, one was our tester, and the last was a programmer. It's a bit alarming transitioning from male to female in a workforce dominated so completely by men. I watched, my friends position in the company and how she dealt with things and it came down to that she really had to be forceful to get anyone to listen to her. And she was good.
;)
Most of my girlfriends just would rather not be thought of as geeks even with the positive meaning it now has. It would be incredibly hard to put into words what I've observed since starting my transition, but it is incredibly interesting. I wouldn't have ever actually believed it if I hand't lived it.
A lot of what I'm having to do is start over. Currently where I live, the computer job market has completely fallen apart. I just hope my future in computers isn't dictated so much by my gender.
And for the sarcastic person who remarked on how "hard" it was to tell the difference between a transsexual and a born woman on site, take it from me, it's not always as easy as you would think. I've never been clocked.
I'd have to agree with you. While it's been over a decade since I graduated with my degree in CompSci, even then the majority of my classmates didn't belong in that degree program.
At my Uni. (at that time anyways) the business school offered a degree in Information Systems Management that would have been far more appropriate for most of the CS students.
More schools should offer MIS undergrad degrees (if they don't already, I really have no idea) and they should be promoted as credible alternatives to CS degrees for students that want to pursue careers in IT rather than 'pure' CS.
(I may be coming off sounding elitist here and I really don't mean to.. I think IT is a perfectly valid career path and universities should be adequately preparing students for that. Simply put, the knowledge and skills needed to design and manage a database system (or whatever) are a lot different than the skills and knowledge needed to write the database software itself)
And just to pick apart that "concentrating on a single thing for long periods of time," I have just one word: mother.
Mother's don't. Actually, mothers have to multitask to w+n+c, where "w" is their job, "n" is the ammount of housework that they do, and "c" is the number of their children under the age of 30.
While the "in-depth" crack was a load of bullocks, it is true that women multitask far better than men--and that men "focus" equally better than women.
Of course, the REAL reason why CS doesn't appeal to women is that it's a boy's club. The tools, methidology, culture, and framework are all designed by rather cloistered geeks for their own use in putting out a rather arcane end product.
Plus, it's a psedudo-mechanical thing, and there aren't that many women auto mechanics, either.
Computer science is heavily math-based. Especially what I do. I'm female, btw, and I'm doing quite well, thank you. Have you not met any women, that you must rely on what you hear from others, and what you can determine to be likely inaccurate from the links in this story? Mathematical rigor seems quite necessary in most branches of computer-based work, though most of my experience has been in research.
Software engineering, on the other hand, is not. Perhaps there wasn't a separate major for it, where you went. Still, math is helpful to teach you logic and new ways of thinking. Discrete mathematics and formal logic might have been more helpful, but calculus is generally introduced before those topics, for whatever reason.
Lea
Look, people are individuals.
1. there may be some good reason they're avoiding you. maybe you smell. I don't know you, so I don't know.
2. coding is not CS. it's a useful tool, but I've found math to be much more useful. I know somewhere around 7 languages pretty well, but I don't use them, generally, becasue I do math. Yet I'm in CS! Oh my! Something must be wrong here! And it's not very unusual to be able to superficially pick up similar languages from observation, hate to burst your bubble.
3. women are differnt from each other, as are geek women. The guys I've dated had no complaints. I also think you're doing the other people around here a disservice in assuming they're recruiting becasue they want dates. Striving for equal rights and encouragement is often an altruistic pursuit. Don't ascribe one person's motives to everyone. Ans as for your comment about music people, that's rather common. In fact, at Berkeley, most of the Wind Ensemble is made up of engineers.
4. some teachers suck. it happens. If you want to swap horror stories, I'll do so, but I'd like to point out that I know some that are a lot worse that have happened to women of my acquantance. I've found it varies a lot by school district.
5. don't flaunt your scores if you're trying to prove that other people are dumb. Really. I got higher scores than you did, quite signifigantly higher in many cases, and I know that that says just about zilch about my intellegence -- the SAT's are justly deprecated. The AP's tend to be better, but vary widely between subjects. (and while I'm on the subject, the GRE's are pretty silly as well)
Just becasue the women that you know don't point out that they're smart, doesn't mean they aren't. Perhaps you haven't met smart ones -- since there's a smaller pool, it's a bit restrictive. I would simply be very, very careful about assuming women are not as intellegent or as educated as you belive yourself to be. I personally know quite a few very intellegent women in CS. I have been doing rather well for myself as well, thus far.
As for your statement that "for the first time, they're surrounded by a lot of guys who are good, know it, and can best them everytime," it's been my experience that a lot of guys have this issue. I certainly met a lot who expressed these sorts of anxieties, and when you go to grad school, at least at CMU, they point out to you that it's normal.
Feel free to email me if you'd like to discuss this further.
Lea
I don't see why women NEED to be in CS jobs. I know it makes it a little harder to get a date, but other than that, who cares if women as a group go into CS? I don't hear the fashion industry decrying the lack of men? Or the press?
As for anyone, if you'd like the flexability to go into any carrer, you need to be able to both handle sci/math issues and empathic/literatry fields. If many women don't strive to get the math/sci backgroud, then they won't have as much flexability. I see many men who do the exact opposite in shorting themselves in the empathy/literary vein. They couldn't write a understandable document to save their life, and they can't empathize what their co-workers are feeling.
I personally will try to get all my children to excel in BOTH areas. But if they don't I'll point out what flexability that they are loosing and be done with it.
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods