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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."
I can assure you the guys are even fewer in this case...
bius sig file. This is a moebius sig file. This is a moe
No chicks and your job will be outsourced to India. Any wonder that all the tv shows are about lawyers and not geeks?
that the article in question is about girls not going into CounterStrike and not Computer Science ? Damn those titles can be confusing at times :x
Worth a look is this article written by a girl doing CS at the university of kent.
And why is this a bad thing?
Girls are okay. Programming is more fun. Guys are more fun. Geek guys are the most fun.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
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.
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
Do you know they are girls for a fact?
/sigh
Or are they just a lot of ten year old boys you are hearing over Voice Comm?
I never felt so old as when they added voice communication to counter-strike and I realized half the people who were kicking my ass hadn't hit puberty yet.
Cars, excavating equipment, COMPUTERS. all examples of machines. Sure the computer is candy coated, but it's still a machine.
Now tell me.. how many women do you know actually LIKE "playing with" machines? This is the same male-dominated issue to affects the construction industry, the auto-machanic business, and many others.
The female gender doesn't generally WANT much to do with mechanical things (I'm not questioning their ability, just stating a trend in their apparent desire).
More than that, computers usually don't allow them to demonstrate their great personal/social skills (which are more often then not, 1000 times better than men's).
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
Humm, so having all of the opportunity in the world and choose not to join a field is somehow bad, or at any rate, is cast as not good?
This mangling of the language seems to be resulting in a mangling of ideals too. If women want to be in CS, fine, if the make a different choice that should be fine too.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
The pyschologies of men and women are different, and its not just because of cultural pressure.
That's all feminsm should be about: letting women do what they want.
There's not any social benenfit in trying to artificially generate gender equity where pychological economies of scale will result in huge gender disparities. As long as there aren't restrictive sociocultural barriers preventing women from doing what they want, there nothing wrong with have gender disparities.
This doesn't mean girls aren't smart, but rather that they think computer science is for dorks. lol.
I go to a relatively small tech school and I would kill for a 44% male population as opposed to the ~70%.
I hold a patent on sigs...
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.
They simply don't like the machines we've created. Have they ever been greatful for the washing
machines, vacum cleaners, stoves, refrigators and such? No!! Instead they are taking over the world.
Take cover boys!
/StarBar
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
My observations over the years has made me conclude that college is for two types of people. Firstly there are those that do not have the dicipline to train themselves. Second are the ones trying to obtain a position that they have no natural talent for. Programming is not really something that can be taught you have to be built for it. Ninety percent of the programmers that I know fit into the first and second category. The good programmers I know are in the last 10%, they do it because it is their god given talent.
Got Code?
I was a CS major until I found out I had to take all that damn calculus.
What does calculus have to do with computers? absolutely nothing.
I hate math but I love computers, I'm a guy, but I've heard girls are not usually good at math.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
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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> 19,000 boys and just 2,400 girls
Before you get ecstatic that you have a 10% chance to get laid, out of those 2400 girls 1000 are lesbians and 1000 are dating businessmen and lawyers. So it's more like 1%. Now go have a beer!
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
Okay, let's take all 2nd year ICT classes at my college. For various reasons I won't explain the nasty details and difference between the dutch and the US education system, so please don't go ballistic over any grades and/or level of progress we use. It isn't my idea anyways, let's just assume the average age of a 2nd year ICT class is 18, for comparisons. To get back at the subject, we have about 140 students (2nd year ICT only) of which about five are female. Two off them never show up for some mysterious reason, but my best guess is that the either don't exist or have left already. So about 3,6% (notice the comma, thank you) of all 2nd year ICT students are female. I don't know about other years or other colleges, but my best guess is that 1st, 3rd and 4th year ICT classes have the same percentages and that this is applicable to other ICT colleges as well.
Then again, one of the three remaining girls is in my class. Blonde, blue eyes, single, nice butt and actually quite smart. (I'd give further comments, however, I'm not secist, I'm going to show her this after I posted it and Slashchick might throw a hissy fit again if I do so, so I won't.) She's capable of coding in C++ (a bit, we're still only students after all) and is quite good with networking as well. And she's snuggly, too! :) If there is a God, I'm sure he prefers quality over quantity!
Hate me!
I found when I was at uni that it tended to be an all or nothing affair with girls and coding. They either computely sucked at it, or they really were good.
I have absolutely no clue as to why that was the case, but it was!
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.
I'm a guy in a CS program, and the women are lacking, but not completely absent. There are a lot of Software Engineering women actually than CS, but men are still the vast majority in tech programs.
Anyway, as for why more women don't go for CS or other tech degrees I am uncertain, but I believe I have pinpointed the reason that they drop out. My College (RIT) will tell you that you don't need to have prior experience to go into CS. This is a lie. If you haven't coded before in your life, you're dead where you stand. First day of CS 1, objects and UNIX. loops? printf? int x? forget about it if you don't know the basics your screwed. The other problem is high school guidance counselors. They see a student who likes computers. Where do they send them? well computer...science! Even when IT was the correct choice for this person. More CS majors go to IT in my school, its rediculous. And there are quite a few girls in IT that do well, I know some of them.
So the reason that people drop out of CS is because they really wanted IT, but their guidance counselor was stupid, and they've never coded before in their lives.
So why more women? Well you've got a major where coming in you've got very few women. An equal percentage of women and men belong in IT, so now you've got less of each, but losing 2 in 20 women hurts a lot more than losing 8 in 80 men. This is just an educated guess, but I didn't know any girls that could code in high school. Not one. So it would be a good guess to say that a higher percentage of women had no prior experience. So the smaller group loses a higher percentage of people. You end up with say 70 guys and 3 girls. And you started with 80 and 20.
How to get more women in CS? Teach computers in high school. High schools buy all these computers and they use them to facilitate learning in other subjects. Use them to teach computers! That's all they're really good for. Hire a techie, there are lots who need jobs, and make every kid learn basic C, basic object oriented concepts, and binary math. Have a hardware class, teach everyone how a PC works, and how to build one. If its mandatory just as many guys and girls will be interested. Nobody is going to go for a CS degree in college if they've never done it before in their lives. Oh yeah, I'm going to commit to lots of money and 4-5 years at a university doing something I've never tried. Yeah, sure.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
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.
There are other reasons why women would not be interested in computer science. As mentioned the work is pretty intense and does require a genuine interest. However, the work can often be fairly individual as well. Although you may be working in a team on a project, this doesn't mean you are in constant interaction with people. There can be times where I go a whole day or two without speaking to people, while working that is. I can't see many women being interested in such a profession. When I go to other departments which are basically being run by women, such as payroll, it seems like they are having a party everyday in comparison to our work enviroment.
Back to the genuine interest, as someone mentioned men like their toys be it cars, computers or even that ball you bounce around while thinking. We love to play with things, break things, make things work. We tend to have a passion for our toys, we could spend days just tweaking things which would seem pointless to others. Simpily put we have a passion for playing. Whereas women tend only to hold things such as releationships as close to them as we hold our passion for playing.
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.
As a current manager and former student, my opinion is that the CS curriculum beats the MIS curriculum in preparing people for the real world of IT.
As you say, IT!=CS. But if look at the total number of IT "applied technology" jobs vs. the total number of CS "hard-core engineering" jobs, the statistical reality is that (like it or not) most CS grads end up working in IT.
I'm currently at McGill, a major (30 000+ students) Canadian University, and here it's quite obvious that girls don't dig the programming. In my Intro to Comp Eng class (that everyone in Comp or Software has to take) there were four girls out of 15 students. Of those four, two were brilliant (and one was attractive too), and the other two got Cs.
The CompEng male-female ratio definatley isn't true for the rest of Engineering here tho: Chemical is almost totally female-dominated (any ideas why? we don't know) and civil is about even. So yeah, even in Canada there arn't many girls in CompEng/Software/ECE...the faculty of arts however, is a toally different story.
Cue The Sun...
this is all rather ironic, since, along with babbage, she started it all
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There are definitely a lot of factors at work in situations like this - things are never simple enough that there's an easy quick-fix solution. I'll front just one of them to consider.
Going into CS, like most subjects, has a prerequisite of interest. Ignoring all those people who go into programming thinking that there are going to be high salaries involved (are there still people like that nowadays?), most others do it because they're interested in the subject and the material. The question to ask then is why are they interested in it?
I'll go out on a limb and say that most people choosing to go into CS have significant background experience with computers. Of course this isn't true 100% of the time, but I'm going to generalize and say that it's the majority. This experience could be anything from playing lots of games to just feeling really comfortable in an OS (any OS), but generally more than just using a word processor.
So someone with a strong computer background is likely to be interested in going into CS. Fair enough. So how many women have a strong background in computers? And by that I mean how many women have been raised using computers, who tinker around with an OS, and feel comfortable with the technology? I would venture not many.
For those of you that grew up using a computer, how young were you when you first used a mouse or keyboard? How much of your time in your youth was spent interacting with a machine? And more importantly, how did your parents respond?
Here's my point. No matter how progressive universities are and how accepting of all sexes their CS programs may be, they're nothing compared to the forces of society that shape expectations. While it's much more acceptable now for women to be interested in computers and it isn't even unheard of for them to get encouragement, remember that there are a _lot_ of parents out there that are _not_ going to encourage their daughters play around with an old Apple or Pentium or what have you. Never underestimate the impact of dolls vs. legos on a child's development - think about the message being given to the child.
It doesn't necessarily have to be active discouragement for it do be discouraging. How many men in CS are there who were never encouraged to use a computer? Or may not have had a computer? Or might have been told that that wasn't for them? Or didn't have a social group of peers with the same interest? Don't underestimate the powers of peer pressure - at least most nerd boys know at least one nerd they can be friends with and get encouragement.
In summary, a reason that we would see more and more women in law and medicine but not CS is a reflection of our current society's attitude towards girls in that field. At least with law and medicine one doesn't generally have a strong background in the field before one begins to study it - CS is generally a different case.
Experts agree: everything is fine.
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.
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.
Interesting stats: in my CS department there are more gay men than there are women total.
OK, I don't want to sound prejudiced or sexist. Please don't troll me down or anything.
;-) ). There's something about the IT field that doesn't attract the smart ones.
At my shop, there is a signifigant number of programers that have come from the former Soviet Union. Both male & female.
The problem that we have is that the male Russian programmers, do the work of 2 people. That being their own, and the work of at least 1 female russian 'programmer'. Usually they're relatives, or married. Working in different groups, but the guy does all the work.
This is no joke.
Fortunately, it's not happening in my group, but I've been seeing this for years in others. We've even done some minor investigative work, where we figure out the login id's of the people involved, and then go into the system (Mainframe), and check the ID's on the female's code. It's always the male programmer's. 100% of the time.
I can't say how the ladies get past the tech interview. Our thinking is that this group of people has someone 'up there' somehere who has enough juice to let the hirings happen.
The ladies draw a full developer's salary. They're usually not senior developers, or even programmer analysts. They have straight 'coder' titles. But that's still good for $50K -> $70K. For doing nothing but sitting in their helper's cubes, taking smoke breaks, and going to lunch.
We thought, with the economic slowdown that this would 'go away'. It hasn't. In the last 8 years there's only been 1 firing over this. Well 2 really. One pair was fired for a mistake that booked a billion or so too little to the ledger.
My point. Well, these are the majority of female developers in my shop. I see no capacity to learn, or even try to understand what they're doing. The others, all seem to have admistrative, or business related jobs. No coders.
There's 1 group of about 5 women that runs our Function Point / Software Development Life Cycle program. You can imagine what a mess this thing is. It's even worse than you can imagine. Non coders, trying to measure coding productivity.
Yeaahh Riiigght.
I know that there are female doctors, female scientists etc.., but in my career I have not seen 1 competant developer. Not 1. It's not that women aren't smart enough, or can't think logically( when they want to
Who knows what it is? Is a programmers work really that much different from any other service or science related job?
Huh?
Enrollment in CS at my campus is in the dumper this year. All the people who thought they were going to make a ton of money because they can squeak through a CS program have gotten the word that there's no jobs in IT anymore. About a third of our Freshmen/Sophomore students jumped ship, mostly to Bio and Psychology. Upper levels have seen similar attrition, though the CSAB accredited program (where all the REAL CS students go) is still going strong (1 person out of 40 enrolled left in the last two years).
We did have a number of female CS students, in the low 20s (percentage). They've thinned out in the last year, I'm not sure what the ratio is now, but I think there are less than 10 female students (full time), so it's around 3%.
I'm a second semester sophomore CS major and this is what I've seen thus far.
.5-1.0 points higher than most of the girls she was talking to and I ended up outscoring most of the girls on AP tests. Her darlings usually had around a 900-1000 on the SAT, I had a 1270 and a 1390 on the SATII (760 American History). I got a 5 on the US history and US government tests, a 3 on the comparative politics (class wasn't even offered at our school and everyone in the surrounding region who tried, got a 1 and I had only 1.5 months to read the entire textbook) and 3s on both English tests. I graduated with a 3.8 weighted GPA (only 5 weighted classes at our school). So no, I'm not bitter, I'm very much amused by how stupid the female cheauvinists are.
The majority of the girls in CS that I've come into contact with fall into one of three groups: those that could be good but are too self-deprecating to push themselves, those that think they're hot shit but aren't and those that cheat and just suck. I've only known one true "computer geek girl" and she wasn't a CS major.
At my university you have to have an overall 3.0 GPA in your freshman CS classes to be guaranteed to be allowed to declare your major and register for sophomore classes. In my last freshman class, I was probably the best one in there and the professor had no problems hinting that he felt so at times. I wasn't the teacher's pet, he demanded more of me than the other students. I noticed that only one of the girls would talk to me, the rest acted like I was an asshole or something. I'm not the stereotype of a geek. I dress like a cross between a prep and a skater, am built a bit like a football player and tend to not act like a geek in general public. So here I am, scratching my head about why this is and I realized something.
My theory goes something like this. In school, before college, girls are given a lot more attention than boys because of "past discrimination." It doesn't matter of course that we've moved past that point. Girls do really well because they push themselves and beat all the guys who don't take their math and science classes seriously and as a result they think that they're hot shit. When the girls get to college and do math and science, lo and behold, they're surrounded by mostly geeks and nerds. Yeah, the guys who do take math, science, hell practically every other remotely interesting study, seriously. For the first time, they're surrounded by a lot of guys who are good, know it, and can best them everytime.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that none of the girls in our CS program could match the best guys, regardless of which CS chic you picked. A large part of the problem is that the girls tend to not be adventurous. Here I am, downloading the D compiler to see what it's like. I'll probably never use it for more than a few code samples on my website, but it's another language I can get familiar with. All of the girls I know, know only 2, maybe 3 languages: C++ and Java and some, VB. I have a solid grasp of C++, Java, PHP, C# and a decent understanding of VB and Python. I'm at the point where I can often figure out a language's syntax just by looking at sample code, unlike the average girl in our CS program. I can read Pascal and little bit of ASM, and I've never formally tried either.
It's my experience that "geek girls" don't make good girlfriends. There are exceptions, but most of the ones I've met are too neurotic and immature to make good girlfriends. The drive to have a geek chic seems to be the reason why this topic keeps getting posted. I've come to the point where I've realized that geeks are generally a waste of time. Stop actively trying to recruit girls because it's a waste of time. Coding isn't for most people, regardless of gender and you're only doing a disservice to them and making yourselves look desparate. You think they don't know the real reason why most guys want a larger female population in CS?
If you want to have a chance to encourage them, make HS more like college. Stop babying them in HS and push them no harder than the guys. I saw too much of that at my HS. I was frequently insulted by a math teacher who would bend over backwards to help the girls, but who looked at me like I was a bumbling idiot when I asked a simple question. Which amused me then and still does. My GPA was about
This topic is just another way for most guys here to say "how can we enlarge our dating pool." Here's my suggestion, pick up a musical instrument and start hanging around the music crowd. I've found that I have more in common with musically-oriented girls than computer geek girls.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
I started as a CS Engin. student at Cornell University. My seconds semester (spring '94 semester), I took CS212, which was basically honors second semester CS.
The class was limited to 75 students. The first lecture, three females showed up. By the next day, one had dropped, so we had 2 females and 73 males in the class.
I became good friends with one of the two females. The female-male ratio in the class and in the CS departments together were a frequent topic of conversation. I got to know her as a very intelligent person, and someone who worked very hard (two requirements to stay in the class).
In a situation like that, the other students, the TAs, and the prof are all going to look at the females differently. They are obviously not the norm in the class, and it is all too easy to expect then that they will act differently. They could do well (which my friend did - the two of us often got the highest scores on the exams) and people chalk that up to "She is female in an all-male field. Just surviving is hard enough, so only the really tough ones survive. It is not surprising that she is doing so well." If they do poorly you can chalk that up to "Well, it is rough for a female to survive in an all-male field. That does not excuse the poor grade, but the situation does have to be realized."
My firned, of course, just wanted to be judged against the males in the class without a second thought about her sex. When you are the obvious exception, though, things you do normally are looked at with that difference in mind.
I learned a lot about how rough it is to survive those sorts of ratios. I think it would be difficult for any female to walk into a program with a ratio like that.
[Also, I am simply flabbergasted by other posts to this story that show an ignorance of the pressure that would face females going into a male-dominated field like CS. "Maybe they just do not want to" and "Girls do not do well at math" are just about as absurd a thing as I have read on Slashdot, and I have been here a *long* time. They demonstrate a clear lack of understanding of the full issues surrounding the topic.
Also realize that I am a Libertarian and I am opposed to Affirmitive Action type solutions. Instead, I think that colleges could do a better job of providing better support systems for females that do enter fields like CS.]
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Maybe if CS majors didnt have to take Math I'd be a CS major again/
If you arent a natural math genius you can forget about taking CS unless you want to be in college for 5 years.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
This is one way to get around guys like him.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Judging from the AP exam statistic -- who takes the test -- fewer than 13% are female. Not even the studies that have shown disporportionate ability among boys would support this difference. These girls are being discouraged, and discouraged early -- despite showing greater math aptitude before about age 12. Women gravitate, but they are also guided.
Strange enough, but in Eastern Europe (particularly in CIS states) women make up half of all technical disciplines. Moreover, throughout high school I have never seen a single male math teacher.
:)
Having studied CS on one of Russian universities, female:male ration was almost equal. Perhaps (or most likely) that has to do with the society itself. Women have always been allowed and enoucraged to persue higher education, they have always worked "male" professions (i.e. painters, bus drivers, engineers) and hence is the high admission rate to technical faculties.
However, having also worked for a number of Russian (Moscow) companies, I have rarely seen women occupying positions in their fields of study. Most women either get married and leave their diplomas collect dust, or take on a completely different job.
It can also be said that a lot of people who take, for instnace, political science (I ended up doing just that), sociology and other disciplines, choose to persue a different career from what they have studied. My fellow "politicians" all but a few took MBAs and other business-related courses and ended up working for private sector doing radically different work from what they first intended.
So if you're in school to merely obtain a degree, you would choose something easy and at least fun (frankly speaking, CS is hardly any fun for women).
Although, a person in charge of CS department in Carleton University (Canada, Ottawa) is a woman, a PhD in CS, and a rather attractive one
- Convert institutions of learning into institutions of conformity and political correctness.
- Socially engineer maleness as a disease, which must be punished and medicated.
- Institute affirmative action for men.
Ok, stop the machine, I want to get off.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
24 out of 195 programmers are female. I could have missed a few, having some trouble with non-European first names. The fraction is higher when you include testing, documnentation and specification specialists. (We are the largest scientific software conglomerate in the energy industry.)
...but only in certain fields. If you're actually a court lawyer, or you do civil suits, then I can see that. But corporate lawyers spend huge amounts of time pouring over obscenely thick documents and analyzing them in excrutiating detail - very much like programming, actually, except that the computer executing these commands is a distributed network of highly sophisticated (and unscrupulous) neural networks. And don't even get me started on *international* law.
I'm the stranger...posting to
The local LUG is a dick farm too. I knew I should have been gay...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Soory, but it was the first thing I thought of when i saw the title... And I can understand... The guns, terrorist and violence...
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Thats a little less than the national average of 57%, but near parity. About 40% of SB degrees are computer-related, but I dont know the sex ratio of that.
GIRLS can get laid.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
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
Admittedly, I know a lot of CS majors who shouldn't be in CS, or even in college at all. But I also know a lot of people, excellent programmers, who don't need college for the skills they'll "learn" (my best friend is a freshman in college, started working for a cellphone software developer in high school), but because businesses want to see that piece of paper. And outside technology, it's pretty hard to train yourself in a lot of fields. I'm a political science major because I want to work in the American State Department, either as a diplomat or an analyst of some sort. Tell me, how do you propose I train myself sufficiently to be qualified for this sort of work without any college education? How would a doctor "train himself"? Would you want him to?
Frankly, sir, I find the idea that I am somehow *less* competent because I am going to college to be offensive.
I'm the stranger...posting to
My girlfriend graduated from university with a BA in English. She decided she wanted to be a technical writer so she took a certificate course and completed that. She then spent a year trying to find a job without luck.
So she spoke with a few people in the industry, curious why she would find it so hard to start her career. She thought it might be because she had an arts degree (actually, she took a lot of sciences in university but that's not obvious) but the common response she got was it was because she is a woman. Why is this bad? Because the TW industry is dominated by women so there is a big push to hire more men.
She's going to go back to school in September but hasn't yet decided what to do (she has a number of ideas, she's just still doing research). Personally, I think she should get an CT diploma so she can be on the other side of the affirmative action coin.
(Disclaimer: This story is rife with anecdotes and personal experience and may only reflect trends in our area of the planet. This also wasn't an attempt to bash affirmative action, so don't interpret it as such. YMMV)
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Who knows, maybe they're just castrati.
Since when do whites have a free pass into college? It is Blacks and Hispanics who are average to somewhat below average in the body applying to X Elite College that get a free pass, and the Whites and Asians have to work harder to make up for it.
"but what other way is there to make things equal?"
By establishing some equality, not by putting in more inequality.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
There's a fair few comments of the type "Men and women are different, and that's why". To which I say, yep. There are differences.
:).
How big are those differences? There is nothing quantitative being cited at all. From distant menory, I think that the differences are of the order of 3-5%. I wish I could cite something, but I can;t find anything (not my field
A difference of theat order of magnitude is a reasaonable match to the sex difference between people studying mathematics, physics, and chemistry.
So the real question is why is the the difference in student numbers greater than the statistically observed difference?
And if someone can point me to some hard numbers on this one, I'd be very interested.
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...
Maybe girls have better written communication skills, and know that the word you want is spelled "dying". Christ, with all the BSD trolls around, how hard is it to remember that? You don't have to be Kreskin...
I don't think the whole story is that there are fewer women taking computer science classes and going on to graduate with computer science degrees, but that the field as a whole is experiencing some drastic enrollment shortfalls. Face it, would you really want to go into a discipline that will put you into a position of being neglected, overworked, and possibly underpaid? It isn't that women are doing it less, everyone is doing it less. That, and the splitting of what-was-computer-science (some math courses and some electronics courses, bam, here's your degree) into 'modern computer science' and then into computer engineering, electrical engineering (with chipmaking, etc), computer science, information systems, and whatever else has cropped up in the past few years.
From what I've heard (and it is only from 2 schools), enrollment is declining overall for computer science. It just isn't happening. Think about right now, the economy is kinda crappy, and we've just come out of this bizarre greed-affair of stocks and internet millionaires that most people would really like to forget. It just isn't as sexy to the general population anymore.
I also wish to take issue about the gender equality statement, just because I can't seem to get it to make sense to me. Law? Medicine? We don't have recorded history long enough to find the origins of those professions. (I won't mention the profession of courtesan, oops, I did.) The fact that computer science and electronic information technologies are so young doesn't really make for a good comparison as to where the gender equality situation stands. Should we take a survey of modern-day sanitation workers? As someone else said, sterotypes are self-perpetuating/self-replicating.
OK, I'm done now. Yes, I am a CS student. Advice: get your prereq courses done at a community college and put the rest of the money in a CD or bond or something (CD, look it up, it's an investment vehicle).
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I think what it is is that programming requires a sort of compulsive nature not often seen in women. It's sorta like model train sets. You can see a man spend months building a perfect little model train set, hovering over all the small little details like the trees and buildings trying to make it just right, but it's not something you'd really see a woman do.
It's that same sort of compulsive nature that makes programming appealing. It's not that you'd never see that trait in a woman, it's just far far more common in men.
but in fields such as biology, mathematics, physics, engineering, etc., women are commonly anywhere from 40% to 60% of the division population. Then we look at CS where the number drops precipitously.
There are indeed differences, but the tenacity for in-depth knowledge in a subject is not the difference. Or were you going to say that math was not requiring an in-depth knowledge. Perhaps biology is just four or five years of fluff. Oh, I know! All of those women who are receiving medical degrees are just coasting along with no in-depth knowledge.
And just to pick apart that "concentrating on a single thing for long periods of time," I have just one word: mother.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
I wouldn't date a girl that fucking stupid anyways. You know, there are multisyllabic girls out there, and they are wonderful.
--sdem
not all of them are fat and ugly.
:)
keep saying that, but until your discussing the finer points on functional programming versus OO programming with a hot chick during sex, you, my friend, are missing out.
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Just look at what you need to do in order to be really successful in programming.
1. Spend enourmous amount of time on your tech hobbies in young age. Free time being limited, it means you don't go out much and don't do well in school (who wants to spend time memorizing when each king/president/whatever came into power when you could be perfecting your tic-tac-toe algorithm?)
2. If you go to college, you will spend your time fighting off professors who want you to mechanically follow the book to do things you already know how to do better. Structural programming experiences, anyone? In addition, you will study subjects that are extremly tedious and are never used in programming, or at least never done manually. Why draw an LR state table by hand when you can just do yacc -v? The best outcome you can hope for is that professors just realize they can not teach you and rubber-stamp your grades to let you move on.
3. Repeat the previous step at work with various Ph.D. - carrying managers that have strong opinions about function names and calling conventions. Finally, give up a good portion of the programming work you wanted to do in the first place to go into office politics and grab good projects, people etc.
Perhaps girls have a tendency to avoid such antisocial lifestyles. After all, there are few female terrorists (well, except for no-longer-Soviet Russia), polititians, mercinaries and so on. It's theoretically possible to imagine a geek-friendly society, but it would involve human-rights abuse of normal people. For now, look for it in an online game near you.
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
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.
That's an interesting theory that goes completely against the grain of market forces.
I'd say that men start LEAVING the field when it doesn't give them a path for advancement. And that usually happens when the jobs become easier, or less profitable.
Men are more agressive in life and their job. Side effect of testosterone.
Women are attracted to jobs that are secure. Secure jobs pay less.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
I don't think so.
I have been for some long years on the computer field and I may say that some of the most intelligent beings here are girls. They preform very well in some more abstract or theoretical tasks. However there are a few constraints that make a girl's life much more harder in this field.
First is the stress. To hold up in the IT field, one frequently is submitted to physical and psychological stresses much higher than in many other professions. I have seen geek girls trying to hold up rythms and hard tasks that I and many other of my colleagues consider "routine". After such situations, most of them, just "turn off" for a few days.
Second is the environment. Most IT rooms are a chaos of dirty coffee mugs, papers all over, tons of computer gear, kilometers of wire. Frequently, dust, noise, lightning conditions and some other things can be added to this. For many girls, this is the Hell in Flames.
Third, is the abnormal sexual enviroment around many IT experts. The computer, frequently, deprives people of some common pattern for sexual behaviour. Many become asexual or gives ground to weird sexual behaviours. In result, girls, who care more for some common denominator, feel some sort of weird discrimination. Among many girls, there is a frequent stereotype to consider most computer experts as impotents, sexually abnormal, or having trouble with their orientation. This weird environment is enough to scare many girls. Anyway they love some attention and care. And cannot cope with a full bunch of guys playing CounterStrike.
Fourth. Girls have lots of troubles when they become pregnant and start to care about their children. While there are some interesting exceptions, more than 90% of girls usually get a serious blow in their jobs, when they are forced to give up the IT world. A girl who tries care up for its child for the first years, usually is forced to expect a much lower position when she comes back to the IT world. Even six monthes out of the regular work is enough to send her into some secondary job.
And last. No matter the intelligence, girls are more prone to find easy jobs (aka more lazy jobs). And more prone to stability, order and care. In the core bottom of the chaotic IT world, most just quit at first try.
Yes but white males already get a free pass, so why shouldnt their competition get the same?
As a white male, I resent the implication that I've gotten a free pass. I resent the implication that my job is the result of my caucasion schlong and not because of my experience, education, skills and knowledge. I resent the implication that I am incompetent but am kept on because of my WM Membership Card.
If you put a quota on IT/SE/EE to hire 50% females, then you will be placing those same assumptions on females. Is that your goal?
You need to address the core of the problem, and not the symptoms. Affirmative action only addresses the symptoms while letting the core problem fester.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
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)
I think I speak for everyone when I say, "DUH!". Actually, I went to Purdue to study CS, and there were i'd say about 15-25% females. I think Purdue's focus on women in technology really helps draw them in, obviously not in proportional numbers to men though. Perhaps other universities just need to enhance their women in technology programs as well, as I think perhaps some females just think that it is a man's profession (incorrectly too). My girlfriend graduated from Purdue with a Technical Graphics BS, but is now doing Cold Fusion programming (which she describes as the PowerPoint of programming languages), and enjoys it more than doing Flash work.
today is spelling optional day.
True story.
There was a small company, made speakers. Damn good ones, too.
One day, Official Government Official shows up, and says 'I can't help but notice that you don't have any handicapped people. That's illegal.
Owner says 'Oh, well, no handicapped people have applied for jobs, you see.'
Does some checking, and when OGO shows back up, owner says 'Hey, I did some checking, and there simply aren't any handicapped people within 100 kilometers looking for work at the moment.'
OGO says 'That's beside the point; hire at least three handicapped people, or lose your permits.'
As I recall, the company then proceeded to move to the states.
Yes, affirmative action taken to the quota extreme simply turns into reverse racisim; you're specifically being hired or not hired because of your race/gender/other criteria, rather than merit/skill/need.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
This is part and parcel of what I do for a living and most of you have this entirely wrong.
It's not discrimination, or dislike for single tasks, but something fairly simple. The Times article almost says it, but not quite.
Women, as a group, tend toward careers that have clear social roles. Areas like psychology, sociology, education lead to careers that contribute positively to society and individuals. Not only do they lead to those careers, they *obviously* lead to those careers, without anyone having to tell them that people with degrees in widgetology can go on to a social career.
Engineering and Computer Science often lack that. The fields that do best are Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Bioengineering, and maybe Chemical Engineering. They suggest more societal, humanistic careers and as a result have significantly higher numbers of women participating.
Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Industrial Engineering, and so on don't obviously suggest societal careers. Everybody pushes Intel and MS as employers. There's little attention paid to bringing power and communications to underdeveloped nations as there is with Civil Engineering and bringing clean water and waste treatment to the same population. If that was part of the culture of these fields, you'd probably attract more women to the field.
Once in the programs, women consistently outperform men. The problem is marketing and focus. The discrimination angle is easy to claim since the people in the field have historically not been interested in social issues - so people that bring social issues are ignored, and the cycle repeats. In order to get more women into EE, we need more women in EE, or at least more men in EE that see the field as something more than inventing the next blue LED.
I ask, what socially oriented career would you suggest out of CS? I'm not suggesting that they aren't there - rather that nobody has bothered to think about them, let alone articulate them.
There are two lines of thinking as to why women look for social careers. One is the nature angle where women are maternal and driven to help people, the other is the practical angle where women realistically need to consider careers that they can leave for a few years and return to. People don't change nearly as quickly as technology, and careers that emphasize technology over people are much harder to leave and later return. Consider leaving the programming field altogether for 5 years and trying to return to a career. Not impossible, but not easy either.
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.
So women use gcc?
~Idarubicin
But I do dispute. Yes, a lot of major literature dand history goes under what myself, my friends, and many of my teachers call the "Dead White Guy" category. I agree it's biased, but then look at the attempts to do otherwise. A political philosophy class: readings are Aristotle, Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau, ... and Mencius (token non-white guy) - and the class universally thought the Mencius reading shouldn't have been in the syllabus. A literature class: poets are Shakespeare, Tennison, Wordsworth, ... and Maya Angelou (token non-white non-guy). With all due respect she may be a great creative force, but her poetry simply isn't in the same ballpark as the other classics. The ONLY time I've ever seen a female author not pulled in as a token gesture but instead as a useful work to study was a Johnathen Swifte - Jane Austen - Nathaniel Hawthorne - John Stienbeck progression. I'm not saying that women can't write (the best essays I've seen usually come from women), but for the general, non-writing/history-intensive education there simply aren't any great works by women to study. And my opinion is that trying to retroactively give women more of a historical voice only creates more problems by showing women as unable to compare to the greatest literary lights ever.
Yes, I AM female. Dammit.
Now that has to be one of the finest statements I've seen here in ages. You have my envy - I only WISH I could use that as a sig.
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
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.
Mod me for being a pig.. but CS, Engineering and other "technical" fields have some serious issues if you are a single parent or the "homemaker" in home where both parents work. Why? Obscene hours, being on call (Jim, the server's down) and the lack of job stability make any project oriented job difficult for women who want to or are mothers. Hell, it's hard for us Dads...
$G
-- $G
As a woman who was in the IT field ("senior software engineer", until I became disabled), I can understand why few women would want to become involved. The hours were horrible, the pay sucked, and I routinely saw men ignoring whatever women had to say about the project. Plus, given the last item, men got all the promotions to management, and more money, while the women were allowed to bring them coffee.
During my tenure at the company, we had 4 women who worked there. Three of us left, and the 4th only kept her job by boffing the boss at lunch. This is *not* the kind of environment that women find "inviting". Small wonder why few women are inclined to get into this field. It's just not worth the trouble.
Lemon curry?
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
Actually, there are plenty of women in my CS classes. But they're almost all foreign, it seems like for non-westerners, CS is perfectly normal field for girls to go into. And to me anyway the ratio of male foreigners to female foreigners seems about equal.
:(.
This doesn't help me much, though, because most of them don't speak English that well
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Yes but white males already get a free pass, so why shouldnt their competition get the same?
I am a white male. I grew up in a 4 room rental house with about 800 square feet of living space. My father worked 60-70 hour weeks for years to save up money for my college education. Even then, I had to work full-time while going to school full time to afford to go to college. It took me 6 years to get an engineering degree because I couldn't pass a full course load and work full time. And I didn't qualify for grants because my father had the ridiculous idea of working hard to better himself and his family, so we were not "poor enough" to get a free ride.
I made more in my second year as a junior engineer than my father or grandfather had ever made in any single year in their entire lives. Next year I make twice as much as my father ever made. Thanks to the hard work of several generations, my children now have better opportunities than anyone else in my family has ever had.
I sure wish I had known about these free passes. It would have been a lot easier with them, I guess.
I bet i know more about computers than you do, from EXPERIENCE.
I know about Data Structions, AI, Object Oriented Programming, Top Down/Bottom Up and other various Design Models, I know how the hardware works, I know the physics involved, I know the way CPUs are written, how they are designed, why they are designed in the way they are, I know current silicon chips are at the end of their lifetime, I know about biological computing, I know about quantum computing and how it works, light based and water based computers being experimented on.
I know how all of this stuff works to the point where I could work with it in the industrym but wait
I dont know the weird math and calculus equation dealing with the movements of light or whatever the hell we are supposed to be calculating with calculus?
Please, no one Ive ever met whos a computer science in the industry has ever used calculus unless its too write a game and even then games dont use real physics so unless you want to make a sim of the atomic bomb explosions or work on writing a genetic algorithm to help boeing design new aircrafts what Math are you talking about.
Math rigor? What is math rigor? yes you do problem solving when you write programs sometimes but 90 percent of writing programs is fixing bugs and using code thats already written, most algorithms are already there and you can just steal them, sure to be a GREAT programmer you need to be good at math but the average programmer they only know up to algebra.
Discrete Math I dont have a problem with, I dont have a problem with Combinatorics, I dont have a problem with Algebra even, its calculus that I have a problem with, and Linear Algebra and the BS stuff they teach us which has absolutely nothing to do with computer science.
You will use statistics more than you'll use Calculus or Linear Algebra, you need to know how to calculate statistics when you work with AI.
Computer Engineering however is what you are thinking of, or maybe Robotics?
Give me an example of when you'll use math, the only math you will use is Combinatorics and
some basic Algebra.
Calculus isnt even about logic, I agree learning Logic is important but Calculus is the wrong math to use to teach logic.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Girls statistically outperform boys overall in grade school
Perhaps because most grade school teachers are women, and teach things the way they make sense to them (which does not necessarily make sense to boys). Most IT teachers (and most college teachers in science / technology areas) are men, and that could explain why males seem to learn those subjects better.
Of course, men and women do have different tastes (or so say cannibals), but I suspect the gender of the teacher plays an important role as well. I know I tend to understand (study / technical) books written by men (or men and women) better than I understand books written (exclusively) by women, even when they are teaching basically the same thing.
RMN
~~~
The reason we don't have many women in CS may be the same resaon we don't have many women mechanics - they simply don't want to get into it.
Maybe they don't consider it 'feminine'?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Theorem:
On average, the more time you spend on doing academic stuffs, the better you'll be at these academic activities.
Fact:
Our cultures have produced a LOT more boys than girls who are more active in pursuing sex.
Implication:
Given that both boys and girls have 24 hours a day doing all their stuffs, boys spend more time on the pursuit of sex thus less time on academic activities.
Corollary:
Girls perform better than boys academically.
THANK YOU!!!!!
:)
I totally agree that if girls aren't going into CS, then there is about as much effect on IT as on the price of banannas
(thats not completely true, but seriously people, if you know you're going into IT, why the heck do you want to take hard classes, when you can get a degree in MIS and have an active social life (which women stereotypically desire))
Need a Catering Connection
Okay, and how many of you guys look like Pierce Brosnan?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
... might I be the first to say, so what?
Perhaps they're just not interested. I'm sure that they aren't being pushed away from the computer industry, guidance counselors are pushing EVERYONE into the computer industry.
Perhaps... we're just not all the same, and we shouldn't push high school girls into computers merely to even out a statistic and make ourselves feel nice about being "equal."
Just my $.02
I remember reading on slashdot that CS folks were working for peanuts, but I didn't realize things were that bad.
And I can tell you that girls are getting more interested in computer related professions now. I think it's mainly because girls use computers more. They use them to chat, AIM and now a lot of girls use them to keep journals/blogs online (nearly every girl I knew in high school had a LiveJournal). Which they later wanted to learn how to use HTML to add colors and what not to their journals thus learning HTML. Two girls I know liked HTML so much they bought books and created their own websites. And both of them are taking technology related classes at UC Davis (California).
"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."
I think you're naive if you think this is still true. 99% or more, companies and schools treat everyone the same. Affirmative action had a place at one time, but now does more harm than good. The problem with affirmative action is it gives people the excuse to say "he just got in to that school because he's black", making it difficult for minorities to prove they really earned their positions, rather than receiving them to fill quotas.
Vote for Pedro
I'm currently a senior computer engineering student and will be graduating in May. My major is best described as half electrical engineering and half computer science. It is true that in my school's computer science department that there is many more males than females. In a course of approximately 35 people there are usually four or five females other than myself.
However, CS is in much better shape than computer engineering in this respect. In my electrical classes there have been many times I have been either the only female or one of two females in the class.
Why is this? I really have no idea. Personally have been interested in computers and their design for a long time. It seems that most females are no so interested in the design process. The only engineering major that actually has close to 50/50 male/female ratio is chemical. And for anybody that says that the girls have a good shot and finding dates if they are in CS or CPE all I have to say is the odds may be good, but the goods are odd.
The media would have me believe that Girls are too busy Going Wild to be interested in CS. I don't know if that's the true reason though...
Most new cs grads will get low paying help desk jobs if they are lucky because the demand sucks all thanks to the economy and H1b1 bisa's taking away american jobs and dignity. I love computers and would like to take cs courses. However I love a good paying job more so I would not major in cs.
My theory is that only the most die hard cs freaks are staying in the program which means they are almost all men. Many who are merely but not insanly interested wont major in it for obvious reasons. Sexism aside boys with mild forms of autism make up the majority of cs students.
http://saveie6.com/
Uh.. i'm not a female
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Are chemical engineering or mathematics tracks less in-depth or less focused than computer science? I don't think so.
My point was that there is no inherent aspect of women/girls that makes CIS/CS/CE an untenable field of study. The differences are mainly social or difficiencies in the way CS programs are run.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
"Girls not goin into CS"
And I can assure you.. the number of CS guys going into girls is far less!
[alk]
I live in Australia (Sydney) and am currently doing a Science degree with a Compsci Major and an Ecology Major... in my comp Science Classes there are plenty of Girls, just not of european descent.. I am the ONLY non asian girl in most of my comp sci classes, (not that this is bad) but I am still yet to figure it out.
Students at the Stevens Institute of Technology are NOT surprised.
This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
Hyperfocus is also a classic symptom of attention deficit disorder (ADD). There are many, many good resources on this topic for the interested.
It is increasingly suspected that ADD/ADHD have a genetic origin, involving one or several genes. The genetic trait may be sex-linked as well, given that the disorders are predominantly found in boys.
For most people, ADD does not translate into a competitive edge, more like a learning disability. The afflicted appear to have a normal range of intelligence. Although ADD is more prevalent than previously suspected, I don't suggest that it accounts for some fundamental difference between the sexes!
I spin this out a little because ADD/ADHD are so grossly mischaracterized in popular opinion. I studied psych and was startled to hear about the hyperfocus symptom a couple of years ago, because it seems so counterintuitive (actually, it's not: ADD is a disorder of regulating attention, and cuts both ways). Lastly, the most common medication used happen to be stimulants, but are in dosages too small and release profiles too long to act as "speed." Moreover, a new nonstimulant drug has been developed with nearly identical effectiveness; if it pans out, it will likely displace the controlled substances and their problems.
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.
I believe we've tangled before, friend. And I'm afraid I'm going to have to call your bluff. There's no way in hell you understand the physics of computing without a good knowledge of calculus. So where do you use Liebniz's tool? Timing, scientific computations, Fourier transforms for example. Additionally, there's always a need for calculus in calculus math packages and software like matlab. I think I'll argue that without knowing calculus you can't know what to use calculus for. And because we're friends and all I'll just dismiss the Linear Algebra line.
If we throw out calculus, why not throw out College Algebra? How many zeros of a function have you found using a computer? Or what about writing? I mean, outside of comments there's no need to learn a second syntax called English. Most programmers out there aren't writing the technical documents for the end users and technicians. And you know, I really don't think many BS in CS students end up writing interpreters or compilers or OS's so lets drop those classes from the cirriculum.
To be a programmer just requires a language and a book. To be a computer scientist means to have a language, an idea, and a means of investigating it. Most of programming indeed doesn't require a new algorithm, just some glue to plug applications together. Of course, most programming jobs don't require a CS degree either.
Machine learning is one of the most interesting fields I see in graduate level academics but sometimes it seems hard to draw the line at what AI is and isn't. I mean, is hardcoding the optimal play set into ROM intelligent? Its definately artificial, however. How do you see yourself? An average programmer? Or a great programmer? I don't know much about Bayesian networks but I do know they're something of a hot topic that looks fairly complex to me, so I'd wager you'd say "better than average" at the least. So why discard a potentially powerful tool?
Finally, don't shoot me, shoot the accrediation board and the math dept. They seem to believe that students should be familiar with calc 2 concepts as a prereq for Discrete or Combinatorics and Linear Algebra.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
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.
>>Information technology, despite its relative youth, has been far slower to approach gender equality
I would love to see more women in IT. In over 20 years of working in IT, I have never seen anything done to keep women out. For whatever reason reason, women just don't *want* to work in IT.
I just wanted to add that the salary data is from a recent salary surveys showing that starting CS wages still come well above average as compared to other four-year degree professions.
Queen's University recently introduced a program in Biomedical Computing and has discovered a much better gender ratio of applicants than its regular Computing Science program. Obviously we believe this is due to the greater human involvement. Therefore: if you want women in CS, make it squishy!
Would you rather be a waitress or a construction worker? Teacher or an electrical engineer? Women are getting shafted at every level of our society, but personally I think it's their own damn fault.
Did you have Dr. Krupp as a calculus teacher too?
--sdem
Repeat after me: "CS does not equal programming." Computer Scientists do not all write code that will eventually be used by someone else. Perhaps you're confusing CS with Software Engineering?