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Calling All Computer Science Women?
SemiBarbaricPrincess asks: "I'm currently in the middle of starting a 'Women In Computer Science' group at my college, and I'm wondering what other groups are out there, and what they do to help boost the number of women in CS." Slashdot last touched on this subject in this article from January. For the women readers in our audience: what do you think would be helpful in attracting more women to the world of computing?
Yeah, yeah. I know I'm replying to my own post, but...
I just wanted to say that I meant no offense, really. What I said was halfway tongue-in-cheek. And I'm not against single gender groups. What I am against, however, is any sort of double standard. When it comes to gender, race, or anything of the like. I don't feel that any race, regardless of history, should be allowed to exclude any other race, but gender is a different issue. It just seems that often the people who are interested in female-only groups are also interested in stopping male-only groups. Not that that is the case here.
So, yeah. Whatever. I'm not trying to bait flame.
David Cole
www.davidcole.net
Um, you're very wrong. I happen to know several CS guys who know lots about other things: motorcycles, classical music, biology, irish dancing.. you name it.
And it isn't just guys who want women in CS. I particpate in Women in Science through IBM and one of the projects is once a year, we give a presentation at a local junior high school to women to try to interest them in science. Why? Because the majority of women don't stay in math and science (because our culture supports other fields.. boy do I want a barbie that says "let's go kill something" and a GI joe that says "math is hard" in a girlie voice) and are not able to get IT jobs in the future. I stayed with math because I was good at it. I was good at it because I had a teacher who let me work ahead as far as I wanted in the book.
I'm very luck to be at IBM. Not just because I'm employed, but because my particular group has a MAJORITY of women in it. In my team at some times, there has only been one guy on it (I want to say we had an all girls team at one point but I can't remember the time). I know that there are few other places that have that kind of percentage.
Oh, and to cover my legal butt, my statements are my own and I do not speak for or on IBM's behalf
"Would you rather have a playstation addicted dork wearing a star wars t-shirt?"
Until a statistically appropriate number of women graduate highschool with the belief that they are good at math, you won't see them in the CS fields.
<OSU [our story unfolds]>
My Dad was an outstanding high-school math teacher, and (as his profession would suggest) we couldn't afford a sitter much. Thus I ended up sitting through many years of high school math. When I got to high school, of course, I had little use for math instruction and ended up assisting others during all the "you may now work quietly" times.
My observation is simply this: The way high school math is taught is the way boys will most easily understand it. Obviously, there are men that assimilate data like women and women that do the job like men. I'm not dismissing the diversity of human cognition but asking for a moment that you acknowledge that there is a trend in the teaching methodologies that work best with a particular gender, and that they are not identical.
The male teachers were by far the worst. They taught, and thought, right down the line like men think. When asked why you do operation X to dataset Y, they had exactly one answer each time. That was the best answer, and if you didn't get it, then you didn't get math. Since teenagers, typically riddled with self-doubt, are prone to hear this kind of negativity whether it exists or not, they are very quick to pick up on it when it is in fact their teacher's opinion. At that point they just give up. And I got to hear them say, "I'm just not good at math." It raises my blood-pressure twenty points just to type that phrase.
In keeping with their superior networking skills the girls in high-school were more accepting of help than the boys, and (in my heteropinion) much cuter. So I ended up helping girls almost all the time. And though there was one girl who drove to the edge of my sanity getting the points across, without exception they were all capable of getting A grades.
The problem (besides male/academic snobbery) was knowing how to teach. As Alton Brown, or Bill Nye or other excellent teachers illustrate so plainly, there are a nearly infinite number of ways to explain something, and any good teacher has 2 to 10 available for any given subject. Where he or she doesn't have a handful of explanations, as a true master of the discipline s/he should be able to come up with them.
What is more, a teacher should observe the trends of the kind of explanations that work for a particular student, and, whenever possible, answer that student's questions with that class of explanation.
In each case where I studied regularly with student, I was able to change their minds about the most important problem they had to solve. The simple belief that they were in fact "good at math." With that lesson learned, they could go to class with confidence and not just shut down when the teacher explained something poorly. Shortly after that conclusion, they would usually make up excuses to hang out with the cute football players, but I digress.
</OSU>
When this problem is addressed and solved, I think you'll see the CS applicant numbers come closer to where actual cranial aptitude would have them. I'm not certain it would favor the men either. Perseverance in the face of failure and broad multi-tasking awareness are far greater assets in my programming endeavors than any I gained in calculus. If we ever get there, I'd love to compile the stats.
There's a lot more information about this here, if you're interested, guys. I'm going to wade through the MIT paper, and when I get back, I hope to hear a lot of informed, intelligent discussion.
:)
(Yes, I know it's slashdot; I can dream, can't I?
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The ones that pick on you because they sense an active mind. My physics teacher had a subtly flawed concept of gravitation, and though I never convinced him of it (didn't have the vocabulary at the time), I did put up an argument that made him think. After that when he would ask a question of the class and no one would raise their hands he would say something like, "...and for the long version of the answer we turn to Art."
The sciences had always come easily to me before that class, but after it, I had a passion for them, and now a career with them as my playthings.
Because the majority of women don't stay in math and science (because our culture supports other fields.. boy do I want a barbie that says "let's go kill something" and a GI joe that says "math is hard" in a girlie voice) and are not able to get IT jobs in the future.
GI Joe is a pretty *dumb* character. If anything, he's probably portrayed as dumber than the newer Barbies.
There aren't particularly good role models in pop culture out of the intelligentsia in general, regardless of gender.
And for chrissake...Lady Ada was a very major player in the foundations of CS! There were women involved in building ENIAC. How many other hard sciences can you think of that had women play such a role early on? Biologists are predominantly female, yet biology was built almost entirely on the work of males.
I was good at it because I had a teacher who let me work ahead as far as I wanted in the book.
I think schools that let students go as far as they want and make a subject interesting produce the best students. Cool extracurricular classes are *great*. Communities and schools that can provide them do wonders for people.
May we never see th
Actually you'd be suprised, I started a CS degree at Melbourne University (in Australia) this year and there's quite a lot of women doing the Introduction to Programming (Advanced), I'd estimate about a 3rd of the people taking it, this also does include people doing various forms of engineering from the engineering faculty and people from the science faculty, but in the end it's women doing computer science. Also the brightest cookie of the lot I've met is a woman, so nrrr to all you disbelievers.
The poster suggests creation of a group of women who are already interested in CS.
CS is not the same as IT.
Natural-science and engineering fields (a category which for some reason includes CS and math, despite the fact that neither is more "concrete" than philosophy) tend to be male-dominated environments, often to (and past) the point of creating an uncomfortable environment for other folks, even when such folks might otherwise be interested in the subject at hand.
Related, some people in our society are socialized in a way that rewards being good at math and math-like things. Some are not.
Often, people of different genders perceive the world generally. To answer your question directly: if we have more people of different genders (and other sorts of different backgrounds), they are likely to be able to bring different experiences and analyses to the field. This creates a richer environment for all. example
hm, interesting.
This is OT, but the author of that page was also happened to be the sexiest geek alive 2001. She has 3 MIT degrees in CS, and can apparently count in binary with her fingers.... definitely a CS woman.
Btw, I only know about her because she spoke at an Ig Nobel Prize ceremony...
It seems pretty obvious from most of the posts here that few people understand why there are more men than women in computing. Many of the posts show gross insensitivity and a serious lack of understanding or compassion, which might have something to do with it.
I would like to see a women's group get together and research this topic and then publish the results on the web. I think only women will be able to really say why they don't currently like CS and what would need to change for them to become interested.
By the way, in the Space Shuttle software group, it's about 50% women. I think everyone who works for the group, both men and women, is married and they also work only 8am to 5pm, no overtime. If more programming jobs were like that, I think you'd see more programmers in general, both men and women. A 60-80 hour work week is just no fun for the average person, especially if they have children or a social life.
As with the military, certain things must change in the computing world to accomodate more women. Many of the suggestions I've seen have been based on guesswork. I'd love to see serious discussion and suggestions from women who've chosen to leave CS for something else.
Ouch! The truth hurts!
> Oh, and I believe one of my female friends in CS grad school said that the ratio of men to women gets more even up there.
No-ho-ho... at least at CMU, there are definitely fewer women in the grad program than the undergrad. (Our undergrad program is pretty good now, something like 30%-40% women). I don't know about other schools, but certainly the students that visit us (and from my visits to other grad schools) indicate similar numbers.
Most women I've encountered are more interested in Living things, not so much machines. Men generally like things like computers, weapons, vehicles, robots, non-organic automata. Women are more into genetics, biology things generally associated with life sciences. This may have to do with the fact that women are naturally tuned into the creation of life much more than men. I think that by itself, computer science can be pretty boring/dry once you get to an advanced level. It needs to be applied to other sciences to be really interesting.
I'm female. Probably more relevant - I have enough of a touch of OCD to be a good hacker (original def)
Any class that I didn't enjoy, or that required "brute force" to pass, I did poorly in. I did my calculus hw during roll call, because it was easy. I failed English once, because it's indeterminate and I couldn't be bothered to think the way that teacher wanted (generally I got A's in grammar, anything goes in content, the average being enough to pass)
I understand computers and logic. OTOH, I have met women who don't, and I don't understand them.
Hell would be being a manager. Money is a way to buy more techie toys.
I have no interest in a "Women in CS" group.
In 1984 I was surrounded by men at a demo of a prototype Macintosh, and totally oblivious to their presence - because I was playing with the cool techie toy.
It wasn't til afterwards I realized I'd been hogging it, so I'd bet *they* were aware they were near a woman.
Hackers don't like being surrounded by people. The really good ones can tune them out, though.
KshGoddess
SlashChick
And there are a bunch more... you just have to look around.