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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?
Let me understand? You want the /women/ in CS to respond to this article?
:)
This should be the easiest first post ever!
(It's just too bad I'm male) In my CS faculty they had a saying - that they could count the number of women in CS on one hand... with three fingers cut off
What is it about CS that keeps the women out? What is it about CS?
... it's not something that can be taught very well. That's why you see so many folks in CS that already basically know everything, and that intimidates the "normals".
In my engineering classes, there were plenty of normal women (and normal men for that matter) who were intelligent but weren't freaks. They didn't struggle more than you'd expect, and most of them stuck with it and were just as good as men.
In my CS classes, there were very few women, and the few there were, well, off the bell curve, let's say. I remember talking with more than one female who seemed to have a gigantic ego chip on their shoulder.
I did notice there were plenty of women in my intro CS classes, but they seemed to vanish very quickly.
My theory: computer science is still really not a "science"
So basically, CS is a bunch of people who already "think" in algorithms and the classes are just a formality.
Now that leads to the question: why are there so few women who already "basically know everything" about computers? Who knows. My guess is that women just don't think that way.
Could be they are also intimidated by the "men" that are in CS. However I don't know about that. Business major are usually a bunch of sexist pigs as well, for instance.
Another question: WHY does any of this matter? I'm thinking, how can we get people NOT to go into CS, so they can maybe have social lives, bathe regularly, and not go blind staring at screens all day. Oh well, maybe I'm just bitter and need to get laid.
http://wics.cs.sfu.ca/ I'm male but I know about this because I am in cs at sfu and know several of the females who started this group.
Oh wait, you already are.
AEIOU: open-source anonymous internet currency
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
Understood. The thing is, homogeneity is boring. That's why these groups exist. The point isn't to compete with or one-up men, the point is to advocate CS to non-CS women. Lack of diversity doesn't really go away on its own.
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ACM is a wonderful organization to belong to,
and there is a women's division that supports student chapters.
Here's the details on setting this up.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I'll send you my opinion to your personal mailbox. If these aren't clear enough, I'd be grateful to schedule a face-to-face explanation session...
(Wait, that might be the reason why...)
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?"
At my school there is a very active Women in Technology chapter. They are mostly IS majors, but they should have the resources you seek.
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Just thought I'd point you to Stanford's WICS group web page.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/wics/
It has some with WICS-related links, resources, articles, and of course contact info. One of the more interesting (and probably relevant to your questions) things they do is a mentoring program. These links should give you some idea what at least one group out there is doing.
Good luck!
check into s.w.e. (society of women in engineering). i work closely with them through a.c.m. and there are a lot of people who are members of both organizations. i'd also talk to upsilon pi epsilon if you have a chapter on campus.
is there any reason why we want more women in our field?
Improved dating prospects.
Organizations like Women in Science are great to help get and KEEP women in CS. The problem isn't just with CS; the problem is with MOST sciences. I was a math major. They were dealing with the recruiting problem there.
;)
The solution to getting more women in CS is to look at the problems. I almost didn't go into CS. My mother (who is a software engineer) thought I wasn't taking enough classes at one point and suggested I give CS a try. I took it the same quarter I took a chemistry lab. Suffice it to say, I spent Monday and Tuesday writing my lab papers, Wednesday and Thursday coding my projects, and then crashing on the weekend and sleeping through it. I burned myself out badly that quarter and almost never went back. It was because I didn't get into medical school and needed job skills that I took another course. My math background (and the algorhythmic thinking that supported it to begin with) was why I was able to easily pick it up in a quarter where I wasn't already over taxed. I actually stuck out in the class of 300: the teacher took a liking to me when I picked out a coding error that he'd had on his slides for the past five years so he'd pick on me lots (in a joking manner). I suppose I would have stuck out being that I think I could have counted the other females in the class using both hands. That first class nearly did me in, though.
The first class did my sister in. She had a crap teacher. When I tried to tutor her (I suck as a tutor), I found out that the teacher was just *not* teaching certain concepts to the class (my sister is an honors student and it was known that the entire class was having trouble due to this instructor).
I was never intimidated by the guys in the class. Hell, I actually got hit on more in my physics class than I did in CS. Maybe I intimidated the guys
So going back to the problems: Organizations like WIT (women in technology) and WIS really help women. It gives them a place to go in a non-threatening environment where they can often get tutoring and not give up on a subject. As I mentioned in another post, WIT has events where they urge junior high school women to stay with math and science. It's those fundamentals that come before CS classes that will definitely make a difference.
As for discrimination: I had a male friend who was actually part of the campus WIS group. It was targeted at women, but men were not excluded. To the person who wants to start a Men in CS group: go for it, but you've already met your objective (to get a significant amount of men in CS) so what's your point?
"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.
So far, I've seen plenty of "IANAW, but..." posts...
May we never see th
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
The way I see it, there are two problems at work here. The only problem that needs to be fixed is that of turning away qualified women who otherwise would be interested in and qualified for Computer Science. The skills that need the most work are math and self-esteem--women need to be taught early to be confident in themselves and their abilities, and this should help them to better succeed in all fields.
The other problem is ancient, and possibly imaginary; you can blame it on nature vs. nurture, society, or whatever you like, but the fact is that people do what they like, and if less women are interested in Computer Science, then there will be less women in Computer Science.
For example, what sort of comments do you think we would get if slashdot ran an article that said "We need more men in Biology; what is the problem, are men not prepared for biology, are they driven away by all the women in the field, or are they just not interested"?
The fact of the matter is, I was never that interested in biology; I might have been more interested in it if it had been more concrete, if we knew more about how things actually worked. However, I was fascinated with computers practically from the moment I laid eyes on them, and I seem to have a natural aptitude for them as well.
Therefore, people who are already predisposed to a given field are not a problem at all, and no effort should be given in trying to change their minds to equal out some demographic notion of equality, on either side of the fence. Believe in yourself, figure out what *you* want to do, and then go do it.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
It's quite simple actually.
First, women have far less variation in IQ then men. Thus they have less representation at the bottom of the scale, and less at the top. They average out about the same as men. Moreover, they tend to do better with verbal tests and not so well with mathematical tests.
Women are also likely to value emotional attachment and emotional stimulation higher than the averge man. (An interesting side point is Aspenger's syndrome and like emotional introversions that tend to strike men at much higher rates.)
Anyone familar with computer science sees how this disadvantages women in the field. Luckily, it's probable that the brain development track that men take is mostly influenced by hormone levels throughout childhood. Therefore the solution to getting more women in CS is simplicity itself. Testosterone shots from the age of 6 months until 18 years. Hell, we could even sterilize the females and get rid of the secondary sexual organs through surgery. With this program of hormone treatment and surgery, I think that we can finally get rid of inequality between the sexes by erasing most of the major biological differences. I'm glad to live in this age that truly recognizes the uselessness of all 'feminine' characteristics and pursuits, and understands that it is only men, and people who are able to act like men, that accomplish anything interesting in the world. If women on average enjoy mathematics less then men, we'll goddamn have to make them enjoy. After all, it's not like some people could find it somewhat unfulfilling...
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...
We may as well ask why there aren't as many women:
- plumbers
- electricians
- digger drivers
Before the abolishment of common sense in 1993, the question was never asked why some jobs seemed to be predominated by one particular gender.No, it's nothing to do with heavy lifting, hard thinking and so on. Surely by now we must understand that there are actually more than a couple of differences between men and women?
Given the number of idiotic sexist posts on this topic, it seems the best way to help boost the retention rate of women in CS is to equip them with sturdy pieces of wood for bashing clues into the heads of fools.
Seriously. To all female /.ers, on behalf of the more rational possessors of Y chromosomes, I'd like to apologize for all the sexist gits in this thread.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I'm going to say it.
I *am* sexist. I believe that there are distinct, insurmountable differences between men and women. I believe these differences make us who we are, and to deny the existence of these differences is to deny our humanity.
That is why I married a woman and not a man. I will never be happy spending the rest of my life with a man, because I want a woman and not a man for a companion. I think this is because I am a man, and one of the characteristics of man is to desire a woman for a companion. (Luckily, the converse is true for women.)
These differences are more than just physical. They are also mental and emotional. They are not learned or forced. They are a fundamental part of their being.
That is why there are not many women in some fields, and that is why there are not many men in other fields. And amazingly, that is also why there are fields that seem evenly split between men and women.
This has nothing to do with "our oppressive white male dominated society" or whatever you lumpheads call it, and has everything to do with people doing what they like because they want to. The reason why there are not so many women in CS is because men tend to want to do CS more than women.
To tell you the truth, I am perfectly happy locking myself in a room to program for hours on end and read technical documentation and other people's code.
I don't think my wife will ever enjoy it as much as I, despite her high intelligence and reasoning abilities. I mean, she picked up HTML in an afternoon, but she has no desire to use it.
Now, here's the disclaimer. I don't believe one is better than the other. I don't think CS is the ultimate field that only the best people in the world can be allowed in.
And now for something that boggles my mind. "Feminists" try to take women out of their realm and place them in masculine roles saying they are better men than men. It would be really weird to see a group of men calling themselves "masculinists" dressing up like women and trying to be better women than women, yet we are comfortable with seeing a bunch of "feminists" that dress and behave like men. Just something to think about.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
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!
I'm a woman and I've worked for the last 7 years in CIS. But it took me many years to figure out that I wanted to do that and that I had a talent for it.
My father is in CIS, and my mother is a housewife/ex-teacher. My brother went into CIS right away. Guess what I was heavily steered toward? Teaching-- a poorly-paid, stressful profession that I showed no talent for but which happens to be traditionally female.The alternative? At one point, my mom suggested that I just "be a mom".
There are huge pressures of tradition and expectation that determine what professions kids decide to pursue. To just say that men "want to do CIS more than women" is absurd. Kids want to do what their parents and teachers want them to do. Kids expect to do what their parents and teachers expect them to do.
I mean, there are some very bright women in CS, and they have considerable success in the field.
Just because there's not even 50/50 parity in the genders in a field isn't proof that there's some insidious conspiracy going on under the surface.
The greater crime here is forcing women who aren't interested or qualified into CS and chasing some perfectly capable men out just in the name of making the statistics look better.
I think a key point to getting more women into careers in CS is understanding the reasons that people choose the careers they do.
Disclaimer: What I'm about to say is a generalization.
Women tend to choose careers based on the social value the job brings. They like to have a job that makes an immediate difference in the lives of the people they interact with each day. If your group can show young women the impact they can have with a career in CS, you may be able to attract more of them.
Occasionally you run into pockets of the opposite culture. At my alma mater, girls outnumber guys 2 to 1 (did I pick the right school or what?). I used to date this wonderful little CS girl there, and it turns out about half her friends were CS women. They would stick together, like women often do, and it seemed to me that the advantage actually went to the women at that program. The best sysad in the program was a guy, but the best encryption people were girls (good luck on your thesis defense, Kristin! Hugs, Theresa!). I guess that's just because girls are better at math. Or maybe at keeping secrets ;). My old girlfriend said that she went into CS because "it was the only thing that was hard for me, and I wanted a challenge".
Interestingly enough, she also happens to be an Iraqi-American. The past couple of months have been strange. Right now she's working overseas and the people there are giving her crap for being a warmongering American. What are you supposed to do in that kind of situation?
And Jaz, if you see this, email, k? I miss you.