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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.
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.
AEIOU: open-source anonymous internet currency
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?"
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.
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.
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?
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!