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?

Comments

Women In CS?

[HRbnjR]

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 keeping the women out?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is it about CS that keeps the women out? What is it about CS?

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" ... 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".

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.

Re:what is keeping the women out?

[Urox]

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.

I think in algorithms. Because of it, CS was very much a breeze for me. I have other female friends who also think in algorithms. So obviously, there are some women who "think that way."

Why are there so few who "basically know everything?" Because women are social creatures. Knowing everything about a subject implies long hours of learning it... locked away in your basement or whatever... and not being social. I'd personally be out hanging with my friends than learning everything there is to know about computers. When I have the time (and interest.. after all, I could be reading Feynman, Fermat, or something on the all-pairs closest points problem), I ask my SO to teach me about networking, but I highly doubt I'm ever going to get to the stage of knowing everything.

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.

Re:what is keeping the women out?

[Blkdeath]

In my CS classes, there were very few women, and the few there were, well, off the bell curve, let's say.

In the high school I worked at, the Cisco instructor decided it would behoove her and the program in general to inspire females who showed aptitude in computers (and when she couldn't find enough of those, essentially any female who could type) to sign up for the program.

What they wound up with were a smattering of females who, to put it bluntly, exhibited the female stereotype to a 'T'. One would concentrate on her cosmetics during class, one or two would flirt with all the guys in the class, one would fret about when she could get out to have a snack (and roam the halls, talking with friends as high school girls do), and the rest just plum didn't get it.

Test results were abysmal. CCNA Semester 1 Chapter 1 is a basic introduction to computers. "This is a Central Processing Unit (CPU). This is a Network Interface Card (NIC). This is a network cable.", yet atleast a third of them failed it miserably, the others went on to either fail, drop out, or barely pass (which wouldn't have happened if Cisco hadn't dropped the >70% requirement to pass right out of the starting gate, but I digress).

Moving on to college, I found about a 15% female population in a networking course. Most of them were very bright women who were sure to go far in the career of their choice. However! Information Technology (sorry, I never was much for CS, but they're analagous enough for my point) is not that career.

Many of them were obviously there because they'd found themselves in similar situations in high school - pushed through the CCNA program by faculty, parents, or administration. The vast majority of CCNA grads picked up the routers again after the summer within hours, but the female CCNA grads had to resort to 'cheat sheets' to configure the routers, not realizing they had to modify their implementations, specifically WRT the IP addressing scheme on the 'cheat sheet' versus the assignment. Other females in the class were sore over the fact that (and I quote) "There were no requirements for computer courses spelled out beforehand."

I've known some brilliant female IT, and I've known some females in IT who should seriously consider a career change. I've also known some females in IT who just plum have too much resentment over their lack of success to be working with other people. (n .b. the same applies to men, but since we're singling out women, I'll talk about women).

For example; I've had several women, right out of the blue, accuse me of sexism because of their lack of understanding of the subject material. Be it a discussion between peers, or helping out people with problems, it's happened several times. In one case, a female's keyboard and mouse stopped working after she'd re-assembled her PC. I suggested, after listing a few possibilities, that it's possible the connectors (both PS/2) were reversed (this being before they were all colour coded; I've done it myself, it sucks, but you flip it and move on, lesson learned - take the extra 5 seconds to do it right the first time). I was treated to a barrage of how wrong I was, about how she wasn't inferior just because she was female, and how my "boys club" mentality and blatant sexism weren't appreciated, etc. etc. as she dug for a manual that explained how the PS/2 ports were interchangable (based on the voltages). I'm thinking Information Technology isn't the right career choice for anybody with this mentality, regardless of the size and shape of their frontal appendages.

So, to make a long story even longer, either you'll believe me to be sexist to the Nth degree, or you'll (hopefully) see my point; diversity for the sake of diversity does not work. Trying to shoehorn people into CS, IT, or any other discipline for which they do not have a) the mindset, or b) the desire to succeed will only lead to failure, resentment, and under-capable graduates flood

women in science.

[Urox]

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?

If you'd like to address the real problem...

[OwnerOfWhinyCat]

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.

more info...

[pb]

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? :)

Why aren't there more men in childcare?

[dotgain]

Yes, rhetorical question.
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?