Slashdot Mirror
Attracting Women Into Computer Science
Frisky070802 writes "U.S. News & World Report has an article about attracting women into Computer Science. '...That sense of isolation and inadequacy is one reason the number of women earning computer science degrees in this country has plummeted over the past two decades--with women dropping from 37 percent to 28 percent of graduates--at the very moment their presence in other scientific and engineering disciplines has soared. 'You look at the national statistics,' says Rick Rashid, senior vice president of research at Microsoft, 'and you just have to be appalled.'' It describes how some companies have even started summer camps to attract high school girls into high tech."
Why do these figures matter? How about we look at how many men become nurses, or how many men become child minders (I remember a news story on one guy being accused of attraction to children for getting a job like this, even though he never harmed a single child in any way).
I don't care if theres 10%, 50% or 103%. It just isn't important to monitor such trivial things. As long as you can do your job why should it matter if you have a penis or a vagina?
I like muppets.
I think the fact that there is a HOWTO for this speaks volumes about why there are not more women involved in IT.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Many boys are given legos. Many girls are given dolls.
Go figure.
I've never been comfortable with the social engineering of equivalising M/F ratios in any given discipline.
Omnis amans amens
I have Karma to burn:
Why do we need any percentage of male/female for anything or everything? When the phonecompanies still used operators, it was women who were better in handling all these calls. They were better in 'multitasking' then men were.
In the Netherlands, the phonecompany did exams for operators and made no difference in male or female. However the women were just better at it. They just hired the best qualified people.
If women are not interested in those things, so what? It is not that we discriminate against women, that would be extremely bad. It is not as if we let the women study and then not give them a job.
Being equal is not the same as being identical.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I'm not sure what "volumes" it speaks, and I'm also not sure if you've read the HOWTO, but I feel the need to comment.
The HOWTO is more about the mentality (specifically the attitude towards women) of many people who are involved in technology, rather than about the female mind or technology itself. The HOWTO suggests that such attitudes tend to keep women out of technology, not the nature of the female mind or technology itself.
Sorry if I seem a bit defensive. I am male. But I have a younger sister who can run circles around me when it comes to math/science/technology.
Raj Against the Machine! http://social-butterfly.appspot.com/
and they want their sexism back. You're correct that we do want the best people, however it would appear that some of the brightest and best are not going into the field. In College, the smart women were all math majors. They were more than qualified to pursue CS, but there was so much blatent sexim in the department they were discouraged from entering the field. Its not so much as encouraging as it is not discouraging.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Other women... check!
Jobs... check!
Men with money... check!
Men with power... check!
Men with style... check!
Men that will leave them alone when asked... check!
Un-sexist men... check!
Yeah, that's a lot of motivation to spend 4+ years at college in a tech degree. Seriously though. Would you want to go to a sports school to get a science degree, or somewhere like MIT for sports? No, you wouldn't, as you would not fit in nor would you likely enjoy the social atmosphere.
I'm sure the social aspect has a large amount to do with it, but it's also likely that that technical fields simply don't appeal to most women. Women seem to be pre-disposed towards "social" tasks, and don't think in an engineer-like fashion anway (so psychologists say).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Ten minutes after it's publicly posted, and the vast majority of comments either say "how about attracting men to childrearing? Why isn't that an issue?" or "well, maybe they just ain't interested! Social engineering sucks!"
:) ). And when I have a child, if she's a daughter, I'd like her to have as easy of a time getting into a profitable profession as a son.
I've not seen any evidence that women are somehow biologially inherently uninterested in the computer science field. You can talk about interactions all you like, but I dropped out of a pretty damn decent CS program because I realized I want human interaction, which is why I'm now in _IT_ rather than in programming -- so I get to deal with people. There _are_ CS-oriented environments and jobs that offer more interaction.
My concern is that what we're seeing is artificial -- that women are either dissuaded from entering/staying in the field or are not as encouraged as men. This is bad both because we might be missing out on excellent people out there just because they don't have a penis and because if we discourage women from entering profitable fields (offshoring notwithstanding), we end up perpetuating an earning power inequity between men and women. This sucks because, well, when I get married I'd like my wife to make at least as much as I do (and ideally, much much more. Really, a sugar mommy wouldn't be so bad
So yeah. Honestly? I don't care about men in nursing; both because I don't think society has much to gain by pushing men to accept lower-income jobs (next, lets try to get affluent white kids to take up a career as janitors! That'd be useful!) and because, even in nursing, we see an earnings gap (male nurses get promoted faster and are paid more, on average, than female nurses).
Oh, and forgive me for being a selfish asshole, but the other reason I'd like to see more women in CS is because I'd like to finally be able to talk shop with my loved one; I've known exactly three very attractive women who were in IT (and had a relationship with one of them). We need more.
Informative? This HOWTO is awful!
"Don't make sexual advances towards women"
er...1)in which profession hobby is it ok to do this? and 2) I doubt this is a reason women avoid computer science, not that I'm any expert, but it just sounds idiotic. Men are making sexual advances on women at anytime of day and place, and I doubt that prevents women from computer science. The rest of this howto just seems to be making victims out of women. "If there is one bad apple in your group of 25 users, women will stay away. Ok... and there are no bad apples outside linux users groups, and women don't stay away from those other things. "Women are less confident of their computing knowledge". Yech. How can anybody write this. My gosh, what a broad sweeping load of crap. This HOWTO seems like a crock of shit. Just my flamebaited opinion. n/t
*sigh* And that is just such a gross generalisation. I find that debugging is one of the programming tasks that women tend to excel at. Their approach seems to be quite different a times to that of their male colleagues. In programming teams, it often seems to be the case that when trying to squish a particularly elusive bug that member of the opposite sex will quite easily point out.
*shrug* - just my own observation.
But hey we're at Slashdot, only women we see here are blow up :)
Hardly surprising, with an attitude like that! ;-)
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
After about the age of 3 or 4 the trends have allready been set and it will be a battle getting women interested into deckery or linux. A lot of superficial mental tokens of personal identification are reinforced and given to children before they get into grade 5 or so. By then it's allready too late. Complaints that engineering/CS fields are underrepresented by women are so because society at large treats women like property, stupid and unthinking, and expects them to act that way, at a very young age. Instead of becoming doctors they are taught to attempt to marry doctors.
And believe me, the marketing departments of large corporations everywhere, expanding their influences younger isn't going to make things any better. There's fashion clothing stores with pseudosoftcore advertisements in public shopping malls for *children*! I realize that the next generation has got to try to out-do this one, but holy cow, using children as sexual objects of desire for mass marketing purposes? this is going to mentally retard the next generation, specifically women who are the targets for the majority of these marketing ploys.
Why think when you can watch television, huh? and THAT is why you won't see quite as many women in the field.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
It's absolutely amazing to me that we seem to think that we can homogenize boys and girls into one common sex. It's even more amazing to me that anyone actually thinks this is even a good idea! As this article claims, boys and girls are DIFFERENT! They play different, they have different interests, and they have different skills. I'm not saying that girls can't do what boys do and boys can't do what girls do! But I am saying that this feminist agenda myth that we should all be bucking nature is crazy. If you give a typical boy dolls, he'll engage them in war games or dissect them or perform some other manner of harsh play with them. Likewise, if you give a little girl toys which are traditionally "boy" toys, she will not engage in play with them the same way a little boy would. And the argument that this is social conditioning doesn't hold any water; my son is less than 18 months old and he already exhibitsthis behavior. The differences between men and women are natural - we're wired to be different, and contrary to the recent trends, those differences are actually GOOD. I think it's great that there is an attempt to show women that they are capable of doing jobs traditionally performed by men, but I think it's wrong to make those fields artificially attractive. Women can be doctors, lawyers, construction workers, and IT professionals, but if the woman isn't naturally interested in what it means to be those things, them it does those women a disservice to artificially make those fields more appealing to them just to push an agenda.
Still, others regard the industry's gender crisis as the product of a more challenging problem--its image as nerd central. At Intel, where she chairs women's initiatives, Liu finds herself trying to convince visiting teens and Girl Scout troops that's a bad rap. "We're trying to show girls that this is something cool and fun," she says, "and that we look like regular people. We're not weird or geeky." The National Academy of Engineering has also launched a website called "Engineer Girl!" with jazzy graphics and job stories of fun-loving young female engineers trying to make a difference.
We're not weird or geeky?
Let's be a realistic here. I am a ubercool kinda dude, and most of my "nerd friends" are as well. My fellow geeks that I work with have played professional sports, won skateboarding contests, gone to medical school, and been in successful rock bands.
These are very cool guys and gals for the most part... however, we are all still geeks. It's like saying that doctors shouldn't express their type A personality... we want doctors who are type A!
To be a good computer person, you have to enjoy staring at code on a screen! That messes with your brain!
Trying to change the image of your average geek is pointless. Pay us more and give us more benefits... that will get more people into our field!
Isn't it a little presumptuous to think that women must be equally _capable_ of succeeding in computer science, and that any observe discrepency between male and female success in the field must be the result of a "sense of isolation and inadequacy" to the exclusion of all else? This is like arguing that women aren't as successful as men at competitive weightlifting or hand-to-hand combat because of their "sense of isolation and inadequacy", and that it couldn't possibly be attributable to hormones and sex-linked genes. When you're dealing with fields of study like pure mathematics, chess strategy, computer science, or other subjects that are so incredibly dominated by men, you have to be open to the possibility that there are simple truths of evolutionary psychology that are preventing women from being successful in these professions. This isn't like wealth distrobution where you can just point the finger at sexism. If I recall correctly, among the top five-HUNDRED highest rated chess players in the world, there is only ONE woman. You don't see that level of male dominance anywhere in the real world outside of contests of pure physical strength, and probably not even there. You certainly don't see it in lists of the richest people in the world (there's two women in the top ten). If we assume that the cause of this is simply a "sense of isolation and inadequacy" or simple sexism, we have to ask ourselves if it really makes sense that chess players and organizations are really so much more sexist and induce such greater feelings of inadequacy, especially considering how much effort major chess organizations are putting in to attracting women to playing chess.
,whether it's genes, nutrition, alien mind control, whatever, and we must accept the possibility that this reason is also applicable to computer science. Only once we understand the _real_ causes of differences between the sexes can be hope to change them. We can't eliminate sexism by deluding ourselves.
Of course, computer science is nowhere near as male-dominated as chess, but I was just using it to prove a point that there are some limited fields where the discrepencies between men and women can't be explained away culturally. There _must_ be some deeper reason why women don't play chess,
Man, just don't get it do you?
There's a frigging HOWTO for interacting with women in this field.
Let me say that again:
THERE IS A FRIGGING HOWTO. Look, do you need a how to interact with women in other fields? No? Then why would you need one in this field?
Maybe it's because a lot of the men in the field are completely inept individuals with the people skills of a rat? DING DING DING! We have a winner!
Sent from your iPad.
The article contains a quote that
but surely biotechnology is also `high tech', and I see no suggestion that women's representation is decreasing in that area.So, what is it? At the risk of being modded flaimbait, is it perhaps that Physics, Chemistry, and Biology are somehow seen as more noble pursuits, that Computers are intrinsically a means to an end rather than an end in themselves? That CS majors are seen as an inferior type of geek relative to their cancer-curing, drug-designing, atom-smashing counterparts? Yet other branches of engineering (bridge building, rocket science) are also fundamentally concerned with solving practical problems, but somehow they don't carry the same stigma.
Is there, after all, something intrinsically semi-autistic, and therefore testosterone-linked, in fiddling with computers?
How about just respecting women?
So many times I talk or I see another woman talk to you guys and your eyes just gloss over like you go into some standby mode until we finish. Then many of you keep right on as if we said nothing at all.
Just a thought.
Madison
- Unless you can question your own beliefs, you have no place questioning the beliefs of others.
I think it's due to the fact that most, if not all us men are driven by that overriding biological imperative, sex. Personally I try not to let it intrude on my platonic and professional relationships and think I am quite successful at this - but I'm never sure
You could help out by pointing it out whenever it happens - ("I'm up here!") but most guys don't even realise their doing it - it's instinct. I have a belief that we are endowed with intelligence to make instinct redundant - intelligence gets you further in life. When's the last time you saw a successful professional (outside management) working solely on the archipallium? Thing is, a lot of the time people have a tendency to abandon their higher functions for a bit of hootin' and hollerin'
Just know that the next time a guy glazes over, becomes a gibbering wreck, acts like a pompous ass or keeps gawking at certain physical attributes it's nothing personal - it's a rush of hormones to the head...
But most geeks are probably loath to admit that
Why bother? More women in CS just means more jobs to eventually outsource to India. The few Americans whom are left in the US tech industry need less competition from new grads not more.
In general, workers should never encourage people of any type to enter their field. Managers always encourage people to join their employees field because more people in CS means lower salaries for those currently in the field.
Lets compare... young guy gets BS and MS CS degree in 7 years, makes $75K for 5 years, skills are obsolete, his job is sent to India, and he will never work in "tech" again. Or, young girl gets nursing degree, makes $50K plus paid overtime for the rest of her life. Who is the "smart" one? Obviously the young girl.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
No shit. And apparently the implication is that girls can't be geeks? Ggeek-ness is something that cuts quite nicely across gender lines. If they're trying to recruit the kind of girl whose main concern is clothes and makeup and who makes head cheerleader into tech ... well, that's their tough luck. Go for the smart, quiet ones in the back of the room, same as with the boys.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
But why is it necessary to go to the effort and expense to "attract" them to compsci? I mean, some government bureaucrat comes up with magical numbers, that true or not, shows a 10% decline over the last couple decades, and now the old saggy feminists are in a tizzy or something? For all I know, those 10% of women decided there was more money in MBA's and they're all our bosses now. How could you possibly hope to persuade them (or their daughters, more accurately) back to compsci?
Excepting any kind of discrimination that keeps them from pursuring careers in this field, why is this a problem?
Quite seriously, for a man to say "bitch" and then say that it's not anti-woman is kind of like a white person saying "nigger" and then saying that it's not anti-black. Some insults are just insults, especially when used by a member of the group that's not being insulted, and there's no way to change that. It amazes me how many people don't get that, and when they're called on it, whine about "PC". It's not political correctness, folks, it's a matter of basic politeness.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I understand that some people are truly befuddled about this. But try to see this from my vantage point.
I am one of very few women in every department I work in. I have an engineering degree as well as a master's degree in computer science. And when I see discussions like this, I feel completely and utterly belittled.
How is it so difficult to see that brilliant women can be turned off by these fields when the following are everyday occurances:
I don't know about you, but if I knew that going into a particular field would result in the above happening on a daily basis, and that my intelligence would constantly be under-estimated by my peers, I would probably want to pick a different field. I would want to learn and work somewhere where I would not be perceived as a token exception to the rule.
Just my .02.
Because there aren't enough computer nerd-girls in high school.
Everyone I know in college in CS who's any good at it has been coding or tinkering with his system for at least five or six years now. It intimidates me for crying out loud, and I'm one of them! When you're sitting in on your first real programming class and guys are talking about the security work they've been doing at Sun for five years (and the guy was maybe one year older than I am) you're going to be intimidated.
Why does this affect girls more? Because society doesn't encourage girls to be social outcasts. Guys, for their entire lives, are encouraged to find a few things that they like and do them to obsession. So in high school you have jocks and nerds and car guys, etc. Now, the nerds KNOW that they're social outcasts, but they've chosen that path, and gain a feeling of personal worth and justification in being GOOD at what they do. And since they generally have no girls to be wasting their time with, they do it a lot and become very good at it.
I've never noticed girls, as a group, creating that same sort of rebel identity, based on ability. I've worked a lot with high schoolers who are going into engineering this year, including a lot of girls, and none of them have seemed to have the "the world hates us but it doesn't matter, because we're damn good at what we do" mentality.
So, when anyone looks at going into CS at college, they see the average person going into it as someone who already knows about half of what they're going to be teaching. They're cocky and confident in their abilities. Of course anyone's going to be intimidated. And, by the structure of our high school society, it is more likely for someone on the intimidated side to be a girl.
My girlfriend's a CS major, too. She's an excellent programmer, and I've never seen someone get as excited as she does about her code working for the first time. She says she's never minded not having more girls in the classes; girls are silly and illogical, or something like that. However, she *has* expressed her concern on multiple occasions that the raw background experience of everyone in our classes makes her feel like she's completely out of her league.
It's a tough situation. I don't see an easy way out of it, unfortunately, since the problems tend to go all the way back to middle school or earlier.
Words are harmless, meaning are. It doesn't matter what word you use if you mean it as insult, it is a insult. I can imagine easily a couple calling themselves the worst insult words in a romantic (not sexy, but romantic) manner and it is also quite easy to picture a racist using politically correct words to insult everyone and their neighbors.
I usually think the wiser persons would, should, not be offended by the use of a specific word. The use of a word is extremely personal, and could have many meanings.
Said that, I am just want to state that I am not saying to everyone start using bad words to people you don't know, this would be impolite at least. But I do believe that a little informality is aways more comfortable.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
I hope you realize that most of us men feel the same way about many of the people we work with... "How the hell did he get that job...?" "How is he not failing out of school...?" "That guy is a moron..." It's male driven competition; no one is safe. If you want in on it kudos to you, but don't feel bad because e question your intelligence, we do it to everyone around us.
As a White Male in America, I would like to know why the fuck I am never represented in a diversity class - there is no more reviled human on the planet than a white male. Everyone else has a "culture" they can cling to for identity, women have the "men have kept us oppressed" thing to bond over, and all these damn diversity classes do is repeat the falicy that because I am white and have a penis the world was handed to me on fucking silver platter and I should feel guilty about it and be less successful that I can be.
Nothing raises my bullshit flag higher than this, I grew up as one of the only "crackers" in a poor black neighborhood, wasn't part of the "cool crowd" in school, and have never been hired to fill a quota, further, I have had more minority bosses in my career than anyone I know, and have gotten along just fine with them. BUT, the people that teach these diversity classes (while in the Air Force I took more training on Sexual Harrasment and political correctness than I did on marksmanship) literally ignore the fact that it's just as wrong to group all white males into a stereotype, quite the opposite, they are the only people you are allowed to be racist against.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society - M. Twain
Oh you don't do that, that is just some women who do that and some men as well?
Then why do you lump together all men?
I have worked with a number of women in both tech and non-tech, in both boss and superior roles and I think that sexism goes both ways and you just proved me right once again.
Many techies are not the greatest communicators, don't attribute to sexism what can be attributed to pisspoor verbal skills.
I sometimes get a kind of glazed look. It usually happens when a non-geek woman tries for whatever perverted reason to join a geek conversation. The glazed look comes from trying to work out how much you gotta dumb down the conversation without it becoming insulting. The same occurs when non-geek guys try to talk geek but there we don't care about being insulting.
Best way to avoid the glazed geek look? Don't talk to us. Many many women already took this advice.
As to the problem of CS students. I think many men take CS because it is their hobby. The few women I met who are into CS mostly took it as a career option. They figured that it is light physical highly paid work and they got the brains so why not. Or they become programmers as a step up to management. Only one woman I ever met in work was into programming for her hobby. And she was working in Human Resources. Oh the irony.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Unfortunately, I think women being turned off by technology starts very young. Back in my pirate/hacker days (Elementary school and Jr-high, mostly), my nerd clique dissed girls who had any interest in computers, or at minimum, hogged the computer time. I only knew two female programmers (sisters that bragged about being babysat by Seymore Cray) by high school and about 30 male (only about 6 good ones), but even those two girls weren't really programming much when I knew them.
By college, there were only a handful of women, and many of them had little practical experience programming, where by that time I had a lifetime. In this way, I believe in the "less confident about computing knowledge" - having programmed since 9 has a very different learning curve than starting at 18 (college, where most of the women I knew/know started programming), although having started at 9 with no formal training means unlearning a lot. One thing it does do, though, is boost confidence - I was completely overconfident that my Apple ][ BASIC knowledge would make Pascal easy (it didn't, but mainly for formal matters like indenting, not coding itself).
Okay, I'm only seeing posts from guys, or from women who are actually working in IT, not from women who like computers/programming but who AREN'T working in IT.
I was interested in computers and took a programming class in high school --PASCAL. (Yeah, I'm old.) I was one of two girls in the class; the instructor ignored us both, unless he was standing WAY TOO CLOSE. The guys did not want to partner with us for programming projects (although MY code always worked, dammit). My dad bought a PS/2; I was the only one in the house who used it. I took another class in college (Hypercard, also called Computer Programming as a Liberal Art). Two quarters. It was interesting (and taught by Don Crabb, anyone remember him?) but not very technical. My technical questions (How Do It Work?) were met by pats on the head and suggestions to just work with the program, not take it apart.
I got a job in a very women-friendly field. However, my job brought me in contact with SGML/XML and (surprise!) Perl. I taught myself Perl from an O'Reilly book. I did a huge conversion project, all by myself, that would have cost my employer $25K to send out-of-house. When it finally ran, perfectly, I spent twenty minutes trying to find a co-worker to tell who would understand why I was so happy!
I love Perl and use it almost every day. I enjoy programming immensely. I have three computers in arm's reach (two Macs and a PC) and another two in the next room. I don't need to call some guy to fix my network settings or my printer (I replaced the rollers on my laser jet myself). I might not be the best programmer ever, but I can hack my way through most of the problems that I need to solve. I even interviewed for a programming job once, but only as a way to get my then-employer to realize how much I was actually worth. (It worked, I got a 15K raise.)
Perhaps we don't need to encourage women to go into CS, but rather let them know how CS skills can enhance their worth in other jobs that they may be interested in. (I find that I don't like to hire people who express disdain for computers -- it's like hiring people to do construction work that don't like hammers.) Also, I totally don't understand why people say women aren't good at programming -- they're programming LANGUAGES, aren't they? Women are supposed to be good at languages. (I find a language like Perl, that has so many Ways To Do It, very easy to work with. If the computer doesn't understand me the first time, I just rephrase my question. Just like I do with my husband. Simple.)
(And I would have loved a computer camp. All those cute geeky boys, at a ratio of 5:1 or better?)
For crying out loud, the only thing the majority of you seem to be able to say is: "but men and women are different".
The whole point is not to make women more like men. If the only answer to getting more women into Comp Sci was to make women more like men, then we might as well all save our collective (very repetitive) breath.
We know that many women are smart. We know that many women are excellent problem-solvers. We just don't yet know how to inspire women to use their talents in the Comp Sci field. That is where the challenge is. It isn't in getting women to change. The challenge is finding a way to think outside the traditional, linear box that Comp Sci sits in right now, to come up with the way that this vast, untapped group of people can use their own skills in a way that satisfies them and inspires them!
And, by the way, yes I'm a girl geek, yes I am good at what I do, and no, somehow playing with dolls as a child did not naturally predispose me to be a nurse or a teacher. That's right, I am feminine - analytical - and a geek and proud of it. The fact that I act like a girl (and have since birth) has nothing to do with whether or not I am capable of getting a comp sci degree. I'm very sorry to disappoint you... Just because we're different does not mean we cannot accomplish the same goals.
Ug. Now y'all got me riled up....
Pixie
don't mess with those geekgrrls
The fact that typing "fortune -o" leads to misogynistic humor half the time and Linux is represented by illustrations that look like Maxim ads speaks volumes as well.
I put the "wry" in "riot."
This is simply called "not paying attention to what the other person is saying". Both sexes are guilty of this. Fixing it is more of a matter of acquiring conversational skills than suppressing your hormones (unless some beauty queen is competing for your attention).
Ever heard of someone who's a "good listener"? They just know how to pay attention.
OTOH, if you notice somebody drifting off, and it's not important, it's wise to just change the topic. Either they're just not interested, or you screwed up the delivery.