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."

Comments

These "attracting women to tech" articles r stupid

[betelgeuse68]

It's the yin and yang. Women are very different and the overboard left brain sided nature of the work does not appeal to their nature. There's nothing wrong with that. The sexes are what they are, the yin and yang.

Yeah there's the occasional exception but they're just that exeption... it's been quite a long while since I've had a "technical" female coworker. And currently I'm doing work at a very large company so the odds would be greater there.

-M

Re:WTF

[nwbvt]

RTFA. The problem this is causing the industry is that half the population is not available. That is a huge brain drain, and can cause massive labor shortages in the next few years.

Re:Sexism in Computer Science

[Viol8]

You can't say that! It might be true! And as we know , truth and political correctness are not happy bedfellows. Don't forget that liberals don't live in the same world as normal people , they inhabit Planet Headinthesand which means the only orifice they have left to communicate out of is their arses.

Race, Gender and the Frontier

[Baldrson]

I quote from the end of the article now:

"If you've got a bunch of nerdy white guys creating the technology, you get stuff that appeals to nerdy white guys," says Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer for Sun Microsystems. "If you want to turn out more usable products, you'd better get more women involved."

As I posted more than 12 years ago:

The progress of humanity, from its earliest hunter-gatherer hominid groups in subsaharan Africa to the technological progress of Western Civilization, has been driven by pressures to survive in marginal habitats placed on excess or "beta" males by the polygamy of dominant or "alpha" males selected by the reproductive preferences of females. It is this process of expansion into marginal habitats driven by the inequities of polygamy that gave rise, first, to racial gradients with climate and then to a moral of monogamy arising from the harsh necessities of northern climates.

Monogamy only exists where successful rearing of children to reproductive age requires the exclusive support of a male.

In benign environments, social adaptations that characterize polygamous cultures were prevalent including homosexual behavior, frequent small-scale battles and stable social cycles. In more northerly climates, social adaptations that characterize monogamous cultures were prevalent including a lesser incidence of homosexual behavior, relatively infrequent wars of technically sophisticated genocide and progressive traditions.

Northern climates also gave rise to a profound biological selection for morality imprinting since it was only through total acceptance and observance of tribal rules, adapted for the unique environment, that survival in such "unnatural" environments was possible. Indeed, immorality could threaten the fragile adaptations of the entire tribe. Instinct, taking too long to evolve, was supplanted by a meta-instinct which allowed one's behavior to be imprinted by the tribe's moral rules for survival.

Once imprinted, these tribal morals would be observed with total fidelity -- even to the very point of death. But the plasticity of the cultural imprinting process created vulnerabilities not present in the deeper cultures where instinct, biologically evolved over many hundreds of millennia, was well adapted to the more "natural" environments. In those of northern climates, an erroneous or mutant moral imprint would, with rare exception, be played out to the point of death of the individual or the tribe if its young were so imprinted.

Thus, access to the mechanisms of moral imprinting in northern tribes was jealously protected. Alien control of the mechanisms of moral imprinting could be used to inflict genocide against a northern people just as surely as the highest technology weapons or gas ovens can today.

Deep cultures are those cultures that were the earliest to arise within relatively benign habitats and also the first to be left behind by technical progress. They are culturally "deep" but technically less sophisticated. Shallow cultures are the later cultures which arose in increasingly marginal habitats, pioneered by the few surviving males with adaptive technical gifts. They were were outcasts from their originating tribes -- physically, sexually, politically and/or socially handicapped.

Women tend to be attracted to deeper cultures and all but the most successful males tend to be driven to the shallower cultures. This is simply because the larger the harem size, the less likely a female is to leave the security of the originating tribe. The only males to stick around are the ones tough enough to fight it out with the harem master or those who have given up on their own reproduction, perhaps homosexuals opting for a kin- selection str

A solution to Outsourcing - the salary GAP

[angrydog]

Why should companies want females with computer science degrees? Simple, they can do the work as well as anyone else, and you get to pay them 78% [SeattleTimes] of what a man will work for. Imagine the savings.

Re:WTF

[nwbvt]

If that was a poor attempt at sarcasm, I apologize in advance for making you look like an ass. In the future, make it more clear.

No, I assure you the stereotype that men are better at math is not fiction. It is very common in our western society, pushed by male chauvinists and by so called feminists like Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings alike.

I have not heard of your study that shows women are actually better and as far as I know it is fictional (if it was a study on young women vs young men who have not hit puberty it is irrelevant as we are talking about grown individuals, not pre-teens). Most studies have actually shown the opposite. Women score lower on math tests like the SATs than men (of course this can be easily explained as we live in a society which, despite your naive opinions, tells women they are no good in the subject).