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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."
Just don't show them how we use that one-handed keyboard.
www.weberseite.at
How about just "Attracting women" for starters....
For those interested in encouraging women to become involved in Linux (and computer science), there is an interesting HOWTO.
Raj Against the Machine! http://social-butterfly.appspot.com/
Well you know boys, a nuclear reactor is a lot like a woman. You just have to read the manual and press the right button.
Many boys are given legos. Many girls are given dolls.
Go figure.
Actually, it's just as important that we get more guys into childminding and nursing as well as getting more women into IT. As a female grad student in a male-dominated lab, it's essential that these role models exist. They are few and far between - the two female profs here are both slightly mad with no life outside of work. It's important to show women that you can do IT/tech/science jobs and have a life. In an ideal world it wouldn't matter if you were a man or a woman. But it does, so I think programs like these will help us get towards a more sex-neutral workplace
But what about women who are interested in CS, but are intimidated away from it because they see it as male-dominated? What about men who would enjoy nursing, but are afraid of the stigma (real or imagined) attached to male nurses?
Sure, don't try to force a 50:50 ratio no matter what, but it's good to encourage the breaking of badstereotypes, so people don't feel the need to take crap like that into account when chossing a career.
Generally speaking, we as a society are better served if a broad spectrum (no pun intended) of our population are involved fully in all aspectss of society. If any field is over-dominated by one segment of our population, we run the risk of making errors in decision making and direction and value. Perhaps rather than "error" it would be more accurate to use "sub-optimal decision" or something like that.
If all doctors are males, perhaps we are less likely to have advances in health issues for females. If all child-care workers are females, perhaps our children will have difficulty creating healthy relationships with males. If all street-seepers are Western Antarticans perhaps no one will ever use the more efficient broom-twist developed in Eastern Antartica.
If all (or an overwealming majority) of any group is homogenous, there is the danger of not having a wide enough number of viewpoints to be able (or likely) to arrive at optimal solutions.
Thus, it is generally a good idea to encourage participation in a variety of fields by a variety of people.
Of course the optimal use of limited resources to encourage diversity, and the optimal level of diversity, and the relative importance of diversity in a variety of fields, is not obviously clear. It is left to the reader as an exercise...
The comp sci numbers quoted seem pretty good comared to physics... I think med school and law school are currently more than 50% female.
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.
I used to think like this. What does it matter what the percentage divide is? We shouldn't be looking to get more women into computing. We should try to get the best people into computing, regardless of their sex.
However, after reading somet HOWTO about how to ease women into IT (I thought it would be funny) it actually changed my opinions.
Little subconcious things that us males do to women in IT segregate the two sexes e.g. hitting on them. Also, (I've been guilty of this in the past as a University Lab demonstrator) if we were helping a guy out with a problem we'd explain what to do / talk them through it. If it's a woman, we take their keyboard and do it for them - thus they learn nothing.
Oh, and really, we are one of the biggest cliques around. It's hard to get into. I just think we could do more to get women into IT, not by treating them differently but by trying to treat them the same.
*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
It struck me as a very wise point of view to have. And it's one I think applies here. You can go with single-sex classes, sure. But once these women graduate, they're going to be in environments where, quite often, they are the only women in the department or on the shift. If they can't take that, well, it's better to find out before you dump $40k+ getting an education in a field where you won't be working.
My cousin David is a nurse. Funny thing is at first he wanted to be a truck driver, but couldn't find a job after getting his commercial license, so he went back to school.
He's very happy (except maybe for that bit about ending up living next to the WTC as a result). As you point out pressures are exerted both ways to persue "sex appropriate" jobs.
I've spent a few years as a "housewife" (excuse me, "homemaker"). If you're a man, socially this means "bum." The stigma is real in some quarters.
Fuck 'em. Do what you want.
KFG
Several women have recently informed me that I'm not nearly as creepy as I used to be!
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Working from home (as a guy) is just about as bad for your image. My mate works in a "real" job (IT manager for the county), so she pokes fun at me for being the one staying home. I get to watch the cat, change the laundry, accept packages arriving (for her) ... and yeah, pretty much everyone around me asks if I work. Apparently to work, you not only have to have income from it, you also have to have an office away from home. (I fully respect "homemakers" for the work they do, particularly if there are lots of kids at home ... but then, I vacuum and do the dishes, and wouldn't have it any other way. If one of us weren't employed, we'd still split the chores.)
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,
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.
Well, actually, I attended a total of three summer events at colleges, while I was in Junior High or High School.
;)
The first one was called Summerquest and was at Eastern Michigan University. It was for both genders and covered a wide variety of topics. I was there for the Creative Writing part. I don't think anyone from that group is earning their living through writing...
The second one was called Summerscience for Girls, later, I believe, renamed, though I could be wrong. This was obviously just for females and included groups on Physics, Chemistry, etc. I was in the Physics group. I truly do believe that more of us ended up with an interest in science. In addition, I heard quite a few stories from girls who really had been discouraged by teachers and other adults from science and math, and I think that this summer program may have given them a bit more strength on that.
The third program I attended was the Michigan American Legion Auxillary Girls' State. Essentially, it was a thing for learning more about politics, and many of the girls who went were ones that were very involved in school politics and the like. While some of them were very bright, it was definitely not true of all of them, and I enjoyed it considerably less than the other two, where participants were sent based on academic record. It also totally turned me off any idea of going into law (I was my "city" lawyer) or politics.
I, personally, have not had a problem with _teachers_ or _parents_ discouraging me from science and math. I've been exposed to computers since I was four (ah, the TI 99-4/a), and always told I can do whatever I put my mind to do. On the other hand, I have certainly felt discouraged by peers, while I was in high school, at any rate, with the typical ridicule for getting good grades, being "too smart for my own good", and reading too much.
Despite the fact that I went to a college (www.rose-hulman.edu) that was only allowing women in in my class, the class of '99, I did not feel that there was anything wrong with my being there. I feel very little pressure of that nature here at work, despite being a programmer on a defense project.
I used to think like this. What does it matter what the percentage divide is? We shouldn't be looking to get more women into computing. We should try to get the best people into computing, regardless of their sex.
Definitely. Get the people in who are interested and who have the skills. As a woman who's been there and done that, I'd recommend to anyone not to read the title as "Attracting Women into Computer Science" but "Stop turning women away from computer science". OK, it's not exactly that situation, but somewhere in between. There are many of us, MANY, who share a common story. We're young girls who, aged 13, find computers. DOS. Linux. whatever. We enjoy computing, we game, we script, we learn to code. Then we come up against...
Little subconcious things that us males do to women in IT segregate the two sexes e.g. hitting on them. Also, (I've been guilty of this in the past as a University Lab demonstrator) if we were helping a guy out with a problem we'd explain what to do / talk them through it. If it's a woman, we take their keyboard and do it for them - thus they learn nothing.
Spot on!. We come up against those little things. And while they're little individually, when they happen constantly, day in & day out, over and over it's a drain to have to deal with it. Any guy ever had the odd bad boss and had to move on? The attitudes of many men feels like that. Not just one, but many all the time. For all the good guys out there there's still many who can't take a hint. Look at a GNAA troll for example. It's funny once, right? Someone's put some effort into a troll. Six months later when 20 of those trolls are cluttering up a story it's not even remotely fun.
I had a discussion with a male friend at university once, who tried to understand how much a PITA it could be and I described the issue of unwanted advances from guys I really didn't care for. He described in great detail how it once happened to him. At the start of the year (a few months prior) a new girl began in his help shift and latched onto him. He felt he knew what it was like, and it was no big deal, he eventually got rid of her affections & moved on. He understood my point when I mentioned that so far that day I'd had 3 unwelcome advances from guys, ones who'd done it before. Just in that day. Guys, it's like spam. Really. Once is flattery, thirty times a week is "I'm going somewhere else, really". I consider myself pretty damned boring as girls go. I'm plain, overweight, completely unstylish and still this amount of attention pops up.
I just think we could do more to get women into IT, not by treating them differently but by trying to treat them the same.
You have it pretty much on the ball. We're all just geeks in the end. Nobody has to try getting any & every woman into IT, that's unfair to the women and men involved. Just let the girl geeks have the same fun as the boys, without the condescending hit-ons put-downs and crap that happen daily, over and over.
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?)