Slashdot Mirror
Gender Gap in Computer Science Growing
EReidJ writes "Looks like finding a compatible girl geek in the computer profession is becoming even harder, as an already wide gender gap among Computer Science majors is becoming larger. From the article: 'A Globe review shows that the proportion of women among bachelor's degree recipients in computer science peaked at 37 percent in 1985 and then went on the decline. Women have comprised about 28 percent of computer science bachelor's degree recipients in the last few years, and in the elite confines of research universities, only 17 percent of graduates are women [...] The argument of many computer scientists is that women who study science or technology, because they are defying social expectations, are in an uncomfortable position to begin with. So they are more likely to be dissuaded from pursuing computer science if they are exposed to an unpleasant environment, bad teaching, and negative stereotypes like the image of the male hacker.'"
Who needs yucky girls anyway. Cooties! ;-)
Stiny! Get me a danish!
Like how many male computer geeks lack the social skills to interract with the opposite sex and mistake friendly interraction by female coworkers as "interest" in something more.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Does it help that the summary itself contains a male-point-of-view sterotype?
"During my freshman year in the computer science department, there were more guys named David than there were girls."
www.code-fix.com
Just as the hard-wiring of binary mathematics spun the entire twentieth century about a simple yes-no axis, the invention of the three-state switch promised to revolutionize twenty-fifth century computing. After all, with three states (negative, positive, and null charges) on nanoswitches, computers could now think in terms of yes, no, and maybe, greatly humanizing their internal logic.
This would have brought many, many more female engineers into the field of computer science (hence accelerating the pace at which computers could do useful things besides transmit, compress, and enhance pornography), except that the same abbreviational logic that turned "binary digit" into "bit" turned "trinary digit" into "tit." This nomenclatural error set computing back nearly three hundred years, and two entire generations of promising computer scientists were lost trying to keep abreast of bad puns.
-- The Tayler Corporation. "Plotting to take over the world since 1998"
Meet a bio girl, have her become a doctor, and spend your days changing diapers and compiling the latest ubuntu release.
I've noticed whenever I hear about a gender gap study or story, the gender gap is a about a shortage of women in good, clean professions with upward mobility and high pay. I've never hear or seen a story about a shortage of women in garbage collecting or ditch digging, or other lower pay and often "dead end" jobs. I've only seen one female garbage collector ever, out of dozens of male garbage collectors, in the various places I've lived.
P.S. I have nothing against garbage collectors... they just happen to be the most visible "down and dirty not high paying" job I can think of. They do a great service for us, I'm not putting them down. I would like to see more women going into CS as well. I'm just pointing out something I've noticed.
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
Is it sexist to mention that as computer science is no longer the gateway to financial riches that it was once seen to be (new motto: "we outsource you") that more people who would not otherwise be drawn into it, well, don't and that this might have something to do with it?
Do you really expect women to code away all night long to the wee hours of the morning? Get real, they won't.
28%? Come on! Which university did they go to? Some girls college, no doubt. In my graduating class there were two women and a about a hundred men, so that works out to two percent or so.
The very first geek was a women...
My other account has mod points.
Like how many male computer geeks lack the social skills to interract with the opposite sex and mistake friendly interraction by female coworkers as "interest" in something more.
As a geek girl myself, I'd put it a bit above half. sucks.
"There aren't any women in here."
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Think this might have to do with the fact that after the dot com crash computer science was no longer viewed as the way to ensure a profitable career?
I have met VERY FEW women who actually LIKE programming among the women professionals I've met.
Rats would be more funny if they could fart.
This is unfortunate, because even my wife is bothered by the lack of women in my workplace (I work in IT for one of the auto makers), and when she came to my office for the first time, she said "Where are all the women? This place is a sausage-fest!"
Im sure there's always that 19% whose intrests in computer science balenced with their ability to tele-commute are powerfull enough to overcome any obstacle. Even being harassed into wearing their hair like Leia.
--not that programmers are ALL like the above, but its a pretty tough image to beat, mainly because theres is a substantial segment of programmers who do unfortunately fit the bill.
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
I know in some of my college classes at Penn State the rare female CS student would be in class and the oogling and 6th grade antics were in full force by the oh-so-suave geeks surrounding her. No wonder no chic wants to be in CS.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
You can tell, you know. You can tell because they don't have caved in foreheads from beating them on the wall everytime someone takes a techy for granted.
"hey, I know it's 10 minutes before 5 and it's a friday before christmas, but could you do this urgent pile of work while the rest of us bugger off to our last minute shopping and holiday parties? i knew i could count on you. there'll be a little something extra in your pay packet this month (a candy cane)"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...are in an uncomfortable position to begin with
REALLY??
You mean being oogled by obese sweaty men who all wear spock ears to work and tell jokes in binary put women in an uncomfortable position??
There's still plenty of girls graduating in fields around computer science: communication majors going into human-computer interaction, science & technology studies majors studying the social impact of computing, etc. Information science and other "not-just-techie" graduate fields around the country are around 50/50 by gender. These girls may not care about programming the "best" distributed computing platform ever, but you can be sure they know more about what one means in society than the majority of techies.
So ScuttleMonkey, women are supplies? Perhaps blatant sexism such as this is one of the reasons for the gender gap.
So they are more likely to be dissuaded from pursuing computer science if they are exposed to an unpleasant environment, bad teaching, and negative stereotypes like the image of the male hacker.'
I don't know if the number is statistically significant, but from my own anecdotal experience I know a number of women who went into CS because of the gender difference and because they were more interested in finding a financially stable husband than in learning about computer science. I know several women who became engaged and/or married and then switched degrees or dropped out. I imagine the same is true, in reverse, for certain fields dominated by women. I know at least one guy who joined the cheerleading squad to meet women.
Geek girls are _amazing_ in bed. It's like Technical Sex 101 ;)
They're good with math too!
Open source software is even more heavily male dominated than academia. The Debian women project has some ideas about why this might be and how to fix it. (http://women.alioth.debian.org/faqs/)
The females just have more common sense and realize that CompSci is a dying degree that is better served by more specialized degrees in eiterh CompEng or InfoSys.
Politics, Life, and More on my Aspiring for the Future
You know, Men and Women are different. Why is that so complicated? In my IT career I worked with about ten different women who had equivalent jobs as I and I have had some contact with probably a hundred others. In that time I have found 1 (one) who I thought *really* understood the finer details of the job. In almost all cases the women would gravitate towards the administrative side of things; paperwork, organizing, etc...
As a electronic technician in the USAF (METNAV) I found the same thing - except it was worse there. They just were not interested in the real nuts and bolts of our job. Again they would gravitate towards the administrative parts of our job.
That is just *my* experience. I'm sure that many of you will site a exceptional woman that you know and project her as the norm.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
... we could accept that men and women are different in nature, very different and that men perform better on technical skills than women, period. It's called specialization, it goes back to the beginning of life and there's nothing sexist to it. The social pressure justification seems a little far fetched, for the sake of correctness. Women perform much better than men in a wide variety of intellectual activities, I'm not implying any kind of superiority, I am just saying the obvious. P.S. Counter-example are pointless because this is of course a general trend and applies on average.
\u262D = \u5350
I'm curious to know whether the gap in CS degrees awarded mirrors the gap in mathematics performance at the high school level. Or, for a more direct comparison, the number of passing grades on the Computer Science Advanced Placement Exam per year awarded to men vs. women. Poor teaching and other college-related factors may be a contributing cause, but I think the bulk of the gender gap is manifested way earlier than the university level.
Well, first let me say that I feel lucky, at my university, there is about a 10% female population in my CSCI classes.
Now, that being said, I have seen most women being viewed as technically inept. I have a friend who is working towards her masters in computer science who complained, quite frequently, that her classmates (entirely male) were not taking her seriously.
Could it be that our own geeky superiority complexes are keeping us from having the joy of female company? Something to think about before you suggest that a girl can't code.
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
What makes you think that women (and men) entering other disciplines don't face the same environments? How is a woman entering Computer Science any different from a man entering Women's Studies? The irrelevant stereotype of the male hacker, bad teaching, has absolutely no correlation with the lack of women entering computer science because this is true for every single discipline known.
For some real experience, in my fourth year of my CS degree, there is all of two women that are graduating. Yes, two women, out of a hundred guys or so. But I don't attribute that to what this article purports is the cause -- no, I think at some point women make decisions for themselves and realize they aren't interested in computer science. I think this theory of mine is called 'common-sense'.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
It must be the popularization in the mass media of conversations like:
#include woman.h
and hope you don't get a compile error
Reality is a big nasty dragon. Fortunately I don't believe in dragons.
To be honest, I've NEVER met a female programmer. Ever. Most girls that I dated before I was married hated computers, and most of them I've met since seem to have the smallest degree of patience for them. I've hired several male programmers for my company, and they are good, but I think there could be some very interesting dynamics with female programmers. You see, with my experience, there is always this sense of masculine competitiveness when it comes to male programmers that gets in the way of productivity and, sometimes, an enjoyable work environment. I'd like to see what it was like to hire a qualified female programmer and throw her in the mix to see if that could balance the equation out a little bit... tone down that competitive attitude a little, and see if people would be more willing to work together without always trying to outcode each other. Of course, there's always the possibility that this would totally backfire, causing a high amount of threat to the male programmers from the female, resulting in the female being completely shunned... but it would definately be interesting though.
This entire line of reasoning ("must find females for job X") is entirely sexist!
I thought someone's sex wasn't supposed to matter. Hmm?
Not to sound like a jerk, but lets throw it down like this.
I'm a fairly successful person (so far), in computer science.
People graduating from my current institution can expect to make about $70k a year with a Masters. A high number of people in engineering here leave to do something other than engineering, when they discover that they will be paid more in other fields (a friend of mine who is becoming a banker will start at $120K/year.
So, while there is a gender gap, one has to ask if telling women to go into computer science will be at all good for their careers. Certainly a certain percentage of all people would like to go into computer science, out of a genuine love for the field. I fall into this group. I hope that all women who fall into this group, do so. I would advocate, however, that we stop trying to push our kids into this field out of a perception that it will somehow make them successful.
Lets break down the facts. Even in the dot-com boom, the jobs that paid the most did not require degrees in computer science. It doesn't take a thick book of credentials to become a web hacker. Go to a web shop, and ask the people working there what their credentials are.
Now, go to any business, and ask their IT people what their credentials are.
There are a lot more of those people, and they only get paid marginally less than programmers. The programmers are in a very very tough job market, so mostly only good ones get jobs programming anywhere (though, there are notable exceptions, of course), and they're overqualified for networking.
As a programmer, without a masters, I made $40k a year. Does it sound like your daughter couldn't make more with a degree in marketing or accounting?
Now that we've got that one solved, you have to ask if pushing kids into the field is a good idea. Only a few of them actually like it, to the rest, even a bachelors is a hellish workload in a field that they dislike. Go ask your marketing student how many all nighters they pull a week. In the atrium here, students write things like "Why don't they let me sleep!!" on the whiteboards... and those are the undergrads, us grads are off in our offices or labs.
So, fine... perhaps we need to make sure that the women who want to be here get here. I am a hearty, strong advocate of THAT, but before you send your daughter off to some brainwashing session that says that she needs to become an engineer, remember that it's a person with an MBA who will be her boss, not someone with a degree in engineering.
This is ridiculous. Yes, 75% of people in computer science are men. So what? What percentage of teachers are women? What percentage or care takers are women? I don't hear people screaming of a gender gap in those or other professions where men are less inclined to have careers.
Let's face it. Women are different and in general not as interested in the science of computers. Note, that I'm not talking about all women, but simply a greater percentage than men. It's reality. Let it go instead of forcing some women into a field in which they're not comfortable just so we can feel better about some meaningless percentages.
10 minutes working on a sig. What a waste.
CS is the only freggin field that gets anything done.
How about the entire computing field, like Information Science, Network and Computer Engineering, Graphic Design, Web Design, Web Development, etc etc...
In my opinion CS is 2 or 3 years of coding. But you see the problem with CS is that it inherently does not have an intent or application of its use. That has to be created from the authors mind. You see Information Science you apply theknowledge of scripting, networking, server software etc.. so solve problems, or provide solutions, it has an inherent purpose. Unfortunately CS does not.
public cells woo(Girl g) {
if (g.hotness > -10) {
while (true) {
hair.smooth();
lysol.spray(armpits);
mouth.stammer();
mouth.tellJoke(lameBinaryJoke);
if (g.noticesYou()) {
return semen;
}
}
}
Sounds familiar
I was thinking about the dearth of women in science just the other day. I think, as has already been concluded and probably supported, that the difference stems at least in part from the fact that women from a very early age are treated differently. This treatment includes not just how they are treated in the classroom, it also includes what is expected of them. Boys get mechanical toys, erector sets, legos, and other toys that encourage engineering and scientific tendencies. Girls get dolls and other toys that encourage maternal and domestic tendencies. It could certainly be looked at as a chicken-and-egg argument, but perhaps we could start to remedy this phenomenon by encouraging women to build and experiment at a younger age.
It's also evident that girls and boys emulate the people around them, so a more stimulating, interactive and intellectual environment at home could be a boon for either gender.
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
I've found that a rather large number of people I've worked with as IT people didn't originally get a degree in IT. At least those in the business world. So basing a % on what Major a person gets might not be, for IT at least, very meaningful.
:)
'Course saying that, just looking around I DO notice a lack of girl geeks... so they may be right
Nearly every tech company I've worked at has had some level of hostility towards women in about half of the male techies.
Really, as fun as it may be, it's not really a healthy work culture to be discussing the details of most South Park episodes, or any other kinds of conversations along those lines.
We're cooperating with our coworkers far more than competing with them.
Arrogance is a bad personality trait. Really.
Female techies are no different mentally than male techies. Really. Get over it. They can do the job every bit as well as you can, some of them better.
Women who assert themselves aren't necessarily bitches; contrariwise, if you don't want a woman to _have_ to act like a jerk to get heard, listen to them! Most women are socialized to start out polite.
It's appalling how many geeks need to be told this sort of thing.
Compare the current health of the industry and profession with that from 1985. I can only speak for myself, but I used to be excited about computers. Now I am excited about getting out of computers. It just isn't as fun as it used to be. Am I saying an increasing lack of women is/a cause? Yes. Lack of gender equity is similar to racism. If your programmers don't accurately reflect the demographics of your local populate, you probably have one or more white males who could be replaced by better programmers. An under-representation of women doesn't mean women aren't good programmers. It means a certain percentage of white males shouldn't be there. Perhaps if we had more women programmers we would have better software and less offshoring.
They much prefer a procedural approach.
I put women in uncomfortable positions all the time.
Bah-dum dum, tshhhh!!!
The 21-30 age group is looking for more than intellectual challenge when they pick a career. Some goals that go beyond this are: glamor, fashion, job security, good-looking members of the opposite sex, influential go-getters, big Buck$, etc. I think comp sci is probably the last career choice you would make if you were looking for any of these things in your early career. Certainly the outsourcing trend has diminished at least the perception that computer programming is a career choice with a bright future. Sure, the best won't have to worry. Despite the outsourcing of late there is still demand for good people right here in the good ol' USA. For those who cannot rise to that level, the number of good-paying jobs with a stable future and room for growth is being reduced. On many levels this is just more supply and demand.
Excuse me, but when did the male hacker become a negative stereotype? Someone's confusing Slashdot's nerds for ESR's hackers, at great expense to available females everywhere.
Is that there is a decline in men enrolling in Women's Studies degrees.
The point is, often girls like certain thing and boys like certain things. It has nothing to do with a social standard or any other kind of garbage these people make up to get grants. It has to do with the same reason more men are found roaming around best buy looking at electronics than girls.
Why do we constantly have this mission from some groups to force 50-50 on everything? Why is it that we have to take natural patterns out and force things on people. So now what, if a girl wants to study CS they make it free to encourage more girls to do it? Who cares who studies it! Race and sex don't matter!
On these same grounds have you seen any studies advocating to get more boys in school? The numbers are going way down for males while females continues to rise. Why don't we see a coalition focused on getting boys into colleges. Especially white boys who are showing the sharpest decline in enrollment?
Sure I'm going overboard here but my point is this: It's not a *problem* that fewer girls are going into CS. It's a fact. And that's all it is. They make guesses as to why and this is fine but do not try and manipulate things and make them unfair for everyone else to strike some unnatural balance. To me, it's irrelevant if fewer girls are going into engineering and CS programs.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Someone has to look at why, despite all the incentives for women to enter computing as Bachelor's candidates, so few of them actually do. More importantly, is the recruiting process and its incentives misdirected?
The graduate school proportion is skewed by the many women from "third" world countries -- they have no incentive program, and they have to struggle against far greater odds than their American sisters. So, it may be that American women choose not to enter the profession. If that is true, then it would be a feature of the empowerment of women, although undoubtedly unintentional.
The two must have something in common.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
One impression I have is that in the 70's CompSci was viewed more as a 'humanities'. In Canada is was either part of the Commerce or Math faculties. There seemed to be more interested in the theoretical aspect. It was a lot smaller and had more of a community fell.
How is the gender ratio for those graduating or entering Biology and the Sciences?
Remembering Grace Murray Hopper - A Legend in Her Own Time
http://inventors.about.com/od/hstartinventors/a/G
While society has changed drastically in the past few decades, the mother is still the primary caretaker in most families. A large percent of IT jobs require significant amounts of overtime and/or odd hours, neither of which are conducive to raising a family (not that there aren't plenty of women who somehow manage it). Perhaps that has something to do with the gender gap. That being said, I enjoyed working in a predominantly male environment. I did leave because of the overtime; I wanted more free time because I am also a part-time student.
Another thing to look at is how many girls are encouraged by their parents to go into CS? I have worked in CS for nearly 20 years, and my daughters have seen all of the wonderfull hoops that I jump through to get the job done. I don't encourage my kids to go into CS or even work in IT. When before long you won't even be able to get a job unless you can't speak english.
One thing that I'd like to know is why there seem to be quite strong racial elements to the gender gap as well. I'm in Computer Science at UBC, and there are a lot of girls in my classes... but at least 90% of them are Chinese. It seems that among the Asian students, there's barely any gender gap, but female students of other races (eg. myself -- a white girl of British descent) are much more rare.
The reason I'm asking this is that the Chinese (and the inhabitants of at least a few of the other East Asian countries) seem to have figured out something that us Westerners haven't. The only explanation that I can think of is that the Chinese (at least appear to) obsess less over what gender dominates what field.
I don't know about other girls, but I get kinda irritated when people, be they men or women, exclaim "Good for you!" or "You go girl!" when I mention my major, as if I'm overcoming some incredible hardship by just -- get this -- interacting to guys and *gasp* doing my coursework without female encouragement!
I also get sick of people going on and on about how comp sci is desperately lacking in women and it's masculine and discrimination is rampant and hard for girls to get into and blah blah blah... and then they wonder why the hell girls are being driven away from the subject "despite" all that advertising. I mean, seriously: do you think you could get more men into nursing by saying something like "Nursing: not just for girls anymore! Not girly at all! You won't be laughed at for doing it! Trust us!"? So why does anyone think that strategy would work on women?
Oh, and incidentally, as a 3rd year student, I have never been harassed, excluded or otherwise treated in a negative manner based on my gender. I have never felt that I was intruding into any kind of boys-only club, and I have never found myself wishing that I had more female friends to talk to. Oh, and my grades are pretty decent too (with the notable exception of math, but I've always been weak in that area).
Just an observation. Of course, I don't actually have a CS degree either...
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Where's the link between "the computer profession" and having a degree in Comp. Sci.?
most of the people I know (admittadly mostly men) in "the computer profession" do not have comp. sci. degrees.
There are many paths into working in this industry, a degree in comp. sci. is only one of them. The smartest people I know do not have a degree, much less one is CS.
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
I once told my female boss, "besides you, there are no women in IT, and you yourself don't even have an IT related degree, you just kinda fell into your 'manager of IT people' position." She got really mad. I now work with all female techs. (I'm glad I lost that argument!!) But they don't even read slashdot!!! Computers are work, not a hobby! They don't have cleverly named computers laying around like Ol' Sparky. Sure they can build their own computer. But they don't have the same passion for it/IT. Sure I know girls that play video games and build their own computer, but usually thats where it stops. You don't see that deeper, I just want to know how it works, kinda interest. I mean you can raise a kid around a mechanic, and he will usually really like cars. He won't say his dad made him like cars. I think the way we raise girls makes them less interested, and thats the main problem. If we raised females a little differently, (could already be in the works, takes 18 years for a girl to make it to collge obviously) they may actually care enough about C.S. to persue a career in it. I think the days of no girls allowed are over, and I've seen a ton of guys jump the CS ship for a less math intensive IT degree. Raise a girl to love math and don't make her feel she can only be a math teacher, and watch what happens.
From my experience, even the 17% figure quoted is an exaggeration. Particularly at the graduate level -- my estimate would be that about 5% of MS/PhD candidates in Engineering and Computer Science are women. Out of this 5%, about 90% are Indian or Chinese/Asian women. So American women comprise such a miniscule percentage as to be practically invisible. The only reason they even appear to have some presence in academia is due to quotas.
All this leads me to question whether the American "culture" suppresses technical aptitude and ambitions of their women. My conversations with a American female faculty member (at a prestigious Engineering institution) appears to confirm this. She claimed that all through her life, her peers, parents, and even professors told her openly about the futility of being a woman in engineeing.
Since this is Slashdot, the bias is to be expected and I'm not bothered by it, but I want to point out that the gender gap exists beyond just CS majors. Look at electrical, civil, and mechanical engineering graduate statistics, too. I don't have any references, but it's easy to tell just from looking at my graduating class, which was about 80 percent male. And, of course, it's not just my school either. Attendence at ASME and SAE student and professional events is overwhelmingly male, too. And it shows at my job. There's probably about 30 people on my floor, including only 5 women, who I believe are mostly technical writers rather than engineers.
We are told that this is a problem, and to some extent, I agree. Sexual harassment or gender bias is obviously out of line, and we should not be creating an environment such that our coworkers feel uncomfortable, but some work guys simply tend to be more interested in. If a woman is more interested in the workings of the human body than how to program computers or (in my case) build forklifts, let her go study biology, chemistry, or nursing (majors which seem to have as many or more women than men). We don't need to BS people into thinking they'll like spending 8 hours a day debugging code or playing with hydraulic oil, just so the statistics impress Oprah or Hillary Clinton. Some women will like CS or engineering, some won't.
Of course, there is the question of why women often don't want to do the same things as guys, and any implication that women are fundamentally different from men different in their interests or the way they think will inevitably be called sexist by someone. Some times I get the impression that the thoughts of the politically correct mafia can be summed up as, "We have to have equality, and by golly, we're gonna get it even if the only way is to make everyone equally miserable."
I graduated with two girls from a class of 100 or so, and neither were proper geeks. They did their best to ignore the rest of us smelly types.
If you're looking for geek girls, try biology or chemistry departments. Many more women there than CS departments, they are extremely clever, and usually are still geeks. Plus, they find it hard to get a decent man who isn't afraid of a woman being smarter than them.
Completly made up:
Annon writes "Looks like finding a compatible guy knitter in the knitting circle is becoming even harder, as an already wide gender gap in the loom room and its becoming larger.
From the article: 'A Globe review shows that the proportion of men picking up knitting needles peaked at 3.7 percent in 1985 and then went on the decline. Men have comprised about 2.8 percent of knitters in the last few years, and in the elite confines of large industrial wool shops, only 1.7 percent of new knitters are men [...]
The argument of many Yarn barns is that men who 'pick up sticks' are defying social expectations, are in an uncomfortable position to begin with. So they are more likely to be dissuaded from pursuing this needlework craft if they are exposed to an unpleasant environment, bad teaching, and negative stereotypes like the image of the old granny sock knitter.'"
Of course, as a true geek, there was SFA I could do about it except slide further and further towards despair as the disappointment and disinterest grew in her with every day that passed without my asking her out for a drink or something. Now, almost a year later, I try to avoid her whenever possible as even a glimpse can push me into a seriously pissed off mood for the rest of the day. Ah well... I've a Linux and BSD based home network to play around on, a bottle of single malt and half an ounce of decent skunk; all far, far more accessible to me than this woman.
So, men, be careful what you wish for unless you're able to do something about it. Women, although the range of intelligent, creative, amusing and sensitive blokes working in the field of IT is great, and they're almost all available, uh... well, forget that. Just get in there and take your pick. We're almost all available, and even allowing for the high prevalence of social inadequates like me, there are still many more desirable single men in this field than probably any other...
*sigh*
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
My guess is that people setting the homepages to sites like lemonparty.org, goatse or some ass tulips is the reason for less female graduates. Let's face it, most chicks aren't cool enough to enjoy the shock sites like we men do. I bet they leave the courses with emotional scars that will last a lifetime.
At my high school, the valedictorian and salutatorian were both female, as were most of the top 10 students.
I scored top in the American High School Math Exam, tied with one other male, but I was only in the top 1/3rd of my class, not top 10. I also had top 10 SAT and PSAT scores, aptitute tests... IQ tests. Guidance even came and asked me why I wasn't top 10 (probably figuring some sort of abuse or drug use or something).
Simply put, the teachers never saw me in the smart-clique, and so never decided that I was a smart student.
More women go to college as undergraduates than men, and I think that this actually extends to graduate school as well.
So, if anything, this phenomenon is QUITE specific to technical fields, because to assert that high schools are somehow shortchanging women is a tired argument that looks at a non-existant problem. If you want to solve something, look at the REAL numbers and figure out what the REAL problem is, not some politically correct BS spewed forth from someone who isn't even interested in what the real numbers are.
Honestly, speaking as a computer science major, I've found that most girls don't see things in that binary mind set that most (as I can see) computer skills really require.
For example, I didn't realise till the next morning why I got to monopolise the prototype Mac that Apple brought to the computer club in early 1984. I was too interested in the computer to even notice.
... run the other way.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
So they are more likely to be dissuaded from pursuing computer science if they are exposed to an unpleasant environment, bad teaching, and negative stereotypes like the image of the male hacker.
Or if they're just exposed to too many male hackers...
If someone avoids the field for idiotic and childish reasons likes the ones other posters are suggesting, the field doesn't need them. CS doesn't need people who are in it primarily for money instead of for the love of what they do, or who'll back off of it because "their coworkers are weird".
One poster in a previous story about this said that a female friend had told him she wouldn't take CS classes because "the room smelled bad". Do you really think she was interested and would've made a contribution to science if something that little could push her away?
Don't believe me?
e c02/college.html
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/july-d
If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.
- Dave Barry
No wonder women are choosing other careers.
Yet another unsolvable contradiction of this intrinsecally falocentric economic system: capitalism.
I studied engineering upstairs from the hairdressing school. Thats where we wanted to be.
One guy picked up 'human form' drawing (required for entry to the fashion design course) just to meet the ladies. It worked. He was the only straight guy in the class. And why not.
1. Americans don't take CS courses anyhow, and the asians and eastern europeans who do tend to come from male-dominated societies.
2. CS degrees are less and less relevant to working in an IT environment or even as a developer. Most IT tasks and many programming tasks don't require the rigorous education in mathmatics that a CS degree gives you.
Personally, I feel that CS enrollment problems says more about the relevance of the degree than anything else.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Yesterday I was at a coffee house with some people from my church, and I met my first female CS major. I'm part of a church of around 13000 people, and she was the first one I had ever met from my church. I've been a member of this church for the past 6 years. When I asked her what she did, and she told me she was a CS major and a developer, I was caught completely off guard. I wasn't expecting CS at all. We of course talked about the gender gap, and how it can be tough for females in the CS field. Sarah, if you read Slashdot, you rock.
My university graduated more CS majors after the dot com crash than before it. Partly this was due to general growth, partly it was due to a major decrease in demand for programmers without a degree, party it was due to laid off tech professionals going back to school. But I didn't meet anyone who dropped out of the CS department because prospective salaries were lower. There were only a few girls in my freshman year CS classes and there was about the same percentage during my senior year. (If I recall, there were 7-10 girls in my 100+ person senior projects class, which everyone had to take.)
There are broadly two reasons to pursue a computer science degree. The first is because the pay is good. The second is because the student loves problem solving, abstract and applied math, and making computers do cool stuff.
Geeks usually don't care about social stigmata, negative stereotypes, or lack of hygene associated with a subject field as long as they get to play with stuff they think is cool. The important question is this: Of the girl geeks (and there are many), why aren't there very many girl *computer* geeks?
(One could an analogous question: Of the boy geeks (and there are many), why aren't there vary many boy *knitting* geeks? I don't know if the answers are similar.)
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Maybe my experience wasn't typical, but I'm female and I never got any sense that I wasn't wanted in CS.
there were less majored people back in the day, which means there are more woman working on the field today then years ago.
It is interesting to note that while the gender gap in engineering and mathematics still favours men, every other program has a higher level of women than men in Canada, including an 80-20 split in the arts. When people are no longer silenced when they talk about a gender gap in the other direction I will believe that these people are actually fighting for equality, and believe me I have been silenced many times for talking about the gaps in arts and science. In Canada, 70% of all undergraduate degrees go to women, that's fair, equality isn't about a 50-50 split, it's about anyone who wants to work for something being able to with no barriers to entry.
I interview students for places in a CompEng degree, and female student numbers is currently about 37% for the 1st year intake in 2006. This is up from about 21% last year.
I have to taken one actual Programming class (C++) for my Mechanical Engineering degree (BA), and my teacher was a female. I found it kind of odd, but she knew her stuff. It was really funny that the only female in my class was the teacher though.
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in mud. Soon, you realize the pig is dirty, and he likes it.
(sarcasm) Nahh. We all know that Duke Nukem turns off so many guys who would otherwise go into compsci. They quit once they learn that they could never live up to *that* image. We learned all about their penis envy, or at least machismo envy, last week. (/sarcasm)
However I bet the 28% who are women, who stay in it despite all the sexism (of which Ms. Croft is just a symptom) are head and shoulders above the remaining "men."
Here's a response that'll tickle the feminists. Babies make IT a bad business for women.
I own an IT company. We've hired women in the past. We've tried to get younger females with good brains to get into the computer science market and attend colleges and programs. Yet we've seen a very high quitting percentage over the past 10 years, and so have almost all of my competitors (who I'll get beers with).
The number one reason why women have left my industry has been child-rearing. If you're a guy, try leaving the business for a year or two, and see how competitive you are when you get back.
Many women I know today (younger ones, 18-25) seem to actually be thinking of babies, whereas when I was 18-25, most of my gal pals were thinking of becoming lawyers, doctors and, yes, even engineers. Maybe society is feeling a change back to the "old bad ways" of women raising kids and men working. I'm not saying this is the best or the worst way to live, but I don't have kids so it doesn't affect me, really.
Expect to see fewer women in the market place for a decade, either way -- in IT our in other industries.
Unfortunately, we are still animals. And as animals, we must compete to mate, just like any other animal. Females desire to mate with the males who are the most confident, successful (in things like "sports" and "business"), attractive, and physically strong. Geeks are generally not good at these things.
Geeks, by and large, are the people who didn't get the girl in Middle School/Junior High or High School-- and who are shunned and bullied due to their behavior and interests-- so they turned to computers instead.
This sort of thing doesn't happen to women because virtually any woman, even a heavy or unattractive one, can get a date.
Most female geeks I've met have been either [A] very overweight, [B] unattractive, [C] lesbian/bi (and therefore socially shunned) or [D] transgendered (and therefore really socially shunned)-- or, most commonly, some combination of the above. Please don't bore me with your anecdotal evidence to the contrary. I know exceptions to this rule exist.
Guy geeks become geeks because they can't get the girl in school. Girl geeks (who are rarer) become geeks because they're utterly socially rejected-- which is much, much rarer among girls than among guys. Girls usually have at least a small clique of friends, and girls can almost always find a date; a much, much higher percentage of guys are utterly alone and utterly sexually frustrated.
Thus, male geeks.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
DO NOT READ THIS UNLESS YOU READ THE BOTTOM PARAGRAPH:
Computer programming is one of the professions requiring the highest IQs. Men on average are stronger, have better hand eye co-ordination, better endurance, and on average can out perform women at every task with the exception of tracking multiple objects. No one disputes these things. Why is there such a fight over their IQs being higher? I think the obvious answer is it is harder to definitively prove. How many times have you heard that IQ tests are flawed? Why? Are you telling me that in 30 years Psychologists have not managed to figure out how to test someone's intelligence? They have. The problem is that the results aren't politically correct. So there must be something wrong with the test. Computer science isn't about being Politically Correct. It is about results. It is about liking the task and finding it challenging. Thus as long as men continue to be smarter on average it will be dominated by men. The vast majority of men are not capable of being top end IT people either. So in a way it isn't a male/female thing at all.
Now never ever use this to judge an individual. That was about averages and not about specific individuals. Look at Chess playing as a logical task similar to programming. Grand Masters the males out number females about 5:1. So look for the good female programmers and don't be stereotypical or biased. They are out there and you can't judge a book by its cover.
PS Google does effectively IQ tests before they hire any employee. What is their male/female mix? If there where in fact a bunch of female programmers out there being oppressed Google would have snapped them all up and have a much higher than average male/female ratio. Which they don't. Google has a higher than industry standard male ratio which means that women are being pushed into programming due to social factors not the other way around.
If anyone has figured out how we can decide the nature / nurture issue without performing experiments that are generally considered immoral, let me know.
But until then, I consider it perfectly plausible that there's just something about the trade girls tend to be bad at or not enjoy, regardless of enculturation?
I'm not trolling, I'm just trying to be open minded and scientific about this. I haven't seen evidence that the "nature" / "bell-curve" type hypotheses have been eliminated. We need to follow the truth wherever it leads.
The 28% of the females entering the field are going to get 50% of the promotions so they are "equally" represented in management.
At one company I worked for 100% managers were female. 45% of group leaders were female and 100% of the "business analysts" were female. Among the males, 60% were ethnic in some fashion or another. Meanwhile, the programming staff was about 80/20 male/female and 40/60 caucasian/*. I think out of a couple hundred people there were 5 white male management and most had been promoted over 10 years previously.
It took me a while, but I finally realized there was no way in hell I was going to get promoted there.
* Asian, Black, Indian, Philipeno, Russian.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I agree that more women should go into programming, but not because the current situation is unfair towards them. I think that personal preference and ability contribute more to the current situation than stereotypes or discrimination. However, I think design of software packages may suffer from the lack of input from women. I think that men and women interact differently with a computer. Currently since most of the coding is done by men, interfaces and features are probably written for a male user and women's productivity suffers when using those programs. A woman's touch to interface design could do a lot in making the program better usable by other women.
Women are more intelligent then men in most cases anyhoo, men are just worried about being shown-up by woman in a variety of fields. This is a male dominated world, it's not a matter of women can't/won't do it, it's more of "You can't cause you're a woman". If you want more women in technology, the environment needs to be more inviting.
:P
And yes, I noted the story has a -male- opinion pre inserted. Weak..
Maybe outsourcing the the decline in QUALITY I.T. jobs is inflating the gender gap.
Another politically correct story. 99% of chicks don't dig computers... not the aspects that tend to attract 99% of males to the field.
Chicks like their shoes, guys their TVs, this is the same script, different actors.
Who freaking CARES?
Yin and Ying.
-M
When I got my degree in astronomy, the graduating class was six ... all guys.
The article says that this condition and change is occurring in all phyisical sciences and engineering fields, not just computer science. "Tech is out" since the dot.bomb.
Too bad I didn't get the "+1 Informative, -1 Flamebait" mod.
My other first post is car post.
Essentialism is saying women aren't as good at math, or that all black men have big penises.
Essentialism is still a lie. I don't know why intelligent people can let themselves be deluded into thinking it's true. Shame on you and shame on the moderator who gave your talk a mod point.
"Essentialism and society
Essentialist positions on gender, race, and characteristics, consider these to be fixed traits while not allowing for variation in the group or individual. Contemporary proponents of identity politics including feminism, equality for gay people, and anti-racist activists generally take constructionist viewpoints. However, these proponents have taken various positions including essentialist ones. Prejudices such as racism, sexism and anti-gay bias may be based on an essentialist view, such as the view that all people of a particular race inherently possess a particular negative characteristic."
Read more at Wikipedia.
Do you honestly think that women are bad at math because they were built that way, or is it because of years of gender stereotyping, starting with what colour clothes the parents put on the baby right after birth?
Essentialism is the lie that African Americans are born dumber than whites because they have a lower IQ, rather than looking at the distribution of income and social equality that those people have (Bill Cosby may be rich, but most black folk are still way below the poverty line; in Canada, replace African American with Native to get the same effect).
"In feminism, Yashar Keramati understands that essentialism constitutes that women have pre-determined characteristics. This goes beyond simple body parts, those being the vagina and the penis. Rather, this means that women are born 'emotional,' 'inferior,' 'irrational' and so on. Therefore, essentialism could circulate false information about women which results in lowering their status. Though this necessarily depends upon the value judgements a society adheres to. It also depends upon the supposition that these qualities are negative and don't possess the ability to be sublimated -- just like the lower qualities in the male sex. Essentialism can also be taken to an extreme by characterizing different races in such a way -- though it is true that every school of thought is subject to distortion."
Essentialism is what Hitler used as justification for putting Jews and Gays and other undesirables into furnaces. To say you support this point of view is carte blanche for a return to eugenics and all the other madness that implies.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Here's a viepoint from an old guy. I went to college in the late 70's and graduated in 80, then went on to grad school from 80 to 82, majoring in mechanical engineering (but was a closet computer/EE type).
In 76 and 77 there were very few gals in any of my school's engineering majors, including Computer Engineering. The ones who were engineering studens those years were by and large geeks. In 78 and 79 there was big in influx of gals and I talked to lots of them about their reason why they got into engineering. The majority were into it because (1) they wanted to prove to the world that they were as good or better than men, and/or (2) engineering was suppose to be a good career. Very few were actually interested in engineering. Needless to say, most of them were mediocre engineering students and I surmised that one reason was because they lacked the (short) lifetime of geek experiences that gave them insight and a "feel" for the courses.
Computer science classes are 'rife' with women, at least compared to electrical engineering courses. In my whole EE department, there were no women at all, no students or facualty.
...stop trying to make men stop being men and women stop being women. Of course men "mistake" conversation from a woman as interest in "something more". We're biologically wired for that. Most of our interactions purpose are for nothing more that propogation of the species. It's why, at some fundamental level, everything we do has "sex" behind it. Evolution has made nearly everything we do have something to do with propogating offspring and ensuring their survival. Would people please STOP FUCKING BITCHING ABOUT OUR DAMN INATE BIOLOGOY AND GET OVER ALL THE PC CRAP! 'CAUSE CRAP IS WHAT IT IS! STOP BITCHING ABOUT GENDER GAPS AND MALE/FEMALE ROLES. IT'S ASININE. PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT IT! I am SO DAMN SICK OF THIS INANGE DISCUSSION. And, please, don't give me this, "That's why you're a geek and don't have a girlfriend." I was married for 15 years and have a beautiful teenage daughter. I got rid of the "Old Lady" 'cause she was a pain in the ass. Now, I have as many girlfriends as possible and I focus mostly on copulating with them, as my biology commands. Be fruitful and multiply, that's my motto....or at least enjoy the act. So, please, shut up about the stupid ass "Gender Inequalities"....Women have as much, if not more, power than men. Weak individuals are weak individuals. Men, women, whatever. Strong women find power in different ways than strong men, but, that doesn't mean they don't have significant power and influence. Women who are really interested in science, math, and engineering do it. PERIOD! They are not discouraged bye "Male Geek Culture". That's an excuse that smells like me ass. If you don't like what I'm saying, that's because you're either a brainwashed prick who has been convinced you have to deny your male biological imperitive or you are an underachieving, socially malcontent female who can't acquire power and influence the way most women do, and find yourself actually having to compete in something you'd rather not be competing in. So, BITE MY ASS! Mod me troll..or vulgar or whatever the hell you want. It just shows how stupid and brainwashed you are.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
I think you should double check your order of evaluation. You have the hair-slicking and armpit-detoxing before the girl notices you. Now don't get me wrong, there are Computer Science kids that talk to themselves, mumbling something about WoW, big O notation, or whatever, but most would wait until g.noticesYou() is true before entering the loop. Hopefully most would know when to break the loop, but that is another story.
"I have met VERY FEW women who actually LIKE programming among the women professionals I've met."
Which will kill a woman's career in CompSci.
There's no way around this... programming is at the heart of what we do. It defines the industry. Everything ultimately revolves around coding and people (not just women) who disdain it or think that it's beneath them, or just not that important, just *doesn't get* this industry.
And if you don't really *get* this industry, you'll never go very far.
I'm an IT Director at a fortune 1000 sized company and I got the position precisely because I understand not only the business, but I understand the nuances so I can make good decisions. Project Management can be taught, but programming can only be learned.
And if you don't get what I mean, I suspect you'll never go very far. You won't be any good at it.
well considering geeks' intentions it's probably a safer bet than treating them functionally...
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Another victory for the soft sexism of low expectations.
Cue Barbie.
After seeing comments like this that imply women are born stupid, I'm glad to see that a balanced opinion can be moderated up on Slashdot.
Maybe someday we can stamp out the rampant ignorance that leads to such gender disparity in some fields!
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Just goes to show that girls never really liked tech. They were more interested in the money.
--
Q
There are 28 people in my IT Dept., and only 9 of us are men.
.NET programmer, we usually hire the women to do .NET stuff, and the men to do PERL/PHP stuff.' etc. =p
I was in shock when I started here actually, I never met a girl who wrote code (somewhat decently even) for a living (outside of IRC).
Of coarse, I like to taunt some of the other guys here... 'oh, you're a
Of coarse, they're (all) ESL/H1Visa workers, but they're all very talented and a great group of people to work with.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
Compilation error 86: line 6: token 'lysol' is undefined
Compilation error 25: line 10: broken pipe
"A D in Women's Studies?"
"It wasn't about what I thought it would be."
(The American President.)
Seriously, I can think of nothing more dead-end than a career in "Women's Studies". I've met a couple of women who have majored in such feel-good careers (my personal favorite was the one whose major was "women and sustainability") and are rather pissed with themsleves for doing so. They're usually working secretarial/data entry/retail jobs, and very disenfranchised.
Please help metamoderate.
When there are more women than men in US univerties (57-58% of college atendees are women) then why are we so concerned here?
Clearly there are more women getting higher education then men, so why does this one small area of university study matter?
The most recent issue of the IEEE newsletter ran a story about the gender gap in engineering schools, and I thought the writer hit the nail on the head with this observation (paraphrased from my memory of the original):
Besides the social stigma, why should a female seek to start a program of intense and difficult study to be rewarded with a career that offers long hours, stressful situations, and uncertain prospects for steady employment?
really, does anyone give a s#!t if there are less women in the CS field?
My posts are definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
Nope, it doesn't. General CS admission dropping may be an effect, but why would the *ratio* of men to women drop? You provide no clear explanation to why this would be.
Your second statement is more telling. How are women treated (or raised) differently, that they don't seem to like pogramming as much as men? Somewhere there lies the real answer.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
..I have seen a lot of woman bow out of the CS and IT areas. I know I have almost traded in my network sniffer for a marketing job or something other than computer related.
Its not that women arent interested, its just that in a lot of cases (NOT ALL), women are treated as second class citizens in the computer work field, especially if they are a network admin or a network engineer (like me).
Boys dont want icky girls playing with their toys. And girls can only be engineers if they are wearing spandex and a Klingon forehead.
Its a lot of crap. But nothing is really going to change this.
Here's my 2-cent theory: studies have shown that the average female has a vocabulary that's twice as large as the one of the average male (interestingly-enough, starting with a very early age). Of course, this is just an average, it's very easy to find people that do not match the average. IMO, this difference simply makes the average woman more inclined to pursue careers which involve communication. In IT, most of the work is just between you and the computer, there's little human interaction going around.
The Raven
http://girlsofcs.com/
8)
Is it possible that women simply don't like computer science as much as men? What about the possibility that what ever it is that seems to draw the geeky or otherwise more socially challenged among us to this field is not as common among women. I am not saying that there aren't geeky, socially challenged woman out there. One of my daughters is a geek girl and is looking to enter engineering as a freshman in a year next year. I am just saying that less woman seem to be so challenged. I would also guess that science minded woman are more likely to enter a profession where they can directly help people such as being a doctor.
I have never met a woman smarter than me. (I know, I know, it sounds very egotistical, but still true). I have met some very smart women, but smarter than me? Sorry no. Do they exist? Undoubtedly; but they are very very rare. On the other hand, I have met a number of men smarter than me. In fact, I have encountered men so smart that I felt like a Cro Magnon standing next to them. My theory is that men have a flatter IQ distribution than women (ie squashed bell curve) The average man is about as smart as the average woman, but at the very extreme end of the curve there are many more super-genius men than women. (Probably true at the other end of the curve also ie more sub-moron men than women)
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
...I had to mentor a couple freshmen for a Computer Engineering course...the class had about 200 guys in it, and one girl...who was also the only black person in the room.
All through my college career, there have never been more than 1 or 2 females, if any, in any of my tech classes, which have between 20-30 students.
One of my professors was always encouraging us to take something in the Agriculture department...he said the hog butchery class he was taking was FULL of chicks. That mental image makes me contemplate a lifetime of celibacy.
Does anyone have a copy of the article (all 4 pages) that doesn't require a login?
of shallowness mods will love this /who cares
I am fortunate that the head of the CS department at my university is an extraordinarily boisterous lady. The entry level courses are taught with the specific intention of recruiting new majors. (In my second or third week or class I walked up to my professor (who is also the head of the department) to ask a question, and she didn't ask me if I was a CS major. She simply told me that I was. As though this was obvious and I should stop pussy-footing around with this undeclared major business).
One of my programmer friends is a transsexual, and she was wondering aloud to me the other day if some of her position and esteem as a programmer are leftover benefits from having been male. (In which case, she ought exploit them for all they're worth.)
By and large, the CS majors in my classes have been wonderful, welcoming and helpful. The CS people I have met in the world at large do not have nearly so pleasant a distinction in my mind.
The head of the CS department pointed out to me that it was part of the geek meritocracy--the guys won't talk to you until you prove yourself, and then you won't be able to get them to go away.
negative stereotypes like the image of the male hacker
How is this a negative stereotype for women? Perhaps a bit exclusionary, but it doesn't degrade or otherwise oppress women... And besides, isn't being a hacker, in the larger social context, a negative stereotype in and of itself? Why would women want to be associated with a stereotype that, in current pop-culture terms, implies illegal activity?
That said, you can't deny the gender gap in and of itself. I simply dispute this as a factor.
akad0nric0
This sentence no verb.
Not to point out the obvious, but the obvious in our world is sometimes overlooked for politically motivated reasons these days.
The obvious conclusion is that there are less women in CS these days because the benefits are less than the penalty. In other words, the main reason there were more women in IT during the dotcom boom was because there was less competition amongst employees (in a mathematics-dominated field), and the field was seen as immediately beneficial and growing. Anyone with a modicum of technical or mathematic ability got into IT/CS because even those that were not the "best and brightest" in mathematics could get jobs in the field. (This is further illustrated by the supposed sallary gap between men and women in technical/CS fields: quite simply, the women pick the jobs that are less technically challenging, and thus pay less.)
Women, being the sensical (and sensual! but that's something else entirely) creatures that they are when it comes to something as unemotional as picking a career, saw the obviousness of the situation: unless they really liked mathematics, there was little incentive to go into CS.
There's also very little "staying power" in the skills acquired with a CS degree (theory aside - most employers don't seem to give a damn about anything but acronyms anyway), and for many women who were intent on getting married while they are still able to have children fairly comfortably, the payoff of a CS/IT degree was further decreased: you can't really jump back into the field after having and raising kids like you can into something that's less skill-based and more theory-based, like business or management.
Anyway, flame on. FWIW, I'm a guy who happens to be not so mathematically inclined, and I've changed my degree from CS for this very reason as well (the technical ability reason, not the childbirth reason).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I read a recent column by Marilyn Van Savant, the supposedly smartest person in the world, that covered this topic. She sees no reason to encourage women to go into a field in which they have no interest.
:-).
Why would an intelligent woman, with great analytic skills, strong math, etc. go into CS? There is little future. Heck, she might as well join the 100s of minimally-employed Phd physics wonks
Women are, on average, more social creatures than men are. I think we can agree on that. In my 10 years of professional experience writing software, I'd say that the VAST majority of people that I've worked with have all the personality of a sack of flour. I'm a social person. I've gotten to the point where I've seriously considered changing careers just so I can be around people who have personality. I worked at a company where beers were provided FREE after 5 on Fridays. Good beers! Any beers you asked for! I love beers and I couldn't bring myself to go to that after the 4th time or so. It was just too painful to be around such a large group of people who had so little personality. Now, I'm not a social butterfly, but I like to talk to people. Maybe the reason that women aren't going into CS is the overwhelming lack of personality they encounter in professors and fellow students in school.
Since 2000 the computer industry has changed in many ways. In a tight job market interviewers can get away with grueling interviews. These interviews are not pleasant for anyone, but may be particularly unpleasant for women, who face hours of being grilled by interviewers who are likely to be entirely male.
At one time the "Microsoft Interview" was largely confined to Microsoft. This style of interview can be characterized by hours of being asked to solve technical problems, frequently by writing code on a white board.
While one or two interviewers asking this sort of question might be justified, five hours or more of this style of interview resembles hazing more than anything else. The "Microsoft Interview" is no longer limited to Microsoft. A number of companies, including nVidia and Google use this style of interview. In fact, as far as I can tell, this style of interview is becoming accepted practice.
This interview style is justified by those who use it by the claim that it recognizes "people who are really smart". In practice this interview style only works if the company has a vast sea of candidates to draw from. Without such huge numbers entering the maw of this process, no one would ever be hired. Frequently you can't even get an interview without a solid background of accomplishment. Then on top of this, you must survive the interview process.
An interview process of this kind rewards people who think rapidly on their feet and don't suffer from "stage freight". I've known women who are more than up to this kind of interview, but I have to wonder if these obnoxious interviews are yet another barrier to women in engineering.
My response: SO WHAT!?!?
Nurses and Interior Decorators are usually women.
Construction workers and Computer Geeks are usually men.
So What? Men are NOT prevented from becoming Interior Decorators or Nurses. Women aren't prevented from becoming Construction Workers and Computer Geeks.
So Friggin' What?! Viva La difference, I say. People worry way too much about inconsequential bullshit these days.
Move along, people. There's nothing here to see.
Man, there sure are a lot of self-hating Geeks on Slashdot. Anytime the subject of "that other 50% of the population" comes up, there's invariably +5 modded comments about how pathetic all the Geeks are. If you guys spent the time you spend on slashdot beefing up your skills with women and exercising, you'd probably find some chick. Fact of the matter is: women over the age of 25, are desperate for intelligent, nice, financially stable men. Younger than that, women are still looking for traditional masculine stereotypes. If you're young, you may need to hold out for a little while. Sorry. In the mean time, you can 'comfort' yourself with the fact that men are declining in every subject other than computer science. This is leading to an over educated female population. And when these women move from college girls to yuppies, they're going to realize they want somebody more intelligent, less volatile, and more succesful. And when they don't find any of those guys, they're going to settle for you.
...but just be careful about the side effects that might arise from using moands.
The politically incorrect explanation which no-one is allowed to say is that it's much easier to get by in today's economy than it was 20 years ago. In better economic times, heroines have always dropped out of the workforce or stayed in the workforce but chosen to do things for pleasure rather then necessity. Male breadwinning expectation has always been constant.
> Women have comprised about 28 percent of computer science bachelor's degree > recipients in the last few years 28%?? you guys don't realise how lucky you are! At aerospace engineering it's only about 10%
Goddamn slow fingers!
And there we have it, a great example of why women are intimidated by CS. Horny nerds.
Would that not scare you? 0_0
Seriously, "where are the hot ones"...cmon. Think outside the sack, d00d. Sheesh.
Seriously, WTF! Who wrote this dribble, some ultra politicaly correct non-CS major. I dont know a single one of my peers who thinks anything like this.
CS (not programming) is pretty simple, ether you love the machine or your everyone else. WTF is this "social expectations, bad teaching, uncomfortable position", etc crap? Sounds like some feminist from the socialogy dept wrote this, not a geek.
If you cant hack it (punny) the get out of the kitchen.
Good grief
Anybody care to speculate why this only happens in IT (and maybe engineering in general).
In the 20 years after the end of World War 2 there was this huge social shift and women started to enter traditionally "male dominated" fields in ever growing numbers. In 1950 my local Uni had less than 10% women in the schools of Science, Law, Commerce (Business), Medicine and Engineering. Comp Sci would have just been starting then but no doubt would have had less than 10% Women. Now Science, Law, Commerce and Medicine are 50% women or more, but Comp Sci and Engineering are still around the 10% women mark.
Now if systemic discrimination, sexism and male attitudes are to blame, why wouldn't these negative factors also be present in all the other schools at the university. I'm not saying there is no sexism in IT and engineering, but are the lawyers that much less sexist than the engineers? I kind of don't think so.
So what is the cause? I don't think we will ever know, until we are willing to look at non-politically-correct reasons such as;
Women aren't interested in computers as much as men are?
Women aren't smart enough (OMG did he really say that!), or more precisely, enough women aren't smart enough?
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Yay for you and your wife!! There ought to be more people like you in the world.
Everytime I see a story like this, the question is answered before the end of the article.
Why aren't there more women in CS? Because they don't want to be in it. The question we may want to be asking ourselves is why we obsess about it. Yes, I know that we're all look for some way we can look "inward" and try and correct our "gender bias". That MUST be the only reason women don't want to be in this business. Just like I don't want to be a nurse because it's a "female" job. It has zero to do with low pay, long hours and changing bedpans. Nope. Not at all.
The reason for women not being in CS is because of the pay, hours, and the social issues. It is, perhaps, possible that we could change the social issues by some introspection, but the question is: why bother? If we're doing it to gain a "female perspective" on programming, then the fact is that any benefit from that is going to be found and cause a change by itself. A change, I might add that would have little or none of the downside of being an "affirmative action" situation. Which is to say people with talent being looked down upon, and people with no talent looking for an easy ride. If there is a benefit to having women in CS because they are women, then someone is going to realize it and capitalize on it and when they are successful, others will follow suit or be left behind.
If there are active harassment situations and artificial barriers to females who actually really like programming and want to be CS people, then that needs to be dealt with. But if we just want females because we think it's a good idea, then perhaps it isn't such a grand idea, especially if you have to prod females towards it with juicy incentives unrelated to a natural interest for CS. Never develop a program based on a nebulous concept about what has value without being able to demonstrate that value.
So?
My personal experiences with interviewing is that women can be just as evil, if not more evil, than men, in interview situations. As for interviews where you have to take tests, write code, solve problems - so what? Why shouldn't a company be allowed to ask an applicant to prove what they claim to be able to do? I thought that kind of thing was expected in this day and age...
If obnoxious interviewers are such a career barrier, then you probably have no business having a career in the first place. And you know what? Sometimes the answer they are looking for is "now you're out of line, you asshat!"
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
Regardless of whether it is or not, the tech industry is viewed as being very unsociable. That's more of a problem for women than men.
Death To women's Rights.
It will level out. The only reason I went into IT was to meet all the babes.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
They're just not interested. A similar article might read:
"Gender Gap in Social Work Widening"
People are interested in different things. It's "OK".
The last thing most geeky people need is a partner with the same type of personality issues. People who have the typical geek personality traits (ie socially awkward), would be much better off pairing up with a normal extroverted girl.
How about going the other way too? I don't know about anyone else, but I just came back to grad school (same place as my undergrad). My undergrad classes were usually pretty male-dominated (me and 1 or two other females), but now I'm finding my classes are bordering on 50-50. It's a way smaller sample size, but it seems like just about every girl in undergrad went on to grad school.
...no two people are not on fire.
Two computer science students, both male, are talking: CS Student 1: Oh! Guess what happened to me this morning! CS Student 2: What? CS1: I was walking through the park and this woman cycles up to me, stops, removes all her clothes, throws herself to the ground and says: "Take whatever you want" CS2: Gosh! What did you do? CS1: I took her clothes. CS2: Good call - you already have a bicycle, don't you.
I remember this girl who worked in Ops, and after a sweaty encounter would light up a cig and say something like "hey, so whaddaya think of those new disc packs, eh?".
Not exactly "Sin and the City" material.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
What's negative of the image of the male hacker? It's more universal than anything, even Batman! What girl doesn't want to be like Batman??? He's so cool!
DELETED!
I disagree, actually. I'm new to the official declaration of a CS major, but I've been lurking on the edges of techie-hood for quite some time. I remember walking into my first 2600 meeting in Dallas, TX, and the following hacker party... and I couldn't get the guys to talk to me. It was ridiculous. Yes, I didn't know as much as they did, but I was absolutely dying to learn. While I am most willing to entertain the possibility that this is not a boys club everywhere, in many places, it is.
That was your first mistake:
2600 is for posers
I wonder what's going on there!
"You and your entire gender are physical objects whose sole role is to provide sexual services, and you should not learn to read, your role is to be kept, at all costs, from having a successful career in order to force you to stay at home so that you can be a female slave to a man like in Islamic countries and any area that does not hate men (america, the UK, the west, hate men and worship women). You will be married off very quickly once you are physically able to have children so as to make your husband happiest in your youthfulness"
I agree.
now I have something to look forward too!
Why do we have to measure the gender representation in every frigging thing? When was the last time you saw any industry association actively discourage women from being techs? When was the last time you saw politicians in government actively discourage women from being techs? Never. For crissakes, we blew up a couple on a space shuttle to get techie women out there in the news. Women are constantly hounded to think with their brains and not emotions, to be more technical and mechanical, to be more like men.
Maybe they DON'T WANT to be more like men. Maybe some things just happen not to interest them. If they want the job and can do it, fine. If they don't and don't give a rats butt and want to be competitive figure skaters or race car drivers or the next big Food Network star, whatever. Their choise. AS INDIVIDUALS.
In the name of women's lib and equality and all that, we treat women equally alright... EQUALLY IDENTICAL. We judge them as a group because they have a uterus as the feminists say who in keeping with their station as a key portion of modern society's Irony Deparment do much to keep up this nonsense (okay, split hairs between the gender feminists and equity feminists if you want). This is part of the problem of focusing on an idea of diversity which seems to be no less group judgemental and defining than the old sexist or racist ideas of the past and is even more stiflingly Borg-like because it is place beyond question in an embrace of holy effrontery (I don't recall racists and sexists of old being afraid to argue their stupid ideas with differently minded peers but the political correctness brigade has managed to embrace more racist and sexist and more repugnant results than was ever possible before because they put their idiocy beyond question on the level of faith where their quintuple standards are only challenged by the truly foolhardy looking to be tarred and feathered as racist or sexist even if the one questioning is non-white or female).
Howabout we treat women like INDIVIDUALS and let them make their own damn decisions as individuals as to what they want to work in and at? Is that so hard?
Of course, I know what the point of the post was. I'm not dense. It's worry about not enough geek chicks around to finally get laid with someone who relates and doesn't think you're strange for reading old issues of Byte with the reverence once reserved for holy writings and getting orgasmic over thinkgeek's latest product line. Get a clue guys. You're being incredibly sexist by thinking the girls have to come over to your field and relate to you. You need to pull your heads out of the system and learn to relate to those women. Whatever it is that they do. Treat the women like specific people for crying out loud. Not a set of boobs in a geek slogan t-shirt.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Every article that bemoans the lack of women in computer science classes seems to quote at least one person who says that the problem is that the classes overemphasize math and technology. The implication, of course, is that women don't like math and technology, or possibly that they aren't good at it. Or maybe both.
I don't know why women tend to avoid computer science classes--or, for that matter, classes in math and many sciences. It seems likely that the reasons include a cultural subtext that says that math is just for boys and the large numbers of male nerds who lack interpersonal skills. Innate differences between boys and girls may also be a factor, or they may not be; I don't feel qualified to have an opinion.
The inconsistency bothers me, though. It seems that if you complain about the hostility of computer science classes to girls, you are free to imply that girls and math don't mix. But if you explicitly say the same thing, even as one possibility that ought to be examined, you will be tarred and feathered, as Larry Summers will be the first to tell you.
printf("This is just wrong\n");
People keep pointing to the growing gender gap in computer science. At the same time the gender gap in CS has been growing, it's been shrinking in the other sciences. The majority of biology and chemistry majors at my school are female, though that doesn't hold for physics or CS. My pet theory is that all the sciences are drawing from the same pool of analytically-minded people. As other sciences became more welcoming to girls and CS became a more exclusive field, female students started migrating to other courses that appealed to them. CS was no longer their door into science because they were welcome in other science departments as well.
I'm not a CS major. I'm a minor. Primarily I'm a physics major, with a "deep interest" in computer science. The article quoted statistics about the number of female CS majors, but how many girls out there are minoring in CS as a complement another major in the sciences? From the article: ""People who are mapping the genome are really computer scientists involved in biology," said Lenore Blum, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh." That can go both ways. They could be biologists involved in computer science as well.
I may be a student sysadmin and help run the student help desk at school, but since I'm not a CS major I don't count as a female computer scientist. How many others are there like me out there?
Ninety percent of teenagers that commit suicide have parents that own toasters. Its sad, but true. You may be asking yourself what toasters and teenagers that commit suicide have in common. Well, they don't have anything in common because its just a statistic, just like the gender gap. Just because some field of study is slanted towards some race or gender does not mean that there is some weird social prejudice or conspiracy going on to keep it that way. The only way to get more females interested in computer science is to start making females that find computer science interesting. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to become an expert at something that you don't like to do. In our generation it is mostly males that enjoy the kind of work that computer science offers, in the next generation is might be just the opposite, or it might get worse. I seriously doubt any effort we put toward changing the layout of computer science, to attract women, would be worth the cost. On a side note I'm not sure I'd really be interested in dating / marrying a women in the same field of study as myself. Its difficult enough as it is to move out into unfamiliar territory, but if my wife didn't come from a different background I probably would not have learned to really appreciate some of the other fields of study. I was a computer science major and my wife was a dietetics major, now she is going back to school in nursing.
10: PRINT "Everything old is new again."
20: GOTO 10
You should propably pass the Girl as a reference parameter to the function, else you are talking about masturbation. Or is this some new hippie programming language?
Failing that, GO back TO BASICs.
Just like when driving, females will stop and ask for directions LONG before a guy will because they FORESEE the futility. Females not enrolling into computer science must be an OMEN that the whole industry is getting lost and only us stupid guys are wandering the streets DETERMINED to find our way.
we could accept that men and women are different in nature, very different and that men perform better on technical skills than women, period.
I know plenty of woment who are technicaly apt as or moreso than me when it comes to computers. They are a rare beast (don't tell them I said that) but usually are the girls who did not wish to be girls.
I wouldn't say genetic, but more social. These girls tended to read more than be into social things and often perferred arts over standard. They were either a only child or were the only girl in the family of boys (hence being tom boy).
If we took girls and from day one didn't give them dolls but instead war toys and playstations and treated them indistinguisble than boys then they would behave accordingly.
If we give them this Paris Hilton, diamond rings mean love, and they should bread children crap then that is how they are going to act.
This girls all know how to install an OS, fix a registry, play video games, and like Harry Potter for some reason. (I don't know why they all like Harry Potter but they do) some of them even play online games such as WoW and every now and then they'll be a jem and like Halo more than me (you just have to look harder men! don't give up on the first lady that'll sleep with you! find one that will play Halo with you, whoop your ass, and then sleep with you!)
As an individual they can overcome this... Not to say some of you guys should overcome sports, porn, and plain ignorant behavior but I'm just saying I think it is more social than genetic.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I couldn't ever get a date as a geek guy so I became a geek girl. That's one way to solve the problem =)
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Yes. Death to Barbie and Disney princesses.
Right now I'm looking for Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman action figures, for my 3 yr old daughter, who adores them. She named her teddy bear after Adam.
I admit I find him more annoying, but then I figure he's more appealing to kids than the more dour Jamie.
And none of you pervs should be asking about a Karri doll. None!
Now this is heresy, but bear with me.
Computer science, as a pure subject, isn't the same as computer programming, and it certainly isn't anywhere near the same as "doing useful things with computers." If you're wanting to write a better blogging tool or pretty much anything that's works with the web, then you don't need computer science. What you need is some time, some books, good tools and libraries, and a solid idea. That approach will take you down some paths that will irk the uber-geeks of computer science. PHP? Python? Perl?You'll make money with them, but you'll lose years from your life discussing it on Slashdot. Even if you want to be out there, writing code in Lisp or another esoteric language (which is often a poor idea, because of the lack of standard libraries), then you still don't need to major in computer science to do so.
The bottom line is that just because the gender cap is widening in computer science, doesn't mean that it is widening across technology in general.
These types of articles only seem to fuel the boys vs girls attitude here.
I'm the only white chick on this whole floor in anything remotely technology related. I was the only girl at all in my 2000 graduating class to get a Bachelors of Science in CS or CIS. So what? Yes, some men get defensive about my presence, others couldn't give a rats ass what gender I am as long as I make shit work. That's life. I guess you just accept it, adapt, and try to grow a thicker skin.
I wonder if there are any hot chicks with assembly skills out there... :P
Per Aspera Ad Astra.
What about all those e-mails telling them that their equipment just isn't big enough?
Individuals vary considerably, of course, but those statistics seems to correlate rather well.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I never said the problem wasn't specific to tech fields. The fact that more women are going into undergraduate programs is a well known fact. Apparently, it's true at both ends of the quality spectrum too, given top schools are having to invoke affirmative action-esque policies just to get a student body that's approx. 50% male. The above does not imply, however, that girls aren't short-changed at the junior high and high school levels. It may be the case that girls and boys are shortchanged, albeit in different ways. Know why I think more girls are getting into undergrad programs? Based on my own experience in high school, it's because, as a group, they have better study habits and are willing to spend more time doing what it takes to get good marks in high school. Note that I'm not making a value judgement on the relative "worth" of "what it takes to get good marks in high school". I can't say whether this deficiency among boys has its basis in an underlying neurological difference or whether it's the result of popular culture, but for whatever reason, boys (at all levels of ability) seem to goof off and underachieve to a greater degree than girls.
actually this program is buggy when hotness is = -10, cuz there's no else clause on what to return.
I'm proud (and lucky) to have caught a girl with an MS degree in engineering and an affinity for FORTRAN programs. She also gets carded going to R-rated movies. I'm not letting this one go anytime soon.
I'm a male computer science student at a top-notch university, and have observed some interesting things about females in computer science.
(1) Most girls I know in my department find it hard to compete with the boys mainly because computer science is a field full of self-selected computer geeks. That is, many of us became computer science majors because we began as hobbyist programmers in high school. Girls are much less likely to have been into programming in high school, and therefore feel they are at a disadvantage from the get-go.
(2) There is nothing about Computer Science that makes it inherently more "masculine" than other fields. Women have been well-represented in Math and Sciences for years, and Computer Science, I would argue, has more feminine qualities to it than one would think. For example, programming, though a technically challenging task, is also highly creative. Problem solving, in the way we do it in our department, is also very "dual-sided" in the brain, and involves both the deep understanding of say, mathematical objects and how to manipulate them, as well as a big picture understanding.
(3) People who talk a lot about gender roles, social pressures, and gender discrimination often seem to speak about the world as if free will doesn't exist. For example, I once had a long conversation with a self-proclaimed feminist who tried to explain to me that women are at a disadvantage for getting and keeping good jobs. I then countered that any woman who decides to major in computer science in college and become a software developer or IT worker has very good job prospects, as many employers are looking for gender balance in that field. This wouldn't do for her, however. "Society" had kept women out of Computer Science. I responded, "Did anyone hold a gun to your head when you were a college freshman and say, 'You can't major in CS?'" She couldn't say that anyone had. Yes, women who don't major in computer science don't do so due to social taboos and all that. But, tough shit. I deal with social taboos too--it's automatically assumed that since I'm a computer science major I (a) can't have opinions, (b) must be a 'quant', (c) must be socially awkward and (d) must be apathetic and uninterested in politics. None of these are true, but they go with the field. I deal with it, just like I would deal with taboos of being a business major and being a greedy sonuvabitch, or a Philosophy major and being pretentious. OTOH, girls who DO major in computer science secure jobs very easily.
(4) Related to above, I recently saw one of my fellow undergrads with little programming background of her own and just 'good' grades in computer science courses (3.5 gpa) get offered a software development job at Microsoft after two phone interviews, both of which she thought she did horribly on because "they were questions on C and C++ and I don't know either." I have had friends who have applied there and gotten weeded out in the first round with perfect GPAs (3.7+) and extensive programming background (open source projects, summer work experiences, etc.). I never applied there personally (I've already got a job on the East Coast), but it is clear to me that MS is looking to hire women like crazy.
(5) Also related to above, I have friends at an all-girls college and visited a few of them. Friends of those friends happen to be computer science majors. I took a look at some of their 4th-year coursework. They are learning Javascript, HTML and a little Perl while I was writing an OS kernel from scratch in my 2nd-year class (and classes only got tougher from there). Nonetheless, all of these girls went on to jobs at big corporations in software, and these corps came directly to their East Coast campus from the West Coast to recruit them. Corps are hunrgy for female IT/software workers. It's a big priority in most HR departments to balance this field.
This is all to say, women don't do CS because of taboos and because of fear that they can't compete against those who have
It's not exactly that 2600 attracts posers; it's more that it attracts people whose main criterion for social interaction is "How much warez/scripts/knowledge can I personally gain from this?"
They'll pretty much ignore male computer scientists too, unless they seem some evidence that there's something there they want. It's all power games.
The people you'll meet at 2600 are also likely self-taught, and most probably know very little about actual computer science.
I urge anyone reading this thread to buy and read Unlocking the Clubhouse, which containes analysis of a study done through several hundred interviews with Carnegie-Mellon CS undergrads.
Lots of women drop out of CS because they feel like they need to be "perfect" to compete with the guys - even if they're already getting better scores than the guys. Most women in CS also don't have the same background with computers coming in to college that their male counterparts do. They probably had access to a computer, but most male CS majors already had their own PC for years before starting college.
The "socialization" (if you can call it that) in the CS world also discourages women. Even if they're not being drooled on or ignored by the guys, they're often looked down on, as if they were stupid. (Because every guy knows that having a vagina means you can't understand electronics.) They also feel that they have to be geeks and talk about nothing but computers - they see that kind of passion in the guys and figure that they have to be just as single-minded if they're going to succeed. Some simply give up and slip back into the "expected" role of women: "I don't understand these 'computer' things, they're so complicated. Can you help me?"
When I read this book, I kept saying, "That's me! I thought I was the only one!" In talking to the (few) other female CS majors I knew, I found that they felt the same way.
In a perfect world, I imagine that there would still be more men than women in CS, but it would be a much closer gap (maybe 60/40 or so). I don't pretend that this field is interesting to everyone, but there are so many girls out there who would love to try it if they could do it without becoming a "nerd". It's not that the field intentionally pushes women out, it's just that they're wired differently, and express their interest in computers differently; and because there are so many men in the field, these views are in the minority.
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
We've got the meebo girls. AJAX Girl is holdin' it down!
David Reimer might disagree with that....
...that women are smarter than men!
There are less and less male schoolteacher, leaving schoolboys with very few responsible role models.
This is far more worrying and dangerous for society than the gender gap in Computer Science.
While I'm not a computer science student, I am majoring in Information Systems which faces the same gender gap. I'm actually in a scholarship program called Center for Women and Information Technology. I can definitely see why there's a gender gap. I'm doubted ALL the time by guys who think they're geekier/better programmers/whatever. I'm often the ONLY girl or one of very few in my classes. I can see how that could be intimidating for some people, however for me, it's just more incentive to kick ass in my classes.
They were scared. It's not often they're in the presence of a bonafied female.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
the only time I see gender bias play out is subconsciously -- the guys I work with are alright, and they wouldn't ever actively deny a job to a woman, but when all they joke about is women and sex and sex with women etc etc ad infinitum.. it's bound to have a mental impact on the way they view women. I'm just sad that, as a junior sysadmin, I have no hiring say. On the flip side, the only women we have (government job -- they transferred. in case you were wondering about my paradox) are nearly incompetent. I'll be surprised, though pleasantly, if we get another woman sysadmin this decade. Shame I'm not in college; I'd like to meet some
Browsing with classic discussion, noscript, at -1 and nested
no hidden comments and I only mod UP
Don't you feel it sexist that you're willing to say, essentially, that women are better than men?
Isn't this what people were supposedly fighting against in the first place?
My experience while getting my degree was that first and second year girls were descended upon by third & fourth year geeks looking for dates and willing to do assignments for a girl would would go out with them. None of those girls graduated from the program I was in - they all flunked out on the tests because they didn't understand the material.
I see equal opportunity blame in that situation -- a lack of intellectual pride both on the part of the girls and the guys.
I have also had to endure the insanity of having a really smart guy ask if you want to be his partner for the year in a class, only to have him show up at the first meeting with a finished assignment and a picnic basket containing a romantic dinner. It is a really difficult situation to deal with. On the one hand, the guy has made a nice and very sincere effort to please you. Unfortunately, that doesn't measure much against the facts that (a) he never actually asked you out, so you didn't get a chance to understand what kind of 'partnership' he was really hoping for, (b) he obviously didn't then and never did think you were capable of doing the assignment, (c) he assumed that you were the type of person who would gladly get out of work, and (d) he didn't mind that fact, as long as you went out with him. And he wondered why I wasn't bursting with admiration at his display of programming prowess.
Did you really see a lot of girls brazenly manipulating their way through a computer degree? It's hard for me to imagine. The women I graduated with knew their stuff, and would gladly prove it when challenged.
Pix
don't mess with those geekgrrls
Computer Science is a highly specialized and limited subset of mathematics, mostly involving things like set theory, boolean algebra, lambda calculus and the occasional bit of vector and matrix math and basic geometry.
It's quite possible to be good at the bits of math that are actually relevant to computer science, and be completely hopeless at the rest of it.
For instance, I always had trouble with integrals. I was struggling to deal with physics, because I couldn't comprehend path integrals, and couldn't follow the mathematics for things like quantum theory and fluid dynamics. I could cope with special relativity, but general relativity was about to kick my ass. So I switched to Computer Science. Never saw another big hairy integral.
I'd say the only bit of CS math I couldn't cope with was in the denotational semantics course. Which was just fine, as nobody actually uses that crap in the real world anyway. FFTs are tricky too, but as long as you know what they are and what you use them for, you're highly unlikely to need to derive the algorithm yourself.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
"It's called specialization, it goes back to the beginning of life and there's nothing sexist to it."
Riiiiight. Girls aren't good at math because they don't have a penis. Guys are good it because they spend their adolescence sitting in front of the computer, measuring their cocks.
"Mental object rotation."
I hope you don't find this harassing, but: one thing I would ask about would be your goals from your given education. I'm a guy, but as with many I got an education/job in IT due to the fact that I was good at it, and (less now than previous) enjoyed it in general. In the workplace however I am semi-aggressive. I keep tabs on job market and watch for what I could/should be worth, and I've hopped up the ladder a few times. The next hop I'm looking at working overseas, but that looks to require hitting the books again.
:-D
In opposition to myself, the women I know that have taken up educations/careers in IT seem to be more sedentary. One of my friends has a job where I swear there are warning signs that they may one day let her go, but she seems to hang on to them in some weird sense of loyalty or something else I'm unsure of. Other geek girls I know (some whom I've dated) seem to have also ended up in the lower job bracket. Some of them are certainly as smart as I am if not moreso, yet they show less interest in ladder-climbing.
So I do wonder, what do women in IT have as goals in life and/or employment? Personally I'd love to meet more women in the field, but for some reason it bothers to see that most lack the personal ambition that many of my counterparts exhibit.
To be fair though, I do know a number of male IT works that lack ambition as well, and it could just be that the lesser number of female IT workers make it seem that they are less ambitious overall.
p.s. Don't sweat the math too much, formulas you might need to know, but you can keep those around on reference sheets and generally if you're in IT you can get the computer to do the rest of the work for you
That's your common sense theory?
/., we have both 1) CS males denying the theory of causation in the article and 2) doing exactly what the article says.
My "common-sense" theory is based on reading the comments by male CS students/professionals in this thread, the number saying women don't want to be in computers, that gender differences mean women won't be as good in computers, that the gender gap is natural like evolution, and of course it has nothing to do with men discouraging women from entering computer fields.
So right here on the pages of
What does common sense say about that? "Of course women aren't being discouraged from the field of CS by men, just that I as a male in CS think women can't do the job as well and don't want to do the job -- of course it's just their own choice when they drop out".
My real experience is that the number of women in introductory classes started high, and halved every semester until you were lucky if there was one women, even more lucky two, in a graduate course. From working with and grading the papers of these student or meeting them in office hours, I saw every bit of evidence I need to see that women are just as capable and just as motivated to study CS as men. No, I can't look into their heads and know why they left the program, but certainly a few have told me flat out that they are discouraged by the lack of role models. Which pisses me off, because I know we've lost some excellent minds.
As far as every other profession -- they have had exactly this problem! Women in medicine? Today a woman doctor isn't unusual at all, but it certainly was thirty years ago! Women had to break into the field and prove their worthiness to be a doctor instead of a nurse. Once there were prominent women doctors, and women teaching in medical schools, and the stereotypes that discouraged women were torn down, then yes you started to see more women join.
It has always been this way, whenever a new group starts to compete for jobs with the established. Whether that was European immigrants, freed slaves, or women after WWII, those who had previously had exclusive rights to some field believed they were entitled to those fields and the others would be inherently inferior, and only after time and great effort were these situations changed.
Common sense says that CS and IT and engineering are no different than any other field, and the stubborn refusal of men to accept women is both the cause of the continuing discrepancy, and a dinosaur of the last century.
The enemies of Democracy are
What more can really be done to encourage more women into CS related fields?
"Give a man a fire, he's warm for a day, set a man on fire, he's warm for life."
BULLSHIT!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Most of the girls (some guys too) who I saw in CS (back in the day, 1995-2000) didn't deserve to be there. The only reason they got through their classes was because they cheated. Once the dot com bubble burst and the fountains of cash ran dry, computer science ceased to be trendy. Before 2000, any knob who could write HTML was in CS trying to cash out, now the only people who are in CS are those who truly want to be. Competition is much more stiff. Mediocrity and bad attitudes are not tolerated as much anymore in the workplace. So without the rivers of free money up for grabs, girls are suddenly disinterested....seems kind of obvious to me.
Well, like most people the sample size in my class was pretty small. There was one girl who got through it on sheer hard work, a couple who tried to slack through and washed out, one who took an extra year (but pretty much got all her work done by favours) and one very nice hardworking girl who always seemed to be in the best engineering groups... but usually ended up writing the report.
Now that I think about it, the guys weren't much better - we were all pathetic slackers there.
Allow me to submit one explanation which is based on economics rather than blind emotion:
Women are less likely to pursue a career in Computer Science because of rational self-interest, and not due to external factors.
That being the case, there is no "fix" needed, because nothing is "broken". To the extent that we are already encouraging women to enter the "hard" sciences through preferences and affirmative action, we are doing those women a disservice.
The elephant standing in the corner which no on wants to mention is childbirth. Women are far more likely than men to desire an extended leave of absence from their field -- think five or ten years.
Let's try to list some careers which you can set aside for the better part of a decade, then re-enter without too much trouble and without taking a huge hit in earnings. Here are a few off the top of my head: teacher, nurse, receptionist, administrative assistant.
How about some careers where the techonology moves so fast that taking five or ten years off means you basically have to start over at square one: computer programmer, electrical engineer, CEO, neurosurgeon.
Anyone noticing a pattern here? Feminists talk a lot about giving women "choices", but wow do they ever get upset when those women make choices they don't like! In that whole four-page article, not once was it suggested that perhaps Computer Science is not actually a college major which fits with many womens' long-term goals. Goals which include childrearing and taking an extended leave of absence from their career.
We exist, but maybe didn't actually get that CS degree. I made it about halfway through my school's program and then got tired of being stared at. I hold a helpdesk job now making a reasonable sum of money... but I work with about 250 guys, and maybe 20 chicks. Needless to say, that staring situation still exists. But I suppose my point here, is that maybe people shouldn't rely on grad statistics, and should rely on the actual amount of women holding IT positions :)
see sig. see sig run. run sig run.
The barriers of entry are pretty low in the OSS world. If you're a good programmer you can take OSS code and run with it.
If you don't like the culture of a particular OSS project you are free to go start your own project. Sure, you may still need other people to help, but if you are doing good work, people might still go help you out.
I suggest that in many fields it's the exceptionals who make a significant difference in the advancement of the field
And in CS and programming, I claim that a particular form of intelligence is a major requirement.
I gather that the variation of intelligence in male humans is much greater than for the females. There are more really stupid males than really stupid females. But there are more really smart males than really smart females too.
So even in a pure meritocracy there would be fewer female humans in the top ranks of CS or OSS.
Do you have any real quantitative data to back up your claims? Otherwise, spare me your anecdotal evidence that you need to be a cliched, ugly dork to work in IT/CS, whatever....
More than three quarters of the people I've worked with in IT over the course of the last 8 years have been highly athletic, outgoing, married or thoroughly enjoying the sexual freedom of being single. At least 40% them (and more like 75% of the IT management) have been female. Out the hundreds of IT professionals I've worked with, maybe a handful of them were the socially inept basement dwellers you seem to think compromise the majority of our ranks.
The above is wholy anecdotal, and it is quite possible that it doesn't truly represent the actual overall makeup of IT/CS professionals in the world, but it is just as valid as the picture represented by the parent post, which is to say not valid at all....
Personally I think people are making a big fuss over the wrong thing. If someone is really interested in something they won't get discouraged that easily.
Part of the experience of a high-school education is discovering what interests you. That can't happen if you're discouraged from even looking. And I think that young women may be discouraged from doing so in many ways.
I'm not in the US, but from what I hear it seems that in the US, it's common for male geeks/nerds to get discriminated against in high school (even physical abuse). But they still go do geeky stuff anyway.
Hmm. Perhaps because a boy geek is perceived as a mildly eccentric target for ridicule, whereas a girl geek is an anathema to her peers at that age. Or maybe a boy's rising levels of testosterone make him feel better than a girl would about doing stuff alone.
The real tragedy here is that many crucial career choices can be made at this age, including ones that determine whether a student can pursue a career in mathematical or physical fields or not. For example, the perception that mathematics is a "boy's" subject can discourage girls from continuing to study it in high school. And that closes many career doors. Probably forever.
(I have heard that this perception does not exist in some parts of the world. For example, in Iceland: at the risk of grossly over-simplifying the picture, mathematics is actually perceived as a "girl's" subject, whereas the boys want to finish high school so they can go out and help their fathers on the fishing boats.)
I think the solution is to debunk the perceptions that young people can have about these fields, to warn them about "closing doors" to their future, and to encourage them to discover their aptitudes, whatever they may be.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I enjoy programming and enjoy being a geek. But if you ask me to choose my career again, maybe I'd think about it.
My biggest fear is by giving birth to a baby (I don't have one yet but plan to do so in a few years), I'll no longer be able to work that hard and my career would basically be ruined. But I definitely want a baby no matter what, maybe I should have chosen a career where not that many deadlines need be met?
Well, maybe it's just me.
Somehow I can't rid my head of the scenario of someone with incompatible cables walking in and asking for a gender-bender and your co-worker's head snapping up...
Horribly non-PC, I know.
I honestly don't remember any real bias against the females in our CS classes, although it probably helped that almost every one of them was extremely attractive, so they never lacked for people wanting to help. *sigh* Now Short Christy ran into troubles, but that was due to her standing about 5 foot and having the general appearance of a vapid 14-year-old at first glance. Once she got people listening, they took her seriously, but it took some work getting them to listen.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
This whole thread is filled with endless examples of the following irony.
[male computer scientist]: "It's not that there are [male dominated] societal attitudes that discourage women from entering CS, it's that women by nature are not designed to be interested in or successfull at CS!"
Look, there are very real artificial barriers set up before women attempting enter computer fields, and most of the attempts by men here to deny these barriers simply prove they exist.
Tear down those barriers, for starters by losing your own attitude, and if the resulting mix of men-women is 60:40 then you'll have a point.
The enemies of Democracy are
I am a woman, I write code and I'm totally unimpressed with the majority of comments here.
Those of you who don't think that this is a problem or understand the value of social skills in CS -- YOU ARE A MAJOR PART OF THE PROBLEM. If you don't understand why, you really ought to take the time to find out.
I worked on this issue in college when I noticed that there were so few women in the department, and I decided that other than the type of sexist oaf who seems to reply to slashdot, the main obstacle here is larger than just computer science departments in colleges and universities.
1. There is a lot of math phobia in kids that turns them off to ALL math and science.
2. The marketing of girls toward e-z bake ovens and boys towards x-boxes is relentless (especially at Christmas)
3. The visual image generally associated with the word Computer Scientist is misleading.
Ok, how many of us "computer geeks" have achieved a BS(or A) degree in computer science?
Not many is my guess, my personal degree is in Business (with a minor in folk lore) and yet I've been in the Computer (related) field for going on 14 yrs....
But hey, it's a statistic, and we all know how much people love to throw statistics around, say for example that 2 out of 3 statistical analysis is flawed.
If women want to get into Wiccan studies instead of intelligent things like CS then you know what, more power to them. I don't want to work with a bunch of goofs that don't have the drive for this industry, CS has already got too many of them in the male department. If anything this ratio has helped to keep down the level of politically correct bullshit we've had to deal with. There's a lot of minorities in CS and it would be pointless to cherry pick on the basis of being a woman because you wouldn't have enough programmers, so the end result is that people are chosen based on their ability instead of how big of a token they are going to be.
If you think that statement makes me a sexist mysoginspellingwhatever, then I'd like to point out there's more women in college than men, so you're a womensogynist whos picking on the minority and you should be working to equalize the college entry numbers to 50/50 (something I would never call for, for one obvious reason and for another considerably more principled one). Go ahead hypocrite get to work.
My wife would sometimes wait for me outside of some of my CS classes, and she said that the odor coming off of some of the students that went by, as they left the class, was repulsive. It has been her guess all along that poor hygiene among the male CS majors is a strong contributor to the low percentage of women in the program. Apparently, women are more sensitive to such things.
I never really noticed the body odor, but I wonder what that says about me. At least my wife has never complained about my body odor.
"Raise girls to be princesses and moms, and you get women who's highest goals are domestic crap and social climbing." It's worse than that. Most little girls are raised to be prostitutes, and THAT is where the problem is. Irrelevent of gender, there is a huge portion of our population that would give up working immediatly if they could have a steady flow of income without it. Most of these people would be more than happy to shake their dirty bits to keep that steady flow of income. This becomes even more pronounced if society joins in on the mass denial of what they are doing.
Now, historically, given that due to various reasons, men have controlled the wealth, and women have controlled the sex. Women are in a greater position to exachange sex, and more importantly the implication that sex could happen, for cash, goods, and most importantly, preferential treatment.
Now, given that the group "women" is a subset of the group "people", a large portion of them will use sex to avoid work. This happens not because they are women, but because they are people, and being a woman gives them the choice.
Unfortunatly, this is taugh to our children. As children, little boy know to get rich they need to make money. As children, little girls know that to get rich, they can make money, or marry a rich man. This leads to a general feeling that financial things will work themselves out, and thus the kind of behaviour that that belief generates.
When half of the women know that they don't HAVE to work to keep a good lifestyle, is it suprising that there are less of them going into fields that require hard work and planning?
I always cry at weddings.
That's a measure of who wants to program.
Wow - that is a mature response that demonstrates exactly how emotionally mature a geek guy can be. Way to prove your point.
Since the thread is now in the throes of "no penis = not good at math" and "it's just their personal choice," I would point to Susan Oyama, a developmental systems researcher. She has a nice speech here about how dividing the world into "nature" and "nurture" basically turns individual persons into puppets. Larry Summers would have us believe that it's "nature" that pulls the strings. Others think it's "nurture." This really belittles individuals and glosses over very important interactions between agents and their environments. Anyway, here's her speech: http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/printer_ friendly.asp?9344
I didn't say they would behave just like boys (they'd still have desires to mate and what not with opposite sex), but more accordindly than if you treated them as a mob mentality. Of course most humans would act better if they acted like an individual rather than a person of a group following trends.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
My anecdotal evidence shows a growing number of women in computer science or related fields. I was in college from 1988 to 1992, and when I venture back onto an engineering campus I am shocked at the number of women in CS labs or CS classes.
;-)
I just got back from ApacheCon where I would say that 10% of the attendees were women. Granted thats not much, but it is much more than I expected at an apache con. What really surprised me was the number of women at apache con that were redheads.... Too bad I had a wife and child at home!
Think Deeply.
Where did I say (or imply) women are "better" than men? If we assume that the gender gap in undergraduate admissions is not due to overt discrimination against men, then it is most likely due to a difference in the number of qualified applicants. Generally speaking, what two measures do colleges look at when evaluating applicants? Test scores and class rank (i.e. grades). From an examination of test scores, we see that men perform as well (if not better) than women. So then, the likely cause is grades. If we suppose that men, as a group, are aproximately equally as "intelligent" as women, why are their grades not up to par?
My personal theory is that for whatever reasons (be they neurological or environmental) women are (as a group) better suited to jumping through the various hoops high school typically requires. Concentrating. Completing homework assignments that are, most of the time, pretty damn boring. Taking the time to properly prepare for exams. Etc.
I freely admit, though, that some of the above may be colored by my personal experience. I went to a selective high school that focused mainly on math and science. Not to toot my own horn, but I also took the AHSME and scored well enough to progress to the AIME. My SATs were in the high 1500s, and that's before the scoring system was re-centered. And yet, I consistently made worse grades than some of my female classmates, who were, I can honestly say, less naturally gifted than I was. Why? Because they completed every homework assignment and studied adequately for each exam. I, on the other hand, was lucky if I completed half my problem sets, and almost never devoted the time I should have to preparing for exams.
Clearly there are slackers and hard workers among both men and women, but at my school, among those in the top academic tier, females fell into the "hard worker" category almost as a rule. The men were a split. There were some "hard workers" and some "slackers" who only managed to eke their way into that category by virtue of natural giftedness.
What's this now? They are forced out of Computer Science because people think they are stepping out of their societal roles?
I thought women were the masters of their own choices. Anyone strong enough to endure childbirth should be strong enough to tell anyone who frowns upon their career choice to shove it, right?
Exotic dancers do that all the time.
How about this: girls on the whole just don't like the subject. Can we say that? without them being all victimized all over again? Can we once again make them the mistresses of their own destinies by just saying they CHOSE to not be computer majors? Please?
BTW, any women reading this... You are not victims.
k? k.
Yeah, you heard right - I am married, to a wonderful woman who has had the fortitude to stick it out with me (and put up with my strangeness) for over 10 years, now. In that time, she (and, in thier own way, her family) have helped to change me from the extreme introverted geek that I was, into the more socially-less-awkward, but still somewhat-introverted geek that I am today.
I would have to say, knowing how I was then, and knowing how I am now, that your biggest issue had to be that you just didn't say "Hi, my name is Cally, how are you doing?". I know how this is: you are shy, you may feel that she will ignore what you say/ask/do, you may feel she will reject you outright. You may think you won't express yourself right, or that something will go wrong, or, or, or...
Stop being so analytical about this - if you have to, smoke the skunk (or down the 40 - or both), and try again. Remember, the worst she can say is "No". It isn't the end of the world (and yes, I know it may feel like it is). It is going to be an awkward thing now, that you saw her for a while, that eye contact was made, that something may have been there but you and her let it float too long. Maybe, just saying something to her will help...
Hey - you just have a need for one of those books on her shelf. It doesn't matter which one. Go up to her office/cube and ask to borrow one. Tell her you are needing to know how to pull some arcane/obscure SQL trick using Oracle or some such bull. Ask her if you can borrow one of her books, and which one she would reccommend. This might get your foot in the door to conversation. Try to find out what interests her (what is she doing there - talk about work, at first). Ask her about projects. Be interested in what she does. If something piques your interest, ask her about that, or tell her "Hey, that is interesting - would you like to discuss it over lunch with me?".
A couple of things could happen here. If she is still interested in you beyond "work aquaintance" status, you might get a lunch thing going. This is a good thing. Go with it. After a few times, work up into meeting up for a time out at night or on the weekend (movies, dinner, hanging out at the comic book shop, whatever - one of the first dates I had with my wife involved sneaking into a resort hotel in the middle of the day).
If she turns you down, ask to borrow the book anyhow - she may still let you, then you will have to return it at some point (another potential in-point to talk again). If you do this a few times, and still are not able to simple walk (or whatever) to go get lunch, there may be another reason, and you should move on (unfortunately). Don't let it effect how you treat her at work, continue to be a professional. Just realize that she isn't dating material, and move on (don't confront her about it, it could possibly blow up into a sexual harrassment thing).
I can't tell you exactly how I got from point A to point B - most of it was a bunch of little changes, and a lot of luck. I know inside me I am still the socially awkward geek I have always been. Somewhere along the way though I have built up, through the patience of my (now) wife, an abstraction layer between the what I really am and the real world. It isn't perfect, it fails me at times. Something I do know, and is difficult to admit, is that being married has made me more able (though less than normal, still) to be able to speak socially with females, since I don't have to worry about moving beyond a certain point. I feel that I might still fall flat if I ever had to go beyond that point, though. However, I honestly do know for a certainty that would be the case.
I know I haven't offered too much here - but seriously, go talk to that girl. Just say "Hi". Talk - that is all it is. I know it sounds difficult - I can feel how I would have felt, back when I was in your shoes many years ago. Just talk. Be yourself, and quit being angry. Just talk. In some way or another, she will talk back.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
It's been my experience that putting two geeks together is a bad idea. They never clean, never cook, and if they manage to reproduce before irradiating one or both during a home "experiment", the resulting ubergeek would have no hope of mating within the species, much less actually reproducing. So for the sake of the geek race, keep fresh genes coming in. Geek inbreeding is a bad thing.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Of course none of us are shocked at this. I think part of the reason why there are less girls in IT is they are actively discouraged from going into this field. I can hear all the naysayers: "Not in this day and age, by golly." Yes, in this day and age. By school, by family, and by society in general.
;-)
I am female, and I have been on a computer since I was a wee one. Worked my way through BBSes, the scary USENET world, and coding (my father started me off on BASIC when I was in grade 3). Now - one would think I would have ended up a compsci major. Well no. For various reasons, I started off as a science major - which made me unhappy so I tried to switch over to CompSci. The Compsci department was fine with that- they would let me in, BUT I had to get approval for one math course (because I didn't have the prereq). Happily, I went off to the math department and was told by the head of the Math Department at an unamed university that "girls were not good at math", and therefore, he wouldn't let me in. So, I ended up in the humanities.
I was lucky, I managed to keep up my skills on the side and eventually got a job as a systems librarian. But, I wonder how many girls gave up.
I also find that families aren't friendly to women learning technology - often giving boys the techy toys and encouraging them to learn, whereas girls are told that's not feminine (in more than verbal words). Luckily, my dad only had girls, and so I got a very nice well-rounded education. (That means, I can be a sysadmin, check my own oil, AND know which lipstick goes with my wine-coloured top).
Wow, sorry to misread your post.
It sounds as though our experiences are largely the same. I had very similar performance, but did not believe that I would be accepted into a good college. I went to an OK undergrad institution, worked for a while... it sucked.
I returned to grad school and, well, I'm getting into a good PhD program in the Fall.
I'm not sure how I feel about having to fail people and ruin their lives
I know a few people that managed to make it through their IT classes but never really had an aptitude/drive in the actual IT field. They generally end up in call-centres or other jobs that also house people of much lesser education (in other words, the education got them nothing).
Failing somebody who isn't cut out for IT or doesn't have the drive to become a good worker isn't necessarily a bad thing, I know a few people who went on the alternate/better jobs that they were likely more suited to.
As for becoming a programmer with influence... not always an easy thing. My current (and previous) job involves a mix of programming, hardware, and system administration. In most situations management still calls the shots, and it's rather painful in the coding arena having to fix the systems that we hired out to a contractor for (when I was capable of doing them myself at less expense/time/headache) and/or seeing projects almost come to fruition only to die in the final stages due to a change of company direction.
Not that there aren't good coding jobs, but I've found that the best is a mix of coding and sysadminning... at the very least I get to pull machines apart every now and again which gives my eyes a rest from screenwatching... and I have a growing collection of hard-drive magnets.
"I have seen two children, one a boy, and one a girl from the same family and similar in age that will behave VERY differently about certain things." Wow, two whole kids. Nice anecdata! Would you like an honorary degree in sociology or child development to go with your keen observational powers? Really. It's not that girls are steered away from instrutmental or complicated things from the very moment of birth. Different colors and different levels of snuggles, even in the hospital, aren't the first signs of a massive degree of cultural firepower that repeatedly beats girls down. Nope. Nothing to see here. Really, deep down, girls don't go into CS primarily because they just suck. It's genetic. /sarcasm.
If that's your salt, you probably have high blood pressure.
I went to an upper-tier state school for undergrad, then entered an upper-tier PhD program immediately afterward. I flaked out after two years and escaped with a M.S. Now I'm working. And yes, some of the time it sucks. You might think success in a PhD program is determined largely by "natural giftedness". In my experience, that's not the case. Natural giftedness is obviously a component, but the students who tend to succeed are typically those who are disciplined enough to "make it happen".
For a bunch of blokes that are way to eager to pride themselves on the value of science and logical thought, I'm always blown away at how you all will literally bend over backwards to try and contort gender issues fit within your P.C. mentality.
/SIDETRACK
Guess what, men and women are significantly different. And that's okay. Women love to communicate and nurture. Men love to solve problems, compete, and get laid. It's like this in virtually every society around the world, and it's been that way since the beginning of time.
SIDETRACK Now, let me already congratulate the reply to this that will use the anecdotal example that contradicts this. Hooray, there are exceptions. Acknowledged. However, those outliers are statistically insignificant and I'm talking about the vast majority which explains the results in this article.
I majored in EE/CS and psychology, and I saw both sides of the coin. And I know you all have seen it, too. For instance, women say about 7,000 words per day, compared to men who speak about 2,000. Women even start speaking sooner than men. Men (albeit later in life), will excel in advanced math, logic, and competition.
Ever see a woman's face when she sees a baby? Her eyes light up and she forgets everything around her. Ever watched a man's eyes when he walks by a scantily clad hottie or encounters a VCR that needs to be programmed? His eyes light up and he forgets everything around him.
Men and women are different. Stop trying to invent complicated explanations to convince yourself otherwise, and enjoy the diversity. It's not a bad thing.
-Fatty
That's purely theoretical. Part of the spec on this program was that g.hotness is never less than -9 in the real world. This function exceeds spec in this regard.
Development will take under advisement as to whether the program can be made more efficient by simply dropping the if clause.
BUG CLOSED AS WITHIN SPEC.
Your male co-workers might just be more polite because of sexual-harassment laws; they may still be just as immature as ever.
The really sad thing is that I suspect that if the geek didn't come on so strongly then he might actually stand a chance. And when I write 'he' I really mean s/h/m/...
"Still, she found it 'really intimidating' when men used terms she didn't know and talked about complicated programs they wrote in their free time."
I remember those kids in college who spent their weekends working on their own programs too. I wasn't one (and I'm male). I love my software job, but I find that it usually fulfills my creative programming drive.
Anyway, my point is that there are both women AND men who are (academically) intimidated by the uber-geeks in college. It's not like all guys in CS spend every waking hour breathing Dew and Pizza in front of the linux box. Pinpointing this "intimidation" as something that chases only women away seems shallow.
Computer geeks have to date computer geeks? Do phychology graduates only date psychology graduates? Just seems a bit short sighted to assume that people in computing science are so pathetic that they could only hope to date within their own discipline.
The one thing that is relevant, is that people in computing (but also in other disciplines) can be passionate about learning, and people who are such, seem to be drawn to others with a similar passion. But to assume it has to be in computing is pretty narrow minded.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
There might be a decline in female CS majors, but where are they going?
Are they going into other fields of study that share traits and skills with CS? or not?
Funny enough, in a linguistics class, my syntax prof gave us this rumor, that apparently women that knit or sow or engage tasks involving repetitive hand-eye coordination are not only also awesome at syntax, morphology, and phonology (the parts of linguistics that are the most rule based) but they make really great programmers. or at least that there is a strong correlation. between the two sets of activities (that of being a competent programmer and that of being a knitter).
People, in general, feel they are succesful and find things rewarding if they are praised for their accomplishments. In general women learn and develop more elaborate interpersonal skills at a younger age - and are rewarded for it. The complexity of the personal dynamics my daughters show when playing with girlfriends is staggering (well at least when compared to that of an adult male.)
CS is definitely a field where social skills - while useful - will not be rewarded as well as they would in management or other professions.
Women are no less capable of handling the intellectual requirements of CS - its the lack of reward for social skills (that they are traditionally praised for) that I think might make them feel less inclined. "...I know I can do it, its just not rewarding..." This is why I feel those that do persist in CS tend to be drawn to engineering sales, program management and leadership.
You are absolutely wrong. There are no studies which demonstrate any significant differences in performance between men in women. In early childhood and adolescence there is a minor performance gap with regard to certain abilities. This gap closes quickly, however, and the sexes abilities reflect this in study after study. I am so fucking sick and tired of hearing people drone on about how men can do this or that better, or woman are more suited for this or that. Socialization plays the largest part in determining what YOU think the behavior of the sexes is most suited toward. What YOU think has no bearing on the real abilities of people. It can only serve to further your ignorant world-view, which if you hold a position of power can cause real harm to humanity in general.
I think this is endemic of a sad, common and systemic objectification of an entire class of human beings based entirely on arbitrary differences.
Just the (possibly uncomfortable) environment of a NOC.
Funny that your mind leapt to rape so quickly though.
I believe her point has been made. Thanks.
It might be nice (or not) to date another computer geek. You'd at least have something in common. How much do I have in common with an Art History major? Or even a physics or engineering major? An Engineering major I *might* have more in common with, as I think CompSci tends to be fairly closely aligned with Engineering and Mathematics curriculum.
I think, fundamentally, though, that people tend to spend the most time with people in their own discipline. Your opportunities to meet people are largely (though not solely) influenced by your academic and professional activities.
So, more women in computing means more chances to meet women that would potentially be interesting to me. Sure, I try to meet people outside my discipline as much as possible, but the fact remains that a large part of my interactions with other computer people almost always tend to be men. Go to a computer conference lately (like a Linux users expo)? You're going to mostly meet men there, and the few women who are at them seem to be mostly already in a relationship.
A lot of relationships over the years have been formed by people who were in college classes together. If there are few women in my computer science classes, and computer science classes are a majority of my classes, that reduces my chance to meet women who might be more compatible with/interested in me. Sure, there are still general ed classes, you can still go flirt in the library, gym, or student union building. But some of us aren't the best at flirting with strangers, and do better in a situation like a class where you have some potential to interact with people that is provided by the structure of the class.
You're right, you don't have to date someone in your discipline, and you could even make an argument that perhaps looking outside your discipline is a superior way to meet people. But, some of us would at least like to have more of an oportunity. . .
I shouldn't have to demand respect or work harder to get it just because I am a girl.
I never said work "harder". I just said that you'll get the respect you deserve if you're good at what you do. Not because somebody mandated that you should be respected.
Geeze, I hate that. The fact is that we are all different. I would feel uncomfortable being in an Interior Design major. I just wouldn't fit in. Those girls would be talking about all that pretty/artsy colors and patterns and furniture styles. If I thought like you I suppose that I would be on some ID forum somewhere talking about how ID majors need to make use of more CAD software and pattern/color matching automation software so that it wouldn't be so tough for me to fit in. And they should also have at least 50% type-A personality male nerdy professors so that concepts would get explained compatible with my nerdy thought process (at the expense of those girls who don't relate to my analytical thought-process). Because after all I should be able to be any type of personality whatsoever and feel like I fit in and learn just as efficiently.
Nerdy math analytical types tend to gravitate to technical fields. And you just want to walk into their universe and tell them who they should associate with and relate to. That's what it amounts to. We have no problem with girls in our field. But it just wouldn't be right to force those nerds to look at her in any sort of unnatural way. If she's a flirty social butterfly that cares more about her pretty background than whether the proper programming techniques are used the guess what? She'll be known for that. If she's a special type of girl who could care less about all those typical girly things but is a darn good and productive programmer, guess what? She'll be known for that. If she's a total girly girl and is also a great programmer then guess what? She'll be known for that. And she'll even find special niche jobs that a typical guy would never fit into and she'll make a killing.
While I'm on my soap box I might as well put forth this assumption. If a lab full of analytical, math, geek girls were all in a lab cranking out awesome code and were really in the groove and a girly girl came in and wanted to know their opinion on how her cute new slashdot T-shirt matches her skirt, guess what they'd do? They'd do exactly what they guys would do. They'd look up real quick and say, "Oh yea, cool!" Then they'd put their heads back down and continue working. She'd sit down next to a focused geek girl and say, "Guess who asked me out tonight?" . . . 10 seconds later . . . "Uh, what was that? Sorry I was in the zone." "Yea guess who I'm going out with tonight?" And so on. She'd feel kinda out of place because what they care about is NOT what she cares about.
So should all the geek guys/girl go to personality tolerance classes so that all personality types will feel like they "fit in"?
That's BS!
The funny thing to me is (and I know I'm gonna get slaughtered for this highly shauvenistic comment) guys never complain about crap like this. Have you ever heard of a guy complaining about not being able to get into an all-girl field? Nope. Why?
Because if the guy wants to be a cook he sucks it up and learns to be successful at it.
If he wants to be an interior designer he sucks it up and learns to be successful at it.
If he wants to be a beautitian he sucks it up and learns to be successful at it.
If he wants to be a clothing designer he sucks it up and learns to be successful at it.
If he wants to be a male fashion runway coach he sucks it up and learns to be successful at it.
He doesn't sit around and whine about hard it is to get into a girl's field.
If you want to be a successful techie, guess what? Suck it up and get good at it! As my headhunter always tells me, "Performance creates opportunity." It's that simple. If there's a barrier in your way, remove it!
Be successful on your own merit. Not because some
"The argument of many computer scientists is that women who study science or technology, because they are defying social expectations, are in an uncomfortable position to begin with. So they are more likely to be dissuaded from pursuing computer science if they are exposed to an unpleasant environment, bad teaching, and negative stereotypes like the image of the male hacker"
...is irritating. They are grossly underrepresented because they are genetically equipped to accelerate at other things!
Am I a male chauvinist? Am I a sexist megalomaniac consumed with notions of male superiority? Am I an idealist who builds hopelessly complex, politically correct, and nonsensical arguments [like the above quote] to justify the realities of nature?
Human beings of different race and sex are different, each with characteristic strengths and weaknesses. Why people feel the intrinsic need to homogenize humans, perhaps to their irrational beliefs
People who fight for equality* are either ethnocentric, biggoted, racist, or sexist [perhaps all three]. Their inability to accept different means they can't stand difference. Hence, they verbally mongrolize the entire human race.
Stop pussyfooting around rationality.
It is clearly hateful, and beyond question trollish (i.e it should be lurking with -1 where it belongs).
I will refer to my 4 colleagues and myself, all top notch geeks (I will spare the modesty here).
One of us goes skiing every year to exotic locations in Europe, speaks 4 languages and is pasionate about horse riding.
The other one is an expert in martial arts and yoga, has travelled to several exotic places and worked overseas.
Another one has worked in many different countries, speaks 4 languages and is an expert in calssical music, chess, Oh yes, he runs 10k races to keep fit.
Another one is a reading vulture, expert in astronomy, SciFi, passionate about economis and politics.
And another one is certainly a gadget freak, but he can afford it after a succesful carrer that allows him to travel all around Europe.
In 15 years working on this industry I have never mete anybody that even remotely meets the stereotype above.
I think you should read less about geeks and go out and meet more of them.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'm sick and tired about hearing about the 'glass ceiling', that, for whatever reason, women only get paid 80% the wages of men. Oh, sure, we can get up in arms about that. That's politically correct. But nobody ever mentions the fact that women win 80% of the divorce court cases. Or have a significantly higher chance of being ruled innocent by some jury.
Nobody ever talks about THAT glass ceiling. There's a nice steaming cup of double standards for you this morning.
Now don't get me wrong. I think women and men should be treated equally. But I mean *really* treated equally, not just treated equally when it's nice and convenient for them and makes good politics.
Women since time immemorial have been first stopped, later discouraged and ridiculed to pursue any interests on their own, but specially any technical knowledge.
I have seen it all my life, males that are patronizing, sexiest, and frankly hostile in occassions to any women on their little male preserve. I had a boss that thought he could close deals with female clients by "pleasing" them as he used to put it. I knew of another guy that would send females to the worst hotels in economy class while all the boys were travelling business class and staying in 5 star hotels.
And that is for starters only, in most companies where policies are not in place to ensure there is no discrimination against women, women doing the same job will earn less and the real differences between sexes, like the little detail of women being the ones that give birth, in some places can be punished with summary dismissal.
There is absolutely no physical difference that would explain why women do not pursue technical carriers. In many countries they are better at science and maths until around 12 or 13 years old and then something happens, it is like if society notices that they are starting to become fully grown women and in that moment the door is shut close and any attempt to solve an equation or write a computer program is met with derision.
The first programmers were women, and they served with distinction, probing that in a virgin field where there were no misnconceptions, they could excell as anybody.
It is the macho attitude justyfing things based on hypotetical "natural differences" (that normally, oh coincidence, put women in positions of disadvantage or servitude) what stop women's progress, not any "differences" as you put it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You work in a system that, for its eternal shame, only manages to produce 2% of female students (that are brave enough to mingle with people truly believing that such imbalance is down to "natural differences").
Then you proceed to claim that women can't do analytical thinking as well as men (of course, this is old Victorian era knowledge).
What an amazing teorethical whatever you are you are...
You are failing to criticize a social and educational system that is clearly broken. The almost complete barring of female students in whatever you are studying can't be down to "natural differences" (of which we have no probe but your anecdotical sexist evidence).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
What you are providing is a lousy explanation, as it was clearly and succintly explained by the other poster.
I will rework his main point: it is unbelievable that people that in general can be considered rational and intelligent spouse the views you are ejaculating without realizing the final implications.
Amazing, amuzing and disturbing.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Not only are there more men, but most of them are named Steve.
What? You mean the Trinity character from the Matrix hasn't inspired young hot women wearing pleather bodysuits to hack into the IRS and become Computer Science majors?
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
I started as a student intern at the Unisys Unix facility in Salt Lake City in 1986. In 1988 I graduated and was hired as a engineer. Between this time and when I left in 1992 we had a number of women software engineers. As far as I could tell there were a higher percentage of good ones than the percentage of good guys.
This was probably before or just as the "sexual harassment" crap started happening in the industry. As a rule they fit in very well with the guys. I got a few "good" jokes from a couple of them. They sometimes had a different way of addressing issues and I did learn something from this. I got a little hot under the collar with one of them for leaving in the middle of problems to deal with her teen age daughter a little too often. I also dated one of them and found out that this is not a good idea.
I think the industry has lost a lot that the software engineering environment is almost exclusivly male these days.
No way man. I learned that lesson. Most of the students here regard me firmly as a top student, including several professors. I do research, I have publications, and I'm pretty prolific for a masters student.
My biggest shortcoming (the one that I'm looking at right now) is a failure to scale back projects to fit. I always "go for the gold." Now, I've got a professor waiting on me because she wants to give me a good grade, but my project isn't QUITE done. I'm trying to convince the same to do a paper on this (and the result is good) and to try to get submission done in... 2 weeks? Ack.
This comes after a group project that bombed because other group members weren't into the don't sleep for a week thing, and a semester project that rocked, but was also a week late (got a high grade, but pretty much was redeemed by a result that REALLY changes the way that a particular task is looked at).
"The argument of many computer scientists is that women who study science or technology, because they are defying social expectations, are in an uncomfortable position to begin with. So they are more likely to be dissuaded from pursuing computer science if they are exposed to an unpleasant environment, bad teaching, and negative stereotypes like the image of the male hacker."
Or could it simply be that most women are illogical and therefore not fit for a "logic" oriented career?
Let me preface this by saying I love CS guys once I got to know them, but.... I'm a cute girl. I'm a social girl. But until I consistently did better on tests in all my CS classes than 90% of the guys, you guys treated me like I was some drooling idiot... even after getting me to help you with your homework! No, I don't spend my spare time at home coding when I could be socializing. No, I'm not up on every bit of breaking news in the tech world. And CS guys seem to equate social activity with mental deficiency. So take it easy on the girls in your first/second year CS classes, and maybe less of them will change majors.... I'm too stubborn to let you guys push me around, but early on I considered changing majors to something where my classmates weren't so condescending...
Oh my god! There are more women then men in nursing! Oh my god! There are more women in primary education then men!
And most importantly female p0rn stars get paid more than male p0rn stars! Say it aint so Ron Jeremy!
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
Our CompSci AP (AB) in my high school has 5 males including myself. There was a girl, but she switched classes after the first month. Also, she was nerdier and geekier than any guy in there.
...ever consider that most geek guys are socially inept, and have repulsive personality traits which turn women away, such as a lack of confidence and an arrogant belief in their inherent superiority to the "popular people"? I'm sorry, but if I was a woman, I'd run away screaming too. Ever see how a bunch of nerds on a message forum react when a woman posts? I'm sure most of the ones who would even bother studying such a pathetic loser-crowded field would run away screaming. I'm sure they usually they just pretend they're lesbians so people will leave their clingy, desperate geek-hands off of them.
I had this fantasy that there would be a bunch of hot girls in my computer science classes, then they would have me do their homework. And while I was doing their homework, they would be hiding under the desk giving me blow jobs. So yes, we really need to get those enrollment numbers up!
This push to create perfect 50-50 splits in every discipline is ridicous. The goal should not be equal numbers of males and females in different fields. The goal should be removing any barriers to success for males and females in different fields. Maybe biology plays a role, and maybe it doesn't. The best way to ensure that the right of all individuals to choose a career of their choice is met is to break down the barriers that exist. If ten years from now, the computer science male-female ratio is 80/20, but those 20% of females have just as good a chance of being promoted as the 80% of males individually, that will be a far greater success than having a 50/50 split where females are at a disadvantage in getting promotions compared to their male colleagues. There has been far too much emphasis on equal numbers and not enough on ignoring numbers and simply working to remove barriers preventing people from making it in their chosen fields.
Just look at how many people have mentioned fat greasy computer nerds in this thread. Women aren't down with that. They prefer fields without any associations with being fat and/or greasy.
CS is not exactly a bad career move, and I personal enjoy it.
It's their loss, really...
I guess that it is also possible that there were more "favors" done than I knew. I was pretty damn naive back then (-:
don't mess with those geekgrrls
Once I changed my "Hello world." program to read "Hello girl." You should have seen it, it drove the ladies wild!
It does seem to be part of the math community, as well. A former girlfriend of mine is a math major, she had similar complaints to yours (and to my CSCI pal)... it isn't from the professors, she had said, but rather the students.
===
My aforementioned friend in CSCI never complained about the patronization as being racial, however, I noticed that the indian students were most often the ones patronizing (this is likely due to cultural differences)... (it might also have to be due to statistics, my university's grad level CSCI program is proably ~80% indian)...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Perhaps because a boy geek is perceived as a mildly eccentric target for ridicule, whereas a girl geek is an anathema to her peers at that age.
When I was a teenager, I went to a science/math/tech focused high school, so I was sheltered from a lot of this. Even so, there were only two girls in my AP Computer Science course (including myself). It was already too late.
You know what got me interested in computer science? Games. It always goes back to games. Nobody decides to be a computer science major because she really digs Quicken. You've got to be passionate about this stuff, and nothing makes people passionate about computers like games do. If you have more girls playing games, you will have more girls going into computer science. That's all there is to it.
And don't even try to feed me that girls-just-aren't-interested-in-games bullshit. The fact that gamer gender ratios vary widely by country is a strong indicator that this is a societal construct, rather than a biological one. So, nobody is going to get very far with that argument around me.
I think women are just smarter than men. CS is a dumb degree. Math, Computer Engineering, Physics, these are all real fields of study. Computer Science is a nothing degree, it's like Lite(tm) beer. Why would a smart person pursue a useless degree?
"This mission is too important to allow you to jeopardize it." -- HAL
Suppose that the privileged male establishment tries to exclude women, but has negligible effect, and women instead tend to stay away for other reasons. This hypothetical situation demonstrates the possibility of an exogenous gender gap.
I'm not going to pull any punches, & be VERY blunt, especially for the women's sake reading this!
Heck, it's just purely based on my own life experience (22 years of it in the white collar world, & a bit over 15 or so in IS/IT/MIS & I'm nearly 41 now)
So here goes:
So, it's better when you sleep your way to the top (OR rather, TRY to) via say, mgt. OR marketing people?
They are, after all, the ones with the MOST pull & cash in companies typically.
Those guys? Hell, I don't knock 'em - some DO get there after spending time in the trenches, usually MANY years of it @ a particular company!
However, for a more realistic viewpoint? Well, ever see the film "American Psycho"??
Especially how & when the main character got his job, is how a great deal of that type do... e.g. -> the '50 VP's in a company sending emails to one another' ala the quote by the great fictional character, Gordon Gecko, in the film "Wall Street"... & it's NOT b.s.!
It really goes on & especially at the WAY high levels in many a firm. That's right - There's a LARGE % that got their via connections & the fact their Dad is a top stockholder, if not a member of the board of directors! Reality flash... not! Anyone that's spent enough time in corporate america realizes it's not.
(Nepotism laws (b.s. they are usually), notwithstanding. BUT, I do see a GOOD CHUNK of them using their position to (being blunt about it) get laid by women on the job - AND THEY GET PLENTY OF TAKERS!)
So, that "ladder theory":
http://www.laddertheory.com/attractiondeconstruct. htm
Yes, it's true.
Now, before you women stop reading here? Don't give up on me yet here, I don't 'hate' you for it if you try to practice that ladder theory!
I figure you're only trying your best, with what you've apparently got left @ the point you're investing time & your body into it.
I really DO try to think of it from a woman's point of view by all means!
Hey - she's out looking to better her own life, those of her kids!
(That's if she comes already preset with them, BIG blocking point as I am sure the women reading this with kids who try this route nearly always run into - not many men want to raise another guy's kids, it's NOT our nature... & yes, nature plays HUGE parts in this, read on)...
However, sooner or later?
Those looks of yours fade & you have to actually get her act together & learn marketable skills, if you doesn't snag some chump... & yes, any guy that falls for this IS a chump imo.
Take it or leave it.
See, I've personally always thought of women like monkeys in trees (a LOT like this ladder theory) - they don't let go of 1 branch, until they FIRMLY have ahold of another, higher up the tree, & better set up.
It's REALITY/LIFE, not b.s. & politically correct candy coated toppings. I hate that crap personally.
(And, please: Don't even TRY to tell us that women do NOT do that sleep their way to the top, ok?? It WON'T wash! We've ALL seen it plenty of times)
In fact, I've just seen it WAY too many times here myself & in various spots over time... makes me laugh really, especially when they get dumped! It's their OWN faults.
Have I seen women leave guys like that? Sure... & they impress me a hell of a lot more than ones that 'hang on for dear life (and dollars potential)', by all means.
(women that sleep their way to the top? Heh, man... it really makes me tend to personally ascribe to this OLD saying - "the most honest woman you'll EVER meet is a prostitute: At least she's being up-front it's gonna cost ya!"))
So, let's say you're NOT "one of those kinds of girls"!
(of which imo, 90% of you fall into that category, since it still is a "man's world", & you're just out looking for your own best interests & 'selling' the one ticket you've ALL
Right here in my home town (Denver) the Rocky Mountain News had a story germane to this discussion -- http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/tech/article /0,2777,DRMN_23910_4325336,00.html is the story, and the website for the women in the calendar. Could the article have been more timely?
My home: http://theloflins.com/
One of the most basely false assumptions is that it is only men who discourage women from entering computer science. If anything, discouragement from females is more insidious and subtle and quite possibly equally prevalent. Neither does discouragement have to necessarily come from within the IT profession.
/gets back to studying for my Algorithms final. Gah! Procrastination!
Women and "Men that actually WANT to do CS" developed their interests at some juncture themselves. I see nothing wrong with encouraging active thought in the areas mathematics and computer science in females and males at a young age or even at a much later age (of course the earlier the "I love CS" juncture the better *smile*).
A more personal note: as a small-Midwest-town chick who came to MIT, I went from zero to hacker in 2 months. I have plenty of male and female friends who did the same. There are others here who have been coding since the womb. While the newbies came naturally curious, it's partly just the mix of people and the encouraging environment that really jump-started our interests.
If it makes you feel any better, in the 5 years since I graduated, I have not once used calculus. But pay attention during linear algebra. Good luck on your final tomorrow.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
In my Mech eng year there were about 80 guys and about ten girls. We were a pretty close group, everyone knew everyone, and there was no stalking or drooling. The girls who dated within the class generally dated (or rejected) guys who would not have looked at them twice if they were in a more balanced program (nice, good looking, fun guys dating plain girls with major personality defects). I had a girlfriend in college, and I, and others, had female friends as well.
I can think of male friends who took minors in psychology and other easy programs where they could do little work and meet members of the opposite sex. I can think of some fairly geeky guys who would show up at the cafeteria with three or four girls from their classes, they were pretty happy (and doing less competitive programs, more free time). The bad side was having to take subjective courses that tended to have crappy teachers...
Are rude geeks an American thing? Most geeks I know here in Canada are shy but not psychotic (OK, very shy in some cases "no, I could not go to your place I might MEET PEOPLE!").
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
At the risk of repeating opinions or ideas posted here already, I'm throwing in my two cents.
Introduction
Me - Male programmer. Long time geek, starting in elementary school with a C64 and Basic. Masters degree from a good university. A small handful of published papers on fun research that convinces everyone who sees it that I am quite insane. I've worked for a couple years at a large software development company. I work lots of 12 hour days, I work lots of weekends. I'm happy with the pay and the free time the lifestyle offers over that of my student life, even if I miss the intensity of a research environment.
Getting to the point
My school had a large (several hundred) entering CS class. By the end of the first year, it was much more manageable. By the end of the undergraduate program, we'd lost approximately 75% of the people who entered (I have a coffee cup with their names on it). Notice that's people, not men or women. We started with a handful of women, and ended with a small handful. We started with buckets of guys, and ended up with something more like a large handful.
I can't speak to the factors or pressures that cause women to choose or not choose their majors. I simply haven't experienced them or studied them, so I don't have the information to do so. For the guys, most who started wanted the high paying job out the door. Most who finished just really liked to code, really liked the theory, or really wanted to show they could finish. The thing I find interesting is that most of the women I knew in the program tended to start with those attitudes... it seems to me that a selection process must have happened at an earlier point to instill them with such. If the programs themselves were discriminatory or slanted so that somehow males would succeed and women would not, I would expect different results. Furthermore, proportionally more of the women in that group went on to graduate studies, or went on to real programming jobs than the male graduates. The people who came out with degrees worked for it, and they know their stuff, male or female. Gcc doesn't care what's in your pants.
It seems to me that enrollment numbers are not really that telling... if enrollment in the beginning is low, it doesn't make sense to blame elements later in the program for it. If a program was discriminatory against one gender over the other, it seems that the trend would be shown in input freshmen versus output engineers, not in input infants versus output freshmen.
Perhaps my university was atypical. Perhaps the women who graduated with me are (they're very smart). But I think the factors that precede college entrance are probably more interesting to look at when wondering why female enrollment in computer science programs is low.
Anyway. My two cents. Now back to work.
and I couldn't get the guys to talk to me
This is most likely because they are scared of being hit with harassment charges. Women in work places and education instiutions are way to quick to acuse someone of harassment.
....people always assume I'm an animator. They never, ever ask. Actually, I'm a shaderwriter (develop plugins, too) and when I explain what I do, there's usually a little silence, and then the inevitable statements of "why did you choose that"? There are absolutely no words to describe how exhausting it is to always be the tiny minority in users' group meetings or at E3 or at Siggraph. It doesn't mean I don't go -- I can't help myself -- the field is fascinating! -- and I'd never stop attending because of this, but I get tired of being isolated during the social hour because the guys just don't know how to talk to women. And to make it clear, I don't stand there, waiting for someone to talk to me; I take the initiative. I walk up to folks. I've made some good contacts and good friends. But I am just so freaking sick of booth babes.....of exotic dancers as appropriate entertainment at social functions...of cool CG being described in sexual terms. I love what I do and I don't want to do anything else, but believe me, I'm not staying in it because the environment is fantastic. It's really gotten better over the years, but there's quite a bit to go before I'll be completely relaxed.
it was part of the geek meritocracy--the guys won't talk to you until you prove yourself, and then you won't be able to get them to go away.
Men also have to deal with the geek meritocracy. I started my freshman year of college as a non-geek and slowly transformed over the years. One of my neighbors in the dorm was a full-blown geek from the very beginning and he admitted that when he first met me, he thought I was 'useless.' I must have eventually proved my geekworthiness because we're now good friends.
Why are people always so worried about gender differences? I just don't see what is so wrong about one sex being generally better than something at another.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
just give them myspace and a digital camera.
you'll get 80% female usage.
If your neighbours roof is flying past your window, you know it's cyclone season.
Anything like this?
What, exactly, is your evidence that men perform better in technical skills than women -- even on average? Do you have any studies that are able to remove cultural influences? Name one, by all means. Produce the data!
You don't have it, because it doesn't exist.
People used to think that women were incapable of all manner of intellectual pursuits. In some of these fields, women now outnumber men at the undergraduate level. So, what makes you so damn confident that you're right? You're just guessing. If history is any indicator, you're probably wrong.
And if you're not wrong, it's irrelevant. Even if there was a vast gap in ability, there are so many completely inept male programmers out there that there is easily room for hundreds more female programmers. I know. I've interviewed some of these guys. Woah boy, it's a shame they couldn't make a career out of growing chiapets.
Marge: Well, most women will tell you that you're a fool to think you can change a man. But those women are quitters! When I first met your father, he was loud, oafish, and rude. But I worked hard, and now he's a whole different person.
Lisa: Mom?
Marge: (forcefully) He's a whole different person, Lisa.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
This whole notion of employment gaps is crap. Women have a massively disproportionate number of jobs compared to degrees. Employment - not counting unis - is somewhat close to 50-50. Degrees are like 1 to 3 or worse. And now we'll get a continuing spiral of worse and worse candidates, as females in CS drop. You have to employ them at about equal rates, or you'll eventually get sued. Merit doesn't matter, because the cost fighting one lawsuit isn't worth the difference in employee quality. Dumb as all hell.
This is going to sound funny, but...
I blame the media.
Whenever you see an engineer in a show/movie/whatever, it is *ALWAYS* a mega nerd with no social skills whatsoever. If it's a male engineer, it's the Lone Gunmen from fuggin' x files. If it's a female, she got pink/purple/otherunnaturalcolored hair, two or more non-ear piercings, etc.. When did you ever see a well adjusted engineer? They do exist ffs... just not in hollywood.
"No one is arguing that women (or men) should be restrained in their "element". I don't think we know what that element is. We don't know what differences there are between men and women exactly. But only ignorant fools pretend their are none. Let women and men do what they like. If there is genuine repression, then we need to stop it. Just as we did when we gave women the right to vote."
I guess it depends on whether you agree that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." (And the more frequently uttered, "One nation -- under God -- with life, liberty, and justice for all.")
If that were the case you might have said that "we outlawed ballot discrimination against women" or some such. My argument is that men don't give women the right to do anything. They already have it. We all do! That's why such rights are described as unalienable rights or natural rights. There is an important semantic difference, and (in my opinion) an even more important cognitive difference.
Saying (and thinking) that those in power 'give rights' to some group belies a hierarchy or authoritarianism that in this case reflects patriarchy and sexism.
Your physiological arguments are all essentially meaningless unless we're talking about a "rib-having contest" or a "chromosome-having contest" (e.g., a woman as tall and as conditioned as Bryant or O'neal could go dunk for dunk in the NBA, pitting lithe track stars against line-backers is ludicrous, wouldn't you pit similarly sized and conditioned female linebackers against male linebackers? This is why we have weight classes in boxing of course, because not all bodies are the same, and pitting outclassed fighters against behemoths is hardly just).
I think your examples of women being different problem-solvers is a pretty good argument for why they need to be in all fields of science and not the ones "we give them the right" to be in. This debate has already happened at length very recently. Here's a good example: starting here (or maybe you should start at the parent of that comment).
Oh, and finally Summers didn't just say, as you put it, "gee... maybe women are just different and don't like them?" One could excuse that because there he's speculating on their interests. Unfortunately, Summers actually said, "There are issues of intrinsic aptitude." This speculates that it's not interest at all, that it falls under nature and not nurture. Female scientists were appalled at this because it's equivalent to saying, "[you'll never be as good as the best male scientist, but don't be sad, it's just an issue] of intrinsic aptitude." Reductio ad absurdum: You'll never vote as well as a man, it's just an issue of intrinsic aptitude.
This is a non-problem. I put this in the same category as "Why arn't there any black people in northern michigan?" Is it because Northern Michigan hates black people? Of course not - it's because black people don't want to go there! There's no jobs, and it's freaking cold!
The question not being asked here is, why would you want to get a CS degree? CS doesn't exist in a vacuum - computers are tools to solve other problems. If you're a woman, and you are smart enough to use computers, why not major in biology, and use computers to solve biology problems? Or major in chemistry, and use computers to solve chemistry problems? Or major in any of several engineering fields? You don't need to know how operating systems or cache management or machine code works to write useful programs.
Women don't participate in CS because women don't want to. Men major in CS because:
1) They think it will make them lots of money
2) They REALLY REALLY REALLY like computers.
3) They are social idiots and CS ain't a bad career for people who don't like people.
Maybe, just maybe, girls don't major in CS because they have other things they'd rather major in, that better match their interests and talents, both intelletual AND social?
I've met several women who are proficient at computers. Only one of them majored in computing - the rest all majored in something else, whether it be chemistry, biology, technical writing, or graphics design. They didn't pass on CS or drop out of CS because of bias, they did so because of better options for them. Of the women I knew who dropped out of CS, they dropped out either because they were dumb (the same as all the guys who drop out of CS), or because they were BORED OUT OF THEIR SKULLS. They took a chem or bio or english elective and liked that better. About half-and-half. Contrast that with many of the men in CS - how many of them even have the option of doing something else? There are many, many men in CS who are in CS because they have no idea what else they can do, because they were socially stunted, and instead of being pushed to do girly things, were allowed to spend those career-forming high school years staring at their monitor and occasionally watching Star Trek.
paintball
Foreign contries are more likely to export males to be educated abroad (this IS a social problem), and especially in CS, they skew the numbers.
paintball
anyway, when my 14 year old junior councillor chicks would walk around with the cute little 7 & 8 year olds on their backs or hips I decided that I was going to even the score; I carried around the larger kids. it was a lot of fun, some times i'd be carrying one (or two or three) around and i'd get mobbed by the others wanting me to pick them up too. no one ever pays attention to the (physically) bigger kids and people tend to be harder on them because they look older.
that lasted all of a week before I got pulled into the boss' office and told that I couldn't pick the children up anymore because the city was worried about potential lawsuits. did anything happen to the girls? no. they got to pick the kids up, they got to hug them, swing them around and play. i got the feeling that I wasn't even allowed to touch them anymore.
men in childcare aren't just discriminated against, in some cases they are falsely accused of molestation which at best turns into an investigation that literally never gets closed and at worst can ruin their entire life. I babysat for neighbourhood kids from when I was 11 to 16, but after that I just couldn't do it anymore. I got paranoid about it, like everyone thought I was some dirty lech.
not cool at all.
Rise up in the cafeteria and STAB them with your plastic forks!
Whooo, where to start. How crap like this gets modded insightful I will never understand, unless the fascination with Jackie Chan films are to blame, and wildly inaccurate propaganda pieces like "hero" (which ended with a lengthy quote from the prince by machiavelli, originally written to flatter a political figure in Italy at the time and make hime feel better about being an asshole)
But whatever your position is, as a CS person, you are socially classified as a geek.
Thats because Americans worship ares, as per the book the Cryptonmicon, by Neal Stephenson.
It's just the way Western societies have been largely static for centuries now--people idolize artists, entertainers, businessmen....and the Western mind hasn't really adjusted to that yet as far as I can tell
At least the west has a society that has lasted centuries, and changed drastically during those centuries (static my ringpiece, talk about propaganda in action, lets ask Marie Antoinette what she thinks about that, or possibly Martin Luther King). Whatever was left of Chinese culture after the revolution was systematically wiped out by Chairman mao, and whats there now is whatever tune the current political leaders are whistling. Speaking of chairman mao, wasn't he the loon that executed like 95% of the educated population of china and left his mark forever on chinese society? See the problem was, he was an uneducated peasant, and feared anyone with an education. Very forward looking and embracing of technology. His body is still preserved and raised for the worship of the chinese masses every year, by the way. And as for static societies, China of all people cannot afford to throw bricks.
Chinese people are very much in tune with what is practical for getting ahead, both as a country and individually.
See above for the tune the Chinese people are dancing to.
There is a combination of old Confucian elements
Confucius ha. You are alone when you are born, and you're alone when you die. Better get used to the idea my bucko. Thats all I have to say on confucius.
In China, it's in fact the 'arts' majors who are looked down on.
You are somehow toting that as a good thing...
Chinese girls are in fact much more inclined to study science and tech
Well its a good thing they are no longer required to have their feet bound from birth then isn't it? Or no wait, that practise still happens all over China. Honestly if I had a choice between being a woman in Chnia and being a woman in Iran, I'd have to think long and hard about it.
A society which respects litigation and playing the stock market more than science and technology won't stay ahead too long.
Why does everyone assume western society starts at florida and ends in seattle? The old world is still very much alive and well, thank you very much. In fact most projections indicate the EU will be the next superpower, and if you think thats stagnant, baby you have a whole other think coming. With half the population of China and a vastly more advanced infrastructure, industry and educational system, unified Europe is the number one economic power on earth. All China is right now is a source of cheap labour with fixed currency rates to keep that labour permanently cheap, and it will be playing catch up for a long, long time.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I rarely notice when they try to hit on me! I am oblivious to most of the subtle attemps. I worked at a company for 3 years and on the day I left one of the guys asked why I'd always blown him off - I never noticed there was anything to blow off! Oops....
Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, which is why engineers sometimes smell really bad.
My question is, why are we so interested in trying to make people who aren't interested in the field get into it anyway? I mean, after those girls graduate from college because we've convinced them to go through this major, then what? I don't think they are going to stay in the industry very long. Let's be honest, it takes a particular mindset to really enjoy programming, and not everyone has it. This is true of every profession. Where is the big push to get more men into Early Childhood Education? Do you realize that nearly all preschool teachers are women? Maybe we need to change the educational system so that more men will be attracted to that major. Until I see people doing studies and mobilizing around this horrible gender gap in majors like Early Childhood, I am not going to waste too much time trying to change Computer Science either.
Everything is "Bob".
I'm a college freshman right now, and I have a few reasons I haven't leapt into computer science. The biggest and hairiest of these is that I have simply not had enough education in math/logic to be able to look at a CS career as a viable option. My teachers have, over the years, been either terrible or supremely unhelpful. I tried to get A+ certification in high school and ended up leaving the program because the teachers simply would not, or could not, help me understand the material, no matter how many different times I asked, no matter how many different ways I asked.
I am, unfortunately, not one of those types who is able to intuit my way through programs, to learn from reading a book, or to have something tossed brusquely at me and be able to parse it. I'm not sure where the fall-through has been over the years of my education, but my math and logic courses in my schools have been repeatedly incomprehensible in the way that they were presented, both to me and to many of the other girls around me. The thing is, when I got a tutor who spoke my language, the material was lots of fun. I really enjoy math/logic/programming when I get it, but the language used to teach it (and the base skills of years before, in elementary, middle, and high school) has been confusing. The feeling of frustration when I am sitting in a class and knowing that if the teacher (who has always been a 'he' save twice in my student career) explained it a little differently, I would be getting it instead of sitting there feeling like I was beating my head against a wall... it's terrible to sit there for an entire semester not understanding, and knowing that if it was explained a different way, you COULD.
So, like I said in the beginning, I'm afraid that if I take CS now (unable to afford a tutor anymore), I will have that same experience of just not being able to get it, the way that it's explained. I'm sick of feeling futile and frustrated and looked down upon. CS is interesting, but it's just not worth the furious struggle that it would take to become a fluent professional for me. I don't know how many other girls share my experience, but I suspect that there's more than one out there... it starts at an elementary school level, folks, not at a college one.
Hotness only has to be better than -10 !? Ewwww...
Think of someone with average intelligence. Now think 1/2 the world is dumber than that guy.
Well you see women are worth something while men are not. Men are worthless, who cares if they die or get maimed?
I find it interesting that it is always the guy that is characterized as lacking of social skills, when there are examples such as this that show up routinely.
Call it what you want, but I give the lack of ability to get a clue and lack of ability to give one one blanket ruling: social retardation that either sex can enjoy.
In my experience as a female computer engineer, there are many environments where women are not welcome, especially women who are not propperly submissive to all the men they work with. (Maybe a little bitterness is oozing through.) This has not always been my experience, and some environments are more gender neutral. However, had I known what an uphill battle I would be fighting, I wouldn't have gone into engineering. I'm not trying to prove anything, I am just trying to have a career, and be relativley successful. If a young woman were to ask me about a career in computer science, I would probably discourage her, as would 90% of my friends who are female engineers. As a female, there is frequently an assumption of incompetance, and inferiority, which my male counterparts claim to not experience. So, here I am working with all these men of inferior intellect, who are paid twice as much as me, are my bosses, (yes, I have four bosses, bossing me around), and make my work environment very difficult. In fact, I am bossed around my men at work so much, I am unwilling to date, because men I date want to boss me around too. (They want to "Be the MAN.") Argh!