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.'"
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.
Maybe my experience wasn't typical, but I'm female and I never got any sense that I wasn't wanted in CS.
I'm female. I started college in 1983, and I never noticed any gender bias.
Ada Lovelace was a complete fruitloop. She had a highly overinflated opinion of herself, and didn't create nearly as much as she was given credit for. Read The Cogwheel Brain by Doron Swade. It has exceprts from letters where she gushes about her on genius.
If you want a proper early female geek I'd suggest Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper. The "inventor" of the software bug. There were probably a decent number working in Blethcley park during the Second World War.
...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.
Feh. Have you dug around the many articles about women in computing here on /.? You can find plenty of men expressing the opinion that women should not enter software or engineering, because they "have different interests" or "aren't as capable at math and logic". Is the Dean of a major university saying exactly that not overt enough for you? Just because you won't hear that expressed in the halls of your workplace due to fear of reprisal doesn't mean the sentiment doesn't exist and that it doesn't enter in to hiring decisions.
So combine this active discouragement with the not overt but quite obvious to someone sensitive to them factors such as lack of female role models or even peers and I'm not surprised at all at the widening gender gap.
The problem with actively recruiting women is that we can't because they aren't there due to the problems above. The only part of the gender gap that "may or may not be simply the nature of things"* is the tendency of a privileged group to feel threatened by and try to exclude another group from joining and possibly stealing their privilege. Justifying their exclusion as being the natural state of things is absolutely classic.
* By the way, good job not being over or anything in your discouragement of women; just leave it open to debate like a good reasonable engineer. I'm sure no mere female will catch it and determine that the male establishment feels she doesn't belong. Is this what you meant by not actively discouraging?
The enemies of Democracy are
Americans don't take CS courses anyhow, and the asians and eastern europeans who do tend to come from male-dominated societies. Actually, Asia and Eastern Europe are far less male-dominated than the US. I suppose it has something to do with Communism and how it encouraged equality between the genders long before it was embraced here. In fact, pretty much all the women who study CS in my university are either from Asia or Eastern Europe.
Consider that 50 years ago, women were second class citizens. That is less than a generation ago.
No, that's actually more than 2 generations ago (and close to 3). (Unless, your mom and dad are 50 years older than you.)
Interestingly enough (to me) I have just finished sexual harassment training (stupid name; should be sexual harassment sensitivity training or something) and you can definitely ask someone at work out. What you cannot do is ask them again after they turn you down, or suggest that if they go out with you, it will help their career, or if they turn you down, that it will hurt their career. It's not harassment until you know it's unwanted (this is true of all harassment) and you can't know it's unwanted until you're told, so you get one shot at asking out a coworker... Make it a good one.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you can accept a strong geek Asperger's/Autism correlation, you automatically accept a gender correlation too (as Asperger's/Autism is more prevalent among males).
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
A 1 is not an automatic failure for skill checks http://www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/usingSkills.htm#
um... never mind.
uh-huh. Never heard of the Ladder Theory, have you? read it here then tell us what you think off all the guys hitting on you!
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
Who cares who studies it! Race and sex don't matter! ...
To me, it's irrelevant if fewer girls are going into engineering and CS programs.
In Meritopia where you think you live, race, gender, orientation, and ethnicity don't matter. Here on planet Earth, they do matter for the simple reason that as human beings we participate in human society and the time spent at work accounts for about 25-40% of our lives. I for one do not want that time spent in some Bizarroland where otherwise intelligent engineering types insist that the Way It Is Now really is the Way It Was Always Meant To Be. Talk about irony.
Here is one of many problems with increasing gender/race/etc. gaps in professions: it leads to stagnant work environments that undermine any semblance of merit-based promotions. Everyone in the company suffers when every manager thinks and acts the same and mentors/promotes only those people who are the physical reflection of their younger selves. This particular problem is real and easily measured: what percentage of non-white, non-male, non-straight, etc. people that graduate in profession X manage to reach the higher rungs, and how quickly do they do so compared to their white/male/straight/etc. peers?
Most of these kinds of problems have an insidious aspect that makes them hard to deal with: they can exist and have dramatic effect even when all decisions look fine at the local level. This is how person A (white, male, ME) can get a 20% salary increase in 36 months yet person B (black, male, a good friend of mine) can get only a 10% increase and be told "you need to do better" -- for work of equal difficulty and similar levels of success. I needed to do better too, but for "some reason" my manager didn't see that as a reason to withhold financial incentive. My friend later discovered that almost every black person in the facility faced similar issues year in year out. This despite the annual "diversity awareness" drives, and this was also a (ahem) Fortune-10 multi-national that we all recognize.
Since this is Slashdot, let me go further with a programming analogy:
You are responsible for maintaining an end-user application that runs on your customers' servers. Your customers insist that on many of their deployments the product is slower than it should be, sometimes unusably so. Your response is that you've never seen a problem in your development sandbox and back that up with data from several excellent profilers and debuggers. It must be PEBKAC, and management should trust you because you have a CS degree. Customers continue to complain, so someone with a Human Factors degree is brought in to examine the product. Instead of trying it out on their own development sandbox, they monitor the application directly on the customers' boxes. They sit back and watch the customers as they actually use the product, and they write a report detailing the procedures the customers are following and the actual outcomes. With this data they show that the customers are indeed seeing the problems. You immediately follow the procedures, but to your surprise you get the acceptable speedy behavior on your development box.
What do you do now? Do you argue that the outcomes didn't actually occur, that the code can't possibly do what it is in fact doing? Or do you look somewhere new? If you are familiar with the "mysterious bug that only appears for customers" then you know how easy it is for trivial, invisibile things to have large consequences later on.
Talking about society issues from an analytical perspective is often like being the developer who thinks every problem can be isolated and solved with good profiler/debugger. The problem itself is the way we think about the problem, and if we can't directly experience life outside our own upbringing (whatever that may be) then we have to take on a measure of faith what other people say. If women enrolled in CS programs say that they experience gender bias, and that it involves a lot of direct but non-verbal signals, then we have to accept that as fact and try to deal with it.
I'm of Russian descent (culturally), and I have to tell you, right on! :) Great comment there. When I was in the USSR (which no longer exists as such), there was no concept of a "nerd" at all. It was a wildly different thing for me to learn about "nerdiness" here in USA. In fact, I still don't associate mentally myself with nerds, although some people probably think I am (and I don't mind it either, although I don't encourage it). The whole "nerd" stereotype is really really lame, if you ask me, and it exists solely in USA, as far as I know. Where I came from often what would be called a "jock" and a "nerd" here would very OFTEN be the same person. It would be quite common that the person is doing very well athletically AND intellecitually, and there was no stigma against either. In other words, athletes were not automatically considered dumn and smart people were not automatically considered weak.
Heh, ok, as a geek guy who's always been rather shy (although less so nowadays), I've dated 3 "geek girls".
;-)
#1 - we used to go out to the bar after work (a whole group of us from the office) shoot pool, have fun, etc. A few times we'd leave and go to the diner together, or she invited me and this other guy we worked with, and his girlfriend, over for dinner... one night we went out, with a couple friends, they left earlier but her and I were talking, actually I was telling her I was interested in this other girl at work, and she said "you shouldn't date her, you should date me"...
#2 - she got hired as a temp, and we worked together for like 5 months, she had two kids, got a full time job with benefits (which she wanted for the kids - good mom, good choice), so I took her to lunch for her last day... and we wound up making out in the park after lunch and...
#3 - met her 1st day on a new job, she was desktop support, thought she was gorgeous, but somehow got the impression she was married. ok, she was seperated... but we became friends, and one october night working late she was 'cold' and I gave a good backrub I guess.. and... lets just say I could make her 'melt'.
I've never been the most 'forward' person, but all my relationships have started as friendships, not all friendships have become more, and it wasn't neccesarily my goal for them to become more, but all based on whether its 'clicked' between us or not. When its become more, we both felt it and took it there, when it didn't.. I'm still friends w/ most of them, ex-GF or just friend.
Having been on the opposite side of things, and having had a girl virtually *stalk* me, I know how ugly that can be. I'd rather have some good female friends (they have no issues with telling me what they think of any girl I'm interested in) than try and ask a girl out purely because 'she's cute'. Mindless, I've though every girl I've gone out with was 'gorgeous' (although I could show you pictures and I'm sure you might say their 'just ok', we all see things through our own eyes, filtered through our brains)...
But hey, I'm a romantic... I have to have a mental connection with a woman before I can carry the physical for more than a weekend (ok, I've a couple flings that I'm not exceptionall proud of).
That makes sense, but it's not what this sort of social policy is aimed at. You're objecting from the perspective of an individual, intellectually gifted woman, that you don't like being tagged as needing special attention because of your gender. And of course you don't need that attention, because you're unusually smart. But not everyone who does the equivalent of a bachelor's in CS is that smart, and social policy aimed at leveling the playing field for women in CS and other technical fields isn't aimed at "smart people" other than the average college level, bachelor's (sic) degree students.
You mentioned in an earlier post the implication that "poor stupid little girls just couldn't handle having big smart intimidating boys around" -- but that's exactly what research seems to have shown, in general: that most women (at least women raised in the U.S.) will avoid situations in which they have to compete with "intimidating boys". You just happen to be an exception. In this context, reaching out equally to boys and girls misses the point -- if the boys naturally create an environment that's unattractive to girls, you have to do something to even the playing field if you want anything to change.
Those airheads you're concerned about are a product of an imbalanced system, and change has to start somewhere. Of course, I'm not claiming that every affirmative action measure taken in favor of women is perfectly optimal, but I do think you should recognize that actions being taken to address pervasive influences that affect women's life choices don't necessarily have to make sense in your individual case, but can still make sense for society as a whole.