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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.'"
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.
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/)
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/
They also have one of the most dangerous (your garbage collector is much more likely to be killed on the job than a cop) and important (along with your plumber, your garbage collector is more responsible for increased life expectancy than your doctor) jobs around.
Somewhere around here I have an old Fenton comic strip with dialog like this: "Did you know a garbage collector makes more than I do?!" "Then get a job as a garbage collector." "Are you kidding? You couldn't pay me enough for that kind of work!"
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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."
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
That's a good point. Walk into a comp-sci class and ask around. You will be hard pressed to find a single guy who wouldn't like more girls in his class - even ugly ones. The repulsion problems don't seem to start in the working world. In undergrad, most guys are more than cooperative to female classmates. Occaisionally pathetic and creepy, but cooperative.
I think it starts younger. Raise girls to be princesses and moms, and you get women who's highest goals are domestic crap and social climbing.
Buy your girls lego. It can be pink, but it still has to have wheels and jet engines.
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.
There are definitely racial elements to this. In most Asian cultures, education is of foremost importance. For many people (speaking from the Chinese perspective, but this also definitely applies to almost all other Asian cultures), majoring in a "slacker" major simply is not an option from the parents' perspective (art, music performance, history). The only accepted areas of study are the ones that have been proven to provide both financial stability and prestige (doctor, engineer, etc.) Of course, this effect is compounded by the fact that many first-generation immigrants are intimidated by language and cultural barriers, and professions like engineering (a decent living where possibly only minimal language skills are needed) are especially attractive. Of course, this is starting to change as more Asians are more assimilated into American and Canadian societies, there is a shifting trend of Asians participating in "less traditional" fields like law and politics (and music performance) as something to do for a living. I myself almost started at Julliard for music performance until I got sick of the competitive bullshit and went for engineering instead.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
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.
Just a random thought, but I wonder how much that has to do with communism. In the eastern european countries at least, the gender gaps were much smaller just because the communists did make things a lot more equal (everyone suffers equally, blah blah blah). The majority of the doctors I went to as a kid in Poland were women. Lots and lots of women scientists.
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
That's a great comment. I'm a Chinese guy, but US citizen now. All my cousins (all female) are still in China though. The way I look at it, it's a cultural thing. There is a HUGE difference in the fundamental career outlooks of Chinese people and Americans. The fact is, CS (and science / tech in general) doesn't get any respect in the US. I'm a CS major, graduating 2006. I've got a job offer for 85k next year. I'm not doing too bad for myself. But whatever your position is, as a CS person, you are socially classified as a geek. At my school, University of Virginia, being a rich frat boy and having a future in investment banking or law gets you a lot further status-wise even though you may not necessarily be paid more. It's just the way Western societies have been largely static for centuries now--people idolize artists, entertainers, businessmen. Rapid technological progress and the careers associated with it is a new phenomenon, and the Western mind hasn't really adjusted to that yet as far as I can tell. So CS people are relegated to nerd status.
The difference in China is that as a new society (not in the sense that China is new, but in that the current Chinese society is the result of extreme social revolution) -- Chinese people are very much in tune with what is practical for getting ahead, both as a country and individually. There is a combination of old Confucian elements and government direction stemming from revolutionary ideology here. In China, there is no such thing as a 'nerd.' There can't be, because science and technology is considered the career path of choice, much like law school is in the states. In China, it's in fact the 'arts' majors who are looked down on.
Look at where the politicians from the US and China come from. American politicians are mostly law school graduates who studied history or english or god knows what in undergrad. The top leaders of the communist party in China are almost all engineering graduates.
So basically yes, the parent is right-on. Chinese girls are in fact much more inclined to study science and tech because that's what's expected of them. And in my opinion, if this trend continues, we will see the consequences a few decades down the line in the form of a growing East-West technology gap. A society which respects litigation and playing the stock market more than science and technology won't stay ahead too long.
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.
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
You should check out an article at the Escapist Magazine discussing gender differences from an evolutionary pyschology standpoint. I'm not going to try and tell you it's in any way definitive, but I think it demonstrates a rationale framework for a biological basis for gender differences.
Women in Games, by Chris Crawford
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/17/3
You've go to remember that individual variation will be greater than group variation, and I definitely think that we sometimes use tradition to override individuality (and that's a bad thing). But to say that "it's just arbitrary tradition" doesn't really make sense: where do you think tradition comes from? Traditions evolved with society, and I think that both society and, therefore tradition, are essentially products of evolution.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
For example, the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers has the Go Eng Girl program that is supposed to reach out to girls in grades 7 - 10. One of the big things they want to do is lower math and science requirements because most women don't seem to like math and science (not my words, don't flame). Girls can then swap out a course they don't like for another, more 'softer' course when applying for university.
In my experience (I'm a guy), every girl I've talked to who's applying to university doesn't want to go into engineering. They'd rather save the world by going into life science or take hybrid programs like biomedical computing.
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?
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.
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
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.