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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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/)
... 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/
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.
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;
}
}
}
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.
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They much prefer a procedural approach.
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
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).
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
Maybe my experience wasn't typical, but I'm female and I never got any sense that I wasn't wanted in CS.
Don't forget that thanks to the dot-com boom, working in IT became fashionable, so that everyone from all walks of life wanted to get in on it. As a result, the old school computer nerds now work side by side with the jocks who beat them up in high school.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
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.
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.
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.
I've been programming since high school (86-87).s px (yes, the only girl here though)
I am
1. Not overweight. (120 pounds)
2. Not ugly. http://www.heartlandsi.com/HeartlandServices/IT.a
3. Not bi or lesbian (although the way men are, I have certainly considered going the other way, especially after dumping my last boyfriend -- in October)
4. Definitely not transgendered
Okay, so, am I a geek then? I call myself a geek cuz I would prefer to be in front of a computer than at some party somewhere. I do okay in social situations, but I do not enjoy them.
Yeah, I was not popular in school, but I didn't turn to computers, I turned to books. Computers weren't available to me until the middle 80's and even then, my favorite escape was a good fantasy Sci/Fi book. (aha! Another Geeky thing! I suppose I shouldn't mention that I never missed a Doctor Who episode while I was young?)
A few years ago, I just finished updating myself by getting a a second degree from Devry Online. There were a LOT of females in the online environment. There were at least 5 in every class and most classes had about 10 people.
I love my job. I love programming.
It's really sad that we females have to be stuck into a stereo type just to be good at something that is normally reserved for Geeks. In fact, I would have to say that I have met few "Geeks" as defined by Caspian, I have met many handsome, interesting, fun and exciting men who are in the computer field.
So, you don't want anecdotal evidence to the contrary. Why? Do you feel the need to justify yourself and your loneliness and don't want anyone to argue with you? What makes you the expert on the females in this field? Just because you don't happen to be someplace that is open to hiring females and to giving them a chance in what is still considered "a non-traditional" field for females?
I am not a feminist. I just happen to be happy what I'm doing. Programming. I did not go into this field because there are so few women. I did it because I enjoy it. I was always really good at it and loved the challenges that came from something that changes nearly every day.
I'm me, and I resent this and many of the other comments within this discussion.
Thanks for listening,
Kris (That girl in IT)
PS
I just gave up my moderation of this discussion to post this.
Remember when Windows were washed, mice were trapped and UNIX guarded the harem?
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
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.
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.
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.
Oh dear.
I checked, and the web page stats says the IT Page has been hit over 800 times since I posted that note...
That's more hits than we have had in one year...
*sigh*
Remember when Windows were washed, mice were trapped and UNIX guarded the harem?