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The Hidden Engineering Gender Gap
ifindkarma writes "Joyce Park, CTO of invitation site Renkoo.com, has written a two-part essay exploring why there is no pipeline of self-taught female engineers entering the tech industry via Open Source or other individual efforts. In The Hidden Engineering Gap, she asks why there are so many self-taught male software engineers in startups, but no similar pool of women. In A Modest Proposal, she discusses a potential short-term fix to the problem: a one-year, co-op, certificate-granting program for women set up and sponsored by Silicon Valley companies."
Er... A Modest Proposal? Perhaps we should eat some of the male engineers?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modest_Proposal
You're looking at the wrong meaning of the word. Engineer doesn't come from the word engine as in Internal Combustion Engine, it comes from the latin word for creation. So, an engineer is one who creates something. Since software engineers create programs, they are, in fact, engineers.
in the immortal words of socrates, "i drank what?"
This type of study has been done, ad infinitum. And any parent will tell you what will happen:
Most of the time, with no prompting, the girls will cuddle and mother the trucks that you give them, and the boys will throw the dolls.
There are inherent differences between girls and boys. And why wouldn't this be true? Every other species on the planet seems to recognize this fact.
Think of it this way. If the differences between male and female humans were arbitrarily decided by society, then how is it that every separate human culture on earth arrived at a similar result?
The experiment you describe happened thousands of years ago before there were baby dolls, footballs, and ovens. You can see the results of it by looking around you.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Nursing
I direct just such a post-baccalaureate program at Mills College in Oakland, California, not far from Silicon Valley. It is coed, although the majority of students are women. Many successful graduates have gone on to industry jobs and CS PhD programs. The application deadline is February 1, if any Slashdotters want to apply.
There was a recent article about the program in the San Francisco Bay Guaridan. For more information, see http://ics.mills.edu and/or contact me.
Instead of seeing this diversity to be a problem, we should see it as an asset. Next we'll see an attempt to make nursing "more blokey" so that we have more men in nursing. I doubt though that patient care will improve.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Axiom: Men and Women are identical mentally.
Query: Why are they different with regard to engineering?
Problem: Axiom is insane. No rational conclusion can be drawn from insane first premises.
Conclusion: As long as political correctness pervades our universities, any science they produce in these areas is warped.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
...And it influenced the GNOME project to open the Women Summer Outreach program and so on...
e nder_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf
e nder_Policy_Recommendations.pdf
It was a report commissioned by the European Union of all things. Have you every checked out the FLOSS Policy Support page?
http://flosspols.org/
Very interesting stuff.
And here's the article on their on gender findings:
http://flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D16-G
Along with their recommendations...
http://flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D17-G
A bit dry perhaps, but still a very interesting, and informative, read full of thorough investigation and professionally collected statistics.
http://mediagoblin.org/
In fact, Sweden has already banned research into gender differences in mental characteristics.
Apparently, an official on the regional level has decided not to give grant money for a book unless an interview with a feminist is removed. The feminist in question states that men's brains work differently and offers as proof the difference between mens and womens service station bathrooms.
"banned research" indeed.
A variety of reasons have been kicked around. Some off the top of my head:
Obviously, a big problem is that the debate is so charged that dispassionate, impartial discoveries and testings of hypotheses are very difficult. Even good unbiased studies will be regarded with suspicion.
In the US, Computer Science is possibly the most lopsided discipline of all. But in Israel, CS is about 50/50. I heard speculation that it was because CS is a relatively new discipline, so there aren't a bunch of crusty old prejudiced men putting up barriers like in all the other disciplines.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
It's an interesting idea - but from by time at Givat Ra'am, it's not true. (Givat Ra'am is the technical campus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem) There are more male CS majors than female, though by a smaller margin than here in the US (by which I mean only 2 or 3 to one - it's not like here, where they barely exist at many schools.)
I'm a concientious
The point I was trying to make is that recent (eg in the last 20-50 years) changes to the schooling system have already disadvantaged boys, certainly here in Australia. One example off the top of my head; smarter boys are picked on by their peers, with no threat of discipline. By doing little to address this, the school yard environment passively encourages stupidity in males.
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