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CS Programs Changing to Attract Women Students
Magnifico writes "The New York times is running an article about a push by American universities to actively recruit women into Computer Science courses. The story, 'Computer Science Takes Steps to Bring Women to the Fold', explains that the number of women in CS is shrinking: 'Women received about 38 percent of the computer science bachelor's degrees awarded in the United States in 1985, the peak year, but in 2003, the figure was only about 28 percent, according to the National Science Foundation.' One of the largest barriers to recruiting women to the field is the nerd factor. To attract women students to the CS field, 'Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs Dr. Blum and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon instituted to draw more women into computer science.' Changes at CMU increased women students in the CS program from 8 percent to nearly 40 percent."
1) Geek woman get CS degrees & jobs.
2) Geek woman meets geek man.
3) ???
4) Aspergers!!!
Trolling is a art,
Just not in the USA; they are in China & India -- you know -- where all the job *aren't* going?..
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
If someone, male or female, is put off entering a particular study path because they're concerned about how other people will view them then they simply aren't passionate enough about it. Hell, they're not even interested in it. They're better off leaving the place open to someone a little less vacuous.
Maybe it's just me, but I see no reason why people need to be recruited into compsci. There's plenty of interest in it already. Should there be more men going to beauty school just to balance out the demographics a bit?
Let people decide what they want to do and stuff the perceived lack of equality.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs Dr. Blum and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon instituted to draw more women into computer science.
I realize that there is more to CS than programming, but I would be surprised if theoretical computer science, which is more math intensive, would be that much more appealing. . . . Any way you go, I don't see how to remove the nerd factor from CS.
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
I think dumbing the program down to attract women is ultimately a bad idea.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
This past year, I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. It has been a remarkable experience that I would like to share with the community. Here's an account of my experience.
Week 1, Sunday: I moved in today. My roommate, a sophomore CS student, had already moved in two days before me. The floor is already completely covered with garbage. He also smells. I think he might be gay too. He's already asked me if I like the color he painted his toenails. This should be interesting. I am almost completely settled in. Techno music is playing in every room in every floor of my dorm. There are computers and other types of trash out in the common areas. What a mess. Tomorrow, I am going to go sign up to get my network connection.
Week 1, Monday: I got hooked up to the CMU network today! I jacked into the network, only to find that the hostname and address assigned to me were colliding with another system. I'll just increment the network numbers a few times. I am really eager to get on.
Week 1, Tuesday: I am still looking for a free IP address. Can't anybody here properly configure their systems?
Week 1, Friday: I finally found a free IP! It's mine! You sons of bitches can't have it, I found it, I keep it, it's mine! To hell with all of you! Head hurts really bad. I've slowly been developing a headache since I first arrived. Everywhere I look there are these Lucent Technologies wireless access points. I wonder if that's the problem.
Week 1, Saturday: I sat down at my computer today. My desktop wall paper is now the goatse.cx guy. Pleasant. Scattered over every directory on my C: drive are thousands, possibly millions, of files titled "J00AR30WN3DBITCH-phj33r-" and then some random hacker's name. Don't these people have lives? Maybe they need laid or something. It'd take days to clean this out. I mentioned to my roommate that I needed to reinstall Windows, and immediately he jumped up and shouted: "NO! Do NOT use Windows!" Suddenly, two dozen other guys (all of them possibly homosexuals) appeared at the door, each touting an operating system called Linux. Half of them got into a fight over which was better, Debian, RedHat, Slackware, and a bunch of others I couldn't recognize. Some kid who appeared to not have showered since he was born was touting "Linux From Scratch," saying that only losers used pre-made distros. A crowd of people in the back kept quiet about how I'd be sorry if I used Linux instead of BSD on the network. Who the fuck are these people? Classes start next week. Hope I have my computer working so I can do my assignments.
Week 3, Friday: People are still trying to get Linux to work on my system. They keep telling my that my hardware sucks. We go through about four or five distributions a day. Every now and then, I notice a little devil on my screen. Stickers for every of these distributions have been plastered on my case. Suddenly, my room stinks a lot more with these people in here. I ask them why they never shower, and the usual response is something along the lines of "showering is like rebooting" and "I don't want to lose my uptime."
Week 3, Saturday: There's a troop of men running naked in a circle around McGill Hall. I am not even going to ask.
Week 4, Wednesday: Linux is FINALLY working on my computer! I have a pretty slick desktop too. I think I might like this. I can finally work in my room instead of the labs, although considering the every increasing layer of garbage on the floor...
Week 4, Thursday: My computer flashes messages about how I am "0WNX0RED" and how I should "PHJ33R" whoever and how "L4MEX0R" I am for having an insecure box. A kid suggests we reinstall Linux after discovering about 17 rootkits.
Week 5, Friday: Someone got BSD working on my computer. I wonder if this will last. The stress has been building and I forgot to
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Soooo let me get this straigth, to attract women they actually need to reduce proficiency? Is their job teaching or meeting quota?
Why should it matter who is getting comp-sci degrees. Shouldn't we care that the candidates are good and not what colour, race or sex they are?
UNIX/Linux Consulting
They intend to attract more CS students by eliminating the need for programming skills? I have heard time and time again from recruiters that more and more CS graduates are completely incapable of programming, so why exacerbate the problem by graduating even more students who are unable to perform adequately?
CS is more than just programming, but a CS student incapable of programming is about as useful as a physicist who cannot do math. To suggest that the standards of a program should be relaxed to achieve parity between the genders is ridiculous. What are we to do in other fields, where the number of women exceeds that of men? In the field of education, are we supposed to graduate students who don't know how to teach? Are art majors supposed to leave school without learning any technique?
Pax Digitalia
Wait, so what's the point?
New webcomic updated on Sundays: HERE
This is a good idea and I think it could equally be applied to boosting the numbers of under-represented groups in other areas. For example, proficiency at flying should no longer be a requirement for airline pilots. And surgeons shouldn't have to be good at doing operations. To say otherwise is elitist and divisive.
Did anyone stop to think that perhaps women just aren't interested in Computers courses at college?
Certainly not a bad thing getting more Women in to Computing though. Right now, there's one female member of the development team where I work as a programmer (and I didn't do a CS course FYI).
ilovegeorgebush
...try shifting the emphasis toward corn muffins and lobster bisque! Seriously, the program directors should focus on producing top-level, competitive people regardless of their demographic.
Or even reduced ?
are these missing the point that even the smallest piece of crap that operates in anything computer related has programming involved in it ?
are they giving a computer science education, or running a matchmaker service ?
Read radical news here
"Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs..."
Isn't that like changing an auto-mechanics class so that it has "less emphasis on repairing mechanical problems" ?!?!?! It's a "success" that they attracted more women, but they "succeed" in graduating women who can code?!
When I went to BYU around the start of the dot com boom, there was a lot of talk about how the women graduates were in demand and (from our school at least) they made more on average than their male counterparts. A big recruiting bullet point was the possibility that women could have kids and work from home. From what I'd heard, that didn't pan out as well as hoped and while at-home jobs ARE possible they are still far from a given and most still need to go into the office regularly. Has the ability to work from home improved significantly since those days?
Shouldn't CS programs be changing to adapt to business needs ( like a real networking degree )? Or how about a CS program that changes to better educate the students?
Seems somehow wrong to be cattering to a gender.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
As a current Computer Science major at Georgia Tech I agree there aren't enough women in CS, but should they really change the requirements? Shouldn't the degree program be setup in the best way to train students to work in the industry. Programming is a very vital part of computer science. If you can't program, you should look into another field of study.
'Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs
Maybe they should try nursing.. if they can handle sticking people.
"The nerd factor is huge," Dr. Cuny said. According to a 2005 report by the National Center for Women and Information Technology, an academic-industry collaborative formed to address the issue, when high school girls think of computer scientists they think of geeks, pocket protectors, isolated cubicles and a lifetime of staring into a screen writing computer code.
Well, the pocket protectors, and I'd imagine think black glasses with white tape on them, are obviously not true, the rest of it is pretty accurate.
"They think of it as programming," Dr. Cuny said. "They don't think of it as revolutionizing the way we are going to do medicine or create synthetic molecules or study our impact on the climate of the earth."
Yeah, doing all sorts of cools stuff, through programming.
Maybe the problem isn't with computer science being nerdy or writing code, just maybe the problem is with assholes spouting off to media trying to make being nerdy into a negative stereotype, and trying to make sound as if writing code is somehow uninteresting.
One of the largest barriers to recruiting women to the field is the nerd factor. To attract women students to the CS field, 'Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs Dr. Blum and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon instituted to draw more women into computer science.'
Hey, why don't you drop the computer bits altogether and replace it with knitting?
Seriously, if women aren't attracted to things like programming, then they shouldn't be taking computer science. Of course, we all know that there are women who like programming, even if they are a minority, the real issue is whether or not those women get a fair shot at it, not the absolute numbers. Mollycoddling students by partially skipping programming is only going to produce even more clueless graduates than usual, at which point people will be asking "How come fewer female graduates are employable? Let's make their jobs easier by skipping the programming there too!"
Too bad. CMU had been a well-respected university. Are there any other schools that are also likely to be dropping off the map in the near future because of similar schemes?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I went to highschool and college with a girl who was in most of my CS classes. She was a hotty, cool as hell, and a college athlete. Not nerdy in any sense. I think she went into teaching afterwards. Her father is/was a college CS prof, so I think that's where that came from. If that's true that she's teaching, I'm not sure if it's good or a waste.
Unrelated. Man, there are tons of Chinese women programmers at the new company I work at. Seems like a pretty good pool of talent to draw from.
Okay, I didn't know what to put in the subject line.
The article says that the reason the numbers are so low is: "when high school girls think of computer scientists they think of geeks [...] and a lifetime of [...] writing computer code." Instead the universities would prefer to see CS as "the intellectual challenge of applying the study of cognition and the tools of computation to medicine, ecology, law, chemistry -- virtually any kind of human endeavor."
In order to make computer science more attractive (especially to women) some universities have dropped programming experience as an admission criterion. Isn't this misleading advertising, since you will never be able to get around the programming requirements in the actual CS program? And if you are only interested in CS because of its applications in, e.g., medicine, wouldn't you be better off studying that and taking additional CS courses during your studies? In that way you will even be able to convince some women that CS is attractive to them, because they see what they can use it for. And maybe they will switch to CS or do another degree in it later.
So now you don't have to program in order to be a computer scientist, Cool! Does that mean that I don't need to learn about all those chemicals to be a chemist?
You mean that there might have been something to what Larry Summers said about women in science and engineering, that resulted in feminists getting the vapors? At my alma mater, we had some professors who were great on the "science" of Computer Science, and light on the actual application through programming, and guess what? They were the most useless professors we had at teaching. Our hardware expert couldn't code in any language or even write ASM to illustrate what he was explaining.
So, to make CS safe for women, we'll make it a degree factory. I'm sure my fiancee, who graduated as a programmer, not a "theorist" will be thrilled to know that CS programs are catering to the women who, unlike her, in our classes couldn't program their way out of a paper bag with the top lifted up.
So, how many of you are going to volunteer to go to Carnegie Mellon now to scope out future talent for your corporation?
Moving emphasis away from Patient Care proficiency will draw more men into Nursing! We must address the gender imbalance in nursing!
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
...our new busty, scantily-clad programming overlords.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Why couldn't they have done this when I was in school? It was a regular sausage fest in my FORTRAN 77 class.
Bullshit.
If there was that big of a demand over here then more people would be getting into it to take advantage of the high salaries.
There's demand, but there's also a limit to how much will be paid. So it is all about the "cheap labor".
because they are attracting more qualified female applicants? Or could it possibly be that they are just admitting more females(could be both as well). Carnegie Mellon is an elite school, if they decided they were going to accept more female students, then odds are they would find no shortage of applicants. However, more likely than not those applicants are people who are obviously passionate about CS and would have probably ended up at another program if they were not accepted by CMU. So does this really increase the number of females studying CS overall? Or just at a particular university?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
These days CS is entirely about repeating buzzwords and getting a job as consultant with a wage that entirely depends on your buzzword vocabulary (Look at the Articles passed by Zonk and you know what I'm talking about).
If you don't like that, then stop studying CS and start working for your own instead. Work on your own projects. Learn PHP. Earn some money by adding adsense to your projects and be happy with the greates of all hobbies.
Don't let the IT business ruin that for you.
It took me a year to get the bitterness and buzzwords out of my head. The IT business is made for people who want to earn money the easiest way possible (With buzzwords). IT business can kill the motivation in people who like to tinker and create things.
I went to college between 1995 and 2000 (co-oped for a couple of semesters) and this was already a big issue with our local administrators, especially the only female professor on the staff. She was always going on trips to high schools around the area trying to get women interested in computer science. She organized (with the help of the ACM) computer science events that were marketed towards girls (especially in high school) to try to convince them to enter the field. They most certainly did not reduce the math, programming, and other "nerdy" parts of the curriculum to try to attract more girls.
On the other hand, all of that work was apparently for naught because my graduating class of around 50 students had exactly 1 female graduate (who was already married). While our year was especially bad, the numbers for the other years weren't much better. We did start with considerably more girls freshman year, but almost all of them dropped out when they realized that the large amount of homework and projects would cut into their evenings and weekends a lot, and when they realized they were literally one class away from a Math minor.
I read the internet for the articles.
If they do this all my fellow male CS students won't be paying attention to the lectures anymore. Have you ever seen nerds around women?
Let's just issue more H1Bs so we can outsource the whole mess.
There's no reason for American to futz with this stuff, we're just not competitive in computers anymore.
India can do it cheaper so why bother? Americans can sell real-estate or be venture capitalists.
They claim that it is NOT dumbing it down.
But I cannot find a comparison between their graduates and the graduates of any other school.
Who really cares how many X you graduate if they're the lowest scoring graduates in the industry?
Now, if they can increase enrollment (and graduation) while maintaining scores that are at least average for all the other schools, that's good.
I don't see how focusing on getting more X into the field would result in that, though.
CS without programming is just a math degree, right? Why not call it that and be done?
Also, 28%?! It's more like 8% here.
They are in small to medium size companies. The large companies will play with hiring contractors, but few are moving their work overseas. The only companies really moving the jobs overseas are monster companies that have enormous IT operations or those that are pure IT companies. MS, IBM, HP, ATT, QWEST, Verizon, etc. are all moving jobs overseas. The reasons vary, and the results more so. Where the large companies have found is that hiring in India is difficult due to the fact that the good ones have already been hired on. Now, the majority are those coming from starter schools and 2 year schools. In addition, Indian law makes firing somebody difficult (as hard as in much of europe). At this time, India is actually worse then hiring in America.
That is why Argentina is catching on. If and when Russia ever gets their act together and create better laws for a business world (and enforces them), then that will be THE place to be.
But even with all that, we will still have plenty of good CS jobs here. But I maintain, that we CSers are better off starting our own companies. Even if you have to do a dozen of them before succeeding.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
So it is sexist to let women naturally enter into a field. But it is _not_ sexist to dumb down a field with the intention of drawing in women?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Not everyone needs to go into CS. Just enough, regardless of sex or the ability to attract a mate.
Women received about 38 percent of the computer science bachelor's degrees awarded in the United States in 1985, the peak year, but in 2003, the figure was only about 28 percent, according to the National Science Foundation.
I graduated in the late 80s from the University of California, I expect my class offers some insights into that 38%. 38% in 1985 is highly misleading. While I recall 30'something percent nearly all were foreign students, only a handful were US citizens. Before we start trying to address American cultural issues and American perceptions, we need a breakdown of those 1985 and 2003 figures showing foreign and US numbers.
No wonder they are pushing Java so much...
Maybe I'm just a big meanie, but if you can't cut the programming aspect of CS, I doubt you'll really be all that useful when it comes to using computers to "revolutionize" solving those big, complex medical/physics/climate problems. If you're good at working on those problems in their domain, but suck at programming, maybe you're in the wrong degree program.
I'm all for coming up with new ways to get people interested in CS, so long as it doesn't involve trying to convince them that it's not all about the "hard" stuff that's kinda central to the field.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Not WOMEN students! I don't know why the media has started using WOMEN as an adjective. You don't see them using the word MEN instead of MALE (e.g., "CS Programs Changing to Attract Men Students").
Sorry... just a pet peeve of mine.
Direct quotes from the article:
"but the truth is when companies offshore they are more or less doing it for access to talent."
Others accuse her and her colleagues of lowering standards. "Well, we would not have success if we did," she said.
So Companies are going overseas because they need access to talent and we are lowering the standards to provide more people with less talent?!?!?
This is all part of the growing pains of a relatively new, hot field. This too shall pass.
If you can't handle the political correctness, you guys should hop on over to the Electrical Engineering department. There's absolutely no effort to dumb things down to recruit girls here -- the math is about 20 dB more difficult, and there's no way around that.
Besides that, if you do encounter a girl, odds are about 2 to 1 she doesn't even speak English.
So come on over to EE. Nobody cares how socially inept you are here. The nerd factor has been converted to the frequency domain, where it's just lost in the noise.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
let me say this... you can change up the university degree all you want and you will not radically change the gender makeup of the student body as that is not where the problem is... it's in the highschools.
The number of girls that are presured by friends, family and even teachers to get out of maths and into the arts and social sciences is crazy. "Math just isn't a good choice for you... how about law? or history?", if this was just from other girls it wouldnt be as bad, but that quote was from my algebra teacher (a course which I got a 90% in dispite his dislike of me). Young girls are actively presured by teachers and adminsistration to avoid maths and science.
If you really want to get more girls into comp sci, stop highschool teachers from telling us what we can and can not do.
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
Actually, I would. There aren't that many theoretical physicist jobs (or theoretical physicists). Most people studying physics are studying it because it relates to their REAL interest (such as engineering).
Computer science is not about programming. It is about UNDERSTANDING programming. Programmers can take any number of 2 year degrees and be proficient enough in a language to get a job. They don't need to know how to write a compiler.
You can take CompSci out of programming and still have a decent BEGINNER programmer.
If you take the programming out of CompSci you have someone who knows the theories, but cannot do anything with that knowledge.
When I took Computer Science in the mid to late 1970's, there were almost as many females as males. Of course, the perception of programmers as nurds wasn't as fully developed then - indeed I don't recall that term even being used.
It suggests to me that public perception, even when it's sort of funny and not intended to be mean spirited, can be damaging.
The head of the CS department demands, as is "his right as a man", to be called "Loretta".
He also demands the right to have babies.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Pink iBooks.
Read the comments above and weep. Who would want to study, let alone work, in an environment with a bunch of sexist men (boys?) like these.
The article isn't talking about removing programming from computer science, but removing programming as a entry requirement for computer science. Just as OB-GYNs aren't required to have given birth before applying to medical school.
But, you have to admit that the field isn't all that attractive on the outside to women.
Pros of a career in computing:
Cons that might make this unappealing:
I'm all for diversity, but let nature take its course. We should be more focused on getting domestic students interested in the field at all, regardless of gender. For those of us who love it, it's been a tough 5 years or so. Outsourcing is on everyone's mind...the truth is that working for ultra-big companies is going to be less of an option in another 5 years or so. It's going to be the medium-sized companies employing IT people domestically.
Also, we should focus on quality of graduates. I love my work, and really try my best every day to make sure anything I do is done right. Many others are _still_ here for the money, even after the dotcom mess. I just want people to work with who can correctly troubleshoot a problem, and apply logic instead of randomly changing things until they work. Developers who produce optimized code wouldn't hurt either...I'm sick of tiny apps requiring 512 MB of RAM to run correctly (and that's not Java either!!)
Obviously Women are capable of being good programmers so to chage CS programs by not focusing on the task 90% of CS majors will be doing in the workplace does a disservice to all of them and their male counterparts.
I'd be overjoyed to see the percentage of women in my courses get above 10%. But I don't think that changing course content should be the answer, since I don't think it's the problem. Instead, I'd blame:
1.) Lack of any experience of CS in high school. Even in schools that offer AP CS (which mine didn't), isn't it usually an elective that could just as well be filled with a language or second science course or music, etc? Since it's not a required class like math or chemistry, it's pretty easy to graduate from high school without ever even realizing computer science exists... or that you're good at it or like it.
2.) And when you get to college, who wants to have all their courses with just guys? Especially when everyone knows that CS majors are nerds? So why bother seeing if you like it? If everyone there already is a guy, then they must be better at or it something, right? Why else would it be so unbalanced?
3.) Bad advising. When I told mine I wanted to take intro to CS, because I was planning on majoring in chem and thought it might be useful, she told me I should take a humanities course instead, because I'd probably get a better grade. Luckily I decided to take it anyway and liked it enough to change my major.
And now when I try to convince friends to take the intro course (because I thought it was fun... and it could be good to know anyway), my guy friends tend to say that it sounds interesting, while my girl friends usually say something about how they'd probably fail. I think until the perception of who can take CS classes and do well in them changes, changing the curriculum or appearance of the program won't do much.
One of the largest barriers to recruiting women to the field is the nerd factor. To attract women students to the CS field, 'Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs Dr. Blum and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon instituted to draw more women into computer science.' - how do we really know that those 28-38% are not the number of women who would go into this field anyway, whatever the stigma is?
"Women are the canaries in the coal mine," Lenore Blum, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, told an audience at Harvard University in March, in a talk on this "crisis" in computer science. Factors driving women away will eventually drive men away as well, she and others say. - there is a crisis in computer science, really? That is fascinating. Let's paint it pink, maybe the crisis will go away? Seriously though, I do not believe in crisis in computer science, I also do not believe that trying to show comsci off as something it is not will not help the issue (too few beautiful females in the software cubicles.)
And there is widespread misunderstanding about jobs moving abroad, said Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington. Companies may establish installations overseas to meet local licensing requirements or in hopes of influencing regulations, he said, "but the truth is when companies offshore they are more or less doing it for access to talent." - isn't that the MS line, that they cannot find enough talent in North America? What, with about a third of a billion people here the tallent is excruciatingly hard to come by.
"Cheap labor is not high on the list," Dr. Lazowska said. "It is access to talent." - bullshit. I am a contractor working mostly in GTA (Canada,) all the outsourcing that I have witnessed within multiple companies is justified by 'low cost' argument, none is justified by 'we cannot find talent' bs.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, demand for computer scientists in the United States will only increase in coming years, Dr. Cuny said. "If you look at the demographics of the country, if we are not
going to get our new professionals from women and minorities and persons with disabilities, we are not going to have enough." - yep. We need the women and the crippled (do emotionally crippled count?) don't forget about minorities. Excuse me? There are PLENTY of so-called minorities in this field. In many firms the software dep's are dominated by minorities (well on my experience, and I've been around, by the way is it just Toronto, or do whites come off as visible minority in the US as well?) By the way in the Chinese 'minorities' who are in comsci the % of women is much higher than in the white folks.
"The nerd factor is huge," Dr. Cuny said. According to a 2005 report by the National Center for Women and Information Technology, an academic-industry collaborative formed to address the issue, when high school girls think of computer scientists they think of geeks, pocket protectors, isolated cubicles and a lifetime of staring into a screen writing computer code. - <sarcasm>Oh, no, in this field you will be surrounded by beautiful socially apt people, with great personalities. You will become a celebrity and will be stalked by paparazzi, who will fight each other just to take your picture and post it on the cover of Glamour.</sarcasm> Ok, not everything in this field is about pocket protectors, isolated cubicles and computer screens, but a lot of it is. A
LOT.
This image discourages members of both sexes, but the problem seems to be more prevalent among women. "They think of it as programming," Dr. Cuny said. "They don't think of it as revolutionizing the way we are going to do
medicine or create synthetic molecules or study our impact on the climate of the earth." - they should through more buzzwords into this. Think about it as not of programming software for whatever purpose, think about
it as of rev
You can't handle the truth.
All the negative publicity about outsourcing and immigrant labor discourages the students who would enter the field for money. People say theres lots of high-paying jobs out there, but the press refutes that.
It's the same thing with sanitation engineers (garbage collectors), Political Science -how that's a science is beyond me, and every other field that tries to pump up their own egos and legitimacy by naming it a "science" or "engineering".
Here's my suggestion: If we want to get more women into computer science, engineering, math, nuclear waste disposal, car repossession, or any other field, why not just pay more for that job? If starting salaries for CS were, say $250k, I'll bet we'll see a lot of women signing up. We'll probably see a lot of other minorities, ethnic groups and sexual preferences sign up too.
I had conversations about this with female colleagues, usually after they gave a tour of our workplace to some high school girls with the intention of showing them how "exciting" our work was. It was usually the last conversation of any kind I had with them
It occurs to me that since most CS grads are already having to compete with outsourced workers in far off places, that adding an extra burden on employability is perhaps, premature?
Politically incorrect or business case unjustifiable though it may be, when the choice came down to a guy with a first class degree in a faded megadeath t-shirt smelling vaguely of pizza, or a hot girl with a 3rd class degree, which would you rather choose to hire?
And I'm noticing that there's been 103 posts so far and no-one has mentioned ponies. Is everyone new here? Or am I the only guy left?
I remember one day in school I was going to class and I noticed a small poster that was advertising the CS/CENG department. The poster had a group of people in one of our labs poking wires into some breadboards, looking at stuff on computer screens, having a great time. The group consisted of about half normal looking guys and half semi-attractive girls.
I immediately wondered who in the hell these people were. They certainly weren't the guys (notice I don't say "people") that were in all my classes. Then I looked a little harder and I recognized them as being some of the Industrial (Imaginary) Engineers I had shared classes with earlier in college. Did somebody just gather them up and say, "Okay, put some wires into that and look interested"? Probably.
Needless to say I felt somewhat insulted. I'm not sure of the degree of distribution of that poster, but I guess it was to lessen the nerd factor of the program. If they had put our ugly mugs on it, nobody would want to sign up.
I find it interesting that the perception is that there aren't a lot of women in IT/CS. As both a contractor and a full time employee, I've noticed that the number of women in an organization has more to do with the attitudes of the organization and less to do with the job.
Some data points: My current team is 50/50 male/female, all engineers. The extended team maintains that ratio when you bring in QA and PM. Only when you bring in the professional services people does the ratio slip. If you take the whole company, only professional services, internal IT, and sales are under the 50/50 ratio.
I also found this to be true at a PPOE, a major university affiliated hospital. Where I did not find it to be true were several "dot bombs" I worked for. There was a strong good-ole-boy feeling at those places that I imagine would be unattractive to female applicants.
Both type of environments share similar traits in their own groups:
Female friendly places tended to have a more "academic" feel - not necessarily in academia but an environment of knowledge and growth; the environment tended to have a strong professional level of conduct and a strong work ethic.
Female un-friendly places tended to have a more confrontational environment, with more competition among teams and team members. Ego was emphasized, and the environment was more "locker room" than office sometimes. Professionalism was equated with how quickly you could close a deal or come up with an angle. Many of these organization were more sales oriented than engineering oriented.
Just my opinion of course, but one that seems to hold true in my experiences.
RM
}#q NO CARRIER
I am a CS grad and about 75% of my friends are women. The key is not to dull down the CS course work but to simply GET A LIFE. Go out, break away from the PC and meet some people. It helps to enjoy some parties. You will have plenty of alone time when those long programming projects and algorithms exams are due. Lowering the bar for CS just makes the degree less credible and ultimately worthless to those who graduate. When they apply for a job and have no idea what is going on because they are constantly researching in books to find out how to write a piece of code, they will simply be fired and replaced by CS majors who know what they are doing.
Changing a CS degree to contain elements of Fashion Design would achieve the same results. That does not mean it's a good idea. Watering down one degree for mass appeal inevitably reduces the proficiency of graduates in the specific areas targeted. Mass appeal is no indicator of quality.
Perhaps a better solution is a wider range of degrees and options for those that wish to avoid programming, while retaining courses for those with a genuine interest.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
But isn't "Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency..." like police planning to recruit more women by telling them they won't have to make arrests?
To me this is demeaning to women and may damn well make the degree itself worth a lot less if they succeed in doing this. Not every field is going to be equal. I don't, for instance, see a lot of men going into the administrative assitant field--even though some men can type much faster than women.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
Everyone assumes a level playing field, that is, everything is *hunky-dory* with the way things stand, but given that statistically talent must spread across both sexes, it ain't. We get put in these boxes with labels and it's hard to break out. Never has been, and never will be, unless changed are forced through. CS misses out on a lot of talent because of the way things are currently pre-ordained. I would say the real changes should happen in the primary and secondary layers of education. By the time we get to tertiary education, the molds are set.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Who cares if its degrading or whatever, the real problem is this: If women know about computers then they won't call me to come fix them, how the hell am I suppose to get invited into their room if they don't need my tech support anymore!?
Mod me up, mod me down, do your worst you modding clown.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This forum -- ./ -- is a good example of what repels many women and non-geek guys. Note that I said "geek" not "nerd." People that bite the heads of chickens to get attention. Or brag about knowing all the details of Virtual Universe .viper framework, and deride anyone who've never heard of it. Or groove on adversarial games.
I object to the characterization of the solution as removing the emphasis on programming. Programming is foundational to computer science, in addition to algorithms, theory, systems and applications. What is not foundational is memorizing some complex and bloated IDE and the associated dogma of contemporary software development practice. The hurdles one has to overcome in programming using contemporary tools are immense, and one of the biggest hurdles is the existence of people who belittle them.
Women can and do survive and thrive in competitive technical environments. That's not what's turning them off. It is the culture; at least their perception of the culture. Perhaps their impression is not fair. There are CS people who bathe occasionally, have an interest in the arts and humanities, and so on. If we really want to attract women, and non-geek men, we'd better put more of these people forward as role models.
Some women gave it a go their first year, one that I knew of because her boyfriend was a CS major, and couldn't hack it. Women have been working HARD to become respected in a field dominated by men. This is just going to set our hard work back by 10 or 20 years. Bad idea.
I knew I wanted to be a programmer when I was 5 back in the early 80's. I would program along with Byte magazine on our Apple IIe that was state-of-the-art at the time, complete with modem. I don't want to be working with EITHER gender who really truely is not a geek at heart. I have, and do, work with them now and in the past, and it's no fun for anyone. They only learn enough to do their jobs and take no initiative to learn new technologies or go outside their comfort zone.
Please please please don't do this to us. Working in the real world in CS is NOT female friendly, so schools shouldn't sugarcoat it.
All my money went to Nigeria and all I got was this lousy sig. . .
Why is there a desire to get women into CS programs, Men and women are different, they gravitate towards different fields. that is human nature. It might just be time to accept that.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
in several professions.
You no longer need any proficiency in marketing or sales to enter these jobs.
All aspects of social work banned any form of proficiency several years ago.
We were gratified recently when one of our shining examples made it right to the top of the political tree, and started ensuring that the military top brass showed no proficiency in running wars. Our Foreign Policy has been proficiency-free for some time now as well.
See? It's not so bad! Shortly we are going to start an exciting move towards proficiency-free Civil and Marine Engineering!
When I was choosing what field to go into, I considered CS. I decided against it precisely because I didn't want to be the only woman studying or working with only men. (There were other factors too, like I was slightly more interested in other things, but that was a major factor.) I don't really mind working with guys--in fact, sometimes I prefer it, depending on the guys--but I don't want to be the token chick.
Too bad, because it programming was one of my best classes in high school. I liked the problem-solving and creative aspects of programming, and also UI design. If anything, the class wasn't challenging enough.
A friend of mine is one of those very women at CMU right now. She has told me all sorts of wonderful stories about how she hates to actually program but she loves all the theory classes. She has some idea that she should never have to program, that she should graduate and be paid lots of money for her wonderfully educated ideas, and give her algorithms to some high school kid paid minimum wage to write her program.
Personally i find it ridiculous. CompSci is both, you have to understand the theory but you also have to understand how to program. You have to be able to understand what the computer is doing and then be able to fully implement your algorithm in code. She's correct, any half nerdy high school kid can write code, but it takes experience and knowledge to be able to write code well and efficient.
Besides, have you ever met a Math major who didn't like to, want to, or feel that they should have to actually solve equations?
Let me get this straight ... Women get more university degress than men today (albeit, most degrees women get are in Women's Studies, etc., but still), and now they want to WIDEN the gap even more? Feminism is indeed alive and well and stronger than ever.
The National Center for Women and Technology is funded by Microsoft and Avaya (which "specializes in call center technology", according to Wikipedia). This sounds like a keep-wages-down lobbying effort, like Microsoft's lobbying for more H1B visas.
Microsoft needs low-wage customer-paid armies of second-tier people to keep their software mess going. It's in their interest that computer science education be dumbed down.
As a CS major, I found out quickly that a LOT of the boys had more programming know-how than I did -- and I swept the floor with the idiots I put up with in AP CS! In both classes I was the 'Odd Girl Out', but I quickly went from one of the smarter students to the midrange once the pool widened.
I CAN program, I just sort of prefer to program when I can instantly see what I'm doing; i.e. interfaces and website programming as opposed to engines and threads. Admittedly I've got a hard liberal arts slant going on, which affects at least some of my work.
The problem is that the CS programs at most places are aimed for a VERY narrow subsection, both of boys and of girls, and this serves nobody's best interests. Ironically, it's also why people are looking for 'More Women' in the hopes they'll crack the nut. Georgia Tech's recent broadening of their CS degree with the 'Threads' program is an interesting approach by allowing for a more customizable education -- and theoretically open the door to more people in general (not just women) who might be scared off by the narrower curriculum -- but I don't think it's enough.
And in the time I took to hit reply you've already got two other responses trying to change the subject rather than acknowledge the discrimination.
Uh, but the problem is that the GP (the post you responded to), was the one bringing up a non sequitur. Whether there's discrimination or not, TFA doesn't really get into it -- what they're talking about is changing the nature of the discipline in order to make it more attractive to (stereotypical) women.
Frankly I think there's a ton of borderline bigotry in that. It's not solving any real problems, just burying them and probably creating a lot of bad feelings in the process that are just going to fester and rear their head later on.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
From my experience I can say that people that are CS grads or are working programmers or are just into software and stuff were into it in high school and earlier. All my friends who are were in CS all learned a large bulk of their programming knowledge when they were in high school. Which says a lot. Good programmers aren't just coders and blah, they are smart well educated people and for the most part self educated. I never really relied on school to teach me what I need to know. I also have the drive to be able to do everything myself (working on cars, fixing stuff, building stuff etc.) Not everyone has this desire or need to really understand everything they come across and it's that desire that is really needed to be good. As for the lack of females in CS I would attribute it to parenting and tv, movies, media etc. People that weren't or aren't bad ass enough to be able to do things on their own like learning or making stuff, I believe, are the ones that bring upon this image that it is not cool to be a programmer or CS student or whatever. There is also the factor that to be good at programming and such you cant put much of your time into your social life (well I am not applying that to everyone, I know many good people that balance it all). Also for the most part parents of kids who are in high school or are going into college are from before computer stuff became cool and way awesome so I think that contributes to parents pushing their daughters to do something other than CS or other hard sciences. As I am a supporter of influencing children to make change in the world I suggest that we start from elementary school all through high school making some sort of requirements or something to encourage computer proficiency and instill an image that programming and CS are cool and good things. Also we would have to make a few really well written dramatic tv series' showing software developers and hackers and whatever in a cool light (of course played by sexy actors because we have to lie to everyone first to begin to make it true!) So that means stuff on the WB(or whatever CW)and NBC and CBS. But these shows need to not show a farce of the computing world, just exaggerate on who the people involved are.
Balderdash!
That's so cute!!
I had a summer internship at CMU for a bit.
...leaving CMU thus became my favorite part of the day.
While on CMU's campus, I noticed that the population was generally Asian. As I went past Pitt on my way home, the population became generally female.
:(){
I can think of no quicker way to get your school disregarded as an educational institution than the course that CM is taking. The goal of a CS program is to turn out CS experts. While there is a lot to CS in addition to programming, programming, and the ability to invent/design/develop/test good code is pretty much at the heart of the subject. If you don't cover and focus on this as part of the program, the graduates aren't going to compete. Sadly, the message that the market will take from thiswill be that CM's program is weak. Further, since CM's female proportion of the graduate pool is increasing, and since the CM course program is destined to produce weaker professionals, the conclusion that will be drawn is that women can't code as well as men, even if they graduate from a good school like CM. In the long run, this will hurt women's prospects in the field.
You gotta love unintended consequences.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
Changing a CS degree to contain elements of Fashion Design would achieve the same results. That does not mean it's a good idea. Watering down one degree for mass appeal inevitably reduces the proficiency of graduates in the specific areas targeted. Mass appeal is no indicator of quality.
IMO, and I know I'll probably offend some "real" CS people in saying this, but I think 'Computer Science' as a degree, at the undergraduate level anyway, has already suffered from this a lot.
At least from the local big state Uni -- and I won't say which, but I don't think it's atypical -- I've run into some CS grads who took the "light" curriculum (it apparently offers a wide range of courses you can take), and were basically incapable of doing anything other than messing around in WYSIWYG web-development tools and making web pages, and even then they weren't great at it. It goes without saying they had never even used or been exposed to anything besides Windows. If they did any software at all, it was a 100-level class in Visual Basic.
Now, I'm sure there are CS grads, even at those schools, who opted to take a lot of real programming and algorithm design and architecture classes, but the people taking what amounts to a graphic-design and web-design curriculum and calling it "Computer Science" are really hurting the value of the degree. I've known people involved in HR who, when they're looking for actual IT people, basically write off CS degrees in favor of CompE or SoftwareE. So the end result is just a lot of degree inflation, and at the top end of the spectrum, you get a lot of bitterness from "real" engineers (the ones with P.E. certs, not quite so much the ones who drive trains) at the people calling themselves 'engineers' in order to get some differentiation from the hacks.
Personally I think the problem is the lingering effects of the dot-com bubble and the associated feeling that a CS degree was a guarantee of easy money. If people in CS want to reclaim the discipline, they should emphasize that it's long hours, sometimes crappy pay, and packed full of nerds, because it's not doing anyone any good to have people who aren't really committed to the subject matter graduating.
You don't see (many) Physics departments compromising their curricula in order to siphon off students from Business school; at least not by reducing the amount of actual physics in their courses. (Making a course of study more interesting or applicable, by showing how useful it is to a wide range of jobs/problems/areas-of-interest; that's perfectly OK, and definitely desirable.) There's no reason why CS programs should.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I'll agree with the ongoing sentiment that programming is important, but what about all those servers, switches, and other infrastructure that you programmers need to run your apps on? The problem with CS in schools is that its all .NET this, Java that...
As a woman in college who took those courses (they were interesting most of the time), but wasn't very good at them. I found that what I really excelled in was the sysadmin side - an aspect that they never even touched on.
You have to show students in school that there is more to being in IT than just coding, you can be a sysadmin, a documentation expert, or a dozen other things. The important thing to understand the concepts that go into IT, not just the syntax of some coding language.
I'm the IT Manager for a small non-profit company who handles everything from coding apps to fixing the printer, and I have a Political Science degree. The CS program at my school, was so focused on teaching you how to program that I lost interest and went into liberal arts.
Later in my career I learned how to program in the context where it made sense to me, but learned to code as a supplement to all my other skills. What CS programs need to learn is that a well-rounded approach is a much better angle to attracting students of all genders.
"Don't be so humble - you are not that great." - Golda Meir
I am a woman who graduated as a CS major 2 years ago. I think one of the major reasons why women weren't attracted to the program was not because it was too intellectually difficult (i.e. women didn't understand the concepts), rather it was the amount of work involved to do well in the program. You have to have a semi-obsessive personality to enjoy doing something for 16+ hours a day. There were many weekends where I had to stay in coding all day long for a project that was due, where my friends would go out and have fun. Also, these friends would be getting straight A's in their classes, where I had to work my ass off to get a C or a B. I think more men have the personalities required to enjoy these kind of things - just look at how many guys play MMOs like WoW for 12 hours a day for little reward. Sure, there are girls that play those games, but how many do you know who become obsessed with it? By nature, females are more social; they don't want to sit behind a monitor all day doing repetitive tasks.
I'll call bull on that.
1. Those who had any habits at all, were passionate about programming and willing to learn. None was some fossil stuck in a 50 year rut of maintaining the same COBOL programs. Au contraire, everyone I knew who was passionate about programming in college, was going through around a language a year and was very interested in learning new techniques and habits.
Is that worse than inexperience? Bull. And doubly so if you're trying to tell me it's worse than someone who's not even interested in it, and turned off by its being too nerdy.
Yes, they might catch up, with enough effort. But please spare me the bullshit that starting inexperienced and uninterested is somehow some valuable advantage.
2. Talking about existing bad habits would be maybe relevant if college did't teach all the worst habits and none of the good ones.
Assignments in college are for a start write-only stuff, that never gets changed or maintained in any way. There you go, way to hammer it in everyone's head that it's ok to write write-only code.
They also invariably lack the complexity to illustrate the need for most techniques taught. So people come out having had to apply, say, structured programming techniques, on 100 line programs that just didn't need all those patterns and techniques. And they come out with ideas ranging from (A) that it's stupid stuff that you'll never read IRL, to (B) that it's stuff that's a purpose in and by itself, not a tradeoff to make complexity more manageable. So then you see them doing cargo-cult programming, where everything has to be packed in 20 levels of decorators, factories, managers, singletons, and god knows what other superfluous extra code, just because they never understood when those are really used and to what end. They came out of university thinking that, say, a decorator isn't a very specialized tool to a very specialized end, but something cool that must be added indiscriminately to all programs.
So let me tell you, if anyone had any _good_ habits at the end of college, those were the people who had worked on far more complex stuff on their own. If someone came out of college knowing why they need to write maintainable code, those were the guys who had to maintain their own hobby programs at home. Not the guys whose only brush with it were the write-only assignments. If someone came out of knowledge knowing how to properly design a program's architecture, those were the guys who wrote a 20,000 line program at home just for fun. Not the ones whose only brush with it were "apply the following 5 patterns in a Hello World program."
So, you know, if someone's only great advantage is that they can absorb all those habits without their private programs getting in the way... then they might not have an advantage at all.
So on the whole: oh please. I've seen many apologies as to why being uninterested and ignorant isn't much worse, but passing it off as some advantage ("at least they don't have to forget the bad habits") is... lame. And stupid.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
explains that the number of women in CS is shrinking
I'm sorry, but we use natural numbers to count numbers of items that exist in the world. You can't subtract from 0 in the natural numbers. So this sentence is in error.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
I just graduated from RPI in december. And on average in most of my upper level CS classes there were about 2-3 girls. So it wouldn't be hard to do much better. The sad part is that the population is significantly larger in CS I, CS II, and Data Structures and Analysis (the pseudo CS3 at our school). There were tons there, who would get through it and quit, change majors or stop taking elective in the area. I vividly remember being in a lab for cs2 and having multiple girls seated on either side of me. In ta'ing DSA there were still a significant amount present, but a lot of them expressed that once they were done with DSA that was it (either they were comp sys and decidedly not taking any more comp sci'ish elective or they were swapping out of CS to another major and using the cs classes they had thus taken as elective credits).
Can't really say I can blame them that much. If I wasn't someone coming in having done CS significantly in high school, and having already interned, knowing full well I 100% wanted to go down this path it would have crossed my mind. Often the early classes can be very tedious, with assignments and grades heavily dependent on coding ability when coding style, technique and good debugging practices are hardly covered in the classes at all.
If things like patterns, UML and software doc and design practices, and CVS were covered earlier I think students, and females especially may find more hope and interest. Even something like graph theory would be good to cover earlier. It (graph theory) should be made a requirement for accredited degree paths anyhow IMHO.
the funny bottom line is that increasing the female population in CS departments won't just make the universities happier; it will increase the male CS student morale as well.
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
Okay, I'm an AC and arguably a troll, but I'm sick of this bullshit. Anybody with programming aptitude can program, and is probably doing so already. The more you do it the better you get, and you can get paid for it while you learn. But you probably can't prove that an algorithm is optimal, or show that an implementation is correct, and you probably don't have a sense of where you should apply a formal method and where it's more effort then it's worth. How do you know when your hash algorithm has "good" behavior, or why "rand() % 100" isn't evenly distributed? Logic, discrete math, and statistics seem like they might be useful, not to mention exposure to current research, so you check out the Department of Computer Science. First they whack you over the head with a giant lead mallet with "computer science is not programming" engraved on it (backwards so everyone can read it from the permanent bruise it leaves on your forehead), then the curriculum makes it clear that you're about to spend about three years doing almost nothing but programming. To add insult to injury, the programming you do doesn't even teach you software engineering (and time constraints may actually discourage it). Anyone have a significant lifecycle in their senior project? Know how to recognize well-written requirements? Ever document an architecture so someone else can actually use it? I know loads of people who've been programming for at least a decade who would enjoy and benefit greatly from studying real CS, but they can't get into the CS department because they don't have the programming class credits. So CS enrollment in general is declining, the percentage of women in CS is declining, high school students show an alarming lack of interest in majoring in CS, and they're pretty good at keeping programmers away. It's not like it's useful or anything, but maybe they should try teaching Computer Science to the people who want to take it.
I'll agree on that. We're taught to play with Barbies. I know I was. I had a fake kitchen thing. What did my brother have? A toy work bench. Who was encouraged to tinker and who was encouraged to be ladylike? I'd say this is probably a common thing in families. The boys are taught that they are supposed to tinker and be "Mr. Fix-It." The girls are taught that that's "for boys." Having your formative years being spent being told not to be interested in those things can certainly have an effect.
There was actually a "girls can't code" argument at my school a couple of weeks ago. One CS BS senior expressed his opinion that some of the students, especially the girls weren't up to par and shouldn't have been admitted. As you can imagine, this was not welcomed by the other students. Last week, I was "nominated" (read: appointed, there aren't enough underclassmen for a real election) to ACM secretary. When I said I'm bad with taking notes, I was told it's "woman's work," so I'd be fine even though girls are all dumb. Double fingers for that kid. The other girls got mad, and I chased the kid ("nominated" for president) out of the room. That resulted in a lot of discussion about girls, coding, intelligence, etc. Only a couple of kids even knew that the first programmer was a woman (Ada, Countess of Lovelace).
I'm sitting in a data structures class right now.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
A career in CS demands an emphasis on logical thought process.
It is well established that most women in the US do not make decisions based on logic, they make decisions based on emotions and they rush to impulse decisions without considering the consequences. You cannot develop reliable software systems by relying solely on emotions without considering the consequences of your actions. Men are more logical and rational in their thought process.
The US media culture has been driving this mindset into women for decades. Browse through the women's interest section in any bookstore. Watch any of the TV shows that are targetted to women. Watch a couple of "chick flicks". The women's culture that is browbeaten into the female mind makes a poor match for the mindset that is demanded by the CS field. This culture is not prevalent in Asia and India which explains why there are more women from those countries in the CS field than there are US women. I've seen a lot of companies in my contract work and the majority of women involved in CS are either asian or european indian. That's not discrimination - that's the hiring process at work, hire the most qualified person for the job.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Just as not all men opt for CS, not all women do, either. It's down to different personalities preferring different pursuits. Changing a course deliberately to attract more women is not attracting them to CS, but to a slightly mutated version of it, and actually accomplishes nothing - it proves that women don't care about CS if they prefer the new course, and puts them off if they don't.
Seriously, I hope they're not trying to make CS into a department that turns out super-savvy users. Many other undergraduates departments turn out large numbers of very sophisticated computer users who can do neat stuff with data and graphics. If that's what CS becomes -- using programs written by other people to do interesting, valuable stuff -- then you should get one of those other degrees so you acquire knowledge of a field along with your computer skills.
Programming, systems, and the theory behind both are what computer science is about. Using computers is a basic function of any educated person.
and an attractive one at that, one of the major obstacles i had to overcome is the american cs male. (i had no problems interacting with international students.) they seem to be amazed at the combination of my gender and interests. so much so that i've been gawked at, pestered, stalked, and even assaulted!
everyone wanted to help little old me with my super hard programming assignments. i refused everyone and did them myself. even when i kept getting the highest marks and my professors remarked my brilliance, everyone still thought i was incompetant and needed help.
it got so ridiculous that i resigned from school after speaking with the department head and the dean of science. i was told i was not the first with this problem. now i love programming, but i think i'll become an art major upon returning to school.
my suggestion to the american cs males: log off the computer once a week and learn how to properly interact with other humans in a social setting. going to bars to drink yourself stupid and sulk about your inadequacies does not count.
maybe it would help attract more females to the field if they weren't treated in the manner i was.
Women are given opportunities a plenty in engineering and computer science. How much more a push would they like? There's no barrier to university. In fact most universities will give a spot to a women even if she's not the best student. There's no barrier in the work place. Every employer I've ever worked with has tries to hire women. Here's the hint, they just can't find enough good ones. The majority seems to be eastern european women and asian women. Some of whom are very good programmers. There's enough people who can't program already doing it :) Let's not lower the bar again.
How about, instead of lower the bar at university, we actually strengthen mathematics and science at the elementary and grade school levels. Oh I forgot, we had to lower those as well so that people would be interested in those well.
While we're at it, let's make sure 50% child care workers are men, 50% of nurses are men, 50% of secretaries are men, 50% of garbage collectors are women... This is ridiculous. Give people the freedom to do whatever they want...beyond that, leave people to their own choices.
That women are smarter than men. Given the bleak prospects for CS graduates in the future, it makes perfect sense to choose a better career.
For fucks sake, I think a lot of people here in slashdot should go and study Computer Science to realize that CS is NOT all about programming, there are countless branches of Computer Science were programming has *nothing* to do. I am making my PhD in Comp.Science right now, and if it wasnt for the fact that I am doing simulations (which in some circumstances it might be possible to do *without* programming like using RepastPy) I would not be using programming.
/coding/ you do).
/code/).
You people are confusing Computer Science with Software Engineering. Software Engineering is what most of slashdotters would *need* to study in order to be "professional" developers (this is, learn the theory and background behind that PHP, Python, Java, C++, C, Visual Basic, etc etc
It is completely possible to study in a subfield of Computer Science (in fact in many of them) without knowing how to program (in fact, many of my fellow PhD students do exactly that, oh, and my own supervisor [a Prof. in Comp. Science] does not
Several slashdotters will find this last comment offending: I believe that removing Programming will indeed attract more women, basically because this fat-dirty-geek-egocentric-smelly person idea is specifically centered on programmers, coders, etc, not on Computer Scientists overall. Gosh, there are really intelligent Women in Computer Scientists, one that comes to mind now is the cryptoanalyst women that sometimes has been featured in slashdot.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
As a true Slashdottian you don't know how to go from step 2 to step 4. :-)
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
I've worked with women in engineering (at least, what traditionally has passed for it, like the automotive area), medicine, and the super-broad category of "IT." Many of these women (including my siblings, one each in medicine and engineering / IT) are tremendously confident people with no visible scars from societal stereotyping. For example, they weren't raised to be "ladies." They don't fear men and they're not itching to kick someone's a$$ to address years of misogynistic practices.
And, guess what? Very few of them have much interest in being a Unix administrator or the 3rd-assistant brakepad engineer at Big Auto Company. (Notice I said very few... not NONE.) Medicine (which, as the parent noted, was historically hostile to women) is a different animal. It would be condescending to call it a "chick" field, but it certainly appeals to women much more than IT and some fields of engineering.
Is it @#$%ing POSSIBLE that some preferences are gender-based and not the result of bad societal influences? What do you think? I think it is.
Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs...to draw more women into compuer science
Here's me as the eternal optimist - I want to believe TFA is saying: "Look - we've got to get more people into CS. We don't care how they get here, but let's not prematurely limit ourselves to preternaturally skillful hackers - don't get me wrong, we're still going to *get* all the hackers into the best programs, but let's not scare off someone who might be good just because they have the wrong idea about CS, or they haven't been writing code on their grandpa's TRS-80 since they were 4." (that was me. I'm old.)
That's OK, as long as the de-emphasis on programming is limited to entry into CS. Once in a CS program, students *have* to program - and program a lot! Writing good code is one of those skills that improves with time and experience. No matter how (hypothetically) brilliant and full-of-potential someone might be, you can't substitute actual coding experience with a few all-nighters in front of a "Learn C in 24 Hours!" book.
I can understand the "lowering barriers to entry" idea of TFA, but only if it doesn't dilute the importance of programming within a CS department's program of instruction.
That having been said...
WTF!?! YOU DON'T AGREE WITH MORE CHICKS IN CS?!?!? DON'T RUIN THIS FOR US!!!! WE'RE SO LONELY!!!
--baboo
I'm sitting in a data structures class right now.
Pay attention, stop socializing.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Some select quotes from the article (boldface font is emphasis by me):
The emphasis on scientific computing and other applications of computers to scientific and medical fields sounds interesting, but it is not computer science. That is called computational science or scientific computing. Computer science is about the study of computation and computers and has different subfields, which includes theoretical CS, algorithms, programming languages, systems (a wide range of topics such as OSes, file systems, networks, databases, compilers, etc.), graphics, and AI. Most computer scientists could care less about designing prosthetics or studying climate changes; they are generally interested in whatever subfield they specialize in.
There is a big difference between computer science and scientific computing. Scientific computing applies computer science skills to other disciplines, but it isn't computer science itself. When you are studying computer science, you study the aforementioned subdivisions above. When you study scientific computing, you know just enough CS to apply it to other disciplines, but it shouldn't be called CS.
I have no problem with attracting women to computing disciplines. I, for one, would strongly support such an effort. However, what is proposed by CMU is not computer science, and it shouldn't be called such. There should be no changes in the standard computer science curriculum. CMU's undergraduate computer science program is one of the best in the country, and if it isn't broken, then it shouldn't be fixed. Instead, CMU should start a scientific computing major inside of the School of Computer Science.
http://www.cra.org/Activities/craw/
I heard CMU's numbers were on the decline? Is that incorrect?
That would be news for nerds.
This statement is the key. To make the degree program more attractive they had to change the fundemental basics to something else. Therefore they are not issuing a CS degree now that is comparable to the one they had previously. The name on the paper may be the same, but that's it. Once companies learn that the new graduates aren't as skilled in programming, they will quit hiring them to do the jobs they always went to that school to fill. This will hurt everyone geting a CS degree from that school. It will actaully promote the stereotype of women not being as good at CS related jobs as the women coming out with these degrees will have a lesser education than their couterparts that received a degree with a focus on programming.
This has nothing to do with stopping discrimination or promoting equallity. It has to do with looking good and being trying to be politically correct.
Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
Currently there is probably more earning power and demand in traditional fields for women such as nursing than Computer Science. As our population ages, more and more nurses will be needed. Why so much effort to attract women to a career path that many feel is in decline?
I changed majors from Radiological Technologies to Computer Science. I enjoyed the science and theory behind Rad Tech, but not the actual practice of it. I really enjoy being a System Administrator. There are still times when I wonder if I made the right decision in regards to quality of life issues, and pay.
Women also tend to seek more flexible employment so they can balance career and family. The traditional jobs for CS graduates such as programming and systems administrations are not very forgiving in regards to life issues.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I am personally very curious about why when the majority of college students are women why a statistic like this is so important.
That's an easy question to answer. If you are in charge of the Computer Science department and you go to the University administration and say, "may I please have more money" then you will be told that times are hard and everyone is having to do more will less.
But, if you go to the administration (or congress for a grant) and say, "we are interested in starting a program to attract women and correct gender inequalities and institutionalized sexism in our department - may we please have more money" then they will shower you with money.
It's a lot like global warming in that respect. It's a buzzword that you tack on to something when you want people to care about it. "We want to be the best computer science department" nobody cares. "we want to help the poor poor oppressed women." Here, have a million bucks.
Look at the wording of the linked article. "Women are losing ground" it says, as if they are fighting an uphill battle against an arm of orks. The truth is, NOBODY IS STANDING IN YOUR WAY. If you want to major in CS you are welcome to do so. If you don't want to major in CS, that's not losing ground.
If anything, there should be more of an emphasis on programming, not less. Computer Science is about understanding the mechanisms behind computers; this most certainly includes programming, and a heavy emphasis on it at that.
Women - actually individuals in general- who are attracted to CS are often attracted to the programming/ tinkering with computers aspect, and not necessarily the theoretical underlying science and mathematical implications of the field. It seems defeating to change the emphasis to attract people who have little interest in the practical implications of the field
As a female who obtained somewhat of a "BS" BS degree, I wish the CS dept at my university was more heavily focused on programming - I would have been more inclined to pursue a CS degree, and not a BS w/ a programming specialization
The other side of the "nerd factor":
Attractive women in the field aren't taken seriously.
I have a friend, who is a very beautiful, stylish woman who was graduating at the top of her class in computer science at UCSC during the height of the dot-com boom. We went to a job fair, and stopped at a booth for Nokia. The guy running the booth looked her up and down, and asked "Are you looking for a receptionist position?".
With that sort of attitude towards us, is it any wonder we don't stay?
I have seen what they did to the program, and I don't like it. When I went to CMU it was full of hackers, people I had known on x.25/internet and other networks while in high school. Now they have done away with that aspect, removing the one very unique aspect to CMU. I have seen what they did to the OS course. I would of course consider hiring from the graduate program because I believe this wasn't changed. CMU's philosophy was to get a 'more diverse' student group which communicates better and is more social. I don't give a rat's ass about people being social, I want hackers.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
On the surface, this sounds like a great idea. I am all for encouraging gender diversity in computer science, because there's not really anything to be lost by gaining another perspective on the discipline. I take issue, however, with the idea that "moving emphasis away from programming proficiency" is a good idea. Computer science is the science of computers -- the point is understanding the computer itself, how it works, how to make it do things faster or better -- only after you have a good idea of the theory should you use it to create applications. This is like a math department saying that they don't get enough applicants from group foo, so they are going to focus more on applications of math than math itself. Doing applications without a solid foundation in the ideas behind them is a recipe for disaster. (I'm not saying that you have to go to the Turing machine level of detail, but certainly an understanding of fundamental control structures/program logic, data structures and algorithms, and the different language paradigms will help a CS student when they try to do applications-type work.) There's nothing wrong with advertising computer science by pointing out all the cool applications for it (and there certainly are some), but to change the curriculum so a degree in CS does not require strong understanding of the theory of computing as well as practical experience in at least a few languages is doing it a disservice.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
"Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs Dr. Blum and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon instituted to draw more women into computer science."
Ok, I am taking this sentence at face value, but it seems to me that Dr. Blum needs to be fired immediately. Because it sounds to me like they are simply reducing standards in order to have more vaginas in the classroom.
It's one thing if you changed the context -- for example, if for a programming assignment you had people build virtual pets and graphical fashion apps instead of a chess AI or payroll database. But "moving away from profiency" seems to be a rather straightforward admission that the students coming out of that school are less qualified to do anything that a CS degree is good for. I mean, what do they teach then? How to use your cleavage to become a project manager? If anything, changing the curriculum like that is only going to reinforce negative stereotypes about female programmers.
The problem with Java is it's not simple and it's not abstract. Why start people in a language that separates Integer from int? Personally, I would start people with SQL so they can start thinking about getting the computer to give them the data they want vs. fighting some compiler.
Think about teaching someone:
Select * from Names where ID < 100;
Vs.
A java hello world program where it might be 6 months before people understand what some of the syntax is doing.
IMO SQL > LISP > ASM > JAVA would teach somone someone how to abstractly approach problems vs. wasting a lot of time figuring out how to get swing to move some boxes around on the screen.
The professor can't seem to figure out his Mac through the Winbox to the projector. A bit of class is wasted on him trying to get the projector to display his slides properly instead of all dim, then he gets fed up and PDFs them and attempts to navigate through Windows and show them. Then he realizes he needs to show some code too, but that the Winbox doesn't have BlueJ or Emacs, and then he fiddles with things trying to make his presentation work. While he muddles with the uncooperative technology, I go here.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
I did a CS degree in the mid 90's. I was one of 3 women who graduated out of a class of 60-odd. Most girls dropped out in the first year but to be perfectly honest it was because the CS major course was deadly dull. I wanted to do research in CS so I stayed.
The course I attended was a complete dirge until the final year when the active research staff began feeding material into the optional modules. Suddenly it came alive. These people were passionate about what they were doing and were literally changing the world. This along with the opportunity to design, develop and manage a research-based project of my own and I was hooked. I went straight into a PhD and loved every minute of it. The people I worked with were great. I was treated royally. Interestingly there was higher proportion of females to males at PhD level.
I subsequently lectured at a couple of institutions hoping to encourage more women into the field. I had a little success but to be honest, until we get some more challenging and creative CS programmes girls are going to continue to stay away in droves.
There are too few women in the system to affect the required change - and there is one less since I quit (academic politics - yawnsville!!)
So I offer a musical metaphor that I used at a jam session, when a non-techie friend noticed that I introduced myself as a "computer programmer" and my younger friend introduced himself as a "software engineer," our mutual non-techie friend asked the difference so here is how I explained,
Way back when, everybody was a computer programmer and before that, people were computers. "Programmer" is a more "traditional" name for what has now grown into different, though intimately related ("intimately" is always an attention-grabber, don't you think?) fields. I said prefer it also because it connotes a progression through time, in analogy with "radio station programmer" etc., and so much of computer programming is time-conscious.
Programming is playing the frackin' instrument. The other parts of CS are composition and music theory. Software Engineering - "would be a good idea"
I then went on to note how all of us at the jam session could name a half-dozen recording engineers we would consider virtuosos of the studio, since for real music-heads these people are as important as the stars on stage. Offord, "Caveman" Shirley, Ezrin....
Then the drunk Dancyr-friend on the floor got really loud (superfluous, I know, as anything Dancyr-related is loud) and we gave "Day of the Eagle" another go.
Now I will derive an ought from an is, please read the following at +3dB 'cause that's how I'd speak it:
A well-rounded musician is a good player first, because that opens all the other doors. Even the engineers have instruments to master, from microphones to long Audio Units chains.
If you cannot program, you are worthless for CS. You cannot explore the theory, you can't try things out. You won't experiment with ML just because someone mentioned it at a party. And you'll never dream in Lua.
It's always about the chops. As the academies are dumbed down, they will emit more tokens, effete dilettantes, and other chopless wonders.
In order to protect Computer Science from non-programmers,
Programming must be rescued from Computer Science programs.
nacturation, your metaphor is flawed.
:P
I'm going to say something shocking here, but bear with me: Computer Science is not Programming.
Moreover, programming is not to computer science as math problems are to mathematics.
Computer Science includes programming, and many people who wish to become programmers do wisely choose to study Computer Science, but Computer Science and Programming are not the same thing. While many people who decide to study Computer Science would like to think of it as a Programming major, it absolutely is not. I've seen decent coders wash out of Bachelor's programs in CS. I've also seen Master's students who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. Moreover, I've met career programmers who didn't really discover the joys of programming until they reached college. Being able to hack together a few lines of java doesn't necessarily prepare anyone for a real Theory of Computation course. It's not necessarily a bad thing to consider programming as only a part of a larger picture.
That said, I don't think the gender disparity is a university's battle to win. I was one of only two girls in my high school's AP Computer Science course, years ago. What that says to me is that college is really too late. If you want to influence attitudes about computer science, you have to start a lot younger. Sure, maybe I decided I wanted to be a programmer when I was punching in source code from magazines as a little girl, but back then, I didn't know any boys who programmed, so it never would've occurred to me for a minute that anyone might think of it as a "boy" thing. For me, it was just a hell of a fun power trip to get the computer to do what I wanted. So, I made games about... um, horses. Girls will be girls.
Where the hell was my 28%? I graduated with a CS major from Georgia Tech in 2004. Of all the CS classes I took, I don't remember any class having more than one girl in it, and a lot of the classes didn't even have one. There was less than 1% attending the classes, and I'm not sure if a single one stuck it out to get the degree.
;-)
Hmmm, maybe they were all taking the 8:00 and 9:00 AM classes. I went to great lengths to avoid taking classes that started before 10:00 AM.
There are lots of commentators pulling out the "It's computer science, not computer engineering, so it's okay to strip down the programming aspects." This is nonsense that flies in the face of reality.
First, the overwhelming majority of people who earn CS degrees are going to go on to careers that are programming oriented. In a perfect world we'd probably have two different degrees: software engineering and computer science, in much the same way we have chemical engineering and chemistry. But we're not there yet. For now we need computer programmers with what is essentially software engineering education. The only practical source for this education is computer science.
In case someone wants to pipe up with, "If you just want to program, go to a technical college, leave us real scientists alone," save yourself the trouble. That's as silly as telling someone who wants to, say, design motor vehicles that auto shop class is a suitable replacement for a, say, mechanical engineering degree. To be a great software engineer your average geek needs a solid basis in computer science, just as a chemical engineer typically spends a lot of his undergraduate education in the chemistry department. A guy who learned to program in a technical college may be a fine rank-and-file programmer, but your average technical college doesn't provide the basis in computer science to help create great software engineer. If I need a great software engineer, I'm going to be biased toward the one with the CS degree, in much the same way that if I need a bridge designed, I'm going to prefer the designer with the engineering degree.
Second, programming is a key part of computer science; a basis you need to understand and be able to execute trivially. Chemistry and biology majors are expected to be able to competently do the grunt laboratory work. Chemistry and biology majors who go on in their fields will usually still be doing some amount of laboratory work. I expect a computer scientist to be able to write a compiler and an operating system. (Not necessarily particularly great ones, but functional ones.) Sure, the science needs some highly theoretical computer scientists, but the majority of computer scientists are going to be spending their time doing research that will require practical implementations to validate theories or do analysis. They'll need to be able to solve their own problems for at least a while until they can afford to hire a few research assistants to handle the grubby coding work (again, with parallels to a chemist or biologist). Once they've got their RAs, they'll need to know enough about practical programming to be able to evaluate and validate their RAs work. Beyond that, ultimately grant money for professors or jobs for those in industry flows to those who can show practical results; without a basis in knowing what is actually practical to program, you can easily end up with brilliant ideas that cannot be utilized. It may be valuable to society in the long run, but most people need to balance their ideals with putting food on the table.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
National Public Radio (NPR) has a radio program entitled "This American Life". On February 16, 2007, they broadcast an interesting episode entitled "Quiz Show", which you can find at http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Archive.aspx. (Click on the speaker icon to the right of the entry on that page to listen to it).
The third story (beginning at 46:36 minutes into the program) is about a real-life trivia quiz show that was broadcast by the Oxygen Network, which is a network entirely geared towards women. One of the writers for the quiz show, a woman, thought it would be a perfect forum for showcasing the intelligence of girls as a role models for other young girls.
The results were...a disaster.
In the end, they had to resort to "dumbing down" the show's questions...listen for yourself, it's actually kind of funny.
Whenever I hear the issues of "gender inequality" being raised up, I have to wonder who is raising the issue, and why. Typically, it is female faculty or female employees who don't want to be the only females in their department/division, and who may be trying to use the argument for their own promotion (eg "there aren't enough female faculty, so make me a faculty member", or "there aren't enough female managers, so make me a female manager".) Indirectly, there is a theory that in excellent companies, "Grade A people hire Grade A people", but in bad companies "Grade B people hire Grade C people". In other words, managers who are not very competent tend to hire people less competent so that they will be easier to manage from an ego-point-of-view, rather than a results-point-of-view. Is that the underlying reason that these "issues" (which are really non-issues) keep surfacing?
Somebody posted earlier that they had intereviewed girls as programmers at Amazon.com, and in something like two cases, both of the hired were from Asia, either Chinese (east Asia) or Indian (south Asia), and wondered if it was due to "culture" and how that culture treated women with regard to science and engineering. However, people who make that argument forget that the people who emigrate to the United States are already an extremely small minority within their own enormous populations (China has 1.3 billion people, India has about 1.1 billion).
I'm not being a troll, this is a fact of life.
I know you guys like more than someone saying so. I have seen this for many years, here is a recent article - http://www.glennsacks.com/mysterious_decline_where .htm . Please read it. The future of the world is at stake.
I was in the CS class of '03 at CMU. In our freshmen class, there were 80 men and 50 women. The previous year there about a dozen women in the class. I heard that for a while, there were more Daves in CS than women. No joke.
In the classes I took freshmen year, there were actually a lot of girls in the classes. As I took more and more advanced classes, the percentage of women went down. There were especially few in the OS class. I think a lot of them transferred out of CS.
I've heard that the class of '03 was the worst in a long time.
Chemical Engineering is the practical application of the scientific discipline of chemistry, so why aren't there more Software Engineering programs that focus on the practical application of the scientific discipline of Computer Science?
I've been away from education for a while (programming instead) but when I was directly involved in helping improve K-12 science education via professional development opportunities for teachers, research demonstrated that the innate curiosity that leads many young people, male or female, to go into any form of science dissipated in girls by middle school. From that point on interest and enrollment by girls in science (and math) classes began to decline significantly.
IMHO, this isn't about equality or diversity for diversity's sake--this is about the loss of a huge talent pool in all sciences, not just CS. I wish that pedagogical changes at the university level could change this but I don't think they can.
Female intellect has to be highly valued in American society and expectations of female students must be as high as they are for male students--beginning long before students reach university.
I personally find this a mind-boggling task facing our schools and our society. One can point to the media, to stereotypical expectations, to the K-12 teachers and administrators and school boards, to the parents--the list doesn't seem to ever stop as far as where changes need to be effected. Are there inherent differences in how girls and boys learn and their self-perception? Most likely. Does that mean that one gender can't be taught a particular discipline. I don't think so.
Also, the "nerd" concept is so overused IMO. I program and I love it so call me a nerd if you want. I'm also a bright, engaging, attractive woman filled with curiosity about everything. When I was the only girl in physics class in high school none of my friends thought I was weird. If anything the other girls were maybe a bit intimidated and the boys thought I was interesting. It wasn't until many, many years later that I realized that it was rather unusual, in my day, to be the only girl in that class.
Finally, I am baffled that so few women seem to realize the amazing opportunities presented in IT. With today's technology (and who knows what looms just ahead?!) young women contemplating IT can enter the field, begin to establish their careers, and still have children since telecommuting, at least on a part-time basis, works so well. My husband and I own and operate our own businesses and decided three years ago that we were tired of the city. We wanted to live in a quieter, more pastoral environment so we just sold our home and moved to a tiny village. We keep an office in the city for our staff who wish to remain there but we bugged out! If only that had been a possibility when I had small children to raise! Anyway, my point is that some, not all, IT jobs lend themselves nicely to young women who wish to have a family and a career without either delaying the family or stopping dead mid-career for a few years.
"The best way to combat this is to give economic incentives for corporations to keep jobs in America, thus, more students will go into CS and inevitably, that will include women too."
But, but, will they be doing it "for the love"?
> Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success
Right, because it would be a terrible disaster if people decided to go into fields they were actually interested in becoming *proficient* in. That would lead to cultural dividing lines between different fields, where the programmers are all people who are interested in programming, and the doctors and nurses are all people who are interested in medical stuff, and so forth. How aweful!
Instead we should all draw computer-generated numbers to determine what field we can go into. That way we can ensure that each profession has an even balance of men and women, jocks and nerds, recent immigrants and multi-generation nationals, and so on and so forth. A nice, smooth, homogenous society.
Eh.
I'm not against having women go into computers, if it's what they want to do, but if most of them are more interested in other things, deliberately de-emphasizing important proficiencies in order to wheedle and cajole them into going into a field they're not really that interested in is not doing them any favors. When they get out into the workforce and discover that the skills they were told they didn't need to learn are, in fact, important in their chosen field, they're going to be pretty frustrated.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Removing the emphasis on programming proficiency as a means to attract women to the departments,
may be effective in recruiting women. However I want to know these schools so I can avoid those graduates.
Lets dumb down the Medical schools too, and see if they want to visit those doctors.
This is more of the effort to flood the programming pool, to dilute the talent and lower the price of talent.
After a company hires a dozen of these bimbos for $60/hr they won't want to pay that,
even for a programmer worth $100/hr.
Raise the standards, make degrees mean something. Remove quotas for gender, race whatever.
Go Gators!
I'm from Canada, so maybe our school system is a little different (and it's been 12 years since I've been in school) but back then if you wanted to go to University you had to start deciding in Grade 11 and pretty much have your choice written in stone by Grade 12. My high school didn't even get their first set of workstations for student use until I was in Grade 11. The beginning programming course was at Grade 12 level, too late to influence my post-secondary educational choices. How was I supposed to know then that a few years later I would take an interest in how they worked? How does anyone at that age know that they want to go into CS? I wasted $7000 and one year of my life in B.Comm only to realize that I was way more interested in computers. I asked the head of CS to switch, his only response was "take a year off and if you're still interested ask me again". So I dropped out for a year, and what a bad idea that was - I never went back. For me, and probably most people in the middle-income bracket, schooling that expensive is a one-shot deal. How about some MONETARY incentives for women to go into CS? If I could go to school and still pay the bills then I wouldn't hesitate to sign up (yes I am a woman btw). I would say that CS does suffer from some negative perceptions, though I disagree that geek factor is the one that puts off women the most. I did see it as a career that would require a higher degree of intelligence than some careers, but I never thought that it was "too hard". If anything, women would probably think that a CS graduate's job is pretty boring. Maybe as computers become more commonplace in the classroom (or more people get over the "don't touch the computer, you'll break it" mentality) then maybe more girls will say "Hey, I wonder how this works?" and become interested enough to find out.
I think it is fair to say that most women are more interested in getting something done rather than playing with the tools (i.e. the newest linux distro, programming language of the month, etc.). And the suggestion to emphasize applications rather than tools will make CS more attractive to them. But why don't we keep the original computer science and collaborate with other departments? This will also attract more women to use CS. That should be our goal and not a higher number of women with CS majors.
I know that for my school, women are drastically in the minority in CS classes http://www.lehigh.edu/~oir/stats/200710/ug200710.h tm/
There are 0/44 in Comp. Eng, and 6/31 in Comp Sci. Not that it lends any credence to the article, there are 11/80 in the Computer Science & business program, which is lower as a percent than CS... (It's also worth noting that a fair number of CSB's drop the program for a business/information systems major)
As a disclaimer, the general campus population is 42% female, 58% male. Oddly enough, the females in those fields tend to take slightly more credits per semester than males. Still, I don't see that changing anytime soon. There are opportunities for female CS students, as one I know has attracted quite a reasonable amount of attention, though she's a good programmer in her own right.
But all in all... its a male dominated field, and I'd be surprised if that changes anytime soon. There tends to be a far greater chance that a male will be somewhat anti-social, and given that there's a fairly strong desire to fill the void with something, sometimes fooling around with random engineering bits, others playing copious amounts of games.
I am not an expert. If I am misled in something, please correct me.
The caption at the top of the page says:
Ed Lazowska and his colleagues at the University of Washington created a Web page to demonstrate to prospective students "the broad range of interesting fields."
Good to see the high standards of CS aren't being lowered. It might be the reporter dumbing things down.
meh
Total number of classes since 2003 = 2 semesters per year.
Average number of students per semester = 26
Average number of students with measurable social skills (ie eat with mouth closed and use non imperatives) = 3 (per semester)
Average number of students who wear the same clothes each week = 18
Average number of students who smell as if a cat died in their underwear many weeks ago = 6
Average number of students who are a serious bio-hazard = 1 (per semester).
Average number of students who comb their hair = 8 (okay some intentionally!)
Average number of students who brush their teeth or are unaware they have ketone breath (from staying awake all night playing Lord only knows what idiotic game that is not Halo) = 8
Average number of students who can explain how to set file visibility in MS Win XP =26 (that is so weird, huh?)
Average number of students who can explain what all those laundry symbols mean on the label of their metallica t-shirt = 0
Average number of students who attend the statistics class = 13
Average number of students who attend the Christmas class on how to attract the opposite sex = 36 (they bring friends)
Total number of students in the past four years who were women = 1
[Jules shoots the guy on the couch during Brett's interrogation]
Jules: Oh, I'm sorry, did I break your concentration?
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
If there is in fact any systematic discrimination against women in CS departments, deal with it there. Treat the disease, not the symptoms. Have you considered that perhaps 30 years ago women weren't motivated to become lawyers? Remember, people don't spontaneously form at age 18; there is a significant generational lag. Women entering college in 1970 would have been born about 1950. I think it's quite reasonable to conclude that the socialization of people born in 1950 would be somewhat different from that of people born in 1970, and they would have different views of their gender roles.
Further, overall women are earning degrees at a higher rate then men. Shouldn't that be a higher priority than the gender balance of individual departments? Especially given that correcting the CS imbalance will further skew the overall graduation rate even further to women.
I've been told that men are strongly encouraged in skilled professions where women dominate, such as nursing.
I don't think it particularly matters much in non-skilled professions such as hairdressing.
I'm sure that's an easy enough position for you to stand behind, seeing you must be, and proud of being, a nerd. However, appearances are often thrust upon women during their childhood and simply expecting people to discount that is stupid. How many women want other women to go "oh, you work in it", or the expectation that the only way for a women to advance in IT because they have tits?
All industries need exposure from people with different backgrounds. Having one social generality of "big fat nerd with chip stains on the keyboard" gives you access to a limited cross section of skills. In fact, Computer Science - both in a vocational and a academic manner - have grown and matured because the "classic nerd" has become a minority within the field.
If we, as a group, don't mature Computer Science and offer different streams of study then we are essentially pumping a dead concept. With streams like Interaction Design, Human Computer Interaction, Technical Business Analysts and Multimedia Design, programming can take a definite second place behind the theory and vocational skills of other Computer Science fields.
While CS should refer to Computer SCIENCE it has come to describe quite a broad range of complete garbage. The whole industry is a total cesspool where only the nastiest shit floats to the top. I found that females seem to be much forward-looking at a younger age than males. Maybe the reason that more women aren't getting into CS is because they don't like the idea of casting themselves into The Great Dilbert Meat-grinder Purgatory.
Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success
Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success
Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success
You've got to be kidding me. That's like saying "Efforts to increase enrollment in the mathematics program was increased by decreasing emphasis on calculus."
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
I graduated from the CS program at CMU last spring and let me tell you, the classes are definitely hard. If spending a whole weekend working on a single weekly assignment, while also having work from four other hard classes sounds like a good time to you, then CMU is a great place. I thought it was awesome, working with my friends to solve hard problems and learn new things. It is important to mention that CMU is a research university. The professors and grad student TAs are active researchers. One part of doing good research is having good theories, with good mathematical formalisms. Therefore the undergraduate curriculum contains several theory courses that cover computer science theory stuff like DFAs, inductive proofs, computability theory, type theory, and discrete math, along with important, but more tangential stuff like algebraic structures and cryptography. I took a fairly theory oriented set of courses, including Lenore Blum's course on Formal Languages, Automata, Computability, and Complexity (there are three Dr. Blums at CMU). Despite my bent towards theory, the following is a small but interesting subset of the programs I had to write for course work, most of these were two week assignments:
A preemptive multitasking operating system kernel (in six weeks!)
A preemptable thread library (one in C and one in SML!)
A neural network trained to drive a car
A weighted link search engine a la google
A raytracer
An opengl based roller coaster
I learned a lot about programming from these labs, but a lot of would just be magic if I didn't understand the math behind it. You can't write a raytracer if you don't know anything about linear algebra. You can't write a neural network if you don't know multivariable calculus. You can't implement any machine learning algorithm without learning statistics. I learned more about the importance of good languages and tools from taking programming language theory courses than I did from just hacking frustratedly. Theory gives the formalisms that let me think at a higher level than a particular programming language. If a theory heavy curriculum meant that we didn't spend four years hacking C or Java and it meant there were awesome girls around then I consider it a big win.
That's a version of the , itself a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. How this works is not fully understood, but yeah, expectations of outcomes tend to lead to outcomes that match the expectations. (Self-fulfilling prophesies are the reason that well-designed experiments with people as subjects use double-blind tests, for example.)
I do object to GP's formulation of this as "men's expectations." It's not just men's expectations that are a factor here--it's the aggregate of everybody's expecations about what men and women are good at and interested in that has an effect in shaping the distribution of skills and interests at the level of the whole society.
Are you adequate?
^^^is a female with a dual major in computer science & information systems.
go me.
now give me a job.
Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I can't help but think that specifically catering to women is the opposite of equality. If women can't be arsed to dedicate themselves to the highest paying jobs in the economy, then fine. Let them rot as the stereotypes they have only themselves to blame for being.
It's been a long time.
Am I the only person around here that had a woman for a professor in a programming class? Of course, this is the same woman that started programming in the 60's with a background in mathematics. She knew she was the minority, and that many of her "colleagues" in the mathematics field viewed her as not being as capable as them. Granted, I was just starting out in community college, but still?...
I can fully understand wanting equality in all professions, as that is a noble goal. As other posters have mentioned, if the number of women in CS and programming is declining, I think the least of the problems is "smelly, nerdy types". While CS is not all programming, any good student will understand that there are some theories that you have to grasp well in order to understand the rest of the subject material. Maybe it's just me, but I fail to see why any college would need to boost the number of women in CS-related degrees. And I don't want to hear a bunch of misogynistic reasons. Any woman has the ability to perform any profession as well as a man. A woman at college should have more than enough opportunities to attend CS classes. If she chooses not to attend, then there's no reason to push her into a CS class, or a profession for that matter. After all, my female programming instructor was damn good at her job, she chose that profession, and stuck to it. Any other woman can do the same thing.
"The only constant in the universe is change." - Unknown author
Hmmm...I had to respond on this one. As one of the "female geeks" in computer science, I guess they didn't need to change teaching styles for me. lol This article was definitely a button pusher. I would say that men and women "work" differently on a general scale...women seem better at multi-tasking and men seem better at focusing on one task at a time; however, this can be disproved over and over by the individual. The main concern I had with this article is that I have interviewed too many young men AND women coming out of college with computer science degrees who not only don't have a clue about the newer programming languages, but they also don't have any real-time experience with databases and would not even be acceptable to work as tech support staff. If we are going to start modifying curriculum, I hope we are going to address what is needed to get a job when you graduate... Just my humble opinion... Plixell
1. Replace language theory by gossip.
2. Replace computer architecture by shopping mall architecture.
3. Replace software engineering by fashion design.
4. Tell them they'll achieve great social status and be near bigshots all the time.
(Of course, I'd rather we make this as unattractive as possible to these stupid women, so only the good, worthy women get in. That way you get the stupid ones filtered out, and can focus on the few cool, geek girls there are.)
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
that prevent women from coming into IT. However, they usually can't be blamed on workplaces and educational institutions as discrimination has been in the past, and as many posters responding to this article seemed to assume.
At my school, the UW (I'm taking classes with most of the students pictured in the article) there seems to be a fairly active effort to provide outreach to women. There are quite a few more women here than at some other cs departments, and all of my CS classes have women in them. Even so, we aren't nearly at 50%.
The main issues keeping women out of fields like CS now have more to do with how they are raised, and the basic values that they are impressed with at a young age. Frankly, the reason I went into cs was that I played with computers and robotic toys as a kid, and so learned to derive joy from interactions with electronics. My grand father was a watch maker and my father is a photographer, so from them I learned to take pride in technical excellence. My basic psychological makeup has been geared since a young age towards the appreciation of tools, and all things that people create with some practical purpose.
The toys girls play with when they are young, and the values they learn from their mothers or other female role models stand in stark contrast to this. By the time women are entering college, many of them have gone their lives without learning to appreciate functional and practical things. Without this intrinsic appreciation, there's little to draw them to fields like cs, except maybe money which can be had easier elsewhere.
Computer science is not like physics... for all practical purposes computer science is an engineering degree with a few theory classes mixed in. A "computer engineering" degree sometimes means the same things as computer science, and otherwise means more emphasis on lower level hardware details.
The problem is that most of what we study in computer science can't be studied theoretically, because there is no real theory behind it. There are proofs embedded in the analysis of many problems, but most of what people do is empirical and highly contingent on industry trends and particular hardware architectures. It would be pointless to teach someone to *study* these things without teaching them how to write code.
Don't get me wrong, I love the theory in computer science, but if you want a computer science degree that just goes over theory and ignores application... then check out the mathematics and philosophy departments.
"Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency..." and replacing that with what exactly? Happy thoughts? Having more women in CS is great, but let's not train them to be incompetent right out the gate, hmm?
...again. It's the American way!
Does anyone know of any program (anywhere) that is pushing to increase the % of males graduating from nursing? Are they using the same methodology? Because the last time that I checked, nursing was absolutely dominated by women. Given that these fields (cs / nursing) are approximately equivalent in pay (more for nurses, where I am) and prestige and training required, shouldn't we be working just as hard to increase the number of males enrolled in nursing?
Maybe I'm just on the wrong boards, but I have never heard of any push to increase male enrollment in Nursing. Seems only fair to me.
This is the problem - not the solution.
I have to deal with too many CS graduates today that have no concept of computer architecture or software development because the emphasis of the courses is dumbed down.
At some point the theoretical has to be usefully applied where the rubber meets the road. The majority of students need to understand this because the vast majority of them are not going to be employed as researchers and theorists, but instead as architects and developers - in roles that lean heavily on engineering. We are not hiring MIS graduates for these positions - precisely because they do not have a firm grasp of the theoretical aspects that are also important to grasp in the applied realm. This is the biggest problem in this field I perceive today.
I think the whole problem came about when we split MIS and CS into 'applied' and 'theoretical/math centric' spheres. MIS programs suffered because they produced developers who don't have a firm grasp of computer architecture and theory - focusing exclusively on business processes instead. CS suffered because it has moved more toward the theoretical at the expense of application. Both groups are missing key ingredients to be useful outside of their limited spheres.
We need 'jacks-of-all-trades' that can effectively be architects and developers, or pursue the higher branches of the theoretical computer science world as they desire. I would suggest the following changes in the university to make this happen:
1. Merge the MIS and CS undergraduate programs. There is no good reason to keep them seperate, and many reasons why this has been bad for all areas of computing.
2. Define the minimal requirements to make the new degree a true prerequisite for CS graduate work or professional employment as an architect or developer. The goal is to raise the bar so that it is truely seen as a benefit to employment and employers - much as Engineers, Lawyers and Doctors are seen today.
3. Allow minors/emphasis areas in the degree for business/application, architecture/engineering (software and hardware), and theoretics/art.
4. Define a code of ethics for the field. Just as the Physician has the physician's oath, and Engineers and Lawyers have professional societies and liscensing - computer system architects and developers must be held to a higher standard.
If this means there are less CS graduates - so be it. There are too many non-starters in the business as it is today - people who saw the CS degree as a quick ride to fortune who have been behind much of the system failures and ugliness we've seen over the past decade. Additionally, I think the degree would become more valuable to women if it was seen as a pathway to success, rather than something anyone can easily accomplish.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
You're either better at programming that you think, or your experience was bigger than you're saying :)
From what I've seen, the first exposure to programming is hard. If you did Basic at 15, or Logo at 10, then it probably was OK. If your first programming experience is Java at 18 (competing with those who already know) it can be pretty discouraging.
Your first programming class you're probably too worried about syntax to really understand semantics. Much more if you're also learning how to use the computer. It sounds weird, but many people still come into a CS degree without really knowing how to use a computer.
Your ideas are some of the most cogent I've seen in comments on this thread.
As I was reading through some of the other comments, and thinking about what learning to program meant to me as a beginner, something occurred to me that might be another way to go. It's rather a radical idea, but the more I think about it, the more I like it.
Here's the idea: All first-year University students must take an entry-level programming class. They get to choose the flavor: something OOP for people who know what they're doing already, something simple, oh heck even Javascript, for people who've never had any exposure to programming before. But all the classes would introduce programming procedures and practices. People who already know what they're doing could test out of programming 101 just like they can test out of math 101 now.
Better yet, introduce programming in high school, and make some computer science compulsory for all students, just like English, Math, and (in some schools, these days) a foreign language. Require four years of English, three years of math, two years of a foreign language, and one year of computer science. Some students will show an aptitude and find that they like it, others will hate it and suffer. Just like they do now with math, English, and foreign languages.
Just as currently only a small group really get jazzed by writing and go into a creative writing major, only a small group would get jazzed by programming and go into a CS major. But you'd be more likely to catch more people who have some aptitude -- people of both genders, all backgrounds, and people with and without prior experience coding. Wouldn't the world be a better place for programmers if everybody with a BA or a BS had at least some inkling of what goes into writing a computer program?
Hmm, at least one solution comes to my mind, when it comes to helping people who have decided to do their degree in CS, yet lack exposure to computers. So, the solution: have some additional elective courses that bring people into the field smoothly. They could teach some basic programming and computing philosophy and constructs. Touching the curriculum proper, however, should still be a no-no.