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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."
Maybe it's just me, but I see no reason why people need to be recruited into compsci.
I agree. I am woman in the IT field, and am very passionate about it. I have a degree in Biology -it turns out I am also passionate about science. I understand that universities care about demographics across programs, but you rarely hear about programs trying to attract more men for Women's Studies, do you? Anyway, my main point is, attracting women to CS can be all fine and good, but what I would really like to see is a job market that is more gender balanced. There still exists a school of thought that women are less suited to IT. More women with CS degrees may help this some, but in the end, not everyone who is interested in IT work necessarily gets a CS degree.
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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.
I agree it is insulting. I think programming is essential to a good computer science education. I think maybe the approach should be (and this would help all students) is show that writing code is just part of the process. I'm a programmer and yes I write a lot of code. However I read a lot of design specs, spend a lot time in design meetings, spend time talking to potential users, spend time talking to testers, debugging, etc...
The very idea that somehow I overcome some inherent deficiency to become a programmer is horrible.
For example, I was helping my parents clean out their basement. My parents kept all my report cards, progress reports, etc... I found a progress report from my junior high school programming teacher. The person commented that I was picking up programming faster than the other students and suggested my parents encourage me to go a computer camp or learn a more complex language. My parents dismissed the very idea of me being a programmer. There was no deficiency on my part.
I've been on the interviewer side of the table more than once when a woman showed up to be interviewed. In general, the reaction (not in front of her of course) has been to be flabbergasted and pleased that we might actually end up with a girl who was working in the tech side of the business.
We did apply the same standards of hiring both (yes, I said both, it only happened twice, and both times the girl was Asian) times and she made it. Once just scraping by (she didn't care a lot about quality and took criticism very poorly, but she did know how to program fairly well) and the other doing pretty well.
I find this rather depressing. When I worked at Amazon, the only women who were ever hired as programmers were from Asia (most from India). There is some strong cultural force at work here that discourages women from becoming programmers.
I wish I understand what it is that convinces US born women to not become programmers. I don't think it's a harassment issue. That's not something I've especially noticed. Though, since I'm a guy, it's possible it just passed me by.
But, I haven't noticed the bias you speak of. As I said, the places where I've been an interviewer people were really happy that a woman was interviewing. And it wasn't because they wanted to hit on her either. :-)
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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.
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.
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
In my experience, women in computer science lean heavily towards theory, where they are over-represented compared to their numbers in CS departments overall. Men in graduate programs tend to heavily dominate the "systems" groups.
I always figured this was because boys grow up "playing with computers" and already have interest in programming, while equally-capable women get into computer science later and, with less already-established interest in programming, get excited about theory.
You don't see it reported on slashdot, but there is actually a push to get more men into nursing. This is not because of a perceived idea of gender-equality, though. It is because there are instances in nursing where men would be better. For example, the average man is stronger than the average woman, and that comes into play with moving patients, or even just moving equipment. Having more men around to do those things is useful. Also, there's the issue of modesty. Many male patients are uncomfortable with the idea of females examing certain portions of their anatomy.
Yes! It's called "higher pay" and it applies to fields of law, medicine, and business. With women generally being smarter and in other fields not needing to interact with as many social retardates, it is clear that there is a cultural imperative to discourage women from programming.
Or maybe it's nonsense like this or this coming from the IT world that keeps them out. Who knows?
That is all.
Human beings do care about demographics. If you live in a country with red-haired and brown-haired people, and all the red-haired people do menial labor, whereas all the brown-haired people have cushy desk jobs with salaries 100x higher, you have a problem. Even if there is no discrimination, you still have a problem. People aren't rational creatures, they will perceive such a situation as discriminatory, and you will quickly have social unrest, and worse. Furthermore, such a situation also breeds some forms of discrimination - not intentional ones, but ones just as effective. Brown-haired people won't have the contacts to get into desk-job schools, and will probably feel quite odd even if they do get in. This is a self-perpetuating system, in other words. Yes, it might 'right' itself in time, but meanwhile you have, as I said, social unrest. It is just better, from a practical point of view, to nudge the system in the more balanced direction.
This is a realistic, not an idealistic point of view. In fact, it even violates some ethical decrees: nudging red-haired people into desk-job school means that some brown-haired people will not get in, who otherwise would have. This is not fair to them, no doubt. But no social policy is fair towards everyone. Helping red-haired people get into desk-job school is probably the fairest overall.
They are talking about admissions criteria, in the context of high school computing backgrounds. Attracting talent that may or may not have extensive programming experience, rather than focusing just on the people who enter college with a lot of programming under their belt
It sounds all well and good when you put it like that, but as an undergrad at CMU in the ECE program (which shares a lot of classes with CS kids, and I had a lot of CS friends) what we witnessed in reality was: the program was dumbed down for girls to get in. This was reflected in many more incoming students not having a clue about how to use a computer, let alone program it, and a lot of female CS majors changing majors by sophomore year. I'm not being mysogenistic here, trust me, CS guys were THRILLED at the prospect of more girls in the program, but it didn't pan out that way. Caveat being this was 1999-2002, I have no knowledge of how it's working now, but in the first 3 years we witnessed lower quality students and more CS degree program dropouts.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
The real question is why are all the women in engineering (at my school) signing up for Civil, Mechanical and Chemical (more women than men in CME from what I can tell) instead of Electrical, Computer and CS? (CS is in the College of Engineering here)
/. will take exception to the lumping in of CS with all the engineering disciplines (ie, ones that you can be a PE in), I generally do as well, but I think its interesting because it takes the same "kind" of person to declare any one of these majors - you have to like math, and thats the same for a real CS curriculum.
If I had to pull numbers out of thin air, I'd say that approximately 1/3 of MEs and around 1/2 of CEs are female. This compares with 1/20 or so in EE and maybe 1/10 to 1/5 in CS. (again, at my school - and I may be wrong on the CE/ME numbers)
Why? I bet the women learning about building bridges are capable of learning control theory or algorithms if they were interested - why aren't they interested?
Of course, most engineers on
Exactly, as an employer looking to hire people as programmers (which would be the majority of the jobs looking for CS degrees), you now have people with a degree that means nothing. There are very few positions (professors, researchers) where theory is more important than actually being able to write code. I say we should go in the completely opposite direction, with more architecture and programming classes (using architecture to have people actually understand what they are doing, and why a certain code block is efficient/inefficient on the hardware it is running on), and only one or two survey courses on algorithms and theory, with more available as electives. CS should be an Engineering degree, as it is in my school (UCF), not a liberal arts degree. I don't see many women in Mechanical, Aerospace, Electrical, or Computer Engineering either, should we stop building cars, satellites, and circuits too? Of course, 28% seems extremely high to me, as my experience has been that there are far less than that in my classes, at least in the later stages (1 each in my senior/grad classes).
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
"CS should be an Engineering degree"
Strongly disagree. It should be made more of a science, not less of one. Computing is going to become increasingly vital for many things. CS should be where the basic reseach happens.
I'm not arguing against better programs which focus on programming--algorithm selection, design patterns, architecture (machine and software), etc. There is a rather large divide between science and engineering. CS already has science in the name of the program. Use it for that. For the rest--stay with engineering terms, such as Software Engineering or similar.
If CS becomes an engineering course, where is the science supposed to happen? How do you train the next generation of researchers? Do we have to create a program called Really Computer Science? Of course we'd immediately need a course within the program called Identification of Serious Semantic Suckage.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
They're moving away from letting people into the program based upon their previous programming experience, which is different from moving the entire program.
On a second note, this is not a bad idea, as you've probably noticed that a good deal of software out there, while written by what appear to be otherwise skillful people, is virtually unusuable. Undocumented, hostile interface, brittle, difficult to modify/extend/repair, and otherwise apparently written by sociopaths on a caffeine hangover. What they're trying to overcome is a culture that has grown around a field that keeps people who are interested in the material, but not in the sociopathy, out.
You'll also notice the article points out that they're emphasizing the applications that computing is integral to, rather than computing for its own sake. Once again, there is a population, talented, but differently (or when talking about CSci programs, at all) socialized, who wish to do things using computing, and who don't wish to to spend their time on Linux-distro p*ng contests. This actually bodes well for many fields in which computing is applied, as we may be able to get better communication between (for example) chemists and comp-scis, yielding applications that allow us to do our work more efficiently, while giving an intellectual challenge and sense of accomplishments to the compscis, i.e. they built something and it's being used.
This attitude that everything is being dumbed-down to allow women in is the same one you hear in physics, medicine, or similar traditionally all-male fields, when what's really being requested is that a bunch of prima-donna alpha-males (and beta-males with delusions of alphacity) are being asked to grow personalities and interact a little more humanely with their colleagues who just want to do their work, and not compete for the gold-plated sphincter award. And yes, I have met women who compete in those fields under the old rules, and you guys aren't happy when you find out what a pair of brass sharp elbows look like from the other side.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken