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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."
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.
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