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Why the Widening Gender Gap In Computer Science?
ruheling writes "From yesterday's New York Times: ' What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?' In many US universities, over the past decade, there has been deliberate effort to integrate and encourage women and girls to get more involved in the 'hard' sciences, engineering, and math. However, instead of the proportion of women to men increasing, in Computer Science the opposite is actually true. Specifically, in 2001-2, only 28 percent of all undergraduate degrees in computer science went to women. Now many computer science departments report that women now make up less than 10 percent of the newest undergraduates. What's going on here, folks?"
For some reason its hard to accept that a lot of women simply aren't interested in studying CS, engineering, or hard science.
Its a similar problem to something like Nursing, in the other direction. At my graduation, the CS group sat right behind the nursing group. There's lots of comments at how the CS group was 80% male. There were no comments at how the nursing group was 97% female.
At some point, the reality has to set in that women on average simply aren't interested, and all the incentives in the world won't change that.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Why do they pick and choose industries to focus on. No-one raises a stink about shortage of female garbage collectors.
And I haven't heard a big push to increase males in areas dominated my women, e.g. elementary education.
Has anyone ever once argued that maybe--just maybe--I really really like computers?
What's the ratio in nursing? 20 females:1 male? So here's your solution: take all the entry level students from these two professions and even them out regardless of what the individual wants to do. See how happy you make everybody.
Or better yet, unfairly weight the minority sex in each of those classes, that's fair because I definitely was given a detailed account of the outside world while I was in my mother's womb and then filled out a scantron card for what I wanted to be--a white male in the United States with no heritage whatsoever.
It pays less than it used to and they weren't all that interested to begin with. I think it's a safe bet that the 10% percent that dropped were doing it for the money.
Last I checked, they comprised about 51% of the population....
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The smart girls are going to med school or veterinary medicine. They see the creepy geek guys leering at them like they've never seen a live female before and figure if they're going to need to deal with some horse's butt, they might as well go to vet school.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Seriously, why does every career or activity have to have an exact 50-50 mix of males and females? Last time I checked, the hormonal balance in men and women were quite a bit different and each sex has a general preference to what interests them. The examples of teachers, nurses, and garbage collectors are excellent examples. The two sexes are different. Why do so many people have a hard time accepting that?
well... yes. Sexual harassment is a huge issue for female students/workers. One girl to a dozen guys, you're going to get hit on, a LOT. Even after I got married, I still got chatted up left and right (don't guys check for rings anymore?) and I really don't like it. It feels like the only reason half my co-workers talk to me is because I'm the only one with tits in the place... not because I'm smart, not because I can code with the best of them, not because I'm funny, or cheerful or anything else.
The "OMFG BOOBS! Let's go talk to them" effect creates a really hostile environment, which causes many of us to change majors/jobs... which makes women even more rare, which makes the next set of boobs even more rare... vicious cycle.
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
I think nationalism is something that has a stronger appeal to people than geekdom. "American" has turned into a somewhat creepy religion.
The OP echoed my own thoughts (geeks scaring off the girls), but the "real" reason is because women are cool and computer science is not. ;-) They simply aren't attracted to that type of work. And there's nothing wrong with that.
You ever wander past the Health & Human Development part of your college?
It's like an engineering class in reverse - 40 women; 2 guys. (I knew I picked the wrong major.) Men and women are not that same. Men migrate towards "things" and women migrate towards "humans", each dominating their respective engineering & health majors. They don't think the same and they have different interests. Why can't people just accept that?
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
I didn't get into computer science to be a SCIENTIST, I got into it so I could write applications and games and make useful things for people.
You don't need a computer science degree for that. You can buy all the books you want from Amazon, you can find the answers to all your questions online, and you can write any app you want in Python or Ruby or Objective C or the language of your choice. There's no need to deal with dry courses about operating systems and so on.
And if you really want some insight into NP completeness or whatever, there are plenty of free articles to read...or buy another book.
Women want to program and do useful things with computers, but maybe they're not as interested in what amounts to computer science for its own sake?
If it was last night when I had mod points, I'd give you +1 insightful. When did "American" become a lifestyle rather than a place of birth?
Perhaps we might recognize natural gender-based tendencies. Isn't it possible women just aren't that interested in programming? It's like asking "Why aren't more women interested in football?" They just aren't. It doesn't necessarily indicate some fundamental problem with the system.
I don't see a lot of people asking why there aren't more female plumbers.
That is an interesting observation, but I think you are right in a sense.
I find it interesting that as few as 20 years ago and before, people held that the "separation of church and state" was an ideal that made things work better for everyone. The notion that the government should not legislate morality had been a virtually constitutional presumption. These days, a candidate has to claim to be a [protestant] christian in order for people to vote for him at all. (Why do people invariably assume "he is religious and is therefore a good person" all the time? That was rhetorical, I know why, actually.)
And now linking conservative christian alignment with being "real americans" is just two or more steps in the wrong direction... a destructive direction if they haven't recognized the horrible dangers of a religiously lead state, one only needs to look at the mess that nations under Islamic law or our own US history where religious extremism had played some roles in some frightening eras. And it doesn't help that religious zeal ultimately becomes an arms race to see who can be the most fundamental and extreme while keeping the masses following them.
It's like that in a lot of science grad programs. The percent of women majoring in it in undergrad is decent. Then you see the percent gradually (or sometimes sharply) drop off over Master's, PhD, and university faculty. I think that one of the biggest reasons is that grad schools, and academia in general, haven't yet caught up with the fact that they are now serving people who need maternity leave and who want to balance their work and family life (and yes, more men today want to do this, too, but at least they don't get demonized if they put their career first). Combine that with the two-body problem in academia, and you get a lot of women who just throw up their hands and say screw it. I know I'm constantly having to convince myself not to, and I don't even have kids yet. (I'm not in CS, I'm not even in hard science - but even as a woman in a very family-friendly social science PhD program there are enough issues. I can't imagine how much harder it would be if the majority of my classmates weren't women who have had or are having kids during the program.)
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
well... yes. Sexual harassment is a huge issue for female students/workers. One girl to a dozen guys, you're going to get hit on, a LOT. Even after I got married, I still got chatted up left and right (don't guys check for rings anymore?) and I really don't like it. It feels like the only reason half my co-workers talk to me is because I'm the only one with tits in the place... not because I'm smart, not because I can code with the best of them, not because I'm funny, or cheerful or anything else.
Now, I'm not saying all those guys weren't flirting, but were all of them? I've sat and chatted with just about everyone in any of my smaller classes. I know that I'm going to work with them at some point during the year, so why not get to know them. The sooner I can pick out who is going to flake out, and who's code is superior, the better I can plan for the final projects.
As the great philosopher Barbie once said, "Math is hard!"
No, but seriously, before my karma is ruined, it's all a matter of differing interests. When I got into computers, they were still a seriously nerdcore hobby. It was rare to even encounter another girl at school who had a computer at home, even less likely for her to know how to use it. My sister looked at my computering, laughed, and went back to her interests.
Kind of without me realizing it, computers became a bigger and bigger thing in the lives of non-geeks. The internet is what really did it. When my sister finally asked me to help her find a computer, this was a watershed moment. And the social aspects made possible by the internet was what really sucked her in. I enjoyed the bulletin boards in my pre-internet days but IRC and ICQ were the killer apps that really sucked her in, that and the web in general. And more and more of her friends ended up having computers, and the social elements online weren't about computers but were simply facilitated by computers. == This, I think, is key. She has become as big of a computer geek as me now but she's using it as a tool, not as an end unto itself. She uses Photoshop and Illustrator for her art, uses different programs as a designer at her job, does her personal writing on there, keeps up with friends, etc. But it's not just geeking out on computers for the sake of geeking out. She's not installing all sorts of upgrades for games, she sticks with consoles for that sort of thing.
Since Slashdot is all about car analogies, I'd say most women are using computers the way they use a car, as a tool that they find very useful but they don't care about what's going on under the hood. Getting into CS is like becoming a gearhead. Most car users, male or female, aren't really gearheads. And from the stats I'm hearing from people I know in academia, Americans as a whole, male and female, aren't really into the hard sciences. There's just no money there.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
And trying to force it is only going to hurt people.
It's getting to the point that if girls are particularly capable of doing math/science they get pushed to even if they don't want to in the name of equality.
For gods sake let people choose for themselves even if they don't make the choices you think they should!
When did "American" become a lifestyle rather than a place of birth?
When people decided that culture was a sacrosanct, frozen set of behavior rather than an adaptation to environmental forces. Of course the overwhelming nostalgia hasn't helped that problem either.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
What I don't understand is why these anti-sexist persons are sooooo concerned about lack of women in science. Why do I not hear anybody crying out, "There are only 2 men for every 40 women in the Health & Human Development Major!" I guess we men don't matter. How sexist. ;-)
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Sexual harassment is a huge issue for female students/workers. One girl to a dozen guys, you're going to get hit on, a LOT.
Getting chatted up and being sexually harassed are not even remotely the same thing.
The lot of posts like "women are just different and don't like CS, accept it" are missing the point. Insight to the youngsters -- it didn't used to be this way. When I was in college about 20 years ago, there was a good supply of women in my math and CS courses. They weren't there for a lucrative career, they wren't chasing a dot-com industry that didn't exist yet. They were smart and geeky and interested in the world.
(And, in a good proportion of cases, damned hot. If you haven't had they joy of 1 or 2 totally cute, smart babes in all your math/CS courses then I do feel sorry for you.)
So something is changing in the culture or CS courses that's turned of women. In fact, it's happened with breathtaking, distressing speed. And it's not about the money, I don't think; the women scientists I knew were the *least* motivated by a big strike-it-rich payday.
I read a paper written about 10 years ago evangelizing teaching all object-oriented programming and asserting in passing that OOP will be more attractive to women for some stupid reason. Obviously that, at least, has not been the case.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
You listed one person, so I'm going to list one person too. Why would my college friend Lynn, even though she had better grades than me, decide to completely drop-out of engineering? Probably because she wasn't enjoying the career. Probably because she was less interested in things than working with people.
You may deny it, but there are a LOT of women like Lynn out there... which is why so few enter science or engineering. Simply put: They don't like it.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
The outrage is that Health & Human Develoment majors typically don't receive comparable salaries to comp sci graduates, hence completely throwing balance of higher-paying jobs into the men's favor. To less-rational people, this can be twisted to illustrate that sexism is more rampant in the workplace than it really is. As ridiculous as it sounds, some feminists still tout these slanted statistics.
If comp sci and engineering majors typically made less than 30k out of college with no benefits, no one would give a shit about the lack of women in that field.
Sigs are for losers
I'm not so sure that's a gender-based problem. I've seen more than my fair share of male students as well who clearly were not interested in actually being in computer engineering and suffered from the same problems. I'm not sure apathy is tied to gender in any discipline.
...no two people are not on fire.
You don't get paid based on how much you or anyone else thinks you deserve. You get paid based on what salary you can command, which is regulated by supply and demand.
It's not an outrage at all that one kind of job doesn't get the same salary as another. If you want more money do something more valuable, which will be something there is a lower supply and/or a higher demand for.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
So an American should at the same time both understand that hanging on to his culture is wrong and allow immigrants to bring their culture with them. Am I getting that right?
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
If half of the population refuses to enter a field because of reasons other than competency, then the general quality of people in that field is going to go down. Half of the people who would have excelled and become great in that field won't because of social reasons.
In the CS world there aren't enough competent engineers. There are a lot of bad ones, but not a lot of good ones. My current company only hires people who are able to demonstrate competence in the field, and they hire 1 out of 5 candidates at most. They have billboards up all over the state and they're only able to get one candidate per week. There's a serious shortage of good engineers. I'd be surprised if there's the same level of shortage in Health and Human Development, especially at the pay grades that they're looking at for a good programmer.
So, while it's true that the "female agenda" or feminist ideology probably has something to do with it, there are very, very good reasons to be concerned if half of the population isn't entering the field for social reasons.
No - what earned liberals the label the "Blame America First Crowd" was them making an honest attempt at understanding why we were attacked on Sept 11, 2001 without excluding all possibility that it might have been in response to actions we had taken in the past.
Your pointless sarcasm aside GP as a point that a certain portion of the population has lost all perspective and worships the country like a god instead of being good citizens and stewards of the country and realizing that it can and does have laws that we should strive to correct to make it an even better country. They've lost the ability to realize that something can be both good and flawed.
There are two forms of love - that of a child to a parent, and that of two adults. With a child to a parent they cannot see the flaws and when the flaws in their parent are pointed out they become irrational and lash out. In adult love they see each others flaws and accept them and work to help the other solve their flaws.
That certain part of the population I talked about before loves America like a child loves a parent. Their lashing out is the source of the label "The Blame America First Crowd" because the other group, the mature one that recognizes and tries to correct flaws, was making an honest attempt at understanding what happened to try to prevent it from happening again.
I would also advise you take a look at your reaction and evaluate it in the light of this assessment.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
So nearly all species in the animal kingdom have inherent behavioral differences between males and females - except humans? You really believe that?
You know, just because men and women are different doesn't mean they can't have the same rights. You don't have to be so petrified at the thought of differences between the sexes.
I'm not sure what you mean -- nationalism is hardly a new idea, or unique to America.
That's odd, I'd say about half the women that I know went to college looking to find a husband, not to make money.
As the adage goes they were looking to earn their 'Mrs.' degree.
There are still a lot of people out there who prefer, given the choice, the nuclear family model with 1 person, usually the male, working and the other , usually the female, staying home and taking care of children.
The social thing to do, if you want to stay with you peer group however is go to college now days. Often women are basically forced to go , because they are not yet married and your ability to feed yourself is in question without a degree of some kind nowadays.
I know women who have degrees in genetic engineering, education, nursing, music, all kinds of things, but the only real reason they went to school was that wanted to be around people their own age and hopefully find a mate. The career was a back up plan.
Which to me explains a lot. As CS and engineering programs have become more work , why do that if your hope , in the back of your mind you don't really ever have to use your degree.
Seems, like it should all be good so long as that is what people want to do, but I have met women who get really angry at other women for not having a profession ( as if staying at home and taking care of children isn't a profession worth having).
I've never really understood that myself. Given our choice, I would both hang out with my wife and our child 24 / 7. The only reason I spend 8-10 hours a day away from her and my child is that food and housing are also important to us. She feels the same way and doesn't want to work. So, I'm glad I earn enough money she doesn't have too.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Honestly, the geek stereotype does very, very little to attract women to CS. No one wants to constantly work with people they find loathsome, even if they might otherwise be interested in the field. There are surer ways to make yourself, miserable, but there aren't many, and women know this. They go into fields where they can apply their talents to people they actually enjoy being around. If that turns out to be impossible or impractical, then they apply their interests in a non-vocational way for example, perhaps by creating or contributing to OSS projects. The saddest cases give up entirely.
The male geek stereotype has been around for a long time, of course; why might it be to blame when it clearly was not in the past? Simple: the stereotype has changed. The "classic" stereotype, while it portrayed geeks as socially inept, also portrayed them as harmless: socially (and often physically) clumsy in an endearing sort of way, and certainly nothing to be afraid of. The more modern stereotype is far creepier, attributing more to problems with inhibition and self-control than mere misunderstanding. Geeks were once nothing to fear, and now they are, and so people have been away. Again, there are few ways to make yourself more miserable than to work with people you feel you constantly have to watch out for. And so they don't.
I disagree. I disagree with the notion that computer science is more important (higher pay) than the care of human beings, and I think people should be just as concerned to know why few men enter the HHD field.
Yes I'm serious.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
You don't get paid based on how much you or anyone else thinks you deserve. You get paid based on what salary you can command, which is regulated by supply and demand.
I don't think that they were saying that it's an outrage that HR workers don't make as much money as other professions. The outrage comes from the overall male vs female income, which female-dominated relatively-low-income professions like HR skews, and thus gives an inaccurate picture.
However even if I misinterpret the sentence starting with the word "outrage", one thing I'm sure I comprehend, and that they're correct on: The reason nobody gives a rat's ass about gender equality in those jobs is because nobody is envious of those job's salaries. Nobody cares about the gender gap in day laborers even though it's huge. If CS was a low-paying job, nobody would care about the gender gap in CS.
The enemies of Democracy are
Ironically, I actually considered going into the military, was forbidden by my mother due to said harassment, and ended up at an engineering school, studying computer science. I ended up getting my cs degree but also a literature degree at the same time to keep me sane.
There were only 5 other females in my 300+ graduating class and maybe 2-3 in my actual classrooms at any given time. As freshmen, most of my female friends dropped out of the major and in some cases, the school at large, to go to a liberal arts college instead. My friend doing comp sci at a state school also dropped out of that major, too, and chose history. This was all several years ago.
I wouldn't say I was stalked or harassed. I actually would say there seemed to be communication issues, with other students, TAs, and professors. Profs and TAs told me and another female friend we just needed to program more. They couldn't explain things. This was true in some ways -- when I finally found a language that suited me, and I just started programming random stuff, things started to make a lot more sense. I was also really helped by my future life-partner who had the patience and know-how to answer my vital questions. When I sat in algorithms class, and the prof told us "Just make a class, with whatever member variables you want.", I'd wonder, "How? I can't just... make stuff up. How will the compiler know to do that? Why would it listen to me? It can't be as easy as just typing out a definition. That doesn't *do* anything." I was not willing to just accept the 'magic' there. There were many sticking points like that. Luckily, my SO was a C++ god, and once I understood the foundation or resolved any mental conflicts, everything fell into place.
You can make a strong case that the above is an overall teaching issue. (For instance, the situation was actually worse when the professor was female.) I do think that it is fair to at least wonder if male and female brains process info differently, due either to genetics or cultural emphasis on certain tasks. If so, maybe those brains need to approach certain subjects in different ways, too. Someone more verbally-oriented might need more 'why' instead of just 'how'.
Women are more aligned with simple, repetitive and multiple tasks. Men are more aligned single tasks that require great concentration.
The only thing conclusive in this statement is that you need to meet more women and more men.
A problem I've always had with this whole ordeal is that men are raised and taught to be ... approaching? They are told that they have to be the one to start up a conversation. I think it's a double edged sword of sorts. You could have forward women, but they are quickly harassed as unsavory types. This leads to situations where a guy has to control that upbringing and suppress it during parts of his day.
I speak from experience when I say that if a guy doesn't approach women with intent of some type he will live a single life. Period. No questions asked. I stopped "trying" nearly 10 years ago and I have only once been approached by women... and she was drunk. I don't consider myself an unapproachable or ugly person, and I've been "hooked up" by friends that are surprised that I'm single. If we didn't have at least one side of the equation attempting connections, the human race would be wiped out in a matter of years.
Anyway, The ranting has a point. It's mainly that children are raised to fit certain roles in life. These roles cater to a work style and an interaction preferential in life. Men will always think about procreation because that's what they are told all their life. They are raised to be upfront and in your face (even if they aren't looking at your face.)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
So an American should at the same time both understand that hanging on to his culture is wrong and allow immigrants to bring their culture with them. Am I getting that right?
Yes. Same way you should both understand that believing the Earth is flat is stupid and allow flat-earthers to voice their opinion anywhere they please.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Schools don't really teach science at all, they teach scientism. Ask your friends who did not get an undergraduate in math/science/engineering what their rationale is for believing in:
1) The atomic theory of matter (as opposed to the continuous theory, popular till 18th century)
2) That space time is curved or even what this means
3) of if they haven't done biology something like the germ theory of disease
The fact is people don't learn science at all, and the reason is because they don't learn how to argue through incorrect theories. I think it would be wonderful to teach the biblical theory: flat earth sitting on a firmament; with the sun planets and stars under a dome of water, .... and slowly work through why these ideas were rejected.
... are we still in fucking highschool? I really wish women did not call guys "creepy", most guys that are labelled such are most likely socially inexperienced and anxious, I really hate how women have a monopoly on dehumanizing these men when what they really need is some friends and some advice about what they are doing that is socially repellant.
I swear such women are seriously giving the good women of their gender a bad name by being so immature, by continuing to dehumanize them based on their social difficulties.