Slashdot Mirror
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?"
You guys are being creepy. Girls don't like creepy dudes leering at them all the time.
Clearly they realize that it is a bad career choice.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
Wait, What? No female /.'s??
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
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.
Simple, because "Math is Hard". That and they're tired of their male colleagues saying, "Byte me", "Mind if I nibble for a bit", and similar worn out expressions as pickup lines.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
Because of the family obligations that women often end up with (or perhaps value more than men), stability in a career is often a big factor for women. However, globalization has made it a more volatile field. Further, during downturns, new software development tends to slow or halt, further hitting one during recessions.
Table-ized A.I.
With props to Will Ferrell, the funniest man alive:
A woman's brain is one-third the size of ours. It's science.
Last I checked, they comprised about 51% of the population....
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Think of the various attempts to encourage women into computer science by watering down the content. Not too long ago /. had an article that talked about how a consortium of schools (including Carnegie Mellon) wanted to eliminate programming altogether as a way to encourage the students to move into CS.
The problem is that students are usually astute enough to sense that the school is presenting "mickey mouse" version of the material. They want the meat, not milk bonez, and watering down the content says, in effect, (a) "you are not smart enough to understand the REAL computer science so here is the for-dummy version", and (b) that there is no point for students who are truly motivated to do the work, since an A can be had for a song.
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
> 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?
A hint: what happened in March 2000?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
In my CS undergrad, about 30% of my class were women. They were CS majors too, not CIS or MIS, so there used to be a decent amount of interest in a very technical, traditionally male, field. After my first job out of school, I still saw plenty of women, although mainly in IT opts. Plenty of server admins were women. Then they all seemed to disappear! I went back for a Masters in Software Engineering and I had 1 (ONE) woman in all the classes I took. In my new job though, about 30% or the programmers are women, but NONE are native born int he US - almost all the women are from India. All the native born women in my company are either BSAs, PMs, some IT Opts, or managers (My VP is a woman). So, at least for native born US woman, they seem to be leaving the more "hard core" tech jobs into affiliated jobs, but still in the industry, according to what I have seen.
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?
I've taken two classes at a major university so that I can get my degree finally. In the most recent class, the teacher has been downright sexist. Crude jokes that come out badly because of his broken-ass english and a horrible sense of what's proper and what's not. I've only gone to class 4 times this semester... the first two classes, and the two subsequent tests. During each of the first two classes I saw a woman get up and leave the classroom after a horribly sexist joke. It may be that I recognize this because I've been in the workforce for several years and have gone through "sexual harassment training" or whatever, but I doubt it. This guy is creepy, and he's outright lewd.
So yeah, I can imagine that women don't want any part of the field if the people training the next generation of workers are this bad.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
Ask a 7 year old kid what a computer person does, and they will describe someone working with machines, boxes, TVs and gadgets. From an early age, we are lead to think that boys work with machines, aka play with trucks. When kids are in high school and start making initial career choices, this mentality stays with them and therefore only small fraction of women end up doing what they were raised to believe to be a man's profession. This has nothing to do with sexism, glass ceilings or modernization. From day one the whole concept of working with computers just seems like something a boy would do. With that being said, companies are DYING to hire female workers in IT. Hopefully this will help.
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?
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.
Wait...there are girls in CS? Plural?
I don't think there is any negative force driving women away from computer science. I think that most women just aren't interested enough in computer science to make a career out of it. The decreasing number of women could have to do with decreasing wages, longer hours, and other job-related things... they drive out people who are doing it for the money and leave only the people with genuine interest in the field.
This is being over-analyzed though, and for the wrong reasons.
When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor's degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, according to National Science Foundation surveys.
There are plenty of fields that are predominately one gender. A lot of people see that as a problem, and, as shown by the language in the article, it's viewed as an "improvement" when the ratio is balanced out. As long as the difference isn't being caused by discrimination or any other negative means, we shouldn't be trying to balance genders.
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
Looking around at the CS students at UNM I see that most ~75% are foreign exchange students. Almost all of them are male. Of the other 25% only a few are female. I think the stats are being skewed by the shear number of foreign exchange students. Also, the number of US born students in CS is dropping.
It seems to me (a software engineer for a company of about 600) that this is less about barriers and more about preferred lifestyle.
Let's be honest with ourselves: the life of a coder is one with a very solidly entrenched lifestyle of sleeplessness and caffeine addiction. Interpersonal relationships are stereotypically uncomfortable, and non-technical conversations are rare and usually involve the word "d20" and "hit points". I'm getting a bit extreme, but the point is there. Coding is nerdy. I've made my peace with that, and enjoy the lifestyle.
Out of the 60 or so engineers in my segment, 3 are female. That's a whopping 5%. Those three females are every bit as nerdy as the guys, and so they fit in well and are accorded respect and not treated any differently.
I can only surmise that there are fewer nerdy/geeky girls, and thus fewer female engineers. Based on life experience (anecdotal, I know) I would say this is due mostly to peer pressure from OTHER GIRLS when they are younger. Not saying guys don't contribute to this, but I think it's mostly same-sex peer pressure that drives females away from nerd-stereotypes.
Thoughts?
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
Come on people. Look at the stuff in here. I am an engineer who loves what she does (I build robots!) and I have the good fortune to work in Cambridge, Mass, where women engineers are often no big deal... and yet if I knew I was in a room with all of you, thinking that my brain is different and I'm just not meant for this stuff, and if I *am* good/interested in this it's just because I'm "weird" and going against my gender norms... well, I'd hightail it out of here, too.
And in other countries there are many female engineers. My mother worked with a Ukranian woman who thought it odd that engineering was considered a "male" profession here, rather than a female profession as it was back home. Most of the women I do see in engineering are of Asian descent. You don't think, just maybe, that we're doing a crappy job as a culture of encouraging American kids (not just girls, but even boys too) to get excited about and be interested in this stuff?
I don't deny that women think differently from men. But I do question the suggestion that this means women can't or won't do engineering or science. I question why engineering or science can't handle the way women think. It's not a matter of dumbing it down; it's a matter of figuring out how to leverage diverse ways of thinking about a problem. A group of people looking at a problem in different ways is more beneficial than one geek sitting in a cube doing what he thinks is best. A group of men is good. A group of men and women is better.
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
When we were in CS classes, we did not consider our male classmates to be scary, and some of them even seemed fairly cool. We'd flirt, and even exchange jokes with them that only a CS major could find to be funny. But we were all about making money. There may be men who are into computers just because it's fun, but women go to college to further their careers, and ever since outsourcing, CS doesn't seem to be the way to do that. If a CS degree becomes likely to result in a high-paying job, the women will come.
Look, in this age of enlightenment - where equality in gender, race, perks, consumerism, lifestyles, or healthcare is the apparent goal - does it really matter that there are is some ratio of men to women in some field of work...?
There are 2 ways to handle the inequality. 1, have government legislate or mandate some incentives for the designated minorities to want to get into that field of work; or 2, let human nature take its course as people make life choices for whatever reasons they find important and that field of work will achieve some balance on its own.
The only thing I know about incentives for any so-called minority program is that it creates a class of people who think they are owed something. And advancement is usually based on that minority designation instead of skill or knowledge or ability or accomplishment.
Any numbers about the ratio of some people in a field of work are maybe nice to know, but does it help that field...? What's the underlying agenda...? What was that proverb about truth, lies, and statistics...?
Ok, I don't do programming, but I do networking for an ISP. I was one of i think 2 women that graduated in our class of around 30 ( I went to DeVry ). Most of the women even on campus were returning students or in one of the new health or HR classes, taking night classes. Needless to say, there were not many girls even on campus, let alone in each class. There were A LOT of creepy guys and yes they would occasionally make you nervous, but if the guys in your school creep you out, then how far are you really going to get in life after school?
I helped out with the Girls in Technology programs we hosted and a lot of the younger girls thought it was pretty cool after seeing what I do, but there is a lot more drive to go towards a medical field. It is still technology and harder than I was willing to take on. In fact, I enjoy working with the routers, switches and servers all day and being able to understand what my IT fiance has to say at the end of the day. The only part I don't like is having to deal with users who don't know the first thing about checking their own LAN and always think that the first answer is to blame the ISP.
At least when I took CS (a decade ago) at a big middling midwest state school, there were very few US-born females. Classes tended to be about 2/5s US-born males (in-state), 2/5s foreign men (Asia, India, South America), and about 1/5 foreign women. By senior year, US-born females were one-per-class at most.
Is there a general slowdown in foreign attendance? Is there something sending fewer foreign females? Economic slowdown meaning fewer women are get the chance? Foreign universities getting more female-friendly? (I know Korean women who said they'd never get an academic job back home). Are there other degree programs attracting foreign females?
I actually mean that from the reflexive side. CS, IT, programming, etc. have become ever more recognized skill-sets. Businesses hiring such skilled workers actually put their trust into those workers -- because the business owner knows very very little of what goes on -- and doesn't want to know any more. They worry that their own involvement will actually ruin their own business, so they tend to trust us implicitly.
That's the kind of trust that most women tend to avoid, or be terribly uncomfortable accepting. It's a responsibility and an accountability that very few people of any gender choose to accept. But it is one of those things that benefits from over-confidence, and macho self-righteousness -- something males tend to have much more often.
Incidentally, many here have been commenting about the tendency for women to be sexually harassed in many work-places by men. Umm, I think there's some context missing to that notion -- men sexually harass men with equal frequency and grace. We simply don't call it harrassment because it's a part of our natural discourse.
As I've always said, if women want to work with men, they are going to encounter men and men's culture. If you don't want to be around men, you aren't going to like working with us.
I don't normally do that, but his example proves my point better than my post did.
One academic, or even a handful, are inevitably going to claim what GP claims, because the claim that "men have different interests than women" is seen as sexist, but more importantly to a scientist, it's not novel enough to justify research money.
However, if you are trying to prove something that is both observationally and logically against the grain, especially something that "proves" mean are "no different" than women, you're going to get money from the sky because the desire to prove mean are EXACTLY equal to women is a powerful motivation in academia.
I trust GP and his "source" as much as I'd trust anyone in a similar situation, that is, not at all.
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
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.
1. You spend just as much time as men earning a degree, but get fewer opportunities to get that "newbie programmer" job than men. There is inherent gender-bias in the field. My ex-bf actually had the nerve to say "women just aren't as good of coders as men." 2. That same company who won't give an American woman a chance at an entry level position will bring in a woman from India who is presumed to be better and cheaper than the American woman. 3. When the woman does finally get in the door, she makes only 71% (or whatever the latest stat is) as much as a man doing the same job. 4. CS generally involves some level of production support. Even if you are lucky enough to get a position with little after-hours support, there is nothing to stop the company from re-org'ing and putting you in a busy oncall routine. That is not very conducive to being a mother, whether married or single. It is hard to put food on the table when you are typing away at the keyboard, or on some long production conference call where none of the men will listen to you and try solutions you offer because you are a woman and you are obviously just not as good at CS as the men. (ironic tone intended) 5. Did I mention that women do not make as much as men? // from a female /. member [yes, we do exist!]
I believe there are two reasons. The first one (already discussed here) is interest. I did not study computer science to get a job -- I did it because I couldn't see myself NOT doing it. I know very few girls who get excited about mechanical things earlier in life (I spent elementary and middle school daydreaming about technology...female daydreams at that age seem to be different). I do not know how to change this.
The second one is more subtle: being really good at anything requires thousands of hours devoted to it with no apparent reward. If what you are devoted to is math or programming, it really helps to be unpopular for at least a period in your life, especially earlier. The same is not true if you are devoted to theater, chemistry, or biology, which you can practice in a more social environment. I think it is easier to be unpopular as teenage boy than it is as a teenage girl.
[this, of course, is a male point of view...I would love to hear the other side]
I tried to switch into a Computer Science double major instead of just my English degree. (English was so boring, I was tired of analysing the sexual inference of a tree shadow across a woman's bed). The Computer Science department was thrilled to have me (I had comp sci experience, could program, etc). BUT, I had to get into this one math course - so off I went to talk to the math department. The math professor I spoke to informed me that he "didn't think girls were good at math" and therefore, he wouldn't let me in. Yes, that was his whole reason - and this was only 10 years ago. I was young, stupid, and didn't take it to the Human Rights Office, instead, I went to the Classics department and spent 3 years learning latin (YAY). I think lots of girls are still discouraged from entering in the sciences - either quietly or overtly. I don't think it's sexual harassment - everyone in university seems to collectively "sexually harass" each other. It's called teasing, and it happens everywhere everyday. I also don't believe it's because CS isn't "social" - there are LOTS of opportunities for social interaction. I later became a systems librarian, so I could use the CS skills I have WITH the sociable aspect. There is a great demand for intermediaries - people who can speak tech and explain things to both sides (techies and non-techies). I suspect it's these small little pockets of "Girls suck at that" professors / administrators / high school teachers who discourage women from pursuing the field.
As a woman who regularly reads science mags (and slashdot), I can tell you that when science talk makes me yawn, it's the guy, not the subject. I was raised by a single father who was an engineer, so our dinner conversations were frequently tech-heavy and geek-intensive, giving me a much higher level of tolerance than most people, male or female. But when someone is griping, not speaking about their interests, I glaze over.
There is a very simple reason to this:
In the United State outsourcing has diven many people out of the Computer Science area. The developing nations where many of those outsourced jobs have gone still have women in many ways as second class citizen.
Enrollment has tanked in the US for an industry that is consistently being driven over seas to nations where women have a considerably more up-hill battle for quality educational opportunities.
It's that simple.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
What happened on 11/4/08?
... 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.
An interesting "natural experiment" can be found in comparing international CS students to US CS students....
While most of the international women students come to Carnegie Mellon without an extensive knowledge of computers, they all have a high sense of self-efficacy in math. Several students told us that not until coming to the U.S. did they encounter the attitude that women are not suited for math and science. They told us that girls (if they were lucky enough to go to high school in the first place) pursue math and science at the same rate and with the same expectations as boys, at least through the high school level
I think you'd find a hell of a lot of people disagree with you in less nationalist places outside the US.
Why do I owe any loyalty to the UK?
I was born here, great, I disagree with pretty much everythiung the government does, I find the people short-sighted, generally ignorant, scared and celebrity obsessed.
Do I owe loyalty to the rocks?
Please explain this further.
He was writing about generalities, and you changed the subject and made it about "boring males". Well, there are boring females, too. About a quarter of the world population.
You did just exactly what others here accused women of often doing: living in denial that any difference exists, so any problem there "must" be due to something else.
What nonsense.
My wife and I have been married for 31 years. We met in college. She was a civil engineering major, I was a computer science major. She later changed her major to mechanical engineering when she learned that ME's are more widely employable than CEs. When we met she was a freshman and I was a senior.
I went on to get a masters degree, she took the classes for a master degree but spent the time she would have spent on a thesis getting ready for, and passing, the P.E. exam. She has had her stamp for a long time.
We are both now in out fifties. She gets calls several times a year offering her jobs. Some in the private sector, some in the public sector. People value her decades of experience. People look up to MEs with decades of experience and a professional certification.
I was laid off for the last time on my 49th birthday and have not been able to find a technical job since. It is hard to find a company that will believe that I actually have the experience I have. I can't tell you how many times I have had an interview where I have been challenged on my experience and even though I can prove every bit of it people just don't believe it. And, don't get me started on certification for computer people, compared to getting a PE certification in the computer world isn't even a bad joke. It is mostly just a con.
I went back to school and "retrained" as a teacher and I am now certified to teach CS in public schools and I work part time teaching people how to use a mouse. I haven't been able to find a full time teaching job because their aren't many of those and the competition for them is fierce. You see, I live in Austin, Texas and for about 10 years this is where IBM transfered entire divisions before they laid them off. There are literally thousands of people my age with my qualifications wandering around down here (we used to have a morning walking club just for laid of 50+ software developers) and they all did the work of getting certified to teach in the Texas public schools. I got the job I had when the lady who had it before me got a full time teaching job. My application had been on file for more than a year. I moved from a job that was even more part time to one that is almost half time. A major step up!
When my wife graduated from high school she took the ACT. She compared her ACT scores to the average ACT scores of different majors and the average starting salary in those majors. Engineering had the highest starting salary and most closely matched here ACT scores. I went into computer science after taking a class in it and falling in love with it.
I have come to learn that I am pretty typical of a guy who goes into computer science. Most of us do it because we really really like it. Some do it for the money but those guys don't stay in it for long. I have also come to learn that my wife is pretty typical of women who go into technical subjects. They do it because it is a good way to make a living and you can do some really interesting stuff too.
Now, lets see some of the differences between being a "software engineer" and a real engineer. My wife has been laid off once, I have been laid off twice. Until I turned 49 (I'm now 56) I made 20% to 40% more than she did. She now makes 250% more than I do. I have done thousands of hours of involuntary unpaid overtime. She has always either been paid for, or received comp time for, all the overtime she has ever done. And, while it is common for programmers to be told to get something done by Tuesday or else, that has never happened to her. Working conditions that are normal for programmers are practically unheard of for engineers.
Women tend to be more practical than men when it comes to picking a career. Being more practical they will google for information about salaries, work hours, working conditions and so on, *before* picking a major. If you want to have a job for the rest of your life, and work 40 hours per week most of the time, and be respected at work and in the community, you do not study computer science. At least
This is the reason that I didn't vote for McCain. Palin believes that her personal beliefs should be imposed on others.
The reason I DID vote for McCain is that Palin said in an interview question on abortion, that communities should be able to decide their own standards.
Palin is as close to a Libertarian candidate as we have seen to date - and part of that is that she is able to separate personal beliefs from government mandates.
I'm not sure how you got to understanding her completely backwards, but now instead we'll have a president and congress very much interested in imposing standards upon all of us. Think on that over the next four years and perhaps next time you'll pay closer attention to what candidates ACTUALLY think before you pull the lever.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
After wading through the postings, it is obvious to me that if the posters that identified themselves as male are a representative sample of guy geeks, then no wonder women are avoiding CS. With a few exceptions (and thank you for those) the postings have been simplistic and essentialize males and females in ways that make it obvious that the posters have never studied or can't remember any sociology or psychology. I am female and I worked as a licensed mechanic for 30 years and although I surely loved the work, it was guys like you that finally drove me out. There were not enough neutral ones to counterbalance the others. Another thing to consider is that women do talk to each other and every negative experience usually gets discussed. Decisions about careers are made in context and not in isolation.