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Girls Go Geek Again
nessus42 writes "Computer science has always been a male-dominated field, right? Wrong. In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the systems analysts in America were women. Women had started to flock to computer science in the mid-1960s, during the early days of computing, when men were already dominating other technical professions but had yet to dominate the world of computing. For about two decades, the percentages of women who earned Computer Science degrees rose steadily, peaking at 37% in 1984.... And then the women left. In droves. ...it looks like women are now returning to computer science."
I thought the headline read "girls DO geek again" and I got all excited for a minute there. Domn Slashdot misrepresenting headlines.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
S/He said girls. ...
it's a good thing.
were there in 1984 anyway?
There may be some disagreement about what it means to "dominate." Clearly the author feels it requires a higher disparity.
It seems the girls are looking for something.... coming, leaving, coming again. What might it be? Girls are strange :P
They defiantly approach problems differently, I find women developers tend to be less interested in the next big things but the daily process of keeping things working... Now I could be way off because most of the Women developers I have worked with are from the 1980's graduates, and are focused on retirement. But even with younger women developers they seem less interested in trying to make something and more to keep it running or do what it is told.
This isn't a bad thing, I have seen some very good code produced, and very timely.
However it does sometimes create a situation where it is harder to create a change in the process.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
most of the hot women i've seen on Google+ so far seem to work for MS or Google. and in media
I question the "leaving in droves" comment though. Did the females leave or did the number of males coming in just go up an a rate faster than women? According to their data, far more men have submitted resumes than women.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Its been a total sausage fest in I/T for the last 20 years. We need more women so we can act uncomfortable and awkward in what we consider our native surroundings.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
That means 58% were men ... and 58 > 42, last time I checked ...
You might be missing a variable ??? ... ... X (% of women) + Y (% of men) + Z (% of other [transgender / lack thereof ???]) = 100%, then Y = 100% - Z - 42% = 58% - Z, and Z = 100% - 42% - X = 58% - X
... just sayin'
If
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
You have so entirely missed the point or value of the article and even summary; lost in the minutiae. As for the non sequitur commentary I wholly disagree and continue to enjoy what slashdot has to offer. Feel free to take your attitude over to digg or reddit. I head they appreciate such snark over there.
and then get me a beer :)
Computers were simple to program up until the late 80's. Eventually computers got too complex for their puny girl minds to comprehend. So they left the discipline.
In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women... the percentages of women who earned Computer Science degrees rose steadily, peaking at 37% in 1984
If women with computer science degrees peaked in 1984 at 37%, then it also means women working as software developers were less likely to have a degree.
From the Article: "In the past year, the number of women majoring in Computer Science has nearly doubled at Harvard, rising from 13% to 25%"
If there was that much change in a single year, I'm betting it has more to do with the admissions process or other factors than any society-wide phenomena.
It has to do with the complexity of the systems. Those early computer systems were not very complicated. Then, throughout the late 80s and 90s systems and software became much more complex. However, in the last ten years or so, much of the complexity is hidden. Programming and systems management has become just a lot of pointing and clicking without any need (usually) to really understand what's going on underneath the covers.
I want to add that this is just a theory, and that tt's not that I think women are incapable of understanding very complex systems, it's just that I think the majority of them have no interest in that kind of work.
Proverbs 21:19
The women got annoyed at all the men who were pimply and awkward, and so they "left in droves". But humanity has a short memory, so the next generation of women to go through this pain is coming.
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
Perhaps I missed a math lesson somewhere, but aren't 42%, 34%, and 37% all below half, meaning that even at that time the respective fields were male-dominated?
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Maybe I'm feeding an AC troll, but there are 1500 people in the engineering department where I work, the majority being software engineers. While there aren't many women, all of them can code in C and C++, because that's what we use for our products.
Although it's great that more women are getting back into CS, these kinds of articles make me itch. Geek girls shouldn't be hired or coerced into taking CS because of or in spite of their gender. They should be hired because they're good at what they do, and they should be encouraged to study if they have a sincere enthusiasm for the subject. If it turns out that the best students, or the best employees are male... so be it. /female CS grad and web developer
I don't not believe there isn't a God.
Since when is 42% dominating?
That's a fair point.
Women didn't leave the field voluntarily. Once it became apparent that programming was becoming a lucrative field women were systematically driven out by a system that favored men:
The gender disparity in programming is not the result of slight differences between men and women or subtle unconscious biases. It is the result of overt discrimination going back decades to the origin of the profession. And it will take overt action to correct the disparity.
It's always had majority men, but 58-42 is very different from the roughly 80-20 split that it has now. It's sort of like the difference between pediatric medicine (currently about 55-45 in favor of women) and nursing (95-5 in favor of women).
In the cases where you have a gender in an extreme minority, you often get silly social reactions around them. For instance, male geeks who stay in all-male environments might not get used to treating women professionally rather than drooling over them or harassing them. Similarly, some female nurses (particularly older female nurses) have been known to mistreat male nurses because they think there is something wrong with the men.
I am officially gone from
I don't think it has anything to do with a rising interest in IT. its that women need jobs these days too, due to the economy, so i bet you will find ALL industries are increasing their woman count. Especially 'clean' jobs since most women ( or men really ) don't want to go out and dig ditches for a living.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As feminist enlightened research has already shown, this is a fallacy. Men are actively pushing women out of top positions by getting undeserved promotions, whereas women has to work five times as hard as men for peanuts. Men are evil.
Feminist state Sweden has implemented good measures to prevent this and as a result some 85% of University degrees there are females,and well deserved.
Men are evil.
women are now returning to computer science
Where?!!!
If nothing else, one thing this article reaffirms is that Marissa Mayer is easy to look at.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
These days your average person pushes a button, types in a username/password, and starts clicking things to get to work.
She powered up various large devices in order, typed a long hex boot string into the system, then proceded to load punch cards, open reel tapes and hard drive cake platters, and perform other various complicated tasks.
It's a lot easier now.
I think it was supposed to read "Girls Go Greek"
To quote the fine article:
That's 37 % of what? Of all women majoring? Or of all students majoring in CS? Of a reference value, e.g. the number of students in 1968?
And how exactly is the relative share connected to absolute numbers?
It might well be that the number of female students actually increased during that period.
And the reason that the relative share dropped is just because the number of male students increased much more.
That's an important distinction, because it means that women did not leave the field.
They did just not follow the male crowd that joined the PC revolution.
Last time I checked, XX were women and XY were men... and some form of tucking represented the others. /ducks
I'm sure I'm just responding to flamebait... but I'll bite.
Every manager I've had in the past 10 years has been a woman. Matter of fact I just lost out a promotion to a woman. I'm not bitter either, she's just as good as I am and has been with the team longer.
There may be a disparity of women to men in many IT workplaces... but it isn't always the case. Take your stereotypes somewhere else because they don't always apply.
Even if they are, most of them are not what you would want to look at; let just say that i would not consider interfacing your hardware with their software.
What about Klienfelter's (46/47 XXY) and Turner's Syndrome (46XX/45XO, and several other chromosomal abnormalities implicated.)?
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
I just like the related link Submission: Girls Go Geek Again!
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Why is it that America always represents the world? The World is so different from America.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
And where is this 42% coming from? Everywhere I've ever worked its been a sausage fest.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Unfortunately, misogyny is rampant in all "geek" fields (as it is in the rest of society). Just see the "Perform Like A Porn Star" talk at Ruby Con 2009, or even "ElevatorGate" in 2011.
(Btw, here in $European_Country, the percentage is still something like 10% female/90% male.)
HAND.
All I'm seeing is a bunch of sexist virgin nerd posts :)
No female comments or point of view in almost 100 comments.
Goes to show... the only women in IT and on the internet are 40 year single old men with issues.
Even though this was a small sample, as Joel mentioned lets look at the numbers:
Made it to resume review: Female - 75.68%, Male - 72.05%
Made it to the coding stage: Female - 28.38%, Male - 26.49%
Made it to phone interview: Female - 0.054%, Male - 0.099%
In person interview: Female - 0.041%, Male - 0.0565%
Received an offer: Female - 0.041%, Male - 0.0194%
Official Hire: Female - 0.014%, Male - Male - 0.013%
Even though this was a small sample, is there anything we can derive from this? The last stat to me doesn't matter as much, even though the numbers were for all intensive purposes the same percentage, even though there were 8 times more male applicants.
If we were to break down the stages the women had better percentages up to the phone interview. Does this show or should this show that the males did better at the coding assignment? If we can agree that that is what happened then the whole "boys play with computers more, tinker, etc etc" might have 'some' truth to it. Before the phone interview the females led by nearly 2%. By the time the phone interview came around, the males had gained that 2% but additional ground on top of the that.
However 100% of those females that made it to the in person interview made it to the offer stage while the men lost the ground that they gained during the coding stage. Does this mean perhaps that the males had poorer social skills to cause some doubt in their ability to do the work or perhaps be a good fit? Did the women wear low tops?(i am not suggesting the Joel and his interviewers are biased regarding to this, but i am just babbling there).
Would be interesting to see what others think or perhaps what Joel thinks of the numbers after he printed them(assuming that he wasnt keeping track as things progressed through the entire process.
My Computing class is all male and i don't know any females who know about computing or would care to. I'm not saying they don't exist, I just haven't seen any.
I care not for your karma and your mod points.
THIS. Discrimination is a problem, a gender imbalance isn't.
Although I would like to see more women in IT...for gross awful male reasons :D
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'm not sure that's necessarily a difference. I'm male, but to me, my job is just a job. It's a way to pay the bills so I can afford my house, my truck, my motorcycle, etc., etc., etc. If Ed McMahon pulled up to my driveway tonight with a huge check and a bajillion cameras, there's no way I'd be sitting in my cubicle tomorrow.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
My CIS major was almost 50% women.
Are you suggesting that at least 16%* of people in IT fit into the "Other" category? I've worked in the industry for twelve years now, and I can't *EVER* recall walking into an office and being unsure about the gender of at least 16% of the people working there...
*Just for women to break even, no more than 42% of the work force could be male. 42% x 2 = 84%. 100% - 84% = 16%. Therefore, for women to break even, much less dominate, at least 16% of the work force must be neither male nor female.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
...all the girls want to be Willow.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
"The first working programmers were all women: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman. Also Ada Lovelace is popularly credited as history's first programmer, although her work never ran."
Right on. A CRUSHING claim of semantics without citations. #*&^#$, who posted this?
Here is the real reason people go into specific careers, especially women:
From TFA:
I’d say I was able to make more friends through things like the dorm than in my Computer Science classes. But that means that I can’t really talk to my friends about the stuff I do for my classes, which is frustrating.
Women tend to value social activities and communication far more than men. Women want to be able to talk to other women about common interests.
So if fewer women are in a field, fewer women will go into a field for lack of women to communicate with in that field.
You get a critical mass above a certain percentage, and the number of women increases rapidly, it drops below a certain percentage, and the number drops even faster. Simple social phenomenon.
What is that?
Google VP Marissa Mayer: " People ask me a lot what it's like to be a woman at Google. I don't think of my experience that way. I'm a geek at Google."
what the hell is that? Now I see what they mean by Google 'perks'.
You can't handle the truth.
Women left: citation http://www.nber.org/papers/w15853.pdf
Let's not forget Admiral Grace Hopper who programmed, developed a successful programming language, led successful standardization efforts, managed--did just about everything you could do with computers both as a direct individual-contributor and as a high-level manager.
She was a nerd and she did "stuff that mattered."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
RTFS - it's coming from 1987
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
We usually see fewer women make it to our interview process, but hire a lot more of those who do. I've usually chalked it up to women being less likely to bluff or bluster; we more often find that we've brought in dudes who talk a good game and can write a function, but when push comes to shove either the skills aren't there or their ego is big enough it'd need its own cube. Women we're more likely to be able to filter out early on. "How good are you?" usually gets a nervous chuckle followed by a diplomatic but pretty accurate assessment, for example.
What's more, according to TFA "34% of the systems analysts in America were women."
Systems analyst = a programmer who can't program, right?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What about them? I'll tell you what - there's not enough of them to overturn a 42/58 split.
Asshat.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
As feminist enlightened research has already shown...
1) [Citation Needed]. Just saying "research has shown..." without referencing a source doesn't mean squat. For all I know, you're just making it up...or you could be misinterpreting the results...or it could be right on the money. Problem is, I can't read it for myself to see if there is any merit to your claim.
2) "...feminist enlightened..." Color me skeptical on the objectivity of THAT research then. Sounds like a heavily biased panel, IMHO. Surprise! Researchers with axe to grind and looking to prove their point find results that validate their opinion! News at 11:00.
Men are actively pushing women out of top positions by getting undeserved promotions, whereas women has [sic] to work five times as hard as men for peanuts.
Yeah, I'm certain that happens. I'm also certain that women are actively pushing men out of top positions and getting undeserved promotions, too. I used to have a female flight instructor who later landed a job working as a corporate pilot for an oil company. Aviation, like IT, has long been a "good ole boys' club", so I asked her if she found it difficult to get a break in aviation because of her sex. She laughed at me. "No, quite the opposite," she said. "HR departments are going out of their way to recruit women pilots right now. Even if you and I had the same qualifications [she had more flight time and more ratings than I did], I would still land the job nine times out of ten because I am a woman." Anecdote, and regarding a different industry, but what I've seen in IT is similar. Where I work right now, there is a woman in my group who blatantly abuses her salaried position; none of the guys in the office get away with the crap she pulls. In the office where I finally got my break in IT, the lead analyst was female. The majority of that office was female (one out of two analysts, four out of six computer operators). Most of my managers since I graduated from high school have been female, even though my current boss is male. IME, you get what you give. I've worked my 4$$ off and gotten promoted; I've also worked my 4$$ off and gotten passed over for promotion. Blaming it on sex, race, etc., IMHO, is making excuses. If you're bitter and blaming everyone else, you probably won't go far in any industry, not just IT. OTOH, if you are willing to look at other people as individuals and judge them on their own merits, you'll find others probably do the same for you. Most of the guys I know in IT don't really give a rip how you're plumbed if you can help get the job done; I know I don't.
Men are evil.
1) PEOPLE are (often) evil. Get over it.
2) Ummm...based upon the context and arguments you present, you seem to be claiming that men are evil because they are sexist and oppress women. Then, you lump all men into the category "evil". Does that not seem like a sexist and oppressive position to take, particularly for one who is denouncing sexism and oppression? How can you possibly argue that for men to lump women into a second class status on the basis of their sex alone is evil, but then do the very same thing to men? There's a word for people who do that: hypocrite.
Feminist state Sweden has implemented good measures to prevent this and as a result some 85% of University degrees there are females,and well deserved.
Men are evil.
Let me make sure I got this right...you point out how Sweden -- which I assume also contains its fair share of men -- has managed to do something to increase the ratio of women:men graduating from college with university degrees and then reiterate you
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
If Ed McMahon pulled up to my driveway tonight with a huge check and a bajillion cameras, there's no way I'd be sitting in my cubicle tomorrow.
Not likely... unless it's zombie Ed McMahon.
By that logic, there must be discrimination at play keeping men out of nursing positions, too. I don't buy it.
IMHO, you are seeing a statistic, and because you want to believe something, you are assuming that MUST be the explanation. Did you take into account any other factors? Are men taking IT jobs because they pay more and men (correctly or not) feel the responsibility for providing for their families, and therefore, that's the job they take even if they'd rather be doing something else? I, for one, wouldn't choose IT as a career field if money were no object...but it is, so while my wife followed her dream of starting her own business (two, actually), I've worked in a job I LIKE (rather than a job I LOVE) to provide for my family while and freeing my wife to do what she loved (even though financially, she's barely broken even on either of the businesses she started). Honestly, I'd much rather be involved in missionary aviation than IT. Or maybe I'd be a motorcycle courier. Or a musician. Or...or...or...
There's also the matter of a difference in what kinds of jobs men and women are drawn towards. If you could get past all the walls and filters and barriers that inhibit clear communication, how does the percentage of women who want to go into IT compare to the percentage of women who ARE in IT? If the ratio of women in IT reasonably approximates the number of women who have a desire to work in IT, there's no problem.
Also, does the ratio of women employed in IT reflect the ratio of women in the sample population? Why on earth would you expect a 50/50 work force in IT, if the population (for sake of argument) is 35/65?
No, on the basis of the ratio of women to men in the IT workforce ALONE, it is far from "obvious" that there is any "discrimination at play."
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Most male programmers I know also take it like "just a job" and are not passionate about it at all. They know squat. I often had to teach them features of languages they were supposed to be experts at, And looked baffled when I explained that you can't do such and such like in $language. I know not every programmer speaks every language but I expect them to know at least one static OO language, one database language, one cross-platform scripting language. Of course they weren't up to date with the framework buzz of the 2009 or the unit testing debates of 2008 and things like contract oriented programming don't ring a bell at all.
Now I know everybody is different and have different interests, and while I AM baffled that one can work as a full time software developer without finding it fascinating, I don't think of them less as a person.
However I don't apologise for my passion for software development.
But... the future refused to change.
Well du'h, a domination is when you kill someone three times before they can kill you.
But... the future refused to change.
"In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the systems analysts in America were women."
So 58% of developers were men and 64% of systems analysts were men. Looks like men dominated the field then too.
I knew I should have checked before posting...
;)
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Also accepted: A programmer who think perl is a real language.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Either way, he's probably not going to work tomorrow, right?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
As a male nurse I think the only time I was ever treated snobbily by older female nurses is when I was a new grad, but this isn't an issue particular to men. They have a saying. "Nurses eat their young". Older nurses are notorious for treating their new brethren pretty shabbily, but there is a reason for this. If a new nurse misses something on their shift or does something wrong it can potentially have disastrous consequences for the nurse about to take over for them. That being said. I love working in a field where us guys are in such an incredible minority. One of the reasons why is because women let their hair down when they are *mostly* amongst their own and I'm privy to 'women' conversations most geeks could only dream of! :D
IT is being offshored, and inshored, to death. It is not especially unusual to find a US IT department that is about 80% from India. For whatever reason, most H1Bs are males. So it would only stand to reason that IT would become male dominated.
go ahead and make fun. i was typing as i was working and it came out wrong. please stop the spelling nazi police. perhaps a one time edit would suffice?
My brother is a male nurse (planning to up his qualification to paramedic some time). I don't know about the older female nurses, but the younger female nurses are all over him all the time. Kind of like how girls in "geek" occupations are treated, I guess.
one thing that is obvious that i forgot to mention is that just making it to the resume review, females were ahead 3.63%. That could show that females are better writers that just know more about how to get someones attention. It would be interesting to find out exactly what one had to do or what their resume had to show to even get to that stage? Did they throw resumes out that were clearly not prepared? spelling errors? bad objective(even though we all know the objective is to get the flippin job because we want experience and have bills to pay.)
Yes. Someone mod the GGP up!
The statistical sample is not significant. When it comes to BSCS majors: they only use three universities, and only one year. Whereas the previous figures included national figures over decades.
Also, software engineering today, is not what programming was decades ago. A lot of the programming, from decades past, was very routine labor; and did not require a college degree.
Actually to most people it's just a job, not a lifestyle.
The entry into that lifestyle is horribly full of casual misogyny. I think though, we're going to see a chance.
Computing and development are one of the few career paths that start as a hobby and wind up being a way to make a living.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Go away! Go out there and be hot, and keep your paws from our computers!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
So long as we stay fixated on these pointless issues, We can never move forward.
How about we just hire the best person for the job they're interested in and be done with it.
Other than a few people with entitlement issues, does anyone really want to force themselves into a company that doesn't really want them anyway? Is that something that you'd really want to look forward to everyday?
I've done both. In fact in one position it was a split position. The job I had meant I could both gather requirements and design software as well as implement. I learned to talk to users. The programmers I worked with were clueless to the fact the user was their real boss. The women SA's were good at talking to people, and so good at understanding users. The programmers were good at failing to design and implement what the user really needed.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
27 students in the final today; 4 women. Let me add that I also took a stats class with about the same number of students and probably slightly more women.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
During the 90's, the dot com boom attracted tons of male trying to make a quick buck, that is why the ratio of female engineers decreased. The actual number may actually increasing, but it was outnumbered by the massive increase of male engineers.
New Economic Perspectives
In the 80's and 80's, 10% of the resumes were from women and in the late 70's I don't remember a woman in my comp sci classes. There might have been one or two out of the 30 or so total, but I can't remember seeing a woman in the lab at all.
Sounds like people are inventing statistics again for some other gain.
Are you suggesting that at least 16%* of people in IT fit into the "Other" category? I've worked in the industry for twelve years now, and I can't *EVER* recall walking into an office and being unsure about the gender of at least 16% of the people working there...
Yes, but unless you asked them all to disrobe, you don't know how accurate you were in your determinations. ;)
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Sounds like my pseudomom (my best friend's mother, who would often refer to me as her "other son"). At times it seemed like she was the only person at her company (a major insurance firm) who could translate user-needs into instructions for the coder. She used to do much of the coding herself, but eventually they just flew her all over the country to just talk to end users and carry instructions back to the coders.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I don't know about the workplace back then but when I was an engineering student in 1987 the computer science classes were where the girls could be found. Just over 50% of the enrolement in CS100 at the university I attended were female. I didn't even go near a software development environment for more than a decade after that, but by the time I did I noticed that female software developers were actually far rarer than women doing welding and other stereotypically male tasks at industrial plant and power station maintainance shutdowns. Where did all those girls go? The other odd thing is most women I know in the IT industry came in via physical sciences or engineering instead of CS.
True :)
I still suspect 16% is a very high number, though.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Are you suggesting that at least 16%* of people in IT fit into the "Other" category?
Absolutely! Although I was thinking more in terms of species than gender...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
And given that the required skills necessary to become a good software developer are not gender specific
I don't think that there's a universally accepted list of what these skills are, which makes it difficult to say whether they are gender specific...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I taught a module that required students to write C last term. The highest few marks were from guys, but so were the lowest - not unexpected, since they made up about 90% of the class. I think all of the women were in the top 50%, and most were in the top 25% when I marked their coursework. Now, it's possible that they all cheated, but not very likely.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Having worked in several workplaces dominated by women, I too have been privy to quite a few discussions where women "let their hair down".
However, unless one has a particular fetish for hygiene, menstrual cycles and other assorted feminine matters, the kind of dreams that conjured up are mostly the ones involving waking up sweaty and terrified ;-)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
But pimples and acne are a sign of very high testosterone levels. Something for the women to think about....
I would love to have some geeky women overlords, to welcome, ....if they can find them......and if they can all have say.....36 d and up???
Somehow I seriously doubt that more American women are being enrolled in CS. It is far more likely that with the increase of foreign students studying abroad that do not share the same cultural bias are enrolling in CS. Considering sample size and moderate increase, this is a plausible explanation.
WOW look like someone panties is riding a bit too high and is getting uncomfortable, that was meant to be a joke.
Yeah, I'm certain that happens. I'm also certain that women are actively pushing men out of top positions and getting undeserved promotions, too. I used to have a female flight instructor who later landed a job working as a corporate pilot for an oil company. Aviation, like IT, has long been a "good ole boys' club", so I asked her if she found it difficult to get a break in aviation because of her sex. She laughed at me. "No, quite the opposite," she said. "HR departments are going out of their way to recruit women pilots right now. Even if you and I had the same qualifications [she had more flight time and more ratings than I did], I would still land the job nine times out of ten because I am a woman."
My wife's a helicopter pilot, and there's a certain amount of gender bias in that industry too, in favor of women. The stereotype is that men tend to take unnecessary risks too often, whereas women are much more "by the book", so if you want a safe pilot, you're better off hiring a woman. If you want some show-off fly-boy, you hire a man. Considering most men entering the industry tend to be men in their teens or early 20s, that many of them are into things like crotch-rocket motorcycles, and that auto insurance stats have shown for decades that young men are risky and dangerous (far more so than women in the same age group), this is probably a good stereotype.
My wife's seen this over and over among young men in aviation school: men who think they know everything and don't want to be told how to do anything, who don't pay that much attention to safety procedures and rules, who value flying skill over all else, etc. These guys do stuff like flying next to skyscrapers and waving at the people inside (true story); they get fired/kicked out when this is found out by the boss, but do the women ever do reckless stuff like this? Never.
Also, a lot of commercial helicopter operations is for touring (flying paying tourists around attractions like Hawaii, the Grand Canyon, etc.). Here again, women generally have a small hiring preference: who do most paying customers want to be around? Attractive young women of course. It's just like at restaurants; when I go to a restaurant, I'd much rather be waited on by an attractive young woman than a dude. Women get bigger tips too (in both jobs).
you seem to be claiming that men are evil because they are sexist and oppress women. Then, you lump all men into the category "evil". Does that not seem like a sexist and oppressive position to take
The OP is probably an American, and what we call a "liberal" here in the USA (which is different from "liberals" in other countries). His/her answer to this is going to be "no". Here, these people claim that, for instance, white people are all racist for various reasons, but if you show examples of minorities treating other races badly because of their race, that simply can't be "racism" because "it's not possible for minorities to be racist". I'm not kidding.
you point out how Sweden -- which I assume also contains its fair share of men -- has managed to do something to increase the ratio of women:men graduating from college
Swedish culture is very, very different from America's. Over here, young people all want to be the next American Idol or sports star. The workplace is also different. For instance, in salaried IT and engineering positions, it's frequently expected that you work 60-80 hours a week (for no extra pay) because there's a "crunch time", or "we're understaffed", or "we have to meet this deadline", etc. This has been going on for ages. It should be pretty obvious that this does not make for a family-friendly work environment. I imagine this might be one factor in dissuading women to go into these industries.
It's a well-established fact that women see and remember colours better than males, while males see and remember shapes better than females. That seems like the kind of fundamental difference that might influence something like coding. Maybe the reason why women are still a minority in programming is that they're expected to use languages designed mostly by males, and adapted to male thought patterns. Or maybe coding in general is just something that doesn't appeal to most women, who knows?
Here's my theory: maybe coding jobs don't appeal to most women for various reasons. There's lots of possibilities here: 1) not that much social interaction on the job, 2) abuse of salaried employees to get them to work unpaid overtime with constant threats of termination if they don't meet arbitrary deadlines, a common practice in the IT and engineering industries in this country.
Also, does the ratio of women employed in IT reflect the ratio of women in the sample population? Why on earth would you expect a 50/50 work force in IT, if the population (for sake of argument) is 35/65?
There's more women in the general population than men:
http://www.geohive.com/earth/pop_gender.aspx
but
http://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/censr-20.pdf
shows that there's more men at younger ages, such as the ages of college-bound young adults.
However, women are now the majority of people going into college in America. They simply aren't going into IT or engineering fields.
If you could get past all the walls and filters and barriers that inhibit clear communication, how does the percentage of women who want to go into IT compare to the percentage of women who ARE in IT?
What I'd like to see is some surveys of women in IT measuring their satisfaction with the career, surveys to determine how many women have left IT, and surveys to see if women who are/were in IT encourage or discourage other women to go into that field. Perhaps you'll find that they've been warning each other away from it. Even among men, I've heard of lots of older men warning their sons to stay away from engineering as a career.
I think people here are missing a lot of other factors. Of all those women who can code in C/C++, how old are they? A lot of engineering fields are seeing a complete lack of young people filling in the voids left by retiring older folks. The OP even said 50% of the men couldn't code either, and that was 10 years ago, shortly after the tech boom started going bust. I remember lots of people back then complaining about kids who had no interest or skill in computers going into those fields just for the money. The foosball tables and giant signing bonuses are long gone now. And kids these days aren't like the computer geeks from the 80s who taught themselves C and assembly before they got to college.
No, it's not. It's a slight advantage. "Dominant" is something like 80%.
How about a sports analogy (as I'm tired of the usual car analogies, and even though I'm definitely not a sports fan)? Suppose two basketball teams play each other. Let's use basketball, because unlike soccer (football for you non-Americans), there's usually tons of points scored in the game instead of just one or two.
So suppose team A plays team B, and the final score is 87 to 89, in team A's favor. Would you say that team A "dominated" team B? Of course not. They just barely beat them. To have "dominated" the other team, they would have had to play circles around them, resulting in a very uneven final score, like 5 to 90. That shows the teams are very mismatched, and one is far stronger than the other, whereas a close score shows the teams are very closely matched, and fairly equally skilled.
58 to 42 isn't a huge difference. More than a couple percent, but not "dominating" in any sense.
Yeah I know there are 1500 people in my department, and all I can say is "there aren't many" women. I don't know all 1500 people. If I were to hazard a guess I'd say they are 5-10% of the engineering workforce.
At least I didn't hide behind "Anonymous Coward".
Proverbs 21:19
One of the things at my is that it's the electrical and computer engineers that do most of the C programming - CS majors touch on it, and depending on the classes they take they may use more, but most of the CS department uses Java. And for all of the CS majors complaining, the ratio in ECE is significantly worse than in CS (closer to 90% guys than the 80% that is the ratio in CS). I'm a girl in CompE, and since my focus is algorithms and computer architecture there are usually no other girls in my classes. Out of my C programming class, only 5 out of around 200 people were girls. On the other hand, the top two students in the class was myself and one other guy. So no generalizing. But it means that at least at my school, the ratio of C programmers is almost no girls because of the lack of girls in CompE.
"Intents and purposes", not "intensive purposes".