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Women's Enrollment In Computer Science Correlates Negatively With Net Access
New submitter MoriT sends this excerpt from a post examining the correlation between women's enrollment in computer science programs at college and their access to the internet. "There is currently a responsibility-dodging contest between industry and academia over who is to blame for the declining enrollment of women in Computer Science and declining employment of women in software development. I hear people in industry bemoan the 'empty pipeline,' while academics maintain that women aren't entering their programs because of perceptions of the industry. I have compiled some data that may help resolve the question by highlighting a third factor common to both: access to an Internet-based culture of computing. ... I conclude that in the last 10 years among many Northern European nations, rising Internet access is correlated with falling interest in computer science relative to other professions among women. The group of Mediterranean nations that show a positive correlation should be a fruitful area for future research, but seem outliers from the Northern cohort."
We can't confuse correlation with causation. While this might be a third factor, what other factors may be involved?
USD inflation is correlated with falling interest in CS among women.
The number of black presidents is correlated with an increase in cell phone use.
The comment "correlation does not imply causation" is correlated with the number of xkcd comics with a similar point.
Has anyone bothered to ask women directly why they chose not to do Computer Science?
You know, rather than just guessing...
The first hypothesis I propose is that Internet culture supports a belief in a meritocratic environment [9], which has been linked, ironically, to an increase in biased behavior [10] as it provides moral cover for prejudiced beliefs. Encountering overt, covert or benevolent sexism undermines both women’s performance and interest [11]. Even if such beliefs were prevalent in professional spaces before the Internet, as masculine gender performance is common, aggressive and publicly visible in online forums [12] women no longer have to be the target of such behavior themselves before college in order to associate it with the industry and choose an alternative career.
The second hypothesis is that the Internet encourages a sense of belonging [13] to the masculinized culture of software development [14], which alienates many women [15] by causing them to feel excluded from a camaraderie-focused profession [16]. Again, while this culture may have existed before the Internet, women with Internet access are likely to encounter such attitudes earlier and more frequently. To the best of my knowledge, whether the Internet has changed the culture of computing itself, either in America or internationally, is an outstanding question.
TL;DR The internet is dominated by sexist men, which discourages women from getting involved in related fields.
This is a pretty interesting idea, and one that I'm inclined to ascribe some level of truth. I'm not too sure what we can do about it, though, other than continue the push for people to stop being so damned prejudiced.
Every chart I look at in TFA looks pretty flat, as far as the M:F ratio. It looks like both men and women tried to jump on the dotcom bandwagon, and we've normalized back to early-mid 90s levels.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
But people who graduate with comp sci degrees make more than graduates in other fields. You can argue that perhaps the work is worse in other ways but the pay should at least be attracting anyone smart.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
"There is currently a responsibility-dodging contest between industry and academia over who is to blame for the declining enrollment of women in Computer Science
Women are. Or are we still forwarding the lie that women don't make their own choices, and need to be coddled/cajoled/hand-held into taking jobs in industries they don't care about?
>> who is to blame for the declining enrollment of women in Computer Science
Blame? really? Last time I checked, people have a free choice as to what field they want to work/study in. If women choose not to do CS then its entirely their choice. No one is to blame.
Why is the ratio of men to women in CS even an issue? Its not intrinsically wrong that it mostly attracts men. Can we end this sexist crap please?
There are plenty of professions that have a significant majority of women:
http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2010/07/27/where-women-work/
I don't see any corresponding massive outcry about how to get more men in those fields.
We just need to offer equal education opportunities to both genders and employ people based on merit not gender. Positive discrimination is still discrimination.
If there's a shortage of CS grads for employers to hire then its a supply and demand problem not a gender issue. Employers will just have to suck it up and pay developers what they're worth in the free market. Oh noes! the horror! Who knows, that might even lead to more people choosing to do a CS degree. Problem solved.
Came here to say this. CS is the place for people with passion for the subject. Where learning and achievement are the reward, not fists full of cash. It's not something you should drop in to if you're just out to make a buck.
Say you're smart, hard working, and want to learn a trade. Why go in to CS when investing your time in learning Medicine or Law will net you /much/ more money for your effort? Real CS jobs, outside of teaching, pay like garbage. The real issue here is companies are not offering proper incentive. (And they wonder why their engineers are so antagonistic when some middle manager or sales goon makes 3x their pay)
You can't dace around the gender issue here, but for whatever reason I've met very few women with any real passion for CS. Or for any "hard" science like mathematics, theoretical physics, etc. Smart and hard working women? Lots! No shortage of those.
If you're smart and pragmatic, it make sense that you'd go for something other than CS.
Can someone explain to me why it matters if more or less women are studying computer science?
Because we're tired of it being a sausage fest?
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
Practically all the disciplines that lean heavily on mathematical aptitude are affected by the gender gap: Engineering, physical science, computer science, and of course mathematics itself.
I can't say I understand exactly why this is so, but it seems that women simply do not demonstrate the same level of interest and aptitude in mathematics as men do. Certainly I have never noticed any actual gender discrimination that goes on in these fields, or at least not by anybody who has any credibility. That said, the only person I know who is my own age with a doctorate in mathematics is a woman... so this gender difference is anything but universal.
Nonetheless, there remains an indisputable gap between the fields that men and women desire to pursue, even though there is no definable physiological or biological reason for such a gap to exist.
I think that trying to figure out why this is so, or assigning blame, or even expending effort trying to change this instead of simply accepting it as fact and moving on is only going to result in a lot of wasted energy that could be better spent on actually improving the education that *IS* offered.
Perhaps, even, if we stop trying to focus on the issue so much, things might start to change on their own anyways. Just don't discriminate in the interim.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I do not have anything to back this up, but my suspicion is that women are not only underrepresented but HUGELY underrepresented in this field.
Sure: pick any other male dominated field of work and you might see the same underrepresentation.
CS is different though, it resembles physics, mathematics and other fields, where women are represented quite well. It's a white collar job. I suspect no other white collar job has this kind of underrepresentation of women..(?) Am I on to something here or is this nonsense?
http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/13/the-three-biggest-myths-about-women-in-tech/
http://www.garann.com/dev/2012/is-it-me-or-are-we-going-backward/
...because women and hard logic are such a natural mix.
Exactly. Access to the internet, and being around people in the industry, has made western women aware of what the industry is really like, so they're steering clear of it.
Not exactly. Many engineering fields (including computer-related ones) actually pay pretty well in starting salaries. The problem is that this is very short-lived; after 5-10 years, all your friends that went into medicine will be making much more money, while yours will have then reached a cap, and you can look forward to only inflationary increases unless you go into management.
So unless you plan to use your engineering or CS degree as a stepping stone to something bigger and better, it really isn't worth it in the long run; you'll do much better going into medicine or finance.
Most of us know that a degree in Computer Science is FAR more related to mathematics
That's based on the assumption Barbie can't do math, therefore no comp sci. However very nearly a majority of the math grads and profs I know are women (in fact I'm pretty sure there are more F than M). The M/F ratio is much more favorable in the math dept than the CS dept. In fact the only bigger sausage fest than CS that I have ever experienced was 100% male EE. Now if you claimed EE was scaring chicks away from CS you might have a point. Maybe.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
if gender equality is so very important then why aren't ... women encouraged to join professions such as 'coal miner' or 'oil rig workers'
Long ago, in an earlier age of feminism, that was considered a worth goal. Feminists worked hard to give women opportunities to work in blue collar jobs -- sanitation, factory work, railroads, mining, etc. Then one day, the libertarians convinced everyone that the only jobs that matter are white collar jobs, and the next generation of feminists fell into the trap of believing that. Suddenly, feminists stopped worry about blue collar work, and started focusing on white collar professions, since as everyone knows, white collar work is the only kind of work people should aspire to. Simultaneously, feminists grew to despise lower class women, because those women did not fall into feminists' idealized vision of the successful, professional (i.e. white collar professional) woman who has "equal access" to joining the 1% (equal to men, which is to say, only an illusion of access).
This century's feminists love the upper middle class, white-collar, middle-management suburban woman. That is all they are worried about. When forced to answer questions about women in blue collar professions, today's feminists base all their answers on the assumption that those women are desperately fighting to get a white collar position (not true).
Palm trees and 8
See, it's jokes like that which get us in trouble.
If these IT, CS, and Software Engineering jobs are so terrible, how do you explain all these surveys and exercises in ranking routinely putting those careers near or at the top of their lists?
Not saying they can't be horrible jobs. Seems more likely these rankings are failing to account for a number of things. Or is it that every other field really is worse?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I believe there is much more logic in following article by Philip Greenspun from 2006 than in TFA.
"but the pay should at least be attracting anyone smart."
why? Smart people generally do what they love. Moderate level intelligence go where the money is. Hence the jump in low skill computing ability in 97-00
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I do not have anything to back this up, but my suspicion is that women are not only underrepresented but HUGELY underrepresented in this field.
So? The question was, "Why should we care?"
So, tell us: Why should we care? Do you even have a reason to care, or is it just because everyone told you that you should care?
It's a white collar job.
Typical concern of 21st century feminists. Women are also underrepresented in blue collar jobs, but feminists stopped caring about that decades ago.
Am I on to something here or is this nonsense?
No, it is nonsense. Women are not applying to CS, EE, CpE, or IT programs; the problem is not in those programs, which have gotten to the point of bending over backwards to attract women. Nobody is being denied access, and women are not facing a harsh environment, at least not to the point where they are fleeing. The cause lies outside of these fields, but feminist theory excludes that as a possible explanation.
Palm trees and 8
Maybe it is because the women want jobs. IT jobs are dramatically down so it makes sense that the enrollment number have also declined.
While I'm sure the data quoted is accurate, I'm not seeing it here locally. In my group (20 of us, QA + development product group in a networking products company with about 2,000 employees), 9 are female, and an eyeball-survey says that this is about normal for the rest of the engineering organization. Same for candidates whom I interview; about half are female.
Where are all these all-male companies? Could other tech-oriented industries (defense, etc.) be getting lumped in with Silicon Valley style companies, and if so, is that really an accurate assessment?
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
We had a decent fraction of women when I was in CS, undergrad or graduate, and a growing number of female CS profs as well.
CS as a whole I think is doing ok in terms of women, though it could be better. However, CS is not IT and I think IT does have problems in this regard.
....is simply due to women in general realizing software is just a bunch of made up egotistical mindset crap.
Don't believe me? wait a little bit and you'll see an article to the contrary, that there is an increase of women in software dev.
And it won't be the first time this babel has happened regarding women in software decline/incline.
In trouble with whom exactly? Twits that don't know the difference between rom and ram. They can sit on it and spin.
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the libertarians
Wait you really just seriously blamed "the libertarians" for convincing people that "the only jobs that matter are white collar jobs"?
The same libertarians that haven't really mattered politically or culturally until the last year or so?
And you think they talk DOWN blue collar jobs?
Do you even know what a libertarian is? Because your post seems to prove you don't. What is up with this sudden rush to blame everything you don't like in the world on a group of irrelevant politicos? By making claims that are demonstrably false?
I've always asserted that it takes a certain type of neurosis to program computers. You have to be from a weird end of the gene pool to be able to think so logically for so long on such complex topics. That is why, until recently, computer geeks were always the basement dwelling twigs with green tans... It hasn't been genetically normal to excel in it. But since it has become popular, their genes are thriving and mixing and giving us better geeks... I think sheer level of competition in an industry where the leaders have different mental wiring, and poor entry level pay, and no social life would be enough to make many people, women included, decide that it isn't the industry for them.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
There are already too many posts asking some variant of "what makes it so bad for women?" or "they have free will, if they're not in the industry it's their own choice." Well i suspect that incidents like this are part of the reason why. I really can't imagine why young women starting to consider their career options might see that and consider staying as far away from the internet professionally as they possibly can.(/sarcasm)
There are also a number of comments about how the women who are in the industry know how to handle the macho bullshit that gets tossed around, implying that it's therefore okay i guess, since some women can put up with it and not all of them are being forced out of the industry. Well of course the women who are still around can handle it, selection bias much? That doesn't mean they should _have_ to handle it though.
You know, every time there's a story about some company, or even most of an entire industry, doing something assholeish to its employees people pop out of the woodwork to say something about how the free market will correct the issue because all the good employees will find work at companies that treat them properly, and the companies abusing their employees will thus inevitable fail. I wonder how much that group overlaps with the group that think women ought to just suck it up when they're treated poorly.
It's funny how when a company/industry/environment treats all their employees badly it's the company that's at fault. This libertarian/republican/conservative viewpoint is that it's up to the employees to fix the problem, but at least the company is still clearly designated as the problem in the equation. But suddenly when the company/industry/environment is specifically targeting women for bad treatment, whether that's intentional or not, and the women choose to go elsewhere, it's not the free market responding to the fault of the company, it's the fault of the women for not being willing to put up with the shit they're dealt.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Woooshhh!!
There is a MAJOR responsibility-dodging group regarding this matter: Women. If anyone is to blame for the lack of female representatives in CS is the females themselves.
libertarians? Explain how they factored at all. The feminists so far as I know tend to be fairly far left of center and the libertarians are opposed at a philosophical level to just about everything feminists believe beyond that women should have equal opportunities and rights.
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You think CS is bad for sexism - try being a teacher, where you not only have to worry about society judging you, but also potentially lawsuits.
The number of male elementary school teachers is declining exponentially, and a big reason is simply that men are worried (and rightfully so) that they could be subject to a lawsuit or a sex offense charge for any number of routine workplace occurrences.
It is a very sad state of affairs. At least women in CS don't have to worry about being placed on a state sex offender registry because of their career choice.
Can someone explain to me why it matters if more or less women are studying computer science?
Because we're tired of it being a sausage fest?
And?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
TFA didn't even consider the most well known explanation, which others here have mentioned, more or less: women are, by and large, more likely to take jobs for job satisfaction rather than to maximize their income to support their family (sometimes because they expect their spouse to be the primary breadwinner). Someone who acts like that is not going to want to go into the computer field, which is notorious for long hours and overtime (but high pay) and low job satisfaction.
And of course, the more internet access a woman has, the more aware she will be of these facts. Also, this doesn't really apply to very poor women (who are more likely to be single mothers and sole breadwinners), and poverty is correlated with low internet access (of course it's also correlated with not going to college at all, but that shouldn't affect the proportions of one major over another.)
It really has nothing to do with sexism at all, or at least, it hasn't been proven to have anything to do with sexism.
First of all I would like to point who cares? Second no one is to blame. This is liking asking our selves why users on slashdot so liberal. No one cares.
Roll back to 1986 - just over 50% of the people enroled in the first year computer science subjects at the University I went to were women. It's the subjects engineering students took as electives if they wanted proof that there were girls studying on campus :)
Anyway, very few of those women back then gained employment in computer related fields and female enrolement has declined since then. I have seen more women in mining, heavy industry and physical sciences than I've seen in IT.
It's anyone in the political range from hardcore anarchist to toe licking royalist (with the super-rich as the new royalty) that like the name "libertarian" so call themselves that. It's become an entirely pointless label, it generally just indicates someone that has camoflaged their politics by wrapping up in the flag and claiming that Washington would be on their side (instead, as deserved in some cases, of calling them a traitor to the ideals of a democratic republic).
It's entirely unclear to me whether there is any responsibility to duck or blame to take from any quarter. When did normative statistics become the consensus secular god?
I had hoped the Berkeley gender bias case had put this kind of trite formulation to rest.
I mean really...what does it matter? There's more men in football too...is this such a bad thing?
There's fields where there are more women than men...is anyone bellyaching about this? If not...why?
I keep seeing this harped on....and I don't know why? Unless there is some mass conspiracy to discriminate letting women into comp sci. programs....I don't see what is wrong. Discrimination would be one thing...and I don't see anyone suggesting that. But lack of interest should be perfectly acceptable. Are we also going to start bitching that there are too many Oriental folks getting into comp sci. math or physics and less Caucasians? More men in coal mines than women? X race females more than another race of females and men?
It is called choice.....what's wrong with that? People are different.
The sexes are different....geez, accept it and lets go on with life.....it just doesn't matter.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Moderate level intelligence go where the money is. Hence the jump in low skill computing ability in 97-00
Spoken like someone else who lived through it. What a horrible time to be hiring high end network engineers or anything else computer related......the amount of crap resumes was simply astounding. Everyone was a 6-month-old CNE.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
Law will net you /much/ more money for your effort?
This right here proves you are 100% clueless and talking out of your ass. Post law school employment is absolutely PATHETIC right now. It's at something like 55%.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
It is possible now to get degrees in CS in major universities (even good universities with some top-notch programs) that are nothing like traditional CS. Some CS programs teach mobile app dev and PHP and web design, allowing their students to get by without so much as a binary search tree. Assuming these enrollment statistics apply somewhat similarly to them, the traditional explanation about gender-based learning of math and science is moot.
It takes all kinds.
Somewhere there is a rich, horny fag, desperate to find a pasty cheeto cheese crusted computer geek (his particular fetish). All you have to do is find him. He might be along soon to criticize my language. You should post.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Hmm. At my company, roughly 95% of the developers are men. My boss is a woman. The HR department is all women. The documentation department is all women. Greater than 50% of the business analysts are women. The accounting department is all women. 80% of the DBAs are women. Yet, I hear women complaining that all us computer guys are misogynists and lecherous oafs and that's why they're not in computer science. Surely they realize that going into another field is not going to separate them from us, the spawn of Satan. Or maybe...just maybe... women don't go into CS because they aren't interested in programming. Call me crazy.
Maybe women just aren't as likely as men to leave India.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I would certainly agree that I don't see people complaining about the gender gap in ditchdiggers, garbage collectors, construction workers and the like.
I wonder how long before we have to have at least 50% of all NBA players be women (even though they have the WNBA already).
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I did EE @ University of Washington about 10 years ago. It was, I was told, an abnormal year where he had 40% female in the undergrad class and 50% in the graduate program - and not imported females either, but actual American-born white people (otherwise it was a pretty heavy Asian student body) and quite a number of them would fit right in the business school in terms of looks and dress.
The CS dept, on the other hand, was a complete sausage fest. 20:1 male/female ratio of a study group walking to grab food was a pretty common sight.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
I do not have anything to back this up, but my suspicion is that women are not only underrepresented but HUGELY underrepresented in this field.
I think you're right, in the sense that the field has a massive gender gap. The problem is... what if it is because women, by a vast majority, don't want to be in this field? If that is true, than every effort to push women into a CS Degree is doing a further disservice to a woman.
Ideally, all the women that want to be CS Majors should get a shot at it, and NO MORE. The workforce is composed of people, with desires and freedom of choice, not 'human resources' that need to be allocated equally.
I got what you said... I just see no reason to be PC on an internet news comment thread.
Yes yes... bloody red carpet... I didn't intend it that way but I saw it when you pointed it out.
The ladies can make penis comments if they want to retaliate but I'm frankly over the notion that we're all equal but be sure to coddle these people because they can't handle it.
Grow the f' up. Stop acting like children or like some absurd 19th century abstraction... but only when it suits you.
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the libertarians are opposed at a philosophical level to just about everything feminists believe beyond that women should have equal opportunities and rights.
That's amusing yet true. Libertarians oppose feminists because libertarians are against sexism.
These types of stories always makes me shake my head. It generates all sorts of speculation by a bunch of (geeky) men on why women do (or don't do) something when they really have no clue what they're talking about.
And, as a woman, I couldn't tell you why not as many women go into computer science as men, because I did. I did get my psychology degree first because it took me awhile to figure out what I wanted to do career-wise. It was when I working full time after graduating university that I decided on computers/software development after hanging out with out IT guys a lot.
I got a two year diploma from our technical college instead of doing another 4 years at university. In my class, we were split about 50/50 between new high school graduates and mature students (over 25) looking at a change in careers. Of the 50% of us "older" folks, I'd say about a third were women. I can only distinctly recall one in the high school crowd. Why the difference? Who knows...
Well, the modern feminist movement is a big believer in social welfare as well especially as it regards the government paying for their vaginal maintenance.
It's about as stupid as men protesting to get free Viagra pills and prostate exams.
Sad to say but if you strip women out of the voting pool it radically changes the electoral picture. You'd hope it wouldn't. That both men and women from roughly the same background and demographic would roughly approximate each other but they don't.
It's an interesting subject. To live so closely and yet fundamentally have a different culture.
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More women than men choose quality of life over income.
Speaking from 20+ years in the field, a ton of women "mommy out" when the work is hard. Sometimes, they quit to be with family. Other times, they get pregnant, take the 6 week maternity leave, then quit within a week of coming back.
Those I've kept up with were still not working a year later.
Now- given that work hours and quality of life are more important to women, why the hell would they enter a field where you have to work 10 to 12 hour days, weekends, holidays, and is low status?
In the IT field, women make 96% of what men do. Given men's aggression to quit jobs over money and go to new jobs over money, that's a very small difference in pay.
But I'm about to retire myself. I would never recommend IT to any woman OR man. It's a terrible, horrible field with slave-like conditions for 95% of the workers. But it pays well. I'll be retiring at 52 with more money per year than most people make every year salary and without a bloated state pension.
So now I can go to painting, massage, and traveling to conventions selling things.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Golly did you ever miss my point.
Basically, I saw the "bloody red carpet" thing, and the pun occurred to me.
The "... which get us in trouble" part was just some random filler I came up with to present the pun. The assumptions underlying that filler material were not remotely my main point, or even something I particularly endorse.
In fact, it was a toss up between "... which gets us in trouble." and simply "I see what you did there."
You seem to have a big chip on your shoulder about the PC thing, and assumed I was buying into it when I was not.
I'm not attacking you... and I wasn't before. Calm down. No need to be defensive.
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As a man I find the general tone of discussion on this thread offensive, both from an emotional standpoint and from a factual one; I can't believe the ignorance I'm seeing. False assertions about women's abilities which have never been founded and have been long settled by research brought up over and over again as if it's a fact that women are less capable engineers than men. It simply isn't true. It's never been true, and it's not likely to be true any time in the future.
I think if anyone is looking for a reason why internet access might discourage women from CS, they should simply read this thread!!!
I never was a fan of the humanities during my undergrad. I believed people should focus more on studies which lead them into lucrative careers, like engineering and computer science. I still believe that to a great extent. But witnessing the ignorance of many in those disciplines makes me wish that they had at least taken the time to study the history of their own frigging profession!!!