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Is Computer Science Education Racist and Sexist?
theodp writes "What's wrong with this picture?" asked Code.org at its launch earlier this year, lamenting the lack of Computer Science students in a race and gender reference-free infographic. But as the organization has grown via public/private partnerships and inked agreements to drive the CS curriculum for the Chicago and NYC school systems, the same stats webpage has adopted a new gender and racial equity focus, positioning Computer Science education as "a chance to level the playing field" for women, Hispanic and African American students. The new message is consistent with the recently-forged Code.org partnership with the NSF-funded Exploring Computer Science (ECS, "a K-12/university partnership committed to democratizing computer science") and Computer Science Principles (CSP, "a new course under development that seeks to broaden participation in computing and computer science"). According to The Research Behind ECS, an "insidious 'virtual segregation' that maintains inequality" is to blame for keeping the number of African Americans and Latino/as CS students disproportionately low. So, what might the future of Code.org's proposed equity-based U.S. K-12 CS education look like? "Including culturally relevant instructional materials represented a driving focus of our course development," explained ECS Team members who now advise Code.org. "Cultural design tools encourage students to artistically express computing design concepts from Latino/a, African American, or Native American history as well as cultural activities in dance, skateboarding, graffiti art, and more. These types of lessons are important for students to build personal relationships with computer science concepts and applications – an important process for discovering the relevance of computer science for their own life." And — ironically for Code.org — it could mean less coding."
The white male dominance of computer science begins with little girls being given dolls instead of engineering toys, and poor children (which includes many racial minorities, although not because they're racial minorities) going to shitty schools where they're lucky if their education is only twenty years out of date.
- There are crazy stock valuations of computer companies that have almost no revenue.
- People claim that everyone should write computer software including those with minimal STEM background and minmal interest in such.
- When crazy articles about computer science racism starting appearing.
Why would you want to make computer science "more appealing" to women? Just look at science students and computer science students in Russia. Women are the majority!
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
"Cultural activities in dance, skateboarding, graffiti art, and more."
As a black software engineer I am tired of needing things dumbed down (or "hipped up") to be made more acceptable to minorities. We don't need skateboarding, "graffiti art", or dancing to teach a kid how to code. Just like we didn't need a substandard English (Ebonics) to teach kids how to properly read and write.
If under representation of minorites in computer science is racist, I'd love to know what they think of the under representation of non-Asian minorities in all science, medicine, and technology fields. By their metric there would be rampant racism.
Racism is a real thing, and a very terrible thing, and it's offensive to assume a lack of minority representation automatically means racism. I came from a culture that shunned academic excellence of any kind, and I think that's the reason there is under representation. But nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the room which is asking people to blame their perceptions and beliefs instead of their environment. Racism makes a convenient enemy when the enemy is within.
Its not the sort of job you can do well if you don't have some sort of inherent interest or curiosity in.,
I used to think that too, but since I've met a number of people who don't really like programming but are still very good at it. YMMV.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I don't see anyone complaining that nursing or primary school teaching is sexist, yet those professions have a definite bias towards one sex.
If you haven't heard any complaints, it can only be because you haven't been listening:
Why Men Don't Teach Elementary School [ABC News, March]
Men in Nursing [October]
CS culture is the same any other cultural block - the sense that your peer group is superior because you believe or know something that other groups do not. You see it in Mac vs PC, Android vs iOS, Windows vs Unix, Debian vs Ubuntu, x86 vs MIPS, etc. It's the same thing that made the football team superior to the basketball team. Or Hondas better than Toyotas, or domestic cars better than foreign cars. Or vegan better than a regular diet. Or heavy metal better than pop. (Or vice versa for all of these)
In other words, it's just the way people are. It affects all aspects of society including CS. If there's one black mark I'd give CS about this, it's that it tends to have a greater percentage of socially mal-adjusted people, and so tends to hang on to this sense of superiority more than other cultural blocks. Most regular people eventually figure out that it's not really important whether the football team is better than the basketball team, or whether you bought a Toyota or a Ford. But people in CS tend to defend and promote their preferred systems with almost religious fervor well into adulthood. This can be very off-putting to regular people thinking of getting into CS. (To be fair, it's a minority of people in CS who behave like this. But they can be a very vocal minority.)
For them, it's just another opportunity for career advancement. If calling someone racist or sexist will help them land the job, that is all that matters!
Funny enough, that's probably closer to the truth than you'd expect. In Canada we went through this with policing back about 15 years ago, and it's completely messed up the management and general way things are handled. We're of course now reaping this politically correct mess, with peace officers who won't touch or do jobs because it "might inflame the minority groups." Different south of the border, back when a lot of places needed cops bad, they would hire anyone who could pass the basics even if they had a criminal past(Detroit was famous for this).
And of course this also swings into various things like fast tracking promotions and so on. An example: Let's say you, and a female cop are at equal terms for the moment in seniority, and qualifications. She gets pregnant...well what do you think will happen? If you think desk job you're half right, in most cases they'll get shuffled to ident, or something similar. In the year that she's not "working the beat" she'll get to sit there and twiddle her thumbs. In two years, because she's already worked at a job that requires a fair bit of smarts to do, she'll get a chance to pick and choose where she goes next. Now in the males case, let's say you get injured -- say serious spine injury, or some other form of a year or two long recovery process where you can still work. You think you're going to ident? Hardly, you my friend are being sent to the front desk to deal with people, and maybe go work in the cage(either weapons, or evidence). And when you're done and recovered, you're going right back to your old job. Enjoy that fast track process.
Om, nomnomnom...
It'll bite him sooner than that, when the compiler or interpreter responds to his attempts with pages of error messages. It turns out that it's not practical to handicap the computers such that white males must write syntactically perfect programs to get any results at all, while minorities and women are allowed some number of errors depending on their relative disadvantage. It's even less practical to allow semantically incorrect programs to work properly merely because they are authored by a disadvantaged person.
What do any differences that African American culture has with mainstream American culture have to do with computer science, though? You say:
If written without any sensitivity to a difference in inherited cultures, it is fair to say the material will be more easily absorbed by the kids who are products of the same culture to which the author caters.
But these words are meaningless without a concrete example. Can you cite some CS material that will be "more easily absorbed" by white kids compared to the black ones due to the way that it's written?
FWIW, I'm not American nor a native English speaker, and my native culture is significantly different. But I learned the trade largely from books written by American authors, and I didn't have a problem with any kind of "cultural difference", because any such does not reflect in CS (and other hard sciences). Computers and numbers don't care what your race, ethnicity, religion etc is.