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ACM Blames the PC For Driving Women Away From Computer Science
theodp (442580) writes "Over at the Communications of the ACM, a new article — Computing's Narrow Focus May Hinder Women's Participation — suggests that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs should shoulder some of the blame for the dearth of women at Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter and other tech companies. From the article: "Valerie Barr, chair of ACM's Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W), believes the retreat [of women from CS programs] was caused partly by the growth of personal computers. 'The students who graduated in 1984 were the last group to start college before there was personal computing. So if you were interested in bioinformatics, or computational economics, or quantitative anthropology, you really needed to be part of the computer science world. After personal computers, that wasn't true any more.'" So, does TIME's 1982 Machine of the Year deserve the bad rap? By the way, the ACM's Annual Report discusses its participation in an alliance which has helped convince Congress that there ought to be a federal law making CS a "core subject" for girls and boys: "Under the guidance of the Education Policy Committee, ACM continued its efforts to reshape the U.S. education system to see real computer science exist and count as a core graduation credit in U.S. high schools. Working with the CSTA, the National Center for Women and Information Technology, NSF, Microsoft, and Google, ACM helped launch a new public/private partnership under the leadership of Code.org to strengthen high school level computing courses, improve teacher training, engage states in bringing computer science into their core curriculum guidelines, and encourage more explicit federal recognition of computer science as a key discipline in STEM discussions.""
boils down to a general lack of self-confidence in women. From the article:
"Boys fall in love with computers as machines; girls see them as tools to do something else," said Barbara Ericson, a senior research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who tracks the AP exam. "Then girls think, Ãmaybe I don't belong because I don't love them like the boys do.Ã(TM)"
Whether that lack of self-confidence is instilled by society, is somehow genetically innate to females, or a combination of the two, *that* is what is behind the lack of women in STEM fields. We need to work on ways to improve our self confidence and the rest will follow.
I've never heard someone saying a sentence like this in high school (girls or boys). Anyone?
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
So women stopped studying computer science because they didn't have to anymore? That certainly sounds like a crime against humanity.
We need to work on ways to improve our self confidence and the rest will follow.
Well start by stopping the blame white males and society excuses for women's alleged lack if self-confidence. Look in the mirror and they'd see the problem staring back.
simply not accept that men and women are different, and like different things? this is getting really creepy how obsessed some people are these days with other peoples lives.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Please, please, teach them something besides how to code in Java. A little theory would be nice. Some basic understanding of what a computer actually does with that code they type in. Some idea of how algorithms are turned into programs. Please?
Funny, I blame organizations like the ACM far more than I do the people who brought the technology into the mainstream. I wish my fellow women would stop trying to blame others for our own collective disinterest in early personal computing.
There was nothing stopping us from being part of the early popularization efforts of personal computing except an unwillingness to tackle the competitive nature of the early business scene, and even less of a willingness to become labeled as tomboys then guys who were willing to be branded as nerds, back when that label was just as much a guarantee of being socially ostracized for men.
Every time I read an article like this, it smacks of sour grapes and head-up-ass syndrome. You won't stop being a victim if you keep acting like one, and you won't make anything better by showing just how large our collective inferiority complex is. If only the ACM still did something of sincere value we might not have to dwell on this now. Thanks, Valerie Barr, now try solving the problem instead of pointing fingers. If other women and men hadn't thought to actually act, we'd still be in the kitchen now.
The guilt, the guilt!! Oh noooooes, what are we to do?! It's all our fault that women don't want to be in CS. We must atone for our sins and force them into all things computer science. They will turn around and thank us and hopefully forgive the rest of the community for our egregious crimes against humanity. Mercy MERCY!!
I give up. This is some sort of mass hysteria.
Compilers don't have emotions. You can't fool a compiler with sophistry, charm it with your charisma, or threaten it with your strength. The only way to get a compiler to do what you want is to know what the hell you are doing.
There's a term for this.
"So if you were interested in bioinformatics, or computational economics, or quantitative anthropology, you really needed to be part of the computer science world."
These weren't even things in 1984.
Computers were not so pervasive that you were missing out on much if you didn't know anything about them.
G.
It sounds like some jocks complaining that they didn't wanna hang with the uncool geek crowd and now they're relegated to polishing the cars of those eggheads.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How come there aren't any people complaining that there are VASTLY more women in nursing than men. Surely we need to make sure that core nursing classes are a core subject for both men and women right?
Where is the push to get men to become primary school teachers? Half of students are male shouldn't the same be true of the teachers?
Same for healthcare. With the exception of doctors most healthcare is dominated by women yet men are a large number of patients.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I bet back in the days computer science was more of an high engineering education than it is now
that before computer science was for people to be researches in other fields and use computer as a help tool, where now you dont need to go computer science as you can take single courses of math lab or other appropriate language for that field
now computer science is more to learn to program and as now playing games on pc, xbox etc has been a more a normal thing for girls to do than before, the upswing for women in TODAYS computer science will be when the ones born around 2000 will start studying in colleges/universitys
"Computing's Narrow Focus"? Get a degree in petroleum geology or structural engineering if you want a narrow focus. Or pick the wrong field in biology. I know a woman who got a PhD in an area of microbiology that turned out to be a dead end. She ended up managing a coffee shop.
It's certainly true that the first drop in female enrollment happened shortly after the PC came on the scene (the second drop happened after the dot-com crash). I'm not sure that's sufficient evidence to blame the PC (my post title is a formal fallacy, after all), but at least it has better support than the prevalent "smelly misogynistic nerd" theory.
Yknow, like Susan "HedgeMage" Sons? She certainly had some choice words about this entire tempest in a teacup.
Also it's worth pointing out that computer science degrees are something like 10% of all degrees conferred in the US, and women utterly *dominate* every single aspect of education from K12 through college, even earning nearly 2/3rds of all bachelors degrees. I would think the fact men are barely over 1/3rd of college graduates in the first place is a bit of a bigger problem than what major women choose.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I think it's because PC's don't come in pink and powder blue -- Hey Valerie I think you are clueless -- maybe it's because most women I've met find PC's boring at least for a career path. There are some career paths that women are not attracted too and the same goes for men. Most men don't want to go into daycare is that Kids R Kids fault?
Bioinformatics didn't exi in 1984 and I'd bet some of the other quoted specialties. What a crock of shit.
"which has helped convince Congress that there ought to be a federal law making CS a "core subject" for girls and boys..."
When discussing how a particular gender has been supposedly alienated from education, how about we not make sexist comments like this suggesting that we actually separate boys from girls in the education system, since that couldn't be farther from the truth.
Welcome to America, where women are forced to become men.
Along with all stupid "transsexuals in IT", "women in IT" and "extraterrestrials in IT"
So, basically, because personal computers made CS more accessible, and men took advantage of this access in greater numbers than women which resulted in the imbalance we see today, it is therefore the fault of personal computers that this imbalance exists.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
It's the fault of everybody if there's few women interested in learning computer science, is what I get from this.
Dear lord, please grant me the power to punch people over the internet...
Maybe they aren't programmers but pts of women are in related technical positions like project management, QA, design or buainess-side jobs like social media, marketing, sales. It takes all kinds...
Just the other day we had a story about how american tech companies only want the top 1-10% of available tech workers in the US and everyone else they hire is a visa worker... This suggests that maybe 1 in 10 STEM workers in the US actually can get a job in the US in tech... So for the love of god we need more women to enter this often dead end field why? So more women can remain unemployed, underemployed, and otherwise in debt?
As fundamental as computers are today I can sort of understand a certain level of computer competency/literacy is probably a good thing... But this drive to force more women into STEM seems a bit silly to me... If they want to sure, if not that's fine....
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
When are we going to see an article that blames the person making a decision being held responsible for the repercussions of their actions vs blaming everything on men? Slashdot is turning into Jezebel.
My wife watches those country music awards shows
I think the biggest problem is that people aren't willing to just admit we don't now why computer science has the male-female imbalance that it does.
There are differences between men and women in terms of temperament and aptitudes, but those differences are small and don't seem to explain it.
There are aspects of the culture in computer science that are inconvenient for parents, and usually wives expect husbands to make compromises (which not all men and not all women are happy about). That doesn't seem enough to explain it either.
There is certainly no lack of encouragement and support for women in the profession, so it's not that any of that is lacking.
We don't know, and that means we don't know what the solution is, or even if there is a problem in need of a solution.
Maybe next year ACM will blame Tesla and Samsung. In the US, female population is like 3-to-1 against male. Most of the tech company ACM pointed out are US tech companies, I'm confuse why would any group thinks tech companies should give special privilege or attention to the majority of the 75% population that have no interest in this field. When I was in high school, I don't see any one outside of my family give a crap about what field I interested in. And when I was in high school, I think majority of the male students only interest in female students and vice-versa. Even clubs like jeopardy or math and science were mostly comprised of male students like 9-to-1 if that club even had a female members. I don't think it was because they had any prejudice against female students, I was sure that they would welcome any female student to join the club. What I saw was many of the female students spent their lunch and after school hours at the gym watching basketball players instead. Not sure if they are the g/f of those players, fans or would be. But most of them didn't even care about basketball to begin with. There weren't even google or facebook back then. Most of those tech employees would be around my age (25-40). Suddenly now people think it's a problem and them to be blame? For the record I'm not working for any of those named companies. I played basketball and did some body building back in the junior high, then got bore and quit before high school. Did some programming in HS, but realized I didn't want that type of job. It would be fun doing that once in a while, but not spending 8-10 hours a day at the desk coding 6 days a week. Things that would become some what popular, I did that at least 3-5 years ahead. And I realized those weren't for me. What concerned me is that just about any dependent study groups, government or journalist/bloggers(can't very tell them apart any more), they weren't blaming parents. Why is that? Parents are the most influential people for any male and female since their birth. And it's their job to give their kids guidance. Students spend maybe 6-7 hours a day at school. And more at home, if they spend less at home that's the parents fault also. Yet, the tech industry is to blame?
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- If picture worth a thousand words, how many megapixels is it? -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
So, it sounds like women don't go into computer science because they don't like computers.
Alright, that makes sense. I don't like pig shit so I didn't become a hog farmer.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The social justice warrior push into tech is getting brazen. The article goes to the edge of suggesting that women are smarter than men, but then says when the applied knowledge gets specific enough, they fall behind? The problem is that the best way to measure mastery of knowledge is to measure how well it is applied to open ended problems. If most women are dropping out at that point, it means they can't hack it. If the majority of high performing employees at places like google are male, that suggests a problem with how the schools measure performance more than anything else. It's not like google isn't rolling out the red carpet for them, and if they were truly better, google would snap them up in an instant and have a female majority by now. Do women earn more credits and get better grades? Probably, but these days, high schools and colleges are bending over backwards to give women the fast track, so I wouldn't trust any of the statistics they present. In fact, the whole article reeks of political think tank style 'research.'
Lucy Sanders, CEO and co-founder of the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT), noted that compared to universities, "corporations are all different, and they're all very private."
I think this unintentionally presents the real motivations behind this whole piece: The justification of more regulation from the feminist lobby.
There are many theories. One asserts that prejudice against women's abilities throws barriers in their way; a related perspective suggests women are less likely to enter technical fields because they expect such barriers.
If this is even true, I wonder why they expect to find such barriers? Maybe because the media, school system, and society have beaten it into their heads they they're victims of the evil 'patriarchy' keeping them out of everything?
"Boys fall in love with computers as machines; girls see them as tools to do something else,"
Exactly true. I would say this is so with all technology, not just computers. However, it takes passion to stay afloat in these fields. You can't just get a degree and then expect to operate as a drone for the rest of your career if you want to move beyond the internship. Perhaps this is the reason why women drop out of the highly competitive applied fields. Hell, most men can't hack those positions either. It's one thing to be motivated by general ideas as the article suggests, but tech people have to have the ability to break those down into individual steps and then build something that executes them.
If anything, the ubiquity of an open, relatively cheap platform like the PC grants the majority of the population the opportunity to learn computing skills at nearly all levels in a meritocratic environment. Other than the cost of the hardware and an internet connection, there is no boundary, except motivation and interest. Sex has nothing to do with it. It doesn't surprise me that SJWs have a problem with such open meritocracy: it provides objective measurement of individual achievement, which is a big emotional hiccup for those who want to believe we're all intrinsically equally capable, yet 'oppressed' by class warfare.
What hinders women's progress when it comes to:
> Working in a mine?
> Working in an oil rig?
> Working in a war zone?
> Working as a trash collector?
Women do almost none of these jobs. Why aren't there fucking articles bitching about that too?
EDIT: captcha: "matron"
Lewlz!
How about we consider the thousands of years that women have been subjugated as the real reason. It just recently became acceptable for a women to pursue interests that were traditionally male dominated. I remember as a kid, my best friends sister would love hanging out with us when we played video games and worked with the old IBM PC. But her dad was constantly telling her to get back to her Barbies and leave the boys alone. Weeding out this kind of institutional repression takes generations. The big tech companies can try as best they can to lure more women into the field, but as long as there are fathers out there frowning upon their daughters not doing little girl things, the less women there will be who take an interest in tech.
So the IT industry in general has pushed women out of computing? My sister manages a book-keeping business and is frequently looking for part-time staff. The reason it's so frequent is that females employees, even working part-time, place doing a day's work as their 3rd or 4th priority. It's obvious a woman will choose her children over her employer, since many parents don't have family support nearby. So jobs with long hours, which interfere with child-care responsibilities are unsuitable for many women. The advantage of low-skilled jobs being that most of them have very rigid hours. But it's troubling that so many women take a contractual obligation so lightly. My sister calls it "shoe money": Women want to earn money purely to spend on personal luxuries, which like the employer who supplies it, can be forsaken at any time.
I do wonder how much of it is a cultural problem since most of the men in town earn very good money: That affects single women who demand pampering from all men, and married women who are forbidden to spend their husband's money on themselves.
Sorry but Facebook and Twitter are not tech companies.
According to this data chart [kff.org], about 30% of physicians are female.
As time go on, this will even out. While the ranks of older physicians are male-dominated, females make up just slightly under half the medical school class in the US. In parts of Europe, they already make up the majority:
women make up 54 percent of physicians below the age of 35 in Britain, 58 percent in France and almost 64 percent in Spain, according to the latest figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03...
I think it is much more likely that the surge in popularity of Hair Metal in the early 80's drove women from computer science.....why not?
... how can you argue that at all, let alone suggest it has a gender bias?
To the asshats who are pushing this agenda: do you really feel that every gender should be equally represented in every field? Or is CS somehow special?
I wonder if the people writing these articles are equally offended because most commercial truck drivers and plumbers are male.
The problem isn't as obvious as you made it. No quote in the article, including yours, points to self confidence as the problem. The one that comes closest is the second half of your quote.
But that's pointing towards realizing a fairly obvious difference and responding appropriately. Should they overcompensate and think that they belong despite evidence otherwise? Is that how this should work? Ignoring evidence? I'm not sure how else you could interpret that.
This is the first explanation I've seen that really makes sense - that women focus on "what it can do for me" and men focus on "what I can make it do". As men tend to design courses, and that develops into the curriculum, and then to an entire program, computer science is focused on the manly perspective.
The other quote :
I'm not sure how that is backed up by real information, but it certainly makes a certain bit of logic. Women in general do have higher verbal skills (ignoring the applicability to real life of such research). An average woman with strong math would still have a verbal edge. Self confidence plays no part in this one.
The post-PC specialization idea makes a certain amount of sense - women got a CS degree to get further in a chosen career, not to do CS stuff. And now that they can learn on a PC instead of a classroom, there's no need for the CS degree. This has nothing to do with self confidence.
The data near the bottom seems to bear out this concept, and it has nothing to do with self confidence. So no, Anonymous Wrong Person, it has nothing to do with self confidence unless you want to drag out something that 1) has been debunked 2) is ten years old or 3) didn't look at environmental causes.
One approach would be to argue that the rifle and the steam locomotive are the most important tools since the printing press, leaving the PC to third-most-important at best.
http://youtu.be/ga3BQWoNPq0
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Wow, just wow. /. has really devolved into the sensationalist Fox News type of media outlet. Welp, that cuts it. I'm out...
Is it just me or did this headline make you lol?
I don't even begin to understand where that sexist female group is coming from... .. they don't do better when they are in class.. they are part of a system wide scheme to push women into careers they are not meant to have. Now don't get me wrong i took organic chemistry and there were three guys and the rest of the class were females .. but those females were taking organic chemistry with the purpose of going into front line medicine as nurses .. not polymer research... not even doctors.
The fact is there are more opportunities in higher education for women than men.
Tens of thousands of women go to college on gender based scholarships that are not open to men and in addition to that they are offered entrance points because of their chromosome count. They don't place higher on tests
With all the scholarships open to them and every opportunity at their feet they decide to study psychology so they can try to figure out why they are so screwed up.. not to become doctors.. They study languages because they were brought up bilingual and the course work is something they have known since the 5th grade... they think women's studies is a realistic career path degree..
Face it Women are SEXIST.. and they use any opportunity they can grasp at to blame their bad choices and failures on anyone other than themselves...
You know what .. other than CISCO which was started by one man one woman .. I HAVE A REAL HARD TIME FINDING ANY COMPUTER RELATED COMPANY STARTED BY A WOMAN...
AND LETS LOOK A LITTLE HARDER WHILE WE ARE ON THE SUBJECT
WHAT FORTUNE 500 or 1000 COMPANY WAS STARTED BY A WOMAN AND LEAD TO SUCCESS BY A WOMAN?
THERE AREN'T ANY...
It costs $75 for a business license.. anyone can get one.. GO START A COMPANY.. MAKE IT A BILLION DOLLAR COMPANY.. THEN COME BACK AND TALK TO ME... because it is utter BS .. that men are to blame for women's failures...
WOMEN ARE FAILURES BECAUSE WOMEN ARE FAILURES... nothing else.
hey and I am not some big success but i don't cry about Michale dell starting his company in a dorm and blame the world .. I know what held me back in life .. and I know a lot of people got pushed through college when they never studied.. put in the time and effort .. and they do the same in their career..
So what if women DON'T WANT to get nerdy CS degrees. SO WHAT. Why should we FORCE THEM to like something that they DON'T WANT?
Go fuck yourself. There, the colorful language is in the posts too.
There are so many free tools for everyone to learn how to code today...
So many computer related documents at the tip of a google search
Microsoft gives away Visual Studio.. Google gives away Android Tools
I mean no one is holding anyone back.. no one is stopping any young girl or adult woman from
It is all out there.. at a click...
So whats the reason women don't click?
Because they don't want to put in the WORK..
ITS TOO HARD.. IT TAKES TOO LONG..
THERE IS NO WAY THEY WILL STAY UP 36HRS STRAIGHT TO CODE A PROJECT...
Men do these things..
We may do it because we like it..
We may do it because it beats cleaning sewers... maybe
BUT WE PUT IN THE WORK... and that is the ONLY REASON.
There are no barriers to women in any way..
The problem here is that women do not choose this stuff. And it has nothing to do with males excluding women. Men go and do this stuff all by themselves with no support what so ever.
Men do it for the same reason men build model trains, collect ornathopters, or play Dungeons and Dragons.
None of these things exclude women but women almost never do any of these things.
Its a choice women make. And it leads them to do different things. It has nothing to do with inferiority or superiority. It is merely a choice. A choice THEY make without coersion, intimidation, or any other manipulation.
I have a female cousin that is 15.
If I handed her a robotics kit do you think she'd be happy or do you think she'd be mad at me. MAD AT ME?!
Well, I did it. I gave her a robotics kit because I stupidly thought she'd like it. I was wrong. She was mad at me. What she wanted was some make up or some other girly shit. And that was my mistake. And that is the mistake of the people that blame this situation on men.
It isn't our fault. Ladies... you want equality? Done. With equality comes responsibility. Take it or get back in the kitchen. You choose this. Not us.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Is the single most bullshit answer ever. Are you people fucking serious? When has having children ever been a hindrance to entering a field such as medicine, law, or science? Women do all of these jobs without issue. That is the dumbest answer I've ever seen. It's also sexist as hell, I'm a guy and I'm not stupid enough to follow that line of reasoning. Lack of interest maybe, social stigma, quite possibly, there's also a huge battery of people saying no no no no no don't do STEM, only guys can do it. It's the man's field. Personally I think it's a lack of parents encouragement. Guys giving up computer time to their sisters, social sexism against women, and a lack of desire due to the above from women themselves. I work for an IT company, it's honestly a hostile workplace. If we ever hired a woman we would get sued to shit for the stuff I hear every day at work.
what better to hide level playing fields than to find some twisted way to 'prove' they're actually part of the patriarchy?
*People* are different, and like different things. Men and women, however, aren't that different (roles in reproduction excepted), so a statistically significant difference points to a social or psychological cause, not biology.
That said, the PC isn't itself the problem, as the TFA -- or maybe just the summary -- seems to imply. Looking at other professions with gender imbalances, though, one can posit a few underlying causes. a) Secretaries were once men who helped important people with important matters; once the typewriter came in, women seized on typing as a "respectable" way to support themselves and the modern secretarial pool was born. (See http://www.stuffmomnevertoldyou.com/podcasts/why-is-secretary-the-most-common-job-for-women-in-the-u-s/) b) Blechley Park and earlier research projects employed female "computers" before they developed electric ones because women worked hard and worked cheap. All the mathematical whizzes, however, were upper-class men; who would pay for a woman's education, when they would just get married and pop out kids? (See also Disney animators.)
Obviously somebody needs to do solid research, but one could hypothesize that the PC coincided with three trends: the growth of male-dominated "hacker" culture, the use of PCs by Serious Men for Serious Business, and the decline of mainframes (i.e. server rooms in which nobody knew or cared women worked). Without hard data, though, this is mere conjecture. Loads better than "women don't like computers", though.
Parent is a racist. Give him the old fashioned slash dot -1 moderation!
Sexist pig!
Racist goat!
What I would like to see is a statistical comparison of students, male and female, who, as high school seniors, score approximately the same on the SAT, and at levels that representative of folks who later enter STEM careers. So maybe we compare the set of students who score 750+ on Math and between 600 and 650 on verbal. Limiting the verbal range at both the high and low ends is intentional; perhaps a student who scores extremely high in both math and verbal may be more drawn to careers that benefit more from verbal ability. So we take this set of students, divide them into male and females, then check back in six years and see which degrees they end up with.
For instance, this might answer questions like, "To what extent is the gender gap in STEM degrees caused by differing levels of aptitude and to what extent is it simply a result of preference?" We'd be comparing students with similar ability and aptitude. At least, to the extent a blunt instrument like the SAT is a valid proxy for ability and aptitude. What degrees do highly mathematically gifted and somewhat verbally gifted women actually pursue? What about men who are similarly gifted in both areas?
Actually, if you are to look at who are leading the Silicon Valley companies you would understand that most of them are more into philosophy than coding
I don't know what the fuck happened to ACM, but for people who truly understand the beauty of philosophy, "Political Correctness" is crass
I bet you get a lot of dates.
What's obviously needed to even out the field is a feminist programming language. Luckily there are people doing research in that field. And our friends at 4chan have even created the first implementation.
Girls who have strong math skills tend to have higher verbal skills than boys who are strong in math, which opens up new avenues to follow, like the social sciences
Social science is about as scientific and STEM as Scientology. It's called Voodoo sciences for a reason. Nobody goes into it thinking it will be a great way to utilize their strong math skills.
Lolz. But he does actually make some good points and his spirit is correct: That women--or any group for that matter--should go out and do things and make it big in whatever they want in life, instead of researching ways of blaming men for various things.
"White males" are going to be blamed for everything and it's going to get worse and worse long after we are a huge minority. Even if we do deserve it, any group focusing on it could spend their time, energy, and resources towards more useful things.
Wait, these PCs we're talking about are dirt cheap. Programming tools are free. Books are cheap. Learning material is available online for free. So - is someone stopping women who want to learn about computers? If so, how? Is there some sort of barrier to entry? Unless there is some proof that someone or some entity is actively stopping women who want to learn about computers from doing so, this is just made-up drama we don't need.
One can argue in favor of efforts to increase interest in STEM careers among women and girls without "blaming white men" for anything.
ACM : an entity that lives in a dream that it represents any authority or exerts any respects in its field :s, no one gives a F.
:s people should learn to stop using that card :s, come on, if you sucked at CS or if there are not enough women around in CS, it probably is because the women were interested in doing something else, now stop trying to find excuses and get on with your life.
Women and Men
Apparently some things just can't be said unless they're copied and pasted from Microsoft Word.
More women got CS degrees in the 80s when CS covered anything remotely computer related. Therefore PCs made women lose interest by making Computer science about computers?
White male Privilege
I think the agenda is that somehow because the field is mainly white men that they are somehow conspiring to oppress women and minorities in order to keep all the jobs for themselves.
Women would be more into Computer Science if it weren't for those pesky computers?
What is it about personal computers and easier access to them since 1984 that disadvantages anyone let alone just one of the genders?
I'm pretty sure it doesn't.
What I have observed is that, culture paints "computers" as the thing the unattractive guys do because they can't talk to girls.
If you happen to be a girl, would you rather take the class you expect to be full of unattractive boys who don't know how to talk to you, or any other class?
The end result is that girls won't study computers unless they really love the technology (enough to deal with taking a class with socially inept neckbeards), whereas boys will take the coarse for any of several reasons including but not limited to: they really love computers, they think programming will let them turn playing video games into a carear, they heard that programers get payed well, they dislike math more and need the credits, they're socially awkward and their socially awkward friends are doing it.
Then take a situation where most women never learned much about computers and comparatively more men have and toy get a stereotype that women suck at computers and now on top of it not being socially desirable for girls to study computers, the ones who do it anyway have to deal with the stereotypes and work harder to get any respect (and no "OMB a girl who likes computers! she must think my neckbeard is sexy" isn't respect).
I'm in the spaceflight business. Most of my coworkers aren't particularly passionate about spaceflight; to them, it's just another job. Apparently our hiring process awards no points for passion. Which is a shame, because there are thousands of people who would give their left arm for the privilege of working here. I believe SpaceX is having one breakthrough after another because it does screen its job applicants for passion.
Wow, how could I have missed this Slashdotting? Nobody tells me nuthin'.
Anyway. I'm the author of this article -- my list of recent work, which includes it, is http://tomgeller.com/portfolio.
I haven't read the comments yet, and am about to (with trepidation).
One quick note: I take exception with the headline. "ACM" didn't blame anybody for anything. Interview subject Valerie Barr "believes the retreat was caused partly by the growth of personal computers". I've asked for it to be changed.
Tom Geller
Thank you, AC. This comment made my day brighter. I wish you success in your endeavour.
I was at school doing CS 75-78, and there was, as I recall, one woman in the class -- and she was primarily a med. student.
we didn't need any more proof our world has gone mad
Equal opportunity doesn't mean equal result.
You may have the same options as anyone else, you may not get the same results. Upbringing, interests, what you do in your spare time, how your particular mind works, and what's important to you.
Working with computers doesn't put you at the height of the social food chain. I find that many women are very concerned with this. Its been my experience.
Not all the women I've seen / met / know are like this, but statistically in my life they are worried about it.
Don't blame men because some women wants to take a selfie instead of take an info tech job and interests.
You know why they have that geek image for men in the IT field? Because they're focused on what they love vs being super socially popular and having a fantastic image for everyone to be jealous about, and they don't care to show that.
Some men, anyway, not all.
But you get my point. And you know what else? It's changing. More and more, women are figuring out they really can be interested in these things and let their life passion be in that field.
It's not all our fault these days though.
noff said...