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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.""
I bet back in the days computer science was more of an high engineering education than it is now
No, it was math. It was engineering for a little while in the 90s. Now it's like accounting - mostly applied software engineering, unless it's a top school.
Where is the push to get men to become primary school teachers?
Unfortunately, our mass media's ridiculous "pedophile" scares have taken care of that. Do a cursory internet search sometime for male teachers in elementary or daycare -- you'll inevitably find a bunch of articles about how parents are convinced that any man who might want to spend some time with small children MUST be a pedophile. Nevermind that pedophilia is incredibly rare, and your son or daughter is probably a hundred times more likely to be sexually abused by as a teenager by a high school teacher or coach than by a pedophile.
So, even if men wanted to get into this profession, we have huge hurdles -- and I agree it's really not right. (As a father, I've even occasionally seen the suspicious looks and odd concern when I would take my young child to the playground or even just for a walk around the neighborhood.)
All of that said, most primary school teachers I know would be happy to have more male colleagues. Most of them know the benefits of having male teachers around small kids -- unfortunately, for us to start a campaign for male teachers, we'd have to overcome the inaccurate media fear campaign about pedophiles... and "Think of the children!" always overrides logic or reason.
Same for healthcare. With the exception of doctors most healthcare is dominated by women yet men are a large number of patients.
I posted on this above with links, so I'll just briefly say that there are in fact organizations trying to get more men into nursing -- and given the growing nursing shortage, just about any place would be thrilled if the numbers of male nurses went up.