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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.""
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.
Naw. Men don't want to be primary school teachers because they know in 15 years some stupid twat will be convinced that regression hypnotherapy is real, be brainwashed by some anti male feminist lesbian quack that she was raped by her 3rd grade teacher and ruin his life. Not worth it. Let the women talk their male students into boning them.
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.