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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.
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?
I give up. This is some sort of mass hysteria.
"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."
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
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
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.
Yeah, bioinformatics didn't exist in 1984 because GenBank was first released in 1982...hey, wait a minute!
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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...
... 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.
This is still silly and defeatist thinking. You can't just blame it on "thousands of years of repression". You have to effect change, not twiddle your thumbs and wait for it.
We have had nearly 50 years of chance for women to inspire other women (their daughters) to become techies instead of nurses. That's a few generations. If this is the best we can do, being at least half of the population, then we don't deserve to be playing the victims anymore.
And the good news is that there are plenty of males in computing willing to help us... we just don't want to be in that profession, and it's not because "cranky old men with power" are holding us back anymore. The glass ceiling is no longer an excuse. We have fewer barriers than many other societies, even other modern ones. We need to start using it.
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.
http://youtu.be/ga3BQWoNPq0
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Citation needed. The 1960's and other such periods are not representative of all of history, or perhaps even a significant portion of it. Even medieval "homemakers" were expected to pitch in and work for their village, be it helping their families farm, or in off-seasons helping to make crafts. That did not dismiss them from their "responsibilities" of making babies any more than a man's job exempted him from the same.
In fact the average man was hardly any more free for much of history, save for the notion that a daughter's worth was in how many offspring she could produce, so it was frowned-upon for her to act in any way that would make her less likely to be marriageable. But then it wasn't exactly socially acceptable for men to not be marriageable either, much like it still isn't, so it's difficult to truly say that women were any more oppressed in the way you state than men ever were.
And ancient peoples knew nothing about astronomy because there were no astronomy degree programs at the time. Right.
Ezekiel 23:20
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
So you affect change by doing studies that point fingers in random directions hoping to shame someone into giving you equality? Why not base yourself in reality first and then tackle the problem? No, you can't wait for actual lasting change. You want your change now, created on a very weak foundation that just instills resentment and resistance to change. Then you'll wonder why it came crashing down at the slightest push. No, I'm not a defeatist, I'm a realist who knows that change takes lots of time and lots of work. Maybe one day you'll come around to this but I doubt it.
Didn't need it, but thanks for butting in anyways.
And then they're praised for accomplishing it while biological men are told to be ashamed of their gender.
In other news, everything is also whitey's fault.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
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.
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.