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ACM Blames the PC For Driving Women Away From Computer Science

Posted by timothy on from the how-you-slice-and-dice-the-factors dept.

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.""

73 of 329 comments (clear)

  1. Do they? by rbarreira · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "With computing, the social element isn't always evident. They ask, 'how am I going to make a difference in the world with a computer science degree?'"

    I've never heard someone saying a sentence like this in high school (girls or boys). Anyone?

    --

    The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
    1. Re:Do they? by khasim · · Score: 2

      I've never heard someone saying a sentence like this in high school (girls or boys). Anyone?

      Not me, either. If anything that would happen in college, wouldn't it?

      Anyway, from TFA (by the way, is it really displaying as grey text on a white background):

      NCWIT senior research scientist Catherine Ashcraft cites the 2008 Harvard Business Review study "The Athena Factor," which found that "56% of technical women leave their private sector jobs by mid-career," she said. "But 75% continue to work full-time, and approximately half of these continue to work in technical occupations.

      Check my math, okay?
      100 tech women
      56% leave the private sector (56 in this example)
      75% of the 56 continue to work full time (42 in this example)
      ~50% of 42 continue in tech (21 in this example)

      So that 21 plus the 44 that did not change is 65. So only 35% of women in tech leave tech in mid-career. 65% are in tech and stay in tech full time.

      What's the percentage of men who leave tech in mid-career? How does that compare to the 35% for women?

      In her position as a professor of computer science at Union College, Barr found contextualizing computer science classes led to an increase in female enrollment.

      I don't mean to sound mercenary here, but isn't "money" a major motivating factor? Paying the mortgage and such?

    2. Re:Do they? by DigiShaman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Babies happen.

      Many women who become moms stay at home on hiatus before returning to work. IT is a fast moving target, so being left behind for a short while is enough to make it too troublesome to return to the same career. Some will chose an entirely different job that better suits their work/family life. Another percentage of those moms stay at home as a "stay at home mother"; which BTW is a full-time job in of itself with bread winning father providing the financials.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    3. Re:Do they? by timelorde · · Score: 2

      Check my math, okay?

      You've gone too far. You should have stopped when the answer was 42.

    4. Re:Do they? by sjames · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I would say that is more a problem of perception in HR and hiring managers than reality. If you've seen one silver bullet that willd solve all our problems, you've seen them all.

      Sure, things do change in just a few years, but it's not that hard to catch up given you needn't bother with the flash in the pan stuff that already went away again.

      C is still C, Java is Java. Python is more popular, Perl a bit less. Java is the new COBOL. It's not like taking a few years off to stay at home until a child is school age is spent in total isolation. Most of the tech news is on the web anyway.

    5. Re:Do they? by sjames · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You do realize that women don't just go to work one day and go into labor, right? There's generally ample warning.

      Depending on the length of the sabbatical and her employer, she might join a different team or department, or perhaps go to work elsewhere. But there's no reason to leave the profession.

  2. So... by ceoyoyo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So women stopped studying computer science because they didn't have to anymore? That certainly sounds like a crime against humanity.

    1. Re:So... by Bite+The+Pillow · · Score: 2

      That did not preclude women, and that seems to be a new area of study for this problem. Women aren't being pushed out by misogyny and male culture (according to this hypothesis) - they are self-selecting, or pushing themselves out. They have the option, but choose not to.

      Except when it is part of some other goal - that is, women do use computers, just not for the sake of using computers (generally). Women are utilitarian in using computers to support other endeavors.

      So women stopped studying computer science because they didn't have to anymore?

      We can oversimplify if you (grandparent and the post to which you replied) like, but the attribution is wrong. Fields constantly diverge and evolve, and the PC revolution meant having access to advanced processing power without competing for time at a mainframe. Women didn't *have to* study computer science before, but it helped in knowing how to get this hunk of metal to give interesting answers.

      And it's not that women didn't have to study it anymore - in many cases, the computer became part of the curriculum.

      We could rewrite this entire article to say that (advanced) courses of study embraced computers as virtual assistants, which pushed basic computer science into many other fields, increasing the number of women who took CS informally along with their chosen major.

      So you don't have to study a specific CS course of study in order to incorporate CS into what you really want to do. Which brings us back to women seeing CS on its own as not interesting, not helpful, or something else. And without further insight, we could stop here and write it off as personal preference due to the underlying brain structures that heighten verbal skills, and give up on all of this "not enough women in the field" nonsense and "men are pushing women away due to misogyny and male culture" beatings.

      The next step is obviously to come up with some sort of number that tells us women should be 30+/-5% of the computer science course for X reason, and stop trying to make it 50% unless that reason itself exposes an obvious requirement to do so. Then given that non-CS people can work in software development, what percentage of an IT workforce should be women? What happens if we turn traditionally male cultures like start-ups into female friendly environments?

      What if it's a tech company that does lots of completely non-software-related things, how many women should work at that place?

      And let women, since they are not precluded and only excluded by choice, be underrepresented where women choose to be. And if we get to the end of all of this and realize that men are just being dicks and it was male culture causing problems all along, men will have no more excuse to fall back on to explain the difference. This is the first step in really getting to an answer, rather than pitting gender against gender in suppositions.

  3. why can the world by ganjadude · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:why can the world by toejam13 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But why do they like different career paths? Is it that there is a biological difference that guides men and women to different career choices, or is there some social prodding that causes men and women to self regulate?

      On the flip side, there have been few articles that talk about why men often avoid female dominated jobs such as primary school teaching, nursing, housekeeping, secretarial / office management, social working, accounting and the like. Often, it turns out to be self-regulating. Remember the movie Meet the Fockers and how Ben Stiller's character was given so much crap for being a male nurse? Yet male nurses are in high demand because they can lift heavier patients and better restrain unruly patients.

    2. Re:why can the world by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 2, Insightful

      why men often avoid female dominated jobs such as primary school teaching

      Because the pay is terrible, and you can't support a family as a primary school teacher?

      --

      "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
    3. Re:why can the world by ganjadude · · Score: 4, Insightful

      why do we need to care why the differences are there? cant we just accept that there are difference and stop trying to "fix" the non problem?

      --
      have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
    4. Re:why can the world by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 5, Interesting

      But why do they like different career paths?

      I'm going to posit that women are smarter about accepting abusive work conditions than men are. 90-hour weeks where you sleep at your desk and get free Mountain Dew and a game of pinball in a few times during a death march is an abusive situation.

      What I really don't get is why some women want so badly to put other women in these situations when they're already winning. I guess what we need is more women entrepreneurs, to run companies sanely. Or men to grow a pair and tell their masters to kiss off so that tech work environments can become places where women would feel welcome.

      Yeah, smoke on that one - when you work unpaid overtime you're being hostile towards women.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    5. Re:why can the world by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Please repost your question in English.

    6. Re:why can the world by Zynder · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why should he shut up? I hate going to my job but it pays so damned good. For every one of your type, there are 10 of us. I mean I wanted to be a goddamned astronaut but it just didn't work out that way so now we do what we must to get by. You should applaud people like me and Bill. You aren't paying us to sit at home and mooch off of the system. Instead we go to a job we might hate but it beats scrubbing your toilets for $20/wk.

    7. Re:why can the world by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      That's kind of a crock of shit. My mom is a primary school teacher. At a middle class school in the suburbs, she brought home a very generous salary, followed by a sizeable lifetime pension after retirement. This myth that all these poor teachers are living in poverty needs to end.

    8. Re:why can the world by toejam13 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If there is a social cause, then society can work to undo it. If it is a biological cause, then we can stop wasting time and effort thinking it is a social cause.

      Had my mom been born a decade later or in a more progressive area, she probably would have pursued a career as a chemist. But my grandmother wouldn't allow it and many of her peers discouraged her. She became a nurse instead. She still has some regret over the decision decades later.

      In her case, she wasn't so meek as to dismiss being a chemist from the start. She actually stuck her neck out only to be swatted down. But I bet that many women of her era would have convinced themselves that being a chemist was a foolish notion and wouldn't have pursued it at all. That's social self-regulation. That should be eliminated.

    9. Re:why can the world by poity · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Perhaps women have the luxury and privilege of not losing attractiveness when working low-paying jobs. Perhaps men are the victims of a society that forces them to over-work and be over-competitive because women ultimately select whose genes are passed on and whose are not. Perhaps this competitiveness is why men will take on more hard jobs, fight for more raises, and suffer the abuses.

      Is female materialism driving men into high wage jobs? Maybe there should be a federal law to address this...

      --
      your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
    10. Re:why can the world by digsbo · · Score: 2

      Those are fair questions. There is no question the people in teaching in my area (Philly suburbs) have done very well in pay due to people arguing that there is some kind of across the board national problem with teacher pay. A teacher with 20 years experience probably makes as much per hour as a software engineer with 30 years experience, but has better benefits and retirement. I think you're looking at about $80-$85K for a 180 day school year year w/ master's degree (which was paid for by the employer, and can be passed by a carrot) and 20 years experience in MANY of the districts in the region.

    11. Re:why can the world by jedidiah · · Score: 2

      Skilled trades have the advantage of being hourly positions with overtime pay. This can easily make a job in the skilled trades quite comparable to something one might have gone to college for.

      You actually get paid for the time you work instead of everyone expecting you to work more hours for a fixed salary.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    12. Re:why can the world by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If there is a social cause, then society can work to undo it. If it is a biological cause, then we can stop wasting time and effort thinking it is a social cause.

      First of all, we also need to consider the possibility that it could be BOTH. I.e., that certain gender stereotypes have some relationship to biological facts, and thus gender stereotypes end up having other effects which are not necessarily biological (but may be partly rooted in them).

      The reason I bring this up is because it makes an interesting conundrum for these sorts of arguments. If something is entirely biological, there's supposedly no sense fighting it. (Of course, not all women are exactly the same, and some may have those "natural" biological elements emphasized to more or less degree in their talents and personalities.) But if something is entirely social, it's perceived as a gross injustice.

      But what if we combine these? For example, someone earlier in this thread brought up the biological fact that women bear children and thus may need to take significant time off of work to have a kid and especially in the first year or two do things that only women can do (particularly nursing). If a woman wants to have more than one child, that can easily add up to 5-10 years of absence from the job force. In a fast-paced field, it may be difficult for women to then hop immediately back in to the job force with skills that are already starting to be outdated.

      So, the issue here is not entirely biological (women could choose to forego children or dump their kid into daycare when he/she is a couple months old or women could actively try to keep up their skills even while not working full-time), but it's not entirely social either (men don't have the same hormones driving them to have children or nurse or be with infants). Yet we're still stuck with the problematic effects -- women will often get behind in their jobs or have trouble keeping up or returning to the workforce. We can't just blame it on biology, but it seems impossible to completely eliminate social issues that arise either.

      But I bet that many women of her era would have convinced themselves that being a chemist was a foolish notion and wouldn't have pursued it at all. That's social self-regulation. That should be eliminated.

      Obviously we need to eliminate actual ignorant prejudice. But the problems are often a lot more subtle than that these days. I know a lot of professional women who "came up through the ranks" in the 1970s, and they have horrific stories to tell about the kinds of indignities women suffered in the workforce back then. Let's not forget all the amazing progress we've made in a few decades... it's important to keep that in perspective.

      Nowadays, we're mostly confronting those harder problems I mentioned earlier, like how to figure out a way to be "fair" in a workplace (and all the related decisions like salary, promotion, etc.) where one gender is more likely than the other to disappear from their career for 5-10 years at a time.

      And we also have to deal with cases where "social self-regulation" actually does serve some important purpose. Sure, is it biologically possible for a woman to have a child and dump the infant in daycare almost immediately to be fed with formula? Yes, obviously. And lots of women do it because they have to.

      But aren't there also psychological and perhaps social benefits to allowing women to choose to stay home and take care of a small child as they are biologically programmed to do? Moreover, aren't there also social benefits to having communities where children are raised by some parent (male or female) who can spend more time with them, rather than getting kids out of the home as quickly as possible and into large groups of kids often taken care of by people paid minimum wage? (Of course, some might argue the reverse -- that many parents are bad parents, and daycare may be helpful to the kids. Perhaps that's true

  4. CS Core Curriculum? by Langalf · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:CS Core Curriculum? by jader3rd · · Score: 2

      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 think the reason why the students are being taught Java is so that the Professors can focus on those other things. For lots of students the gotcha's of native code get in the way of learning the theories, algorithm tuning, and data structures. So by using a managed language in the classes, the classes can spend more time focusing on something else besides language implementation details.

  5. In 1984... by Gavin+Scott · · Score: 3, Informative

    "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.

    1. Re:In 1984... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      These weren't even things in 1984.

      People working with Smalltalk machines and Lisp workstations at that time would probably disagree. But then again, only a chosen few could afford those.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    2. Re:In 1984... by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 2

      "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.

      It depends on what you mean by "weren't even things." If you mean that most people didn't know about them, well, that's still true. If you mean that NO ONE -- even at research labs and in grad school projects, etc. -- was doing this stuff, well, you're wrong. Even if you just do some searches in Google Books restricting sources to 1984 or earlier, you'll find the use of the term "bioinformatics" going back to the early 1970s (the first shared protein databases go back to the early 70s, and gene sequencing software to the late 70s), and entire books devoted to mathematical programming and computational modeling in economics from the 1970s.

      As for "quantitative anthropology," there are a few sources out there that mention applying quantitative methods back then, but I doubt there was as much computer use as in, say, economics. On the other hand, I know a number of people who did their doctoral dissertations in the humanities in the 1960s and early 1970s who were making use of computers to try things similar to what we'd called "digital humanities" today. And I've read papers in the humanities using computer-aided analysis going back to at least the early 1960s. Perhaps it was the "space race" era or something that influenced those projects, but computers were around particularly at universities.

      Computers were not so pervasive that you were missing out on much if you didn't know anything about them.

      I'd absolutely agree with that. But there's a difference between saying that "you weren't missing out on much" and "those ideas/fields didn't exist" (and sometimes made significant use of computers) in 1984.

  6. Know what that sounds like? by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  7. What about nursing?? by Cutting_Crew · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:What about nursing?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Because women who want go into medicine end up nurses instead of doctors. This is the result of stereotypes, peer pressure and a largely male establishment.

      So what you are saying is if a field is male dominated, it is because of men and we need to change it. If a field is female dominated, it is still because of men. Is there anything that is not a man's fault?

    2. Re:What about nursing?? by Guppy · · Score: 3, Informative

      Because women who want go into medicine end up nurses instead of doctors. This is the result of stereotypes, peer pressure and a largely male establishment.

      In 2011-2012, women represented 47.0% of entering students entering medical school, and it's been hovering at just below half (around 47-49%) for the past decade. This value has also been approximately proportional to the gender mix of applicants, which was 47.3% female in 2011-2012.

      Source: https://www.aamc.org/download/...

    3. Re:What about nursing?? by epyT-R · · Score: 2

      ..or maybe nursing offers a social and psychological environment more suited to them. It's not that women are corralled into it, it's that they want it.

      Men who try on nursing often find that long term exposure to 'female space' politics is toxic to their sanity and productivity. While both men and women have their own set of group work dynamics, the problem is that feminism demonizes the existence of men's while praising the existence of women's. In fact, it goes out of its way to justify "make history, her story", turning male spaces into female ones. ....and feminists wonder why they're labeled hypocrites?

    4. Re:What about nursing?? by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 2

      How come there aren't any people complaining that there are VASTLY more women in nursing than men.

      There are. For example, have a look at organizations devoted to recruiting more men, like the American Assembly for Men in Nursing or the "Are you man enough to be a nurse?" campaign. Also see various studies and concerns about the issue on the Minority Nurse page. It's really a complicated issue, and organizations like this have really been trying to figure out recruitment efforts.

      Maybe there should be more "people complaining" about this issue, but your assertion that "there aren't any" is just untrue. The fact is that we have a shortage of qualified nurses that is only projected to get worse, and many of these organizations, many hospitals, etc. would be extremely happy if they could get more male nurses, or get more men who are currently unemployed or in crappy jobs in this economy to go to nursing school. But it doesn't help the stereotype when just about every portrayal of a male nurse on television or film is usually made to be the butt of jokes and ridicule.

    5. Re:What about nursing?? by PlusFiveTroll · · Score: 2

      I know a person who has worked at an inmate detention center for 20 years. That long around people and you gain some insight in to human behavior. In general they summed up the interactions between inmates in the following manner.

      Males: Violent.

      Females: Manipulative.

  8. Men in education and healthcare? by trout007 · · Score: 2

    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.
    1. Re:Men in education and healthcare? by CronoCloud · · Score: 2

      The fact is, school systems have become quite toxic to men. There used to be a lot more of them, and now they're leaving for a reason.

      That's not true, there are actually more male teachers now than there were when my dad (born in 1927) went to school.

      There is no "toxic environment". The truth is, most men don't teach because they view it as a low paying low status job dealing with people "kids" they don't want to have to deal with. In other words. Men are more selfish.

    2. Re:Men in education and healthcare? by epyT-R · · Score: 2

      Ah I get your rules now.. Only you're allowed to say your anecdotes are correct. I'm not. I forgot. Sorry. That's about the kind of logic I'd expect from a feminist or any social 'justice' warrior, really. Maybe your area wasn't the norm? Oh, oops, sorry, another failure to conform. When will I ever learn never to question?

      You're engaging in the same sort of systemic shaming towards me that you would not tolerate towards women. The only arguments you've made are an ad hominem and a generalization that men are more selfish than women. Knock it off with the shaming language if you expect people to take your morality seriously.

      As far as toxic environments go, school has always been a place where you are told to sit down, shut up and do as you're told, which can be good or bad depending on the circumstances. Today, though, mainly because of feminism's push in government and education to focus on women and girls at the expense of men and boys, students are encouraged to express and focus on their feelings and feminine traits (as long as they are 'positive', definition to be set by the faculty) like conformity and group awareness, instead of on objective measurements of achievement and competition. Naturally, girls respond well to this, but the boys? not so much. This cultural toxicity to individual expression and achievement (which tend to be masculine traits) has long since spread into the faculty dynamics as well. There are fewer men involved today because education isn't very rewarding to them anymore. Like the boys in class, the men are expected to behave/express themselves like dominant female space expects them to or face career-ending fallacious accusations. It has nothing to do with selfishness, not on the part of men anyway.

      A quick search gave me this
      http://www.edweek.org/media/po...
      go to page 12, there's a graph that shows the trend from 86.
      http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/d...
      read under demographics.. 76% of teachers are female in 2008.

      These sound about right to me. I don't know where you're justifying your 'more male teachers today than in the past' prideful patriarchy shit, but it's not in alignment with at least this cursory reality check.

    3. Re:Men in education and healthcare? by ultranova · · Score: 2

      I bet you're a lonely guy. Bitter, much?

      Whether he is or isn't, false accusations of pedophilia are a real risk for any adult working with children, which is unlikely to increase the quality of said people any.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

  9. Re:The problem, as always... by Smallpond · · Score: 5, Funny

    We can't even solve the problem of Unicode on /.

  10. "Computing's Narrow Focus"? by Animats · · Score: 2

    "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.

    1. Re:"Computing's Narrow Focus"? by russotto · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "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 my not-far-post-1984 CS degree was focused pretty much on computing itself; computer architecture, automata, algorithmic complexity, database internals. Not so much on applications; the article suggests that pre-1984 there was more focus on what you can do with computers. I'm not so sure this particular explanation holds up, because the drop in women in CS is mirrored by a drop in women in business computing, which by definition remained focused on applications.

      To throw out my own hypothesis, the PC revolution also caused a huge increase in the number of prospective majors in the field. Overwhelmed departments responded with "weed-out" classes and restrictive admissions policies; this may have had a disparate impact on women.

    2. Re:"Computing's Narrow Focus"? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      It's certainly true that my not-far-post-1984 CS degree was focused pretty much on computing itself; computer architecture, automata, algorithmic complexity, database internals. Not so much on applications; the article suggests that pre-1984 there was more focus on what you can do with computers.

      I must have missed something because when I look at Knuth and Dijkstra, they apparently expect you to already understand how to apply the stuff, and they did so in the 1970s. Was there actually any change in this respect, in the CS field proper?

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
  11. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc by russotto · · Score: 2

    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.

  12. Here's a thought, lets ask actual women by Shadow+of+Eternity · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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."
    1. Re:Here's a thought, lets ask actual women by strikethree · · Score: 2

      Hey, the focus is on where women are not excelling at. Stop pointing out that they are excelling overall.

      Please ignore my crossed eyes.

      --
      "Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
  13. Let me get this straight by poity · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
  14. Re:The problem, as always... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    I don't have self-confidence for two cents and I'm in CS. Any other theories?

  15. We need more women in STEM why? by Shadow99_1 · · Score: 2

    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....

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  16. We don't know by Livius · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  17. Re:mass hysteria? by Opportunist · · Score: 2

    Was a reference to mass hysteria.

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  18. Loud and clear by PopeRatzo · · Score: 2

    "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."

    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.
  19. You've got to be kidding me? by epyT-R · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:You've got to be kidding me? by epyT-R · · Score: 2

      Of course not. Those jobs aren't in the spotlight nor are they were the money is.

  20. Re:The problem, as always... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    It wouldn't be hard to solve, but given the current state of affairs: no dice.

  21. Re:The problem, as always... by Sperbels · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Same. My lack of self confidence is what caused me to spent all my time with my c-64 instead of people.

  22. PC is most important tool since the printing press by Glasswire · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ... how can you argue that at all, let alone suggest it has a gender bias?

  23. Re:The problem, as always... by knightghost · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As usual, the ACM totters between cluelessness and a corporate stooge.

    CS population is a social issue. To be blunt, the USA views STEM as low class. "nerd" and "geek" are 4 letter slurs coming from most people.

    Women are taught to be more in tune with social issues so shy away. Later on, 75% of STEM graduates leave the field.

    It's worse in Canada and some European countries. After working several years there, I'll never willingly go back. If you're in tech then you're an untouchable lower social rung.

  24. Re:The problem, as always... by jez9999 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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.

    What does this have to do with self-confidence? This is women approaching computers from a different perspective (on average).

    "Then girls think, Ãfmaybe I don't belong because I don't love them like the boys do.Ãf(TM)"

    And they'd be right. Why do they belong at a company passionate about technology if they aren't passionate about technology? They don't belong there any more than I belong in a doctor's surgery as anything but a patient - I'm not passionate about healthcare and didn't take exams to become a qualified doctor.

    --
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  25. Re:The problem, as always is ignorant commenters by Bite+The+Pillow · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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 :

    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

    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.

  26. Re:WTF by Stumbles · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Asshats indeed. They are equally offended because they don't have the wherewithal to enter a field unless they are given special consideration and handled with kit gloves.

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  27. Re:The problem, as always... by Lisias · · Score: 2

    We need to work on ways to improve our self confidence and the rest will follow.

    Why do you *NEED*?

    Why the statistical spread of man and womans *NEED* to be equal on the various fields of human knowledge and/or work?

    EVerybody must, or at least, should, be able to choose whatever he/she wants - if she/he is able to do so. What I don't get is the use of the verb "NEED".

    Why wornens *NEED* to work on I.T.?

    --
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  28. Re:The problem, as always... by BitZtream · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The 'CS population is a "women aren't fucking interested" issue' Stop trying to make it out to be more than it is. Stop trying to make it 'equal'.

    People are different.

    Genders are different, if you don't realize that, you need to take sex ed over again.

    Races are different, if you don't realize that, take a look at distribution of races in sports (All of them from chess to basketball).

    Certain groups of people have certain attributes in GENERAL that make them prefer, not prefer, or have some general level of skill above or below the 'average'.

    NOTHING YOU DO IS GOING TO CHANGE THAT SHORT OF GENETIC ENGINEERING.

    Stop trying to turn it into a fucking social issue, its a god damn evolution issue. WE ARE NOT ALL THE SAME.

    That doesn't mean any particular person of a race or gender CAN'T do something or MUST do something, it just means they are predisposed one way or the other and most people of that particular group will behave in a similar way.

    Most women don't want to spend all day dicking with computers. FULL STOP.

    To be blunt, the USA views STEM as low class.

    ... Really? Since when? What fucked up part of the world do you live in that believes such a silly statement? Who are the 'upper class' then? Blue collar workers perhaps?

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  29. SO WHAT? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:SO WHAT? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You can't be serious. Of course the answer here is to force them to do something they don't want to do. Because clearly if there's a deficiency in the supply of women in a given field it's clearly because there's something wrong with the men in the field. If we force women to get involved in the field we can put those men in their place.

      The fact that you'd now have men that are unhappy and being underpaid due to the increased competition and have women that are unhappy with a career that they didn't really want is completely beside the point.

    2. Re:SO WHAT? by buddyglass · · Score: 2

      In terms of forcing someone to learn something, at least at the high school level, the argument is that it's sometimes good for kids to learn some things even when they don't want to. I may not think that's true for the specific case of computer science, but that's the argument being made. It's the same reason everybody who attends secondary school in the U.S. is forced to take English, some science, some math, some history, etc., even if they're wholly uninterested in one of those subjects.

      With respect to why we might want to break down cultural taboos that keep women out of STEM fields, it might be because doing so could potentially both increase the quality of the U.S. STEM workforce and/or allow it to increase in size. If one half of your population opts out of a given profession then that shrinks the pool of potential talent.

  30. Having babies.... by DMJC · · Score: 2

    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.

  31. Re:The problem, as always... by Z80a · · Score: 2

    Zuckerberg is not a problem to your old money theory, as well, the rest of the "upper class" is probably just riding the money the other people "lucked into" in the past.

    Unless he fucks up somehow, his whole lineage will live off this same money, and well, it will became old money just like the rest.

  32. Re:The problem, as always... by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 3

    I agree with some, for example, why aren't more men in elementary education? In some cases there is true sexism at play: some people think men who teach little kids are either gay or perverts (and some think those are the same thing...). But for the most part I don't know many men who'd want to do these things.

    To be blunt, the USA views STEM as low class.

    ... Really? Since when? What fucked up part of the world do you live in that believes such a silly statement? Who are the 'upper class' then? Blue collar workers perhaps?

    I think he's right on this one. The US is entirely about idolizing business and management, in spite of how very bad most of our businesses are managed. If you're in STEM, you are always going to be on the bottom rung. You will be paid much less, you will work longer hours, you will not have nearly as much control or options. You're the one that gets axed when the boss makes a mistake, you're the one that has to stay in the office late when the customer wants a new feature, you're the one that has to take the fall when a very public mistake is caught that probably was the result of some bean counter elsewhere.

    Yes, the company comes to a grinding halt if we were to all band together and fight, but that's unlikely. Hell we can't even VOTE together to stop H1B nonsense, never mind do something that might draw attention personally to us.

  33. Re:The problem, as always... by buddyglass · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Stop trying to turn it into a fucking social issue, its a god damn evolution issue.

    Then we would expect to see very little variation from country to country in terms of male vs. female interest in STEM careers, right? Is that the case? It may be the case there there are physiological differences between men and women on an aggregate level that give rise to some of the gender disparity, but you're an idiot if you don't think social issues also play a part. For instance, if it's all physiological then why was women's participation in computer science higher in 1984 than it is today?

  34. Re:The problem, as always... by ameoba · · Score: 2

    Zuckerberg was already going to Harvard when he started Facebook. He was in the club from the beginning.

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  35. Re:The problem, as always... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    NOTHING YOU DO IS GOING TO CHANGE THAT SHORT OF GENETIC ENGINEERING.

    Stop trying to turn it into a fucking social issue, its a god damn evolution issue. WE ARE NOT ALL THE SAME.

    We are not all the same, but it is a fucking social issue. From my experience math is a pretty girly thing. That is until the parents step in or teachers. Mostly parents though. School teachers with this mentality are mostly retired by now (here). A friend of mine is still an outcast in her family, because she not only liked math, but she also studied computer sciences which was ok for her brother, but not for her. In the eyes of her family that screwed her chances for a good classical marriage. Or girls that get hoarded into the puppet house and Lego friends corner in the Lego store when they have Lego technics sets in their hand.

    You can really imprint a lot in the early years. Like math is hard. This is stuff for males and this is only for female. It might not end 50/50, but you sure can raise social barriers so that stuff wont be tried.

    Btw. most men don't want to spent all day dicking with computers either.

  36. lolwut by Spy+Handler · · Score: 2

    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.

  37. Re:The problem, as always... by buddyglass · · Score: 2

    In other words the change is explained by something other than biology. That makes my point. To your explanation, though, I'm not convinced that C.S. was relatively less discriminatory than other fields in 1984 that have since become less discriminatory and caused C.S. to lose its relative advantage. We'd need to look at which fields the women who would have been academically suited to study C.S. in 1984 are now entering at higher rates than they did in 1984.

  38. Re:The problem, as always... by LWATCDR · · Score: 2

    Is it a social issue or is it biology?
    Maybe fewer women want to go into CS because fewer women actually like that type of work? I mean I do not see anybody upset over fewer men going into cosmetology than women. BTW at the top of the field you can make good money.

    Maybe we should drop the idea that we need equal numbers to be equal. What we should care about is no one is restricted or prevented from doing into any field that interests them and they have a talent for. At my office we have lots of diversity in race and gender and I work at a tech company.

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