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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'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.
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?
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.
We can't even solve the problem of Unicode on /.
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
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)
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."
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.
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.
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.
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
It wouldn't be hard to solve, but given the current state of affairs: no dice.
Same. My lack of self confidence is what caused me to spent all my time with my c-64 instead of people.
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.
"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.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
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?