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Solving the Mystery of Declining Female CS Enrollment
theodp writes After an NPR podcast fingered the marketing of computers to boys as the culprit behind the declining percentages of women in undergraduate CS curricula since 1984 (a theory seconded by Smithsonian mag), some are concluding that NPR got the wrong guy. Calling 'When Women Stopped Coding' quite engaging, but long on Political Correctness and short on real evidence, UC Davis CS Prof Norm Matloff concedes a sexist element, but largely ascribes the gender lopsidedness to economics. "That women are more practical than men, and that the well-publicized drastic swings in the CS labor market are offputting to women more than men," writes Matloff, and "was confirmed by a 2008 survey in the Communications of the ACM" (related charts of U.S. unemployment rates and Federal R&D spending in the '80s). Looking at the raw numbers of female CS grads instead of percentages, suggests there wasn't a sudden and unexpected disappearance of a generation of women coders, but rather a dilution in their percentages as women's growth in undergrad CS ranks was far outpaced by men, including a boom around the time of the dot-com boom/bust.
... more about systems than people and women are more interested in people than systems.
kinda like, never was.
That's why you can't rely on means/medians/averages alone, they don't tell the whole story.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Men have to go out and code to support the family.
Are we gonna get one of these articles every week from now on?
The marketeers turned me into a newt.*
Really just how many times do you need to go around the block before it becomes impossible to see this as anything but what it is someone's attempt to push an agenda. Gee women coders are now the victim and have to be made right. I guarantee that if you look at any profession you can see groups that are under and over represented, this isn't a social problem it's statistics and thank god that everyone is not exactly the same.
*I got better which is why i can post this.
You must find putting everyone in your boxes pretty easy.
That sounds about right. Why would you bet your career on something that is increasingly being viewed as a blue-collar profession?
Perhaps women have realized that a career path where your job could be outsourced to India just might not be the best career path available to them.
If girls want to sign up for CS, then fine. If they don't, then fine. Stop it with the sexist nightmare shit.
They don't call 'em BROGRAMMERS for nothing.
There are two ways to get more women coders.
1) Pay them to go into CS programs. I guarantee it that a full-ride to CS programs will result in more women coders.
2) Men coders should stop being dicks. Seriously...Not a day goes by without a story talking about how much a bunch of dumbasses men software developers are. When was the last time you saw a bunch of civil engineers or mechanical engineers talking about how great it is that women get paid less, or offering to freeze their eggs so they can work more (how messed up is that?). Or stories of all-night coding sessions with shots taken for each bug discovered.
Either pay women ridiculous amounts of money to put up with the crap, or stop creating an environment that most women would avoid like the plague.
Mike
As a middle-aged white male that's been in I.T. my whole life, having dealt with the globalization of I.T. services, not to mention the wage-supression of our industry being settled within the court system, lately there's seems to be a new threat. People like me are actively discriminated against, in favor of women and minorities. I haven't knowingly experienced it first-hand, but it is impossible to tell. I read HR text all the time explaining how women and minorities are preferred candidates and are encouraged to apply, when I apply for a job.
When was the last time you heard of 'affirmative action', and was it on one of the news talk shows recently? Frankly, I advise youngsters I come across to steer clear of I.T. and to find a job in another industry. One that doesn't eat its own.
rerun article.
When was the last time you saw a bunch of civil engineers or mechanical engineers talking about how great it is that women get paid less, or offering to freeze their eggs so they can work more (how messed up is that?)
Never. But I also haven't seen coders doing that, either.
I'd like to hear what Bennett Haselton has to say on this matter. His take on matters is always insightful. And he's also a frequent contributor here at Slashdot.
They don't complain because there are even fewer female mechanical engineers. Let's review: more women=more bitching. Nursing actually is one of the most hostile workplaces for women due to the concentrated bitchcraft, but they deal with it since there are no men to blame and nag
Now we're not just sexist pigs, but we are also in an unstable industry and women will avoid us like the plague. Actually I don't find this stuff as insulting as the "anyone can code" meme. Maybe we should all wear suits so that people take us seriously, like lawyers. Actually, that might be the real reason women don't get involved. Their parents don't take the profession seriously, so they steer their smart daughters away from it.
Comparison of the demographics of undergrad CS majors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1984 and 2014.
Consider the possibility that women just aren't interested. Don't apply your feel-good agendas to it and expect it to be magically transformed.
How many times does this have to be proven? Women aren't in CS/IT/Software because they don't want to be. Who the fuck cares?
Has anyone, you know, *asked* women why they don't go into CS?
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
It really boggles my mind that the guys studying this stuff haven't come to the conclusion that the matter "missing from universe" that they are trying to associate with Dark Matter is more than likely brown dwarfs or dense material with just can't detect yet from super nova explosions. WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!
.
My #1 complaint about that BS article every time I see it pop up is this: there is a few false assumptions in it. Firstly, "Computer Science" isn't the ONLY school route to teach computer programming. It is also offered under the label of "Information Technology", or as elective classes under other fields such as "Network Administration" or "Database Administration" - And the other assumption is that SCHOOLING is the only way to learn things. Pretty sure just about everyone here on Slashdot can easily agree that they've learned a hell of a lot more tech either on the job or on their own than they could have ever imagined learning in a classroom environment.
2) Men coders should stop being dicks. Seriously...Not a day goes by without a story talking about how much a bunch of dumbasses men software developers are. When was the last time you saw a bunch of civil engineers or mechanical engineers talking about how great it is that women get paid less, or offering to freeze their eggs so they can work more (how messed up is that?).
About the same time I last heard coders saying that (coder != CEO). Never. The reason engineers don't get attacked on the news all the time is there isn't a campaign to demonize them yet.
Either pay women ridiculous amounts of money to put up with the crap
The whole point of this campaign is to get more people into IT so they can pay people less. Paying anyone more would be counter-productive.
stop creating an environment that most women would avoid like the plague.
They avoid it because nerds aren't really cool, suits are. Pay coders better and you will see more women there. Don't and they will flock where the well-dressed guys with fat wallets are.
Mike
Fuck you very much, Mike. Why don't you SJW idiots complain how gravediggers are worse than Hitler instead? There are few women gravediggers, so clearly it must all be their fault and this imbalance must be corrected no matter the cost.
That said, I like your idea of paying women more. This would help drive salaries up for men as well, so I'm all for it.
Woman are more rational than men, and don't want to go into CS because it might be a bad job market. So fields like psychology and art history, which have more than enough women, must have amazing job prospects, right? Anyone who thinks about it for two seconds can see that the problem is not that simple.
"When was the last time you saw a bunch of civil engineers or mechanical engineers talking about how great it is that women get paid less,”
When was the last time you saw CS people doing this? As someone who went into CS after a previous career, I have observed that CS men are the weakest, most browbeaten pansies I have ever met. Almost every one of them is scared of their own shadow, especially when women are a topic of conversation. Quit acting like the “brogrammer” is the norm; it isn’t, and even the brogrammers I know are really quite milktoast.
...they are all in the kitchen making my damn sammich.
...why the sudden change started around 1984-85. Did the labor market for CS grads suddenly start its "drastic swings" around that time frame? Or, since we're looking at % of graduates, about four years prior (e.g. 1980-1981)? If not, then I'm not sure how women's (alleged) aversion to "drastic swings" explains the sudden change.
"Oh noes, women are under-represented in science/engineering/politics/business leadership!" "Typical oppressive old boys' club glass ceiling keeping women down!"
Has anyone ever seen a feminist petition for more women to do construction jobs, cleaning jobs, heavy industrial trades etc? ... ... ...
Yeah, that's what I thought. Cherry picking 'gender equality' when it suits them.
P.S: Has Slashdot degenerated into a cesspool of women's rights activists? This is a tech blog/forum, so behave like a proper one.
No mystery - suddenly there was money in it and the women were squeezed out of the profession. Even as a male I got to notice the depressing bit in the late 1980s where there were still a lot of women training in CS/IT but hardly anyone was employing them. As I've written here many times, I've seen more women even in heavy engineering, mining etc roles than in IT.
However it is rather amusing to see some here trying to justify how women are not suited for what was historically considered "women's work" - we're sitting inside at keyboards FFS and would be considered sissies by someone defrosted from 1970.
Comp Sci guys have the WORST Parties ever...
The change isn't just sex, it's race: all the new CS undergrads are Asian males according to those stats.
Where is the pissing and moaning about the over-representation of women in nursing?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
History has always judged past civilizations by how well they treated their women. How will history judge us?
If you were trying to discourage girls from trying to program computers, you'd be hard-pressed to top Apple's famous Ellen Feis 'Switch' ad (2002 Slashdot discussion). Btw, by introducing 'The Computer for The Rest of Us' in 1984 without a viable hobbyist programming language, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates no doubt helped discourage both girls and boys from studying CS, even if BillG is trying to make amends now.
I would bet the stats for nursing programs are similar in the the opposite direction.
That is all this study confirms. Because men are willing to get into things that might not be the best financial move. If women only go into it if there is a lot of money then they're showing up for the money... not the coding.
This confirms what has been established many times already. Men and women get job satisfaction out of different things.
There are jobs women will go into that don't pay as well as other options because they find them personally rewarding.
Men are the same way. But they find different things rewarding.
Shocker... humans are sexually dimorphic. Any biologist or anthropologist or medical professional could tell you this in a heartbeat.
The gender studies academics have their heads so far up their own asses on so many issues. We're sexually dimorphic. Get over it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Did the debut of the AP CS exam in 1984 and its choice of languages - Pascal, C++, Java - make some kids hate computer science and programming?
lolwut? The only schools I have ever heard of offering a "Network Administration" degree are for-profit mills like Devry and ITT. If you're looking at American schools producing standard-quality engineers (like a large state university), the computer programmers come out of computer science programs and to a lesser extent computer engineering and electrical engineering. EE programs are generally harder and EE jobs generally pay more so you don't see a lot of EEs doing software programming but they are out there. You'll also get programmers who majored in other fields like physics but obviously they don't take as many advanced classes in CS as the more relevant majors.
If you were trying to discourage girls from trying to program computers, you'd be hard-pressed to top Apple's famous Ellen Feis 'Switch' ad (2002 Slashdot discussion).
I'm not sure I understand how you are concluding that Apple's Ellen Feis 'Switch' ad was discouraging women from going into CS as a profession. The ad was Ellen discussing her woes of having her computer suddenly just "eat" half of the paper she was writing for a class assignment. Seriously, who here has not had this happen to them at least once? Considering how this experience is almost universal, I can't see how this is somehow steering women away from CS as a profession.
from HN:
scoofy 3 days ago | link
Here the articles points to childhood experiences with hardware, commodore 64s, etc. However, i think this is absolutely nonsense. Now, many people go into college with little idea of what they want to do. Perhaps this is a result of the expansion of college from building a unique skilled career path, to simply being expected.
When talking about demographics and college degrees, i think popular culture is certainly relevant. We are talking about high school and college freshmen discovering themselves. Thus, i'd like to point out that 1984 is the same year the film Revenge of the Nerds came out.
Thus, i'll throw out the hypothesis that, since 80's popular culture was a very regressive era in terms of anti-intellectualism, desire to enter STEM probably took a serious hit at the time in general, much more so with women. That is not to say that previous generations were much better, but gone were the days where the space race inspired tons of kids to pursue STEM education regardless of gender.
...was that absolutely CS is like many professions a labor of love, you follow what interests you.
And 100% of the girls in high school - even the ones that were brilliant in science and math - had far, far better things to do with their spare time than to fuck around with a computer in mom's basement or dad's attic.
-Styopa
This is about the 50th article on this same BS topic; trying to solve a problem that isn't even a problem. Everyone has different aspirations in life, let them do what they want.
At its release, the Mac was "designed as an information appliance" for which a hobbyist programming language was deemed unnecessary. To me, this ad - targeting teen girls - is consistent with that leave-the-programming-to-others philosophy. Your mileage may vary. :-)
but ageist, definitely.
Everyone time I see an article like this I have to wonder why I'm not seeing a similar effort to get men into teaching positions. Do we not want positive male role models for our children?
Why are we not seeing a push for more male nurses? Why not a push for more male hairdressers?
Is the assumption just that men have nothing to offer these fields? Why are we not deconstructing these situations to find out what sort of systemic sexism (given that seems to the default assumed cause for situations like this) is causing these disparities?
The summary attributes the low CS enrollment to women being more practical than men. If that's the case then why do we also see a much lower portion of females in engineering fields? Isn't engineering considered to be one of the most practical course of studies available? In my experience women are in fact more prevalent in "non-practical" fields such as health, humanities, and fitness.
There's more than just one or two things going on here, and most of it is perception based. And it's not "Geek" culture that is screwed up.
- 1. "Parental Consent" - Most people really believe in the "computer geeks are uncultured slobs, with poor social skills and bad personal hygiene" meme created by Hollywood. Yes, there are a few coders who fit this description.
-2. "Geek is not Mother" - In the media, very few women in tech are mentioned by name without the "Oh, look at what this woman is doing, working like crazy and not being a stay at home mother" BS being mentioned somewhere in the article.
-3. "Educated Woman" - In academia, you've got the whole "Here for her MRS degree" meme, which is fortunately slowly dying out. But not fast enough. Girls are 'encouraged' into particular classes throughout their public education experience. How many boys were in your Home Economics class? First Aid? Wood Shop? Art? Drafting? Typing?
-4. "Uneducated Woman" - Name a mainstream film from the 1970s to 2010 where any single leading female character was 'intelligent' and more focused on her education/skills than she was on 'fitting in' or being 'popular' or intent on getting romantically involved with the leading man. "Real Genius" does not count, as those female characters were not "leading." Apply the Bechdel Test to the recent movies.
-5. "Mommy Track" - From just about day one, girls are traditionally not encouraged to "take things apart, put things together, find out how they work, make them better." This is the core of STEM. Look at the toys. As dumb as that my previous statement, when was the last time you saw a toy advert or movie where a girl wasn't playing with a "pink aisle" toy?
-6. "Reverse Discrimination" - I've dealt with female geeks who are normal people. I've dealt with female geeks who have the "I am woman, I am special." I've dealt with female geeks who have the "I am womyn. Hear me whine" problem. Guess which ones I prefer working with? And guess which ones actually get their jobs done? You're right. The ones who are "normal" as well as the "I am woman, I am special" ones. Most of the "womyn" are the ones who can't analyze, who can't break a problem down into component pieces, who can't think logically. Why? Because they're so busy forcing their world view on others they can't focus. I have worked with ONE "womyn" who didn't do that. That was actually a refreshing look at humanity.
-7. "Comfort Zone" - One of the creepiest things I have ever experienced was watching a female geek coworker flirting with a male geek coworker at a bar. Talk about multiple layers of clueless! I couldn't even yell "get a room!" at them, because neither of them would have understood.
-8. "Woman is weak." - Excuse me? Bowling ball through a straw? Higher average pain threshold. Better average cardiovascular stats. Quicker reflexes. Denser muscles (not bigger, denser). In general, healthier.
In short, we will see more women in STEM related careers when the powers-that-be of Hollywood, Media, Marketing, and Parents stop pushing them to be "pretty, pathetic, pink, and pampering."
Put down the cell phone. Turn of the video game. Talk. Teach. Educate. Involve. Encourage questions and curiosity. Read. Experiment. Break. Build. But above all, get a life!
Obviously women are hesitant to join fields with lowercase letters.
We need to increase demand for COBOL and FORTRAN graduates, this will increase the percentage of women in CS.
If by "people from other races" you mean "international students".
It is not that boys are more curious than girls --- in terms of curiosity both gender are roughly equal
But there are difference tho
The female kind are more caring, which carries more emotional weight - or another word, the female kind prefers to use their "heart" more than their "brain".
Therefore, the female are better when detail analysis are required
Now, looking at computer science / coding --- yes, details, down to a difference of a period (.) or a comma (,) makes all the differences, especially during the debugging process
However, as those of us code monkeys who are into debugging already know "debugging" and "heart" are mutually exclusive, unless you are looking for a heart attack
We, the boys, we are not into the details, - that is why we fucked up our codes so often - but when we do debugging, we do not put our soul, our heart, our everything into it --- we just do the fucking debug, and if it doesn't go well, we smash up the screens, kick the doors, punch the walls, curse up and down and sideway, and somehow, automagically, we (almost always) find a way out
That is why boys are more into this computer science while girls are more into medical science
It has nothing to do with "social" thing nor "peer pressure" nor whatever fuck that they gonna trot out --- it's our nature that predestined us to do whatever we do
Women can pull $80G in a good waitress job; men can't. Nuf said....move on.
Which is what this boils down to.
There aren't any mysteries here at all.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
affirmative action is a requirement for federal government contractors. outside of the government and federal contractors, nobody likes affirmative action because it is a colossal headache to document and track and it interferes with hiring and promotion decisions. if you don't like affirmative action, go to work at one of the thousands of companies in Silicon Valley that don't have it.
Because suddenly there was money in it, and as a consequence it squeezed the women out of the profession. I even put it in bold. Do I need a BLINK tag?
The majority of Women want 9-to-5 jobs so they can spend time at home. Unfortunately Programming or CS is the exact opposite since hours can be anything but 9-to-5. I rarely do see women at the office later than 6 PM. where as at least a 1/3 of the men are working past 6 PM on a daily basis.
In the 1980s many people may have thought programming was a 9-5 job. In the 1981 movie Outland, Sean Connery is playing a cop and at one point his ex-wife explains that she left him for a computer programmer because she wanted someone who would be home for dinner at 6:00 every night. Such a misconception about the nature of programming may have been common in those days.
We're talking about the 1980s. Sexism, racism, nepotism and a lot besides was pretty blatant. Employers were happy to take workers that wouldn't get pregnant and didn't want to finish early to pick the kids up from school. They also wanted people just like them so not just a boys club but boys that resembled the founders - making it a bit tough for serious grown men coming in from other industries as well.
As for your second bit, WTF did that baggage come from?
Percentages of women in CS and engineering is much higher in developing countries like India, China and many countries around Africa. I can assure you the reason is not less sexism. It's because women are less free to chose anything else. It's a proven fact that women who are more free to choose, choose the opposite. If this is not the strongest indicator of innate differences, I don't know what is...
I believe women on average has an increased tendency to be social, risk-averse, caring, and seeking stability.
> P.S: Has Slashdot degenerated into a cesspool of women's rights activists? This is a tech blog/forum, so behave like a proper one.
Women's rights are a good thing. It's the androphobic nonsense where men get blamed collectively for everything that's ridiculous.
From the blurb here, the conclusion that Matloff makes is just a restatement of the question and contradicts his assertion that women are more practical unless he also has evidence that computers science related jobs are largely less lucrative (pick your utility function) than the other available options *and* men opted out of those more lucrative jobs. The evidence of such an event should be obvious -- we would be asking why is the percentage of men so low in industry X that is far more lucrative than computer science related jobs.
Girls notice the paste eaters in kindergarten turn into the middle school dweebs who in high school who then become the full hardcore computer nerds with no social skills, few friends, zero social status and complete inability to interact with the opposite sex. After graduating from high school these nerds go to college to achieve full neckbeard status.
Women know to avoid losers. Why would they pursue a field of study that would lock them in room full of socially inept losers for most of their waking hours? They know better than that and will pursue careers that contain the social winners, like the business administration or medical field, not social losers as one would find with CS.
I can't get my sister who has 2 girls to consider teacher her kids programming. She does not see it as a priority. I have 2 boys and I know that programming is critical to almost all jobs in the future.
The lack of MacBasic is hardly evidence that programming was made inaccessible on the Mac. HyperCard and later AppleScript were excellent ways to get started programming that did require a lifetime coding experience. The AppleII already had various Pascal implementations and BASIC and was still a relevant computer in schools and homes at this time so picking out a lack of one company's implementation of a single language is hardly evidence that it discouraged anyone from programming. The existence of a large number of programmers who started in during this time learning Pascal, assembly, and BASIC might refute your argument.
I put the "problem" in quotes because I personally I do not consider this to be a problem at all.
But let me shortly put on the things a bit different perspective.
For starters, why the basic assumption is that the enrollment of the men is the baseline number and therefore there is not enough women enrollments?
Why no one tries to phrase the question in reverse, why there is so much more men enrolling for CS than women?
Where comes the assumption that lower women number is something wrong that needs to be corrected? Why it is a seen as a loss that a woman chooses different path of career?
Hardly anyone ask here question why majority of teachers are women? Somehow it is never a problem, but guess what, maybe it is directly connected with the question why there is less women in CS?
The discussion around the "problem" has hardly anything with solving the "mystery" in scientific way. It is pure goal-seeking based on set of preconception on that higher women enrollment would be "better". It happens with no proof that it actually would change things for better and no concern for repercussions for the fields of industry from where women would divert to enroll in CS.
Boys and Girls are different.
Boys are interested in different stuff than Girls.
Perhaps that could explain this? Or do biotruths go against the grain of modern truth?
1984: Women: 153
2014: Women: 179
That's actually an increase.
Where is the big drop that everybody is arguing about the cause of?
For shit's sake, can we stop with the PC bullshit and finally acknowledge that women and men are different?
Women in general have evolved over thousands of years to have lower tolerance for risk, and the CS labor market is a risky place. That is ALL there is to it.
Being middle-aged means that any time soon they will kick out the old and bring in the new because somehow everybody seems to know, old IT workers are somehow completely useless and just cost money...
Oh and there is never enough of them so please let in more cheap labor from abroad!
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
While differences between men and women might play a part in this they can't wholly explain it. In Germany the percentage of female CS students has been rising for years.. Still only at about quarter but higher than in the US, so culture does seem to play a part.
Looks at decorative towels and wash clothes in bathroom we're not allowed to use taking up prime realestate that would be great for useful things.
Looks at fake flowers sitting on top of storage furniture I access frequently that must be moved before accessing said stored objects and returned.
Looks at useless decorative items that must remain on kitchen counter despite being useless, in the way, and knocked around regularly.
Thinks of how many times I've been asked to hold a purse because it's impractical for the owner to do things, or carry something in my pockets because the objects owner didn't bring their own pockets.
Thinks of how the toilet paper is stored in the closet at the entry of the dwelling because the storage areas in the bathroom are taken care of rarely used beauty products and appliances.
My head is shaved - literally a bar of soap, a stick of deodorant, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a razor and some shaving gel is all I have for bathroom use in comparison.
I call this quote for the summary into question
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
After an NPR podcast fingered the marketing of tampons to girls as the culprit behind the declining percentages of male tampon users.
After an NPR podcast fingered the marketing of lipstick to girls as the culprit behind the declining percentages of male lipstick wearers.
Yawn.... Yet another "Blame the other sex, instead of me" Story.
I have seen quite a few hand-wringing and postulative articles about why there are not more women in programming or general IT disciplines, and why the ratios of men to women in CS courses widen so much as they progress.
One thing I have not seen in any of those articles is a report on any attempts to reach out to those girls/women and the boys/men who dropped out of CS courses to switch to other options, about why they chose to switch. It seems such an obvious choice that I am sure it must have been done at some point, except that nobody seems to want to mention the results.
Everyone is entitled to equal opportunity, but absolutely no one is guaranteed equality in outcome.
So long as the CS field is accessible to everyone - that's all that matters. If a group of people decide that CS work is not for them - that's OK. That is how markets work.
We should stop wringing our hands about things we cannot control and start focusing our efforts on real problems.
I go out and talk to kids of various ages, sometimes, and I do a lot of mentoring. I've talked to girls who want to program, and I've talked to other girls who don't. When I poll the ones who don't want to go into it, the girls at elementary-school age tell me:
"I can't do that, because I'm no good at math."
This just kills me. There is NO math these kids are doing in elementary school that is any indication of programming ability, whatsoever. I've been programming professionally for almost 20 years, and I'm terrible at elementary-school level arithmetic.
When I actually engage these same kids in a programming exercise, they light right up. They get right into it. Who is telling these girls they can't do this? It breaks my heart.
*tin foil hat*
Hmm...
Conclusion: If you can't get the H1B visa legislation passed, why not push for people who already accept lower wages to take on programming jobs?
And put all the men in concentration camps.
That if overall enrollments are falling that the # of females enrolled would also decline.
How many work visas are fem?
I have worked with a (notable) number of Russian (Slavic) gals as well. (dont know where they were schooled though)
Rick B.
If it is true, is the over- riding reason that gender imbalance is due to men doing things that discourage women from entering those professions?
The "reasons" we hear, that we stopped advertising to women, therefore discouraging them, must mean that we got what we wanted in computer programming, shy and socially awkward males.
If the "reasons" are that these males are sexist pigs and they harass women, of which the "dongle" incident is the biggest example, how do we reconcile the two?
Even if we don't reconcile it, the reasons start to sound more like excuses than verifiable actual causes.
Moreover, why is it possible to discourage women so easily? I can only say as a sample of one, that I have worked around some disagreeable women, yet they have no more influenced my career choice than the wonderful women I have worked with. I just accept it as different people being different, and no mean person is responsible for my career choices, only me.
The most discouraging aspect of this entire discussion is that once you buy into the premise that women are discouraged by advertising, or by guys making "dongle jokes", you are saying women are inherently weaker than men, because they give up easily, and are influenced away from science and tech careers by advertising. I've heard women in the workplace make many off color jokes, and just figured it's what people do at times. It's just people
Do we really want to say that women don't have the ability to stick to what they want to do, and are turned away by what are actually trivial things?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
While I don't disagree that more needs to be done to close up the gender gap in some areas of technology, I don't think "CS Student Enrollment" is a good proxy for "Coders".
There are a whole lot of people with vested interests in the idea that the two are correlated and who cannot face the non-correlation rationally, including exactly the kinds of people running these studies. The plain facts of the matter are that (a) good coders arise without CS degrees quite normally, and (b) most undergraduate degrees in *anything*, whether it's CS or any of the other 100 little titles you can earn, are far less about skill and far more about earning a little piece of paper that says "Yes, I can be sufficiently conformist to keep my head down and work as a cubicle wage slave, please hand me a white-collar salary in return for my soul." Aside from that aspect of the degree process, the real skills you learn could easily be learned by any motivated, determined, intelligent individual on their own in 1/10th the time.
A big part of the problem in all related news articles and studies is we don't have good language for differentiating those with real skill and the masses. Most of what are often labeled "Coders" in this field (or "Professional Somethings" in every other field) are so mundane at the task that they could just as easily be insurance agents, documentation editors, factory floor workers, etc. They're completely replaceable, commodity entities. Nobody aspires to be that. Those who deserve the label of being real Programmers or Coders are not like this. People who do interesting things that others admire don't do them through or via the education system; they do them in *spite* of the education system.
Given these things, it's not at all shocking that there's about zero correlation in the real world between productive, highly-skilled Coders/Programmers and CS degree holders. Given that lack of correlation, looking for gender-specific effects here is pointless. A possible rational explanation for the data: Good women coders skip college just like good men coders do, and out of the rest of the population, women are less stupid than men, and therefore fall for the wage-slavery scam less often. Or if they're not going to be deeply-skilled techies, they go into management and run the cube farm instead of dwell in it, and thus the expected CS degree proportion is over in the MBA department (we could go into disparaging that as well, but that's a whole other rant).
This is interesting, because it indicates that sexism might be a result of an environment being overwhelmingly male-dominated and not the cause thereof.
I've never been a fan of the idea that diversity for the sake of diversity is important. Equal opportunity is, but trying to entice people who may have other reasons not want to enter a particular profession doesn't seem like it's inherently a good idea. I'm all for women becoming involved in computers. I was building a computer a few weeks ago and I went to Micro Center and there was a woman there who was also buying components to build her own computer. I was impressed by her knowledge, because it's uncommon. But I think people should be empowered to accomplish what they want to accomplish instead of pushing them into fields just because there aren't many people like them in said fields.
Having been in IT since the 1970s I believe the decline in female participation started when employers began requiring bachelors degree for new IT hires.
The IT courses would be taught in engineering and mathematics departments, areas that attracted mostly males.
Prior to this companies would train employees from engineering, payroll, accounting, HR etc.
Posting as AC for good reasons:
Okay, so we have different ratios of men and women in computer science than the general population. Why exactly is this a problem again? How will equalizing it result in better code?
In the old days CS was associated with Math and Physics which still have high (relatively) female enrollments, now it is associated with Engineering which I believe never had enrollment of females. I believe that this is the major reason for the declining.
disclaimer: I have no evidences whatsoever about what I am claiming.
So someone felt threatened enough by the above post to mark it flamebait? That very strongly reinforces my suggestion that it wouldn't be considered a job for "real men" by someone defrosted from 1970. What kind of weakling would think the opinion above is coming on too strong?
Face it kids (ie. too young to remember when there were many women in CS/IT), it's soft indoor work with a bit of thinking so saying it's something better suited for big strong men is ridiculous. If it's the thinking bit that is supposed to be the big deal that's even more ridiculous - not much of IT is at the physics doctoral thesis level and women can do that stuff, let alone the lesser tasks that most of the people reading this site do.
Me.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I am 26.
I taught myself how to program because I liked video games and wanted to make my own.
That led to a career in software development.
Before I started playing video games and learning to program, I wanted to be a dentist.
For the last 20? 30? years, women, generally, did not play video games.
That is changing now, due to mobile gaming, but computer and console gaming has not been appealing to women.
So, I am not saying that everyone my age (and in the last few generations) only learned to program because they liked video games, but asking around, I get the feeling that a LOT of them did.
So, does a teenage interest in video games correlate with CS graduates 10 years later?
Will we see more women CS graduates in 10 years because of Candy Crush and Angry Birds?
I have a 6 year old daughter. She knows she is a girl. She knows things she can do. She also knows some things she can't do.
If she told me "Girls can't fly" I would not disagree. Though neither can boys.
If she heard the term physics, she may come to the conclusion she does not know what that it. She could say "I can't do physics" or just as likely say "Girls can't do physics"
It may be more correct for her to say "I can't currently do physics" but that may be a bit much for a child of 4 or even 6.
who cares. If they want to do the job they will male or female - if they cant they will cry and quit as usual.
I have a great many thoughts on this topic as I have a 10 year old daughter who I am trying to rear with a love a learning and desire to get into the STEM fields academically. She has great math skills and won this year’s round of math-Olympics at her school. That said, she probably wouldn’t excel at math if her mom and I didn’t push and insist at doing well in math. She hated dad trying to introduce her to programming and HTML, but when she was exposed to a summer camp of HTML (semi against her will) and discovered she could use it to create her own webpages and blogs she suddenly became quite enthusiastic about using at home. Similarly I suggested she might like Minecraft as it was a creative form of game playing and she demurred, citing specific geeky boys that were into Minecraft. About a month later a teacher she likes suggested she was so smart and curious she should try Minecraft. Nothing would do but I download Minecraft that evening and now she plays Minecraft.
Now comes my Ah-ha moment, the reason women are not in our field is not about them, but about us. Not in the typical harassment fashion which one hears about anecdotally, and which is I believe is overstated at best – but because we geeky guys are not perceived as attractive socially. Rightly or wrongly we are not perceived of has having brawn or power.
Women flock to lots of careers that have tons more harassment than the typical IT house will have. Lets face it, other than a few awkwardly made, bad taste jokes, our ranks can be quite milquetoast. I for one cannot conceive of myself or any of my coworkers pulling a female coworker into a side-office to grope her, and yet in many institutes of politics and money this seems to come to light quite often.
I’m not saying women want to be harassed, far from it, but they are attracted to Alpha male types and the careers they have. We my comrades (the male programmers out there) are the Betas, and women know the power flows not from us. That said, many a considerate, intelligent, and even attractive women can be found that knows we are the best bet for building a family and future, even if they are not programmers like ourselves.
Letter To Iran
big-ot: "a person who is intolerant toward those holding different opinions."
Historically, we now also apply it to those we feel have an unfair strong dislike towards those who are different from them, whether via race or class or religion.
Oligonicella, you are calling the person a bigot for believing that girls at a young age could be persuaded via social norms/marketing that certain things "are for boys" and hence girls are stupid and gullible. For them to be a bigot, you have to assume they don't believe boys are susceptible to the exact same social norms or marketing (rarely do you see barbie playhouses marketed to young boys). You simply do not like his argument and are intolerant of the implication that choice could be involved, even if it is a manipulated choice.
Basically, you have presented a delicious example of someone calling someone a bigot as a tactic exposes their own hard bigotry.
Nah. Lots of dudes like to cook as well. And most of the professional chefs are male. Traditional gender roles are fucked anyways.
Your observations are accurate, but your conclusion is completely wrong. All the elements you called out are things that would keep women from staying in a CS position for a long duration. Very little of what you listed would be something that a freshman entering CS would be exposed to or have any knowledge of. If your conclusion is correct, we should see a lot more of female CS grads that drop out of the talent pool in the first five years, and what we are actually seeing is they aren't even entering CS programs.
The problem starts much earlier. Girls start losing interest in STEM topics at a much younger age. There are no positive female role models to show young girls that they can excel at programming and there are plenty of females presented in the media as being interested in 'girl' stuff. Children are highly impressionable, and if they don't see an archetype they probably aren't going to gravitate towards it.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Boys willing to work long hours for pizza. Girls not so much
I've seen many articles talking about reasons why there are so few women in CS and about ideas how to overcome this problem. However, I fail to see why this is a problem to begin with. If women are not interested in this profession, why would we want to change that?
These daily gender bender articles on a technical site will be the final nail in /.'s coffin. Good riddance and congratulations, you've ruined a legacy.
Listen to ur inner woman as I do. The macho side thinks its great for being able to solve problems that shouldnt exist ) debugging gradle on top of maven on top of and buried in eclipse and most amongst a sea of other dependencies and apis.. Part of me makes me think its completely retarded and pointless. I think its the female part.
to mistake a female dominated field for CS and the problem disappears.
Another big demographic change in CS students started in the 80's, the percentage of foreign students versus U.S citizens. In my experience in college, the foreign CS student population was "more male" than the U.S. CS student population.
Not sure if anyone has stats on the gender makeup of foreign CS majors. But unless the PBS stats controlled to insure that only U.S. citizens were considered, their conclusions and their criticisms of american culture (and males in general) is suspect..
Comparison of the demographics of undergrad CS majors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1984 and 2014.
Did anyone notice the large change in Caucasion students? from 88.5 -> 34.6 (53.9% decrease). The largest catagory increase was 'International' (28.1% increase). I have not idea what that means, in the ethnicity category. The second largest was Asian, at (25.4% increase). One might guess this is realated to the change?
That's the most sensible thing I've ever heard.
Candle burns its brightest in the dark
Most nerds are repellent. Small-minded, solipsistic, and semi-consciously libertarian. The most despicable of which get promoted into management. Any wonder why anyone with any sense would would avoid this work like the plague?
IT is a boys club, computer science especially, my wife has a degree in computer science, and it took her 10 years and changing jobs multiple times to finally land a role in a company where she is taken seriously by men, or at least a company culture that requires they do.
It's not secret why woman want nothing to do with IT, the men in IT are the problem
is this another political war on woman foolishness?
when will people be worried about males in biology fields?
So many people have been whining and crying about the relative lack of women programmers.
No one is defining why that is a problem.
Women make up for over 50% of the US college student population and are choosing not to go into Engineering and CS programs. They are however, going into chemistry and mathematics in droves. The number of women mathematicians is roughly 50%.
There is nothing unique to a woman that would bring a useful and different prospective to programming.
So why does it matter if women want to go into CS/IT programs?