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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.
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.
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.
I work in an environment where most of IT is outsourced to India-based corporation. My casual observation is that there are many more young females from India in our IT group than Anglo-Americans. I've also noted the same with computer courses - that there are many more Asian women (South Asian and East Asian) relative to their male counterparts than there are Anglo Americans.
I suspect that Asian societies do not view computer work as primarily male-oriented work, and that talented women are encouraged to work in the field.
Among the Anglo-Americans, many of the IT focused women are in their 50's and 60's, having entered the field when mainframes were predominant and hence when computing was viewed as less of a male domain.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Consider the possibility that women just aren't interested.
Yes, but why? It might lead to some insights about ourselves and the field itself.
Could it be something biological, as politically incorrect as that might be? Autism for example, is much more prevalent in males than females: "ASD is almost 5 times more common among boys (1 in 42) than among girls (1 in 189)." [3rd bullet point from top]
So it seems like there are brain differences between males and females, when viewed as a group. And the brain creates personality.
If the reason is purely sociological, we can fix that and open the field to women. If the reason is in fact biological, we can stop trying to hammer square pegs into round holes.
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.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. There were a few problems I had with the video.
It did make the guys who professed that biology had nothing to do with it look a bit like closed minded idiots, but that was mostly their own fault. With the two that were shown the studies contrasting their views starting to call the studies weak, and almost name calling.
The video alluded to many studies that proved that biology had something to do with it, but only really went into details with two of them, and those looked to be one off studies. If they had been repeated by other scientists then I would give them more weight.
The video was a bit bias in its selection on who to present. The 'biology has nothing to do with it' looked to be young and barely out of post grad and wanting to make a name for themselves. They also seemed defensive and emotionally invested in their views. The ones on the other side of the debate were older, and looking to be more established. This gave the 'there's a biological link' a more credible appearance.
Personally I'm with the guy who said that you can't ignore biology and you can't ignore culture. That's also known as the grey fallacy, but when you're trying to find the root cause of something like this you can't cut out one side of the argument, even if its bee proven wrong. You have to continue to prove it wrong with hard facts and understanding, and each time you do you promote more understanding of what the issue is.
The video was also nice in that it pointed out, it was only the scientists form the culture is everything camp that discounted the biological portion of it. The scientists from the biology is important camp didn't say that culture wasn't important.
Software Engineer & Writer of Military Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog: petermwright.com Twitter: WrightPeterM
The trend is for people like you to shit on the lives of women by teaching them that they aren't allowed to be curious, and punishing them when they are. If you weren't a misogynist pig, then maybe women would be more curious. Nah, nobody knows or cares what you think, but enough other people beat wrong "innate" characteristics into others that it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
Learn to love Alaska
You mean feminist peer reviewed data gotten from skewered studies? The only institutions involved here are already heavily influenced by feminists. I hardly call that science. Would you buy anything taken from a book called "The Faith and Science Reader"? Probably not. There actually is a book called "The Gender and Science Reader" which provides a "comprehensive feminist analysis of the nature and practice of science." They cherry pick facts that fit their ideological precepts and then mix it in with their bullshit. There's a phrase for this: science fiction.
None of the "victims" in gamergate were techies,
Isn't Zoe Quinn a programmer of some sort?
Nope, depression quest was developed using "an open source tool for telling interactive fiction stories" (their own description). For the record, this is something my (almost) eight year old son has done numerous times. Doesn't make him a techie. Makes him a story-teller.
Using a word processor to write an eBook doesn't make you a kindle-programmer, it makes you an author.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
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.
We've been asking this question for decades. We have some ideas and some answers, but aren't satisfied. Political Correctness makes it harder to check some ideas out. It's also just a plain hard question.
Yes, there are gender expectations that work against women going into engineering. But there could also be innate differences in our brains which bear some responsibility for the gender gap. It's not PC to suggest that, but not being PC doesn't make the idea untrue. And that's where we run into a lot of trouble. Testing hypotheses about high level thinking is very difficult. We have good progress on understanding small, more deterministic parts of our brains, like our vision system, but it is very hard to answer why people choose or reject an option that has no obvious advantage or disadvantage, an option that isn't clear cut, that isn't a choice between two chess moves, one of which immediately loses the game.
The article suggests that women are put off of CS by the boom and bust nature of employment in the field. There are a lot of parts to that notion. Are women more risk adverse than men on employment prospects? Is software engineering such an uncertain career path? When choosing a subject to study, do people think first and foremost of where the most and "best" jobs are, or do they try to discover what subjects they like on the idea that having passion for a subject makes one better at it, and therefore more employable? Or, employment opportunities being as arbitrary as they are, do people say the heck with trying to figure that out and merely try to find something they love and do that? In any case, often what matters is having a college degree. If it's not in a field that's in high demand, like STEM is supposed to be if the screams from employers are to be believed (take cries for more STEM workers and H1B visas and all with large grains of salt), then the particular field may not much matter. Lot of people end up working in fields that have nothing to do with their degrees.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
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.
Even worse you can see the gender difference in monkeys. Put more clearly monkeys who have *NEVER* seen a toy in their life will exhibit classical gender differences when presented with a mix of wheeled toys and dolls.
That should put paid to any notions that it is down to cultural barriers.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie...
Nope. It's all the mothers with the Disney princess nonsense and the cheerleading (instead of sports). Then you graduate to teen magazines and then after that Cosmo.
Even the "Damsel in Destress" nonsense from the SJW bloggers contributes to the problem.
Never mind the parents and Madison avenue and Hollywood. It's all the evil computer geeks fault.
Nerds just make an easy target for people that always valued socializing more than academic or career preparation.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.