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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.
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.
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
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.
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.