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.

Comments

The difference between boys and girls

[Anonymous Coward]

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