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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.
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
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.
Women are being pushed out of tech - look at GamerGate
A fallacy driven by hardcore penis-hating feministas such as Anita Sarkeesian, Leigh Alexander, Zoe Quinn, and Brianna Wu.
captcha: frocks
Just watched it. Very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
And guess what? Companies and universities go out of their way to accommodate women, and women generally are as happy with their jobs as men.
Identifying trends is GOOD! It enables us to tailor processes, in this case education, to those who want them, rather than pushing people into them that actually don't want to.
Exactly. Like when the trend is that women become nurses (92%) and men become doctors (67%), it's probably unrelated to the social or historical aspects of those training programs, but rather to sexual dimorphism. Probably, nursing is a way for women to participate in healthcare without being burdened by all those complicated facts and theories, while satisfying their natural inclination to be subservient to the physician in authority. We can probably make better doctors by turning med schools into boys' clubs and better nurses by turning nursing schools into girls' clubs.