Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
Again. We have people who assume a conclusion and attempt to work their way back to a "proof" from there.
Just ask them, already?
1. Did you consider a career with computers?
2. Why or why not?
3. What would make you change your decision?
4. To the inquirer. Answers such as "Math is hard" or "the guys are bullies" are NOT objective truths, but personal perceptions and, as such, need to be further reinforced by actual concrete instances. And, in fact, if there is the perception that "math is hard" or "the guys are bullies" without objective proff, then additional research needs to be made. Locate the source of these perceptions, address any actual problems found, work to correct any mis-conceptions.
Lay off the "because Men are Jerks", already. That's not very objective either, and it's just as much a case of bullying, even though it flows in the opposite direction.
Ideological fights solve no problems.
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.
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
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.
Offshoring is a HUGE consideration for women in tech. It has nothing todo with WESTERN cultural views of women; it has EVERYTHING to do with how the offshore component interacts with western female workers. Regressing to being patted on the head and told not to worry by offshore colleagues is an enormous setback to western women who have worked insanely hard to earn the respect of their peers. Management that is invested in offshoring just pretends that the problem doesn't exist. This is why I no longer work in tech. I loved the work and the intellectual challenges but couldn't tolerate going back to being treated like a child. Western industry is trashing a tremendous resource with its singleminded focus on offshoring. And the alienation of female tech talent is only the tip of the iceberg.
It's not yet settled whether there is some sort of discrimination or bias either keeping women out, or pushing them out. Until that is settled, lots of people give a fuck for many different reasons. I'm not going to enumerate them, but I do expect you to at least consider the point.
In a rare statement of my actual opinion, I don't think there is anything to study. But that doesn't mean there is nothing to study, so I support the studying. I think you are tired of reading about it, so just don't read about it.
Here's the really big problem: Now that the cat's out of the bag, social websites are picking up the story late. What is this post actually about? NPR is wrong, and is sending the wrong message.
All of the people who rely solely on NPR for their news are misinformed. And you may run into these misinformed people in a day. Isn't it better to understand what they heard, what faulty conclusions were involved, and be able to speak to those points?
The perception about math is kind of irrelevant, IMO. In two decades of programming, I can count the number of times I've used math above the seventh grade level on one hand, in unary. Yes, there's CS work that involves math, but most of the people doing that work are scientists who also know how to write code, rather than coders who also know complex math. So if that's someone's excuse for not getting into computer programming, the misconceptions run much deeper than whether math is hard....
What programming does require is a high degree of abstract thinking. Folks who do well in algebra are likely to have no trouble with programming. Mind you, there's a big difference between solving for a variable and assigning a value to one, but at its core, the notion of a name that represents a value is still the same. And that abstract thinking ability becomes critical when you're architecting a piece of software, imagining how the parts are going to fit together before any of them exist. The better you are at thinking abstractly, the better you'll do at programming, from the lowest code monkey jobs to the highest software architect jobs.
Unfortunately, at least in the United States, IIRC, most tests show a gap in abstract thinking ability between men and women by the time they reach high school. Whether that gap is biological or social in nature is unclear, but as long as that gap in the mean/median of abstract thinking ability exists, you'd expect more men in computer programming than women, because a larger percentage of men will find it easy to learn the core programming concepts, and to then move on to complex architecture work. To achieve a more balanced tech workforce, you have two choices: either take steps to encourage women with strong abstract thinking abilities to choose CS at a higher rate than men with those abilities (a higher percentage of a smaller population) or fix that abstract thinking gap (assuming that it isn't caused by biological differences). All other problems (e.g. "men are jerks") are secondary in importance by comparison to the abstract thinking gap, IMO.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
GamerGate is driven by the trolling of a journalist (Sarkeesian), a political science major (Wu), and an artist (Quinn). Their problem isn't that they are women, their problem is that they are bigots who have made a career out of spreading hatred. These people and their supporters (i.e., you) deserve to be treated like Fred Phelps or David Duke because they are operating the same way. Instead of religious nuts or racist nuts, they are feminist nuts.
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.
I am a male and I claim a fairly different nature than thou.
I also claim your notion of predestination is absolute BS.
My observations:
- Women protect their own time more than men in this industry (don't want to do as much overtime, don't want their weekends to vanish, etc) and this leads to a negative management style that penalizes healthy behaviour and thus limits women's progress
- Women take maternity leave and have kids and that hurts prospects in the high-grind world of CS
- There are a lot of poorly emotionally developed males in management roles (not all, by any means, but enough that an 'I like my coders young male and single' comment isn't a surprise out of a manager)
- Women will try to ask for an answer when stumped, guys will try to battle through (taking a long time sometimes) - the best course is usually somewhere in the middle.
- Women don't particularly love to be abused and they are less willing to put up with it from management than men (who are willing to get called some nasty things by their boss most times)
The industry is hard on developers and artists and QA people. It burns them out, treating them like disposable resources. Women are smart enough to recognize this and fewer of them want to enter this. Guys are still 'hey, neat tech!' and 'I get to code a video game/drive the space shuttle/build smartbombs/code networked scrabble/etc'. So they still throw themselves into the grinder more willingly.
Guys also respond more to challenge and to hostile bosses (that's likely deep in our genes) by trying to outperform. That same climate I believe makes a lot of women just want to leave.
So in summary, it can be a hard field on people and it is managed in ways that drive women from the field.
My cred: 18 years in software development in a lot of companies (custom software contractor much of the time in and out of companies of all sizes).
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
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.
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.
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!