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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.
You must find putting everyone in your boxes pretty easy.
You must find putting everyone in your boxes pretty easy.
You must find confusing valid observation of a trend with something else pretty easy.
When you are looking for why a segment of the population is or isn't doing something, working out generalised patterns between members of the group should be the first thing you should do.
There is an exception to every pattern, but means little when answering questions of percentages. If you are the exception, then maintain that it doesn't apply to you and move on.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Well, unfortunately, these boxes happen to describe reality. We had 8/250 women in CS after the first 2 years and as it turns out, they had all pretty non-standard reasons to be in the field. One had a male twin (typically causing more testosterone-influenced behavior), one had a father that was an engineer and wanted a son but taught his daughter instead, and so on. Really, the reason there are significantly less women in CS is that significantly less women want to be in CS and the reasons seem to be all the traditional ones.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The problem is not whether or not it what the GP said may be true for the group as a whole. The problem is that these stereotypes are applied to everyone in the group regardless of whether they fit it or not. Thus, countless women who do not fit this gender stereotype are intentionally being pushed out of a field they could excel in because "only boys do that". People should be encouraged to explore things regardless of whether that field fits into these mostly dated gender stereotypes.
When you are looking for why a segment of the population is or isn't doing something, working out generalised patterns between members of the group should be the first thing you should do.
The problem comes when people confuse cause and effect.
The implicit assumption here is that women are less "curious" about systems than men because they are biologically predetermined to be that way, rather than they have been socially conditioned to be that way. So far there is very little evidence for the former, but good evidence for the later.
I have a male twin and was taught by my father, who was an engineer. From my experience, I have come to the same conclusion.
People are heavily influenced by gender. For many women, sticking too closely to gender norms during developmental years will shape her into the kind of person that is unlikely to develop an interest in CS. It's the same reason you see more women (or gay men) than straight men becoming stylists.
What year was C++ released ?
See the trend between objectifying programming and women running away ?
C++ and JAVA are to blame.
Women naturally think like cobol and fortran compilers.
What difference does it make whether women choose career X because of the bed time stories their mothers told them or because their brains are genetically different?
Because, in this case, it seems like social pressures may be pushing a group out of lucrative, high-benefit career paths. We, as a society, may consequently be excluding a large number of highly talented people from those jobs and making [CS or other male-dominated field] less productive. Remember how blacks were excluded from professional football because they lacked strategic thinking skills? Does anyone think football was better back in the segregation days?
More importantly, "the establishment" has a long history of justifying their position with generally unsupported claims that [group] is just not naturally suited or inclined to [leadership position]. The aristocracy knew that their magical blood entitled them to rule. The Europeans knew that Africans were unsuited to proper education. Men know that women are unsuited to rigorous logic. Historically, these claims have frequently been found untrue, and it's appropriate to be skeptical with the party in power claims that an identifiably different group "just doesn't want" some path to success or power.
Now, certainly there are differences between the sexes. I don't think anyone is questioning that. What I think we need to do is figure out to what extent extraordinarily subtle social pressures (the very forces that men claim to be insensitive to) might be skewing the data. Maybe girls play with dolls and boys play with trains because of built-in genetic programming. I only know that, when my friends' daughters go for the dolls, my friends coo just a little louder and say things like 'We didn't encourage that at all - she just naturally prefers the dolls." When their sons go for the dolls, they don't make any special noises of approval and say things like, "You know, he's got an uncle who's gay, and we're totally cool with that."