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Why the Widening Gender Gap In Computer Science?
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Nov 18, 2008 11:03 AM
from the thomas-sowell-can-speak-to-that dept.
from the thomas-sowell-can-speak-to-that dept.
ruheling writes "From yesterday's New York Times: ' What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?' In many US universities, over the past decade, there has been deliberate effort to integrate and encourage women and girls to get more involved in the 'hard' sciences, engineering, and math. However, instead of the proportion of women to men increasing, in Computer Science the opposite is actually true. Specifically, in 2001-2, only 28 percent of all undergraduate degrees in computer science went to women. Now many computer science departments report that women now make up less than 10 percent of the newest undergraduates. What's going on here, folks?"
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Obvious.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Obvious.... (Score:5, Funny)
No doubt that the CS field is "socially challenged" at times. However, there are plenty of women in the military. These women face an almost institutionalized form of sexual harassment. This has not dimensioned the enrollment of females into the armed services.
I second your call for male nerds to dial down the stalker instinct. You aren't the first to complain of it.
While we're Blue Skying, I'd also like to call for wider adoption of deodorant in the CS field.
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Re:Obvious.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Obvious.... (Score:5, Insightful)
If it was last night when I had mod points, I'd give you +1 insightful. When did "American" become a lifestyle rather than a place of birth?
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Re:Obvious.... (Score:5, Insightful)
When did "American" become a lifestyle rather than a place of birth?
When people decided that culture was a sacrosanct, frozen set of behavior rather than an adaptation to environmental forces. Of course the overwhelming nostalgia hasn't helped that problem either.
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Re:Obvious.... (Score:5, Funny)
To be fair, she's a whackjob, and one who belongs to the fringe-end of evangelical churches.
Again, I'm not making a judgment on her (or anyone else in the race) on religious grounds, but that's a fair one to make, if you are.
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Re:Obvious.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The OP echoed my own thoughts (geeks scaring off the girls), but the "real" reason is because women are cool and computer science is not. ;-) They simply aren't attracted to that type of work. And there's nothing wrong with that.
You ever wander past the Health & Human Development part of your college?
It's like an engineering class in reverse - 40 women; 2 guys. (I knew I picked the wrong major.) Men and women are not that same. Men migrate towards "things" and women migrate towards "humans", each dominating their respective engineering & health majors. They don't think the same and they have different interests. Why can't people just accept that?
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Re:Obvious.... (Score:5, Funny)
<annoying-voice>because that would be sexist!</annoying-voice>
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Re:Obvious.... (Score:5, Insightful)
What I don't understand is why these anti-sexist persons are sooooo concerned about lack of women in science. Why do I not hear anybody crying out, "There are only 2 men for every 40 women in the Health & Human Development Major!" I guess we men don't matter. How sexist. ;-)
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Re:Obvious.... (Score:5, Insightful)
If comp sci and engineering majors typically made less than 30k out of college with no benefits, no one would give a shit about the lack of women in that field.
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Re:Obvious.... (Score:5, Insightful)
And trying to force it is only going to hurt people.
It's getting to the point that if girls are particularly capable of doing math/science they get pushed to even if they don't want to in the name of equality.
For gods sake let people choose for themselves even if they don't make the choices you think they should!
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My Thoughts (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Obvious.... (Score:5, Insightful)
well... yes. Sexual harassment is a huge issue for female students/workers. One girl to a dozen guys, you're going to get hit on, a LOT. Even after I got married, I still got chatted up left and right (don't guys check for rings anymore?) and I really don't like it. It feels like the only reason half my co-workers talk to me is because I'm the only one with tits in the place... not because I'm smart, not because I can code with the best of them, not because I'm funny, or cheerful or anything else.
The "OMFG BOOBS! Let's go talk to them" effect creates a really hostile environment, which causes many of us to change majors/jobs... which makes women even more rare, which makes the next set of boobs even more rare... vicious cycle.
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Re:Obvious.... (Score:5, Interesting)
"don't guys check for rings anymore?"
Why bother? With divorce and infidelity so popular these days, who cares about a piece of metal on your finger?
BTW, I'm not the harassing type. My workplace seems mercifully free of that and reasonably well balanced (for a software house). Just my observation on modern society.
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Re:Obvious.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Obvious.... (Score:5, Insightful)
well... yes. Sexual harassment is a huge issue for female students/workers. One girl to a dozen guys, you're going to get hit on, a LOT. Even after I got married, I still got chatted up left and right (don't guys check for rings anymore?) and I really don't like it. It feels like the only reason half my co-workers talk to me is because I'm the only one with tits in the place... not because I'm smart, not because I can code with the best of them, not because I'm funny, or cheerful or anything else.
Now, I'm not saying all those guys weren't flirting, but were all of them? I've sat and chatted with just about everyone in any of my smaller classes. I know that I'm going to work with them at some point during the year, so why not get to know them. The sooner I can pick out who is going to flake out, and who's code is superior, the better I can plan for the final projects.
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Re:Obvious.... (Score:5, Interesting)
One girl to a dozen guys, you're going to get hit on, a LOT
Really? This is about the ratio in my undergrad courses, but that doesn't mean you need to socialise with your peers. Most of the people I knew socially as an undergraduate were English students (now they seem to be linguists or physicists). It's not like you get much of a chance to hit on anyone in lectures, since you're meant to be paying attention to the lecturer, and once you're outside lectures the gender ratio is the same across campus, it isn't tied to your subject.
The "OMFG BOOBS! Let's go talk to them" effect creates a really hostile environment
You know, not every time a guy talks to a girl is a come-on. Generally I would talk to people outside lectures who were standing by themselves looking bored, or who were part of a group already engaging in an interesting conversation. Whether they were male or female didn't really enter into it, but if you want to interpret this as hostility then there's a good chance you might be part of the problem.
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Re:Obvious.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting chatted up and being sexually harassed are not even remotely the same thing.
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Re:Obvious.... (Score:5, Funny)
But there is a girl in the classroom! I'm going to show her some cool macros...
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Women don't want to do CS? (Score:5, Insightful)
For some reason its hard to accept that a lot of women simply aren't interested in studying CS, engineering, or hard science.
Its a similar problem to something like Nursing, in the other direction. At my graduation, the CS group sat right behind the nursing group. There's lots of comments at how the CS group was 80% male. There were no comments at how the nursing group was 97% female.
At some point, the reality has to set in that women on average simply aren't interested, and all the incentives in the world won't change that.
Re:Women don't want to do CS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Women and men are different, feminism seems to think "Equal"="same". This is simply incorrect, the sexes are different and so are attracted to differing professions. Maybe men have a higher aptitude for the hard sciences because the simply find them more interesting and so pay more attention? Nursing requires an ability to deal with blood, urine, and shit of other people, I find women aree more able to deal with this kind of thing. Why is it important for more women to do "hard sceine /mathematics" jobs anyway? Let women do what they like/are good at, and men can do the same, k.
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Re:Women don't want to do CS? (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, the article mentions that in the 80s, female enrollment in CS was closer to parity with males. Something has changed since then and I doubt it's biological.
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Re:Women don't want to do CS? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah. Dot-com crash, combined with more general computer familiarity. CS is no longer seen as a lucrative degree, not even to the extent it was before the dot-com boom. And computers are now commonplace, so the field in general has lost some of its apparent exclusivity. Those attracted to CS for money or for exclusive knowledge are not entering the field anymore, leaving the hardcore geeks, who are alas mostly male.
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Re:Women don't want to do CS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Women and men are different, feminism seems to think "Equal"="same". This is simply incorrect, the sexes are different and so are attracted to differing professions.
Well said! While there is nothing preventing a woman from pursing a CS degree, why do so many people fail to see the obvious.. Women are generally not interested in CS and/or engineering. I have several female friends (non slashdot reading females) who have absolutely no interest in CS. When I talk to them about computers they look at me like I'm a freak. They are more interested in jobs that are more "social". This could be why men prefer action/horror movies, and women prefer drama/romance movies such as "Sex & the City".
Rather than forcing women into CS, I say let them choose what they want to do. Women tend to be more in touch with their emotions than men are, and hence tend to prefer jobs that allow emotional freedom and creativity. Many men would be find in a non-emotionally stimulating environment.
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Re:Women don't want to do CS? (Score:5, Insightful)
We raise girls to be nurturers and boys to be tinkerers. Small children are all given little dolls, which act as security blankets. But when little girls get their next toy, it's another doll. A little boy will get a toy truck, or car. The girl gets the Barbie dream house. The boy gets the lego set. We define gender roles for children from the time they are small, then are amazed when they don't break out of those roles.
If/when you have children, you will understand just how false this is. I can't tell you how many times I am personally shocked, and my friends who are also parents are also personally shocked, at just how innately different boys and girls are. And it's not just my own kids, but it's all kids.
Another thing I found shocking is just how unreceptive children are to parents' attempts to define roles for them. They really are there own people, and that goes from about age 0.5 onwards. Go ahead. Try to give your male child a doll. Last time I gave my son a doll, he was about 1 year old. He threw it around for a while, then smashed it repeatedly with a hammer. Try giving your little girl a toy gun. She'll put it to bed and tuck it in and give it a kiss good night.
In our house, my wife and I do not encourage traditional gender roles. But man, oh man, do they sure happen on their own.
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Re:Women don't want to do CS? (Score:5, Insightful)
You personally might not encourage traditional gender roles, but the culture around you, including friends, relatives and the media, probably does.
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Re:Women don't want to do CS? (Score:5, Interesting)
You personally might not encourage traditional gender roles, but the culture around you, including friends, relatives and the media, probably does.
That might be true, but we noticed the differences since long before they were old enough to even have a gender identity. How could a child take clues from society about his or her gender roles before even knowing his or her own gender?
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Re:Women don't want to do CS? (Score:5, Funny)
Insightful? Parenting advice that includes giving a 1 year old a hammer?
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Re:Women don't want to do CS? (Score:5, Informative)
Ah the oft toted argument.
Problem is that even with infants only a few weeks old, if you test their attention span for different stimula then you'll find that little girls tend to be more interested in faces and will pay attention to them longer and little boys will tend to be more interested in things and pay attention to them longer.
Children are not empty vessels, sure you can beat them into the shape with enough force applied but not everything is due to outside influence.
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Re:Women don't want to do CS? (Score:5, Interesting)
So that's obviously the case, but the point of studying the topic is: "why?". It's also important to determine if this is by their own choice or if women are subtly coerced into their disinterest.
I helped out with FIRST LEGO League at Georgia Tech a few years back. FIRST LEGO is a robotics competition for middle-school students using LEGO automation parts to perform various tasks. There were tons of girls participating at all levels, and it was pretty noticeable how different the demographics were between the middle school competitors and the typical college-age engineering students at Gatech. Thus, it's worth asking whether girls seem to lose interest in engineering as they get older, and if so, why?
If it's purely biological (the parts of the brain that determine interests are gender-specific), then so be it. If, however, it's due to upbringing and society's pressures, then it's a topic worth discussing. Indeed, it is probably desirable to change it. Why limit the pool of intellect in a field to men? You're potentially losing 50% of the problem solving skills, assuming men and women are equally capable.
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Re:Women don't want to do CS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Trivially falsifiable - if "women prefer good pay and healthy lifestyles" were true, then nursing classes wouldn't be overwhelmingly female as nursing fails both criteria by a wide margin.
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Re:Women don't want to do CS? (Score:5, Insightful)
For some reason its hard to accept that a lot of women simply aren't interested in studying CS, engineering, or hard science.
Now for fifty comments about how "men and women are different" without any recognition that historically, "male" and "female" professions can and do change.
Medicine, for example, used to be almost entirely dominated by men. Now many medical schools have 50 percent or more women in their entering classes.
The real issue, I believe, is that most people need to feel comfortable in their chosen career, and for many women the culture of computer science doesn't seem to have a place for them.
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Re:Women don't want to do CS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Key paragraph from TFA:
What's particularly puzzling is that the explanations for under-representation of women that were assembled back in 1991 applied to all technical fields. Yet women have achieved broad parity with men in almost every other technical pursuit. When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor's degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, according to National Science Foundation surveys.
"Women aren't interested in X" has historically been applied to X = medicine, business, politics ... and it's always been wrong. There's something specific about CS here, and I don't think it's the field.
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Re:Women don't want to do CS? (Score:5, Funny)
To deal with the cold, hard logic of computers all day, you need to be comfortable with such an unemotional, machine-like environment. As an IT worker, I can tell you firsthand that many women aren't comfortable in situations like that. Far too many ex-girlfriends of mine have told me I'm "too much like a robot." To which I reply, "a sex robot?" And they say no. :-(
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Women aren't a "minority", either.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Last I checked, they comprised about 51% of the population....
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Re:Women don't want to do CS? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Women don't want to do CS? (Score:5, Funny)
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Widening gap in first posts (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do they pick and choose industries to focus on. No-one raises a stink about shortage of female garbage collectors.
And I haven't heard a big push to increase males in areas dominated my women, e.g. elementary education.
Re:Widening gap in first posts (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, from today's Boston Globe: Hunt is on for more men to lead classrooms [boston.com].
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Re:Widening gap in first posts (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually that does hit the news every so often, usually in relation to the daemonisation of men seeking to work with kids.
Males are in decline, leaving the traditional female sectors even more to women for fear of being branded "too interested" in working with children etc. Some folks are decrying it because kids won't have any male role models left. I think it's just what you get when society consumes itself with frivolous fears and scares itself with a new pretend evil each week.
Comes of people being comfortable and having nothing to really be afraid of, they have to invent or inflate stuff.
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Re:Widening gap in first posts (Score:5, Funny)
I got fired from my last job, so I'm staying home with the kids. I suppose that means I got Terminated, and I Stay Resident instead.
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This Is the Part ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Has anyone ever once argued that maybe--just maybe--I really really like computers?
What's the ratio in nursing? 20 females:1 male? So here's your solution: take all the entry level students from these two professions and even them out regardless of what the individual wants to do. See how happy you make everybody.
Or better yet, unfairly weight the minority sex in each of those classes, that's fair because I definitely was given a detailed account of the outside world while I was in my mother's womb and then filled out a scantron card for what I wanted to be--a white male in the United States with no heritage whatsoever.
Re:This Is the Part ... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the part where you say something you know lots of people will agree with, but preface your statement by telling us how bold and daring and anti-PC you are. GMAFB, AC.
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Brain size (Score:5, Funny)
With props to Will Ferrell, the funniest man alive:
A woman's brain is one-third the size of ours. It's science.
Re:Brain size (Score:5, Funny)
Women's brains may be 10% smaller (Brain Size [wikipedia.org]: 1130 vs 1260 cc), but I believe they're more advanced, uses less energy, and generates less heat.
They appear to be:
Why women avoid pursuing a CS career is a mystery to me.
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The brainy girls are going to med school (Score:5, Insightful)
The smart girls are going to med school or veterinary medicine. They see the creepy geek guys leering at them like they've never seen a live female before and figure if they're going to need to deal with some horse's butt, they might as well go to vet school.
Why is gender 'equality' so important? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, why does every career or activity have to have an exact 50-50 mix of males and females? Last time I checked, the hormonal balance in men and women were quite a bit different and each sex has a general preference to what interests them. The examples of teachers, nurses, and garbage collectors are excellent examples. The two sexes are different. Why do so many people have a hard time accepting that?
Here's an idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps we might recognize natural gender-based tendencies. Isn't it possible women just aren't that interested in programming? It's like asking "Why aren't more women interested in football?" They just aren't. It doesn't necessarily indicate some fundamental problem with the system.
I don't see a lot of people asking why there aren't more female plumbers.
differing interests (Score:5, Insightful)
As the great philosopher Barbie once said, "Math is hard!"
No, but seriously, before my karma is ruined, it's all a matter of differing interests. When I got into computers, they were still a seriously nerdcore hobby. It was rare to even encounter another girl at school who had a computer at home, even less likely for her to know how to use it. My sister looked at my computering, laughed, and went back to her interests.
Kind of without me realizing it, computers became a bigger and bigger thing in the lives of non-geeks. The internet is what really did it. When my sister finally asked me to help her find a computer, this was a watershed moment. And the social aspects made possible by the internet was what really sucked her in. I enjoyed the bulletin boards in my pre-internet days but IRC and ICQ were the killer apps that really sucked her in, that and the web in general. And more and more of her friends ended up having computers, and the social elements online weren't about computers but were simply facilitated by computers. == This, I think, is key. She has become as big of a computer geek as me now but she's using it as a tool, not as an end unto itself. She uses Photoshop and Illustrator for her art, uses different programs as a designer at her job, does her personal writing on there, keeps up with friends, etc. But it's not just geeking out on computers for the sake of geeking out. She's not installing all sorts of upgrades for games, she sticks with consoles for that sort of thing.
Since Slashdot is all about car analogies, I'd say most women are using computers the way they use a car, as a tool that they find very useful but they don't care about what's going on under the hood. Getting into CS is like becoming a gearhead. Most car users, male or female, aren't really gearheads. And from the stats I'm hearing from people I know in academia, Americans as a whole, male and female, aren't really into the hard sciences. There's just no money there.
Re:The girls are smarter (Score:5, Interesting)
In terms of money, that seems to be true.
I've recently read a Groklaw article that mentioned a salary dispute between two lawyers. Both claimed to usually charge $400 per hour. AFAIK even highly sought after IT consultants rarely get away with that kind of fees.
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