CS Programs Changing to Attract Women Students 596
Magnifico writes "The New York times is running an article about a push by American universities to actively recruit women into Computer Science courses. The story, 'Computer Science Takes Steps to Bring Women to the Fold', explains that the number of women in CS is shrinking: 'Women received about 38 percent of the computer science bachelor's degrees awarded in the United States in 1985, the peak year, but in 2003, the figure was only about 28 percent, according to the National Science Foundation.' One of the largest barriers to recruiting women to the field is the nerd factor. To attract women students to the CS field, 'Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs Dr. Blum and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon instituted to draw more women into computer science.' Changes at CMU increased women students in the CS program from 8 percent to nearly 40 percent."
There are lots of Women in CS Programs (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Nerd factor? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually nursing schools and health care facilities are aggressively trying to recruit men to nursing -- there's a nursing shortage and likely to be one for decades, so making it less of a "woman's" job is an obvious way to attract a lot of very qualified candidates who otherwise may not have considered it.
Re:Nerd factor? (Score:3, Informative)
No it doesn't. it helps a heck of a lot, but there are still a lot of guys who say "I'm not going to be a nurse -- what, do you think I'm gay or something?". Changes to dress codes, professional behavior, etc all have helped bring more men into the field. If you still had to wear white from head to toe it would be difficult to bring in male nurses regardless of what it pays. But walk around any facility these days, everyone is wearing scrubs, you'd have a hard time telling who is a doctor and who is a nurse. That's not entirely accidental.
Re:My own CMU story (Score:2, Informative)
And that was before they went on this yay-diversity, anti-{geek,nerd} kick, which I'm not necessarily a huge fan of, since I thought we were doing pretty well to begin with, and certainly makes share people's concerns about effects on lowering the bar.
Re:Great for the gene pool (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nerd factor? (Score:3, Informative)
One argument is the general pro-diversity argument. Basically it claims that women have a different experiences and perspectives than men, and that having computer scientists with a mix of different backgrounds can better stimulate solutions/creativity/etc than a more homogeneous mix would. Thus balancing out the gender discrepancy in computer science would benefit the field. Obviously this is a difficult thing to prove, as you alluded to. But it is an argument that does not rely on women being "better" than men at computer science, only different.
(It's possible that argument might still work even if women were actually inferior in this respect - there's been some social science suggesting that groups containing a mix of experts and non-experts can often come up with better solution than the subject matter experts alone would. See a book called "The Wisdom of Crowds").
The other argument is a scarcity argument, i.e. that the field has a shortage of workers in general. Following Amdahl's Law, focusing on the improving particular shortage of women in the field has a much greater maximum benefit than would focusing on the shortage among some other, smaller demographic. The unspoken assumption in this is that fixing the shortage will benefit the field, whether through increased research output, more appealing work/school environments attracting better candidates (male or female), etc. IMO that's probably true; though obviously if you're one of the current members of the field, adding more competitors and thus potentially decreasing salaries does not seem like an improvement. But regardless, the argument applies even if women are no better at computer science than men.