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."
Nerd factor? (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone, male or female, is put off entering a particular study path because they're concerned about how other people will view them then they simply aren't passionate enough about it. Hell, they're not even interested in it. They're better off leaving the place open to someone a little less vacuous.
Maybe it's just me, but I see no reason why people need to be recruited into compsci. There's plenty of interest in it already. Should there be more men going to beauty school just to balance out the demographics a bit?
Let people decide what they want to do and stuff the perceived lack of equality.
nerd factor (Score:5, Insightful)
I realize that there is more to CS than programming, but I would be surprised if theoretical computer science, which is more math intensive, would be that much more appealing. . . . Any way you go, I don't see how to remove the nerd factor from CS.
Bad idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Why does this matter (Score:4, Insightful)
Slipping standards are not a solution... (Score:3, Insightful)
CS is more than just programming, but a CS student incapable of programming is about as useful as a physicist who cannot do math. To suggest that the standards of a program should be relaxed to achieve parity between the genders is ridiculous. What are we to do in other fields, where the number of women exceeds that of men? In the field of education, are we supposed to graduate students who don't know how to teach? Are art majors supposed to leave school without learning any technique?
Great idea! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a good idea and I think it could equally be applied to boosting the numbers of under-represented groups in other areas. For example, proficiency at flying should no longer be a requirement for airline pilots. And surgeons shouldn't have to be good at doing operations. To say otherwise is elitist and divisive.
Does this sound wrong to anybody else? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems somehow wrong to be cattering to a gender.
Don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
"The nerd factor is huge," Dr. Cuny said. According to a 2005 report by the National Center for Women and Information Technology, an academic-industry collaborative formed to address the issue, when high school girls think of computer scientists they think of geeks, pocket protectors, isolated cubicles and a lifetime of staring into a screen writing computer code.
Well, the pocket protectors, and I'd imagine think black glasses with white tape on them, are obviously not true, the rest of it is pretty accurate.
"They think of it as programming," Dr. Cuny said. "They don't think of it as revolutionizing the way we are going to do medicine or create synthetic molecules or study our impact on the climate of the earth."
Yeah, doing all sorts of cools stuff, through programming.
Maybe the problem isn't with computer science being nerdy or writing code, just maybe the problem is with assholes spouting off to media trying to make being nerdy into a negative stereotype, and trying to make sound as if writing code is somehow uninteresting.
Sexist (Score:1, Insightful)
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.'
Hey, why don't you drop the computer bits altogether and replace it with knitting?
Seriously, if women aren't attracted to things like programming, then they shouldn't be taking computer science. Of course, we all know that there are women who like programming, even if they are a minority, the real issue is whether or not those women get a fair shot at it, not the absolute numbers. Mollycoddling students by partially skipping programming is only going to produce even more clueless graduates than usual, at which point people will be asking "How come fewer female graduates are employable? Let's make their jobs easier by skipping the programming there too!"
Re:Great for the gene pool (Score:5, Insightful)
What I'm trying to say is if women don't want to enroll, so be it. Why force this 'positive discrimination'? Now if it was said that there was an overall drop in students enrolling then I would understand some concern but I just don't understand why we should force equality.
Personally I have no interest in signing up for a degree in Fashion Design. Some men may and more power to them but if there are more women signing up than men I don't think they should spend time or money trying to make fashion design more butch.
Re:Bad idea (Score:3, Insightful)
If some people find CS too hard to do, then fine. Let them either do something else or, if they're passionate enough, work harder at it. Dumbing down the curriculum is not the answer to anything. The only thing this will accomplish will to put even more ill-qualified people out in the workforce and further accelerate the USA's decline in technological leadership.
Re:Nerd factor? (Score:3, Insightful)
Should there be more men going to beauty school just to balance out the demographics a bit?
But, in grade school, teacher said everyone is equal, so shouldn't there be equal numbers of everyone in everything?
Chalk this one up to another "politically correct" falsehood. People aren't equal - don't keep someone from doing something they like, but don't change an entire system of educational thought simply because there isn't a 1:1 ratio in all categories. Do change it, however, because it doesn't work, or because some in the field do a poor job educating real thinkers and instead churn out platform-addicted code junkies.
Or as the article says: (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit.
If there was that big of a demand over here then more people would be getting into it to take advantage of the high salaries.
There's demand, but there's also a limit to how much will be paid. So it is all about the "cheap labor".
Re:nerd factor (Score:5, Insightful)
Surely there is a better way to attract women to CS. Surely the issue of women not being interested isn't just a "Programming is haaaaaaaard" thing; women are not Barbie dolls. If we assume that there's a genuine problem, then we need to be spending more effort figuring out why, rather than using this as a convenient excuse to lower the bar.
Re:Nerd factor? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
They are talking about admissions criteria, in the context of high school computing backgrounds. Attracting talent that may or may not have extensive programming experience, rather than focusing just on the people who enter college with a lot of programming under their belt -- those people are overwhelmingly male.
Might they have some catching up to do? Sure. But at least they won't have bad programming habits to unlearn, which can be just as bad as inexperience.
Re:offensive and really quite strange (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed. If they want to attract women to CS, it needs to start not at the college level, but at the junior high school and high school level, where girls are discouraged from becoming proficient at math and science by mainly male teachers.
Re:nerd factor (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, the fields of programming and computer science ought to be separated. Most people studying computer science are doing so because they want to learn programming. Conflating the two means that people wanting to study computer science itself have a hard time finding a program which meets their desires. If de-emphasizing the programming aspects of computer science in a conflated program causes more women to enter and complete that program, then separating the two ought to achieve a similar effect, and would still provide a program for those who wish to learn computer engineering more than computer science.
FEMALE students... (Score:2, Insightful)
Not WOMEN students! I don't know why the media has started using WOMEN as an adjective. You don't see them using the word MEN instead of MALE (e.g., "CS Programs Changing to Attract Men Students").
Sorry... just a pet peeve of mine.
Re:nerd factor (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd argue that it's more like what math is to physics (and to computer science).
Programming isn't science, it is an application of science.
It's also the means of expressing that science, which is ultimately why they're as inseparable as math and physics. Take away the ability to record knowledge and it dies.
You wouldn't say that engineering is the most important aspect of physics, and you wouldn't say that de-emphasizing the engineering aspects of physics amounts to lowering the bar.
No, but I might say these things if a school were to de-emphasize mathematics in its physics programs. In fact, this is why I made the Barbie reference in my previous post.
Re:Bad idea (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't measure this, which means it's shorthand for "whoever we feel like picking."
Which means they'll take a woman with no programming experience over someone with a history of interest in computers specifically, just because she's a woman.
More power to them. The competition in the field just got that much easier for those of us who had a real education.
As much as I hate political correctness, I sure as hell can't escape the realization that policies like these only benefit me personally. No, I'm not a minority woman.
Thank you, closet bigots!
Re:Why does this matter (Score:1, Insightful)
Slashdot culture part of the problem (Score:1, Insightful)
The article isn't talking about removing programming from computer science, but removing programming as a entry requirement for computer science. Just as OB-GYNs aren't required to have given birth before applying to medical school.
Re:Bad idea (Score:4, Insightful)
OMG Ponies (Score:4, Insightful)
"Women are the canaries in the coal mine," Lenore Blum, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, told an audience at Harvard University in March, in a talk on this "crisis" in computer science. Factors driving women away will eventually drive men away as well, she and others say. - there is a crisis in computer science, really? That is fascinating. Let's paint it pink, maybe the crisis will go away? Seriously though, I do not believe in crisis in computer science, I also do not believe that trying to show comsci off as something it is not will not help the issue (too few beautiful females in the software cubicles.)
And there is widespread misunderstanding about jobs moving abroad, said Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington. Companies may establish installations overseas to meet local licensing requirements or in hopes of influencing regulations, he said, "but the truth is when companies offshore they are more or less doing it for access to talent." - isn't that the MS line, that they cannot find enough talent in North America? What, with about a third of a billion people here the tallent is excruciatingly hard to come by.
"Cheap labor is not high on the list," Dr. Lazowska said. "It is access to talent." - bullshit. I am a contractor working mostly in GTA (Canada,) all the outsourcing that I have witnessed within multiple companies is justified by 'low cost' argument, none is justified by 'we cannot find talent' bs.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, demand for computer scientists in the United States will only increase in coming years, Dr. Cuny said. "If you look at the demographics of the country, if we are not
going to get our new professionals from women and minorities and persons with disabilities, we are not going to have enough." - yep. We need the women and the crippled (do emotionally crippled count?) don't forget about minorities. Excuse me? There are PLENTY of so-called minorities in this field. In many firms the software dep's are dominated by minorities (well on my experience, and I've been around, by the way is it just Toronto, or do whites come off as visible minority in the US as well?) By the way in the Chinese 'minorities' who are in comsci the % of women is much higher than in the white folks.
"The nerd factor is huge," Dr. Cuny said. According to a 2005 report by the National Center for Women and Information Technology, an academic-industry collaborative formed to address the issue, when high school girls think of computer scientists they think of geeks, pocket protectors, isolated cubicles and a lifetime of staring into a screen writing computer code. - <sarcasm>Oh, no, in this field you will be surrounded by beautiful socially apt people, with great personalities. You will become a celebrity and will be stalked by paparazzi, who will fight each other just to take your picture and post it on the cover of Glamour.</sarcasm> Ok, not everything in this field is about pocket protectors, isolated cubicles and computer screens, but a lot of it is. A
LOT.
This image discourages members of both sexes, but the problem seems to be more prevalent among women. "They think of it as programming," Dr. Cuny said. "They don't think of it as revolutionizing the way we are going to do
medicine or create synthetic molecules or study our impact on the climate of the earth." - they should through more buzzwords into this. Think about it as not of programming software for whatever purpose, think about
it as of rev
Re:Great for the gene pool (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Does this sound wrong to anybody else? (Score:4, Insightful)
Shouldn't physics programs be changing to adapt to business needs?
Shouldn't astronomy programs be changing to adapt to business needs?
Shouldn't math programs be changing to adapt to business needs?
Shouldn't computer science programs be changing to adapt to business needs?
No. No. No. No.
Re:It's not the same. (Score:3, Insightful)
A theory-heavy CS-major will pick up any programming language in a few weeks. Producing a good database design, or a problem-specific sorting algorithm, or even simply picking the right programming language for a particular job, on the other hand, will remain impossible for someone without good exposure to the theory.
This debate is very old and has been settled long ago: theoretical knowledge (and the ability to learn new things, developed while obtaining that knowledge) is more important — in almost any field, not just CS — than the practical experience.
Re:Nerd factor? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Why does this matter (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why does this matter (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't agree with that. Men and women are different. They think differently and are likely to have different interests.
Lots of women here. (Score:2, Insightful)
I find it interesting that the perception is that there aren't a lot of women in IT/CS. As both a contractor and a full time employee, I've noticed that the number of women in an organization has more to do with the attitudes of the organization and less to do with the job.
Some data points: My current team is 50/50 male/female, all engineers. The extended team maintains that ratio when you bring in QA and PM. Only when you bring in the professional services people does the ratio slip. If you take the whole company, only professional services, internal IT, and sales are under the 50/50 ratio.
I also found this to be true at a PPOE, a major university affiliated hospital. Where I did not find it to be true were several "dot bombs" I worked for. There was a strong good-ole-boy feeling at those places that I imagine would be unattractive to female applicants.
Both type of environments share similar traits in their own groups:
Female friendly places tended to have a more "academic" feel - not necessarily in academia but an environment of knowledge and growth; the environment tended to have a strong professional level of conduct and a strong work ethic.
Female un-friendly places tended to have a more confrontational environment, with more competition among teams and team members. Ego was emphasized, and the environment was more "locker room" than office sometimes. Professionalism was equated with how quickly you could close a deal or come up with an angle. Many of these organization were more sales oriented than engineering oriented.
Just my opinion of course, but one that seems to hold true in my experiences.
RM
Re:Slipping standards are not a solution... (Score:1, Insightful)
How about reading skills? You're either lacking some, or you didn't bother to read the article.
The article talks about how rather than only looking for applicants to CMU who already have programming skills, they're considering people with great leadership and academic skills but who may not have had much experience programming yet.
I know several women who stumbled into coding at college and then switched to CS from majors in English or performing arts. They were great programmers despite coming to it later than some of the hard core geeks. They were smart, logical, good at math, and happened to also be creative. I think what CMU is doing is trying to find and interest that type of woman before other interests suck her away.
I certainly don't have a problem with that.
Dilute to taste. (Score:4, Insightful)
Changing a CS degree to contain elements of Fashion Design would achieve the same results. That does not mean it's a good idea. Watering down one degree for mass appeal inevitably reduces the proficiency of graduates in the specific areas targeted. Mass appeal is no indicator of quality.
Perhaps a better solution is a wider range of degrees and options for those that wish to avoid programming, while retaining courses for those with a genuine interest.
Re:Great for the gene pool (Score:5, Insightful)
Because of the negative discrimination that is artificially limiting the number of women in the field in the first place. Discrimination in the form of men assuming that women "don't want to enroll", simply because they're women and thus less interested in our manly computer engineering/sciences.
Look at this thread. I guarantee (in part because a lot has already shown up) that you'll see men in computer fields stating as fact that women don't really want to be in computer science. You'll see them state as fact that women aren't as good in computers as men. That it's an obvious "natural difference" that means that there really shouldn't be as many women in CS, only those rare few that have what it takes to match up with the men, and thus recruiting more is futile or even counter-productive. And then they'll say that all this proves that there isn't any discrimination against women in CS. Despite the fact that the real reason there are few women in CS -- men in the field discriminating against women -- is put blatantly before them every time they look in the mirror.
It's the same thing that went on in the 70s and 80s with women in the fields of law, business, and medicine. Fields dominated by men, and those men said that clearly women neither wanted nor were capable of succeeding in these fields, and hence would continue to be minorities. Well time passed and the women proved both that they wanted to and that they could, and you'd look like an archaic dinosaur with severe damage to the tact centers of the brain if you said otherwise. Computers, a field that has been dominated by a particularly anti-social breed of men even more prone to insulation than lawyers or MBAS, is the next stop. Encouraging women, letting them know that there are people in the field who welcome them, that the ones telling them what they want to do with their own lives are dinosaurs on the way out, that's helpful.
It may be that once we have gotten rid of all the sex discrimination in the computer field that there will still be fewer women in the field. It may be that there is in fact natural tendency that affects the ratio of men vs women. There's nothing wrong with that. The problem is that if you think that we are at that point, today, where sex discrimination doesn't exist? Then you're 1) male and 2) delusional.
Re:Nerd factor? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great for the gene pool (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, there can be discrimination, and yes it should be opposed. That's not what this is about.
Re:Great for the gene pool (Score:3, Insightful)
Because guys don't get called nerdy? The degree should be about the education. They shouldn't alter the education to suit a "balanced" audience. Period.
Re:Great for the gene pool (Score:3, Insightful)
Why the desire? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Slipping standards are not a solution... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great for the gene pool (Score:3, Insightful)
And in the time I took to hit reply you've already got two other responses trying to change the subject rather than acknowledge the discrimination.
I think that's why CompE is popular. (Score:3, Insightful)
IMO, and I know I'll probably offend some "real" CS people in saying this, but I think 'Computer Science' as a degree, at the undergraduate level anyway, has already suffered from this a lot.
At least from the local big state Uni -- and I won't say which, but I don't think it's atypical -- I've run into some CS grads who took the "light" curriculum (it apparently offers a wide range of courses you can take), and were basically incapable of doing anything other than messing around in WYSIWYG web-development tools and making web pages, and even then they weren't great at it. It goes without saying they had never even used or been exposed to anything besides Windows. If they did any software at all, it was a 100-level class in Visual Basic.
Now, I'm sure there are CS grads, even at those schools, who opted to take a lot of real programming and algorithm design and architecture classes, but the people taking what amounts to a graphic-design and web-design curriculum and calling it "Computer Science" are really hurting the value of the degree. I've known people involved in HR who, when they're looking for actual IT people, basically write off CS degrees in favor of CompE or SoftwareE. So the end result is just a lot of degree inflation, and at the top end of the spectrum, you get a lot of bitterness from "real" engineers (the ones with P.E. certs, not quite so much the ones who drive trains) at the people calling themselves 'engineers' in order to get some differentiation from the hacks.
Personally I think the problem is the lingering effects of the dot-com bubble and the associated feeling that a CS degree was a guarantee of easy money. If people in CS want to reclaim the discipline, they should emphasize that it's long hours, sometimes crappy pay, and packed full of nerds, because it's not doing anyone any good to have people who aren't really committed to the subject matter graduating.
You don't see (many) Physics departments compromising their curricula in order to siphon off students from Business school; at least not by reducing the amount of actual physics in their courses. (Making a course of study more interesting or applicable, by showing how useful it is to a wide range of jobs/problems/areas-of-interest; that's perfectly OK, and definitely desirable.) There's no reason why CS programs should.
Re:Dilute to taste. (Score:5, Insightful)
The first part of any learning path should be to allow those who are not familiar with it to see what you can do with it. Do we start teaching mathematics with order of operations? No -- we show first how to count (immediate practical applications), then how to add, subtract, and other things with immediate practical applications. Do we start teaching reading with sentence diagramming? No -- we start with simple sentences (immediate practical applications). Etc. So why should we start on programming with a focus on learning a language? You should start with a simple language with a clear syntax** -- then work on practical applications immediately. Competitiveness and freedom in project selection should also be encouraged early on. If people get to work on what they want and are trying to outdo their friends, they're more likely to spend more time, actually learn what they're doing, and really get into it.
Good coding style (comments, self-documenting code, etc) should be taught and rewarded early. If a more complex language is needed for later courses, the switch should be made as necessary. Object oriented code and important modern coding features/standards (templates, const correctness, etc) should be taught after the introductory courses. Data structures would probably be good after that. As for learning languages, I'm more of a fan of the concept of a later "Programming Languages" class that simply covers learning a number of different languages, stressing the advantages and disadvantages of each. There's no need to frontload the learning of languages. Learn what's neat about programming first, then learn how to be a good coder, then diversify your language and library knowledge.
** -- I learned on BASIC, but something like Python would probably work well. A fun language with a useful syntax would be LPC (a MUD-coding language), since you can "visualize" and "handle" everything that you code, everyone has an avatar in the same virtual world, and it's based on C, so it would make switching to C easier. Another option that would probably help attract teens is Javascript -- relatively simple if you stick to a single browser, and definitely useful since webpages are really popular among teenagers.
Re: play factor (Score:3, Insightful)
There was actually a "girls can't code" argument at my school a couple of weeks ago. One CS BS senior expressed his opinion that some of the students, especially the girls weren't up to par and shouldn't have been admitted. As you can imagine, this was not welcomed by the other students. Last week, I was "nominated" (read: appointed, there aren't enough underclassmen for a real election) to ACM secretary. When I said I'm bad with taking notes, I was told it's "woman's work," so I'd be fine even though girls are all dumb. Double fingers for that kid. The other girls got mad, and I chased the kid ("nominated" for president) out of the room. That resulted in a lot of discussion about girls, coding, intelligence, etc. Only a couple of kids even knew that the first programmer was a woman (Ada, Countess of Lovelace).
I'm sitting in a data structures class right now.
Re:Nerd factor? (Score:2, Insightful)
in my freshman year SOOOOOO many people dropped out because of the 12 kids who had been programing in 3 different languages for the last 6 years. they made it this huge pissing contest and those of us who were learning it for the first time felt so inferior because of them. It's not that we didn't have the potential to be excellent Computer Programmers, it was just that we didn't have the experience yet. It's like being a freshman in high school and being thrown into the Senior basketball team. It's not that you aren't good at basket ball, you just haven't played as long as every one around you. In 4 years you will be able to keep up with them, but you have to stick with it.
Dear GP, sorry for this, it is nothing pesonal (Score:5, Insightful)
You people are confusing Computer Science with Software Engineering. Software Engineering is what most of slashdotters would *need* to study in order to be "professional" developers (this is, learn the theory and background behind that PHP, Python, Java, C++, C, Visual Basic, etc etc
It is completely possible to study in a subfield of Computer Science (in fact in many of them) without knowing how to program (in fact, many of my fellow PhD students do exactly that, oh, and my own supervisor [a Prof. in Comp. Science] does not
Several slashdotters will find this last comment offending: I believe that removing Programming will indeed attract more women, basically because this fat-dirty-geek-egocentric-smelly person idea is specifically centered on programmers, coders, etc, not on Computer Scientists overall. Gosh, there are really intelligent Women in Computer Scientists, one that comes to mind now is the cryptoanalyst women that sometimes has been featured in slashdot.
Re:Great for the gene pool (Score:4, Insightful)
And guess what, they say it worked! Sounds rather scientific
Theory:
Women do not enroll in CS because they are not interested in it.
Test method:
Change CS to mean/teach what you believe women want to learn, observe results.
So you change it and get dramatic results that indicate you were right. Conclusive proof it is not, but it's damned good evidence that you may be right.
Our culture is suffering from a sever case of MPD. We claim that diversity - that enjoying and celebrating the differences between different races/nationalities/cultures/sexes - is a good thing, but then are not allowed to even contemplate that there ARE differences. It is shown through many studies over many decades that the brains of men and women are wired differently. Not inherently better or worse, just different. In some cases the differences will give one a bias toward things or an advantage, but it is not universal.
There is nothing wrong with women not wanting to be programmers. People whining about women not being as common in the field as men are pretty much either:
1) Men looking to pick up on women, so they want more around without the effort of looking outside their little realm
2) People looking to absolve themselves for some perceived or actual social crime, or looking to make themselves "look better/compassionate/caring" by "fighting for the little guy"
A prior poster got it spot on. We don't see organizations saying that men are not represented well enough in fields that women dominate, or fields such as fashion design, hairdressing, etc..
It's got nothing to do with "being macho" or "manly'. Seriously, it's amazing that someone would post to slashdot (the grandparent to this post) that programming and CS are "manly sciences". Sure, tell that to the jocks bashing the nerds in high school. Yes, men and women are different. Get over it and quit trying to make us all the same. It is damaging to everyone. The human race are not Borg drones. We are each different with our advantages and disadvantages. This is true between races, cultures, nationalities, and pretty much any other group you can arrive at.
Interesting ideas, but it's NOT computer science (Score:4, Insightful)
Some select quotes from the article (boldface font is emphasis by me):
The emphasis on scientific computing and other applications of computers to scientific and medical fields sounds interesting, but it is not computer science. That is called computational science or scientific computing. Computer science is about the study of computation and computers and has different subfields, which includes theoretical CS, algorithms, programming languages, systems (a wide range of topics such as OSes, file systems, networks, databases, compilers, etc.), graphics, and AI. Most computer scientists could care less about designing prosthetics or studying climate changes; they are generally interested in whatever subfield they specialize in.
There is a big difference between computer science and scientific computing. Scientific computing applies computer science skills to other disciplines, but it isn't computer science itself. When you are studying computer science, you study the aforementioned subdivisions above. When you study scientific computing, you know just enough CS to apply it to other disciplines, but it shouldn't be called CS.
I have no problem with attracting women to computing disciplines. I, for one, would strongly support such an effort. However, what is proposed by CMU is not computer science, and it shouldn't be called such. There should be no changes in the standard computer science curriculum. CMU's undergraduate computer science program is one of the best in the country, and if it isn't broken, then it shouldn't be fixed. Instead, CMU should start a scientific computing major inside of the School of Computer Science.
Re:Dilute to taste. (Score:5, Insightful)
For a beginning language, you want the syntax to be as easy as possible. Let's look at a Java "Hello World":
public class Hello {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Hello World!");
}
}
1) Classes are not beginning topics. They should be introduced as soon as possible, but certainly not at the very beginning. They're req'd in Java. And Java's implementation of them is poor.
2) "public static void" and "String[] args" are nonsense to a beginner.
3) System.out.println is pointlessly verbose. We do *not* want beginners to be having to learn libraries to get anything done.
Java is not an intuitive language -- certainly not for a beginner. Let's iterate over the characters in a string (a typical beginner task, right?). How do you do that in Java? Why, like this:
CharacterIterator it = new StringCharacterIterator("abcd");
for (char ch=it.first(); ch != CharacterIterator.DONE; ch=it.next()) {
}
Yeah. A bloody iterator. That's a great beginners topic.(/sarcasm) All sorts of other great "beginner" topics like there being both primitives and classes for all basic number types and the like. Of course, even some primitives are confused -- is a char a character or a number? Why, it's both! Try out "blah" + 's' (JDK 1.1 -> "blahs"; JDK 1.2 -> "blah15"). Java dates are very ugly; I don't think I even need to get into them (certainly a newbie wouldn't want to!). You can't compare strings for equality with == like you do for most everything else; you have to use equals(). You have gems like "".compareTo(null) throwing a null pointer exception. Oh, java nulls, gotta love them. String.valueOf on an int[] returns "null", but on a char[] returns a null pointer exception. Java makes you pointlessly cast all the time and makes you stick parens all over the place; I've seen apps spend half their time casting. Java error reporting when compiling is done very poorly. Java crashes manage to be both verbose and unhelpful -- quite a challenge. There are more incompatabilities between versions and interpreters than you can shake a stick at. Even running a Java program is made needlessly complex for a beginner.
I'll repeat: Java is *not* a language to teach coding to a beginner in. You're going to drive people away by doing that.
Computer Science != Programming (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm going to say something shocking here, but bear with me: Computer Science is not Programming.
Moreover, programming is not to computer science as math problems are to mathematics.
Computer Science includes programming, and many people who wish to become programmers do wisely choose to study Computer Science, but Computer Science and Programming are not the same thing. While many people who decide to study Computer Science would like to think of it as a Programming major, it absolutely is not. I've seen decent coders wash out of Bachelor's programs in CS. I've also seen Master's students who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. Moreover, I've met career programmers who didn't really discover the joys of programming until they reached college. Being able to hack together a few lines of java doesn't necessarily prepare anyone for a real Theory of Computation course. It's not necessarily a bad thing to consider programming as only a part of a larger picture.
That said, I don't think the gender disparity is a university's battle to win. I was one of only two girls in my high school's AP Computer Science course, years ago. What that says to me is that college is really too late. If you want to influence attitudes about computer science, you have to start a lot younger. Sure, maybe I decided I wanted to be a programmer when I was punching in source code from magazines as a little girl, but back then, I didn't know any boys who programmed, so it never would've occurred to me for a minute that anyone might think of it as a "boy" thing. For me, it was just a hell of a fun power trip to get the computer to do what I wanted. So, I made games about... um, horses. Girls will be girls.
Misguided (Score:2, Insightful)
Right, because it would be a terrible disaster if people decided to go into fields they were actually interested in becoming *proficient* in. That would lead to cultural dividing lines between different fields, where the programmers are all people who are interested in programming, and the doctors and nurses are all people who are interested in medical stuff, and so forth. How aweful!
Instead we should all draw computer-generated numbers to determine what field we can go into. That way we can ensure that each profession has an even balance of men and women, jocks and nerds, recent immigrants and multi-generation nationals, and so on and so forth. A nice, smooth, homogenous society.
Eh.
I'm not against having women go into computers, if it's what they want to do, but if most of them are more interested in other things, deliberately de-emphasizing important proficiencies in order to wheedle and cajole them into going into a field they're not really that interested in is not doing them any favors. When they get out into the workforce and discover that the skills they were told they didn't need to learn are, in fact, important in their chosen field, they're going to be pretty frustrated.
Re:Dear GP, sorry for this, it is nothing pesonal (Score:4, Insightful)
One problem with your last comment. There are many fields within computer science that require programming; in fact, the only field that doesn't require coding is theoretical computer science and its relatives (such as algorithm complexity), and even those fields can benefit from coding skills to provide some real world measurements that complement the theoretical ones. For example, systems research (my personal favorite area of computer science, which consists of operating systems, networking, databases, file systems, etc.) is heavily dependent on programming, because systems research is quite experimental. You make a hypothesis, design your system, implement your system (which involves coding), and do performance analysis. Most other fields in computer science work very similarly.
Yes, it is true that once you become a professor, you don't have to code; you can just hire some graduate students to code for you ;). However, all computer scientists should know how to program. Do you have to be the best programmer in the world? No. However, programming is very important in computer science, even in the theoretical fields. Programming is one of the tools in a computer scientist's toolbox. A good computer scientist knows how to program well, even if they aren't the best in the world.
Removing programming removes a key component of the computer science curriculum and limits the choices to theoretical computer science (and that requires good algorithmic and mathematical skills, which is related to programming skills). Programming isn't rocket science. Perhaps we can encourage society that programming isn't something to be intimidated by, just like we have encouraged society over the past 40 years that mathematics and science are nothing to be intimidated by, either. In order to succeed in computer science, you have to learn how to program. Sorry, but it's the truth.
Re:Dear GP, sorry for this, it is nothing pesonal (Score:5, Insightful)
Name one. I bet there's some programming involved in there.
When I was going through, the major CS areas I studied were Computer Vision, AI, Cognitive Science, Security, Compiler Theory, Language Theory, and OS Design.
There wasn't a single one of those that didn't involve writing code. You *can* do those things without writing code, but that's not as useful. You advance the field by showing that you've got a new approach that works better than previous approaches. You write a paper with theoretical and empirical evidence. You get your empirical evidence by running your code.
Sure, you need the theory as well. If you've got an algorithm that you think is always more clever than the currently accepted best - or that breaks something currently thought of as unbreakable, etc, you need to prove it mathematically. But a lot of people will think that you're probably pulling a fast one if you don't have actual data to back it up, so you probably should implement it.
Re:Nerd factor? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it's often a very subtle thing--not harassment, but a definite bias against women in certain fields. Most people don't even realize they're doing it. In high school, I had the best grades in my honors math and science classes and was willing to help classmates with questions. When awards time came at the end of the year, the math and science awards went to the guys I'd helped (and outscored), and I got the English and Social Studies awards. Looking at the years ahead of me and behind me, the same thing was true. The girls might be just as good as the guys, but the perception by the generation in charge was that the guys were better at math and science and the girls at languages and humanities.
If you listen carefully, it comes out in little things people say, and in the toys people buy children. Thank God my parents watched me play with all my brother's cool stuff and bought me building sets and used computer magazines (for the TI 99, baybee!) to help offset the insipid Barbies and tea sets I got almost exclusively from other people. (I mean, I support kids getting dolls and tea sets, too, but not JUST that.)
If you want an enlightening experience, go to a computer show with a woman that you know knows something about computers and see how many of the vendors there address her versus how many address you when speaking, regardless of who asked the question. I once had one vendor answer all my questions to my husband. At the end of the conversation, I pointed out that he'd overlooked me, and that was a poor way to treat a customer. He asked me what gave me that impression, as though I were overreacting. We actually had to explain that he was ending his sentences with "sir," which pretty obviously excluded me from the conversation. (Boy, was he embarrassed.) That's not unusual at computer shows. Heck, when we went car shopping, even car salespeople picked up more quickly that I was the one they wanted to focus on and talk to or they were going to lose the sale.
If you aren't with a woman, or if you aren't with a woman who is trying to ask questions and get an answer, you might never see these things, but added up over a lifetime, it's enough of a subtle deterrent to influence some women who are good at several different fields. Why go for one like comp sci when you can choose another one that is as lucrative and more accepting?
Just something to keep in mind as you go about your day. You might be surprised what you catch yourself thinking (we're all culturally brainwashed to some degree), or your coworker buying for his new daughter without a second thought... And that, of course, is ignoring the people who specifically raise their daughters to be wives and mothers and nothing else.