Solving the Mystery of Declining Female CS Enrollment 608
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.
Boys are naturally curious... (Score:4, Insightful)
... more about systems than people and women are more interested in people than systems.
Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
You must find putting everyone in your boxes pretty easy.
You must find confusing valid observation of a trend with something else pretty easy.
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:4, Insightful)
And THAT is the problem with the people hijacking feminism for their misguided man-hatred.
Identifying trends is GOOD! It enables us to tailor processes, in this case education, to those who want them, rather than pushing people into them that actually don't want to.
A trend does not exclude the minorities that go against it. That is another step that needs to be taken that can be addressed on a per situation basis.
YOU, on the other hand, are an oppressor. You oppress fact (and we don't take too kindly to that around here) and you try to press women and men into a, granted new, mold. "Women must do everything men do" is just as bad as "Women can't do what men do."
So kindly go fuck yourself.
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If you really are a woman and a leader, then you can probably deal with men and a man's world on it's own terms. You don't whine and bitch that it's unfair. You just take care of business and men respect that because that's how they work.
If anything you suffer from caustic female social politics more than "misogyny" from the guys.
However, you may be a statistical outlier.
Such a fact is neither good or evil. It simply is.
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope. It's all the mothers with the Disney princess nonsense and the cheerleading (instead of sports). Then you graduate to teen magazines and then after that Cosmo.
Even the "Damsel in Destress" nonsense from the SJW bloggers contributes to the problem.
Never mind the parents and Madison avenue and Hollywood. It's all the evil computer geeks fault.
Nerds just make an easy target for people that always valued socializing more than academic or career preparation.
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Society applies 10,000 cuts to the "minority" trying to get ahead. Those aren't applied to the white man. And if you give a Black man (or a woman) a band-aid for one of their cuts, everyone rushes over and screams "favoritism", and complains how affirmative action is bad. Even with the little help some programs give, the whole system is still slanted against those who do not succeed.
I never blamed the nerds for this
Re: Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
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. [livescience.com]
Re: Boys are naturally curious... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is when people confuse group averages with universal, individually applicable facts. Women choose CS programs less often than men do. That could be because something in females makes them less attracted to CS, or something in typical female upbringing does. A followup question is whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. The author argues that women who avoid CS are actually making a good career decision. Either way, it doesn't say anything about the abilities or interests of any particular person.
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I managed to track down more information on that paper. It had some very interesting results. The non-traditional gender role group outperformed both males and females from the traditional gender role group (The men still outperformed but just within the margin of error). It doesn't have anything to do with curiosity though. They offered a quarter of a day's wage to put 4 puzzle pieces together which is a pretty high incentive I'd say.
Likewise it is a pretty large jump to form a conclusion that spatial abi
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A single study is "good evidence" because it finds interesting correlations beyond the dozens if not hundreds of studies that find gender differences in spatial ability, which you call "very little evidence". As if the "spatial ability" measured is the same as being "'curious' about systems".
Who is actually fishing for data to fit the narrative here?
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Re: Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
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? What gives you or anybody else the right to mess with their nurture and education just so they meet your arbitrary criteria of equality?
Re: Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
Re: Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking of lucrative career paths (and CS isn't much these days), I'm reminded of my days on campus seeing the groups of female nursing students wandering around the health science building. How do you think it would be for a man trying to fit in that program socially? It wouldn't be easy, but of course some men who really do feel the calling stick it through and end up in nursing. And they only number about 20%. And you know what? There's no problem with that. Men aren't being "denied lucrative careers" in nursing.
It's telling that you only hear this huge outcry when it's a deficit of females in a field, but not a deficit of males. It's a case of PC progressed to its awful conclusion - where it's so baked into peoples' subconscious that they don't even realize they are succumbing to the forces of irrational thought. The hyper-militant feminists (misandrists maybe?) who have brought this drivel into the public consciousness bring shame to the real feminist trailblazers who fought for women's rights in the 1920s-1970s. We have moved beyond providing an equal opportunity to all people, to trying to force an equal outcome for everyone with perverse incentives like affirmative action. I have hope tide of history will wash this stain away, and we can simply get back to appreciating who we are as people, and where we choose to go in our lives.
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It may or may not be true that women don't go into CS because of social factors, but you're making another assumption, one that is the primary focus of the article. Does CS lead to "lucrative, high-benefit career paths?" The author argues, with some quantitative evidence to support him, that female enrolment in CS follows economic factors. Programming jobs do tend to be short on job security and long on pressure, overtime and stress. There seems to be a lot of pressure to push women into "lucrative" care
Re: Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
You are looking at it backwards. The problem is not trying to force more women into careers they don't want, it's trying to stop them being put off having careers that they do want.
It can't be biological or genetic because back in the 80s a far greater percentage of CS grads were women. Even in the 90s we were doing a lot better than we are now. The time scale is too short for evolution to have altered biology or genetics in the population... So either it's some kind of chemical/environmental problem, which would be pretty alarming, or it's social.
Re: Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should it be social? A testosterone infused .com boom, not social. A aggressive venture capital driven web 2.0 scene, not social.
My experience with many young and male only teams, they degrade into brogrammers, with all the social ills. When banter and one-up-manship are the daily routine, only few want to participate. These few tend to be young, male and have something to prove.
This situation is not prevalent in the industry, especially with an R&D department integrated into larger companies. But these these "new and hip" companies, where such bad behavior may thrive, are what people tend to see. I can understand when people, including women do not want to participate, if they perceive that the industry is like this.
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A testosterone infused .com boom, not social. A aggressive venture capital driven web 2.0 scene, not social.
I don't think you know what "social" means in this context.
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Those gender norms are really societal constructions. When women get bombarded by subtle messages every day growing up about what will make them happy and what are presumed to be appropriate values, concerns, toys, goals, etc. then we can hardly expect anything else.
Gender stereotyping is a massive aspect of where women end up going. Same with boys.
Those who aren't comfortable with non-stereotypical gender roles like to argue this is nature, but it isn't (at least 95%), it is nurture (education and advertis
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
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No matter what you try and railroad your kids into they'll eventually find their own path.
The vast amount of media and advertising and social pressure they are bombarded with is far more influential than you are.
You also have to remember that children think differently. If a toy shop has a girl's section they don't question what makes the toys in it girl's toys or if they would prefer the toys from the boy's section. Same with advertising. If dolls are only ever shown being played with by girls then young boys will assume that is just how the world is and do the things that they see other boys (
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Re:The difference between boys and girls (Score:5, Informative)
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).
It isn't gender differences (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
You don't think students research the careers they're spending tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare for?
The problem starts much earlier. Girls start losing interest in STEM topics at a much younger age.
Given the other poster's accurate observations, why should they want to have interest in STEM topics? Should they not have the choice to avoid STEM if they don't want a career in it?
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Very little of what you listed would be something that a freshman entering CS would be exposed to or have any knowledge of.
Really? When I was choosing a university course I was aware that certain fields, such as video game programmer, were a massive slog and regular "crunch times". At the time I kind of relished it, even though now that seems like stupid youthful bravado.
I agree that the problems do start earlier, but there is plenty of evidence that even those who do get as far as finishing a CS degree often drop out of the industry after a few years because of the conditions, so it's a case of loss at all points along the lin
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Who is pushing women out of the CS field? There are obviously a lack of women entering the field (for any of the meriad of reasons posted in this thread), but in my 20+ year experience in the field I have never experience an environment where women are pushed out. If anything they are championed because of their differences and often treated with kid gloves.
In my current office a majority of the women have risen above the rank and file. Whether it's due to talent (in my opinion it is, as most do seem to be
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Doesn't seem to stop feminists from negatively generalizing and stereotyping men while they bitch about being generalized and stereotyped. Also, it's been shown that even as infants, boys are more interested in the things around them while girls respond more to people's faces. This is NOT just social programming.
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem here is not the skewed gender-relationship, the problem is that observable facts collide with feminist theory and hence some evil plot must be the reason. Guess what, it is not.
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Guess what, it is not.
It is when it works to discourage women who do not fit the stereotypes, and there are many who do not, from entering fields they could excel in. There are plenty of women who love math, science, computers etc. and aren't into nursing and making babies. The generalizations coming from the GP are only useful for mapping trends over an entire group and should not be used as a blanket way to treat all individuals.
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There are actually not that many women that love math, science, computers etc. I met a few and they all said that it was no problem for them to become Mathematicians, EEs, Computer Scientists, etc. The thing here is that I have yet to see any credible evidence that women that are good at STEM subjects are somehow "discouraged" or "prevented" from going into these fields for any gender-related reasons in significant numbers. Lets face it, there are few men good at these things and fewer women. Typically they
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Ignore the peer revied data that is easily available and quite clearly shows a number of artificial cultural barriers to women in Computer Science because you have not "seen" it (Argument from Personal Incredulity Logical Fallacy).
2. Proceed to base your conclusions on your own anecdotes rather than the copious amounts of scientific research that have actually been done on this subject (hasty generalization logical fallacy)
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean feminist peer reviewed data gotten from skewered studies? The only institutions involved here are already heavily influenced by feminists. I hardly call that science. Would you buy anything taken from a book called "The Faith and Science Reader"? Probably not. There actually is a book called "The Gender and Science Reader" which provides a "comprehensive feminist analysis of the nature and practice of science." They cherry pick facts that fit their ideological precepts and then mix it in with their bullshit. There's a phrase for this: science fiction.
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So you are rejecting the study, without offering any contrary studies or detailed analysis of your own, simply because you dislike the source? It's a classic ad-hominem attack. If you have an argument, make it with evidence and reasoning.
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:4, Insightful)
The "peer reviewed data" does not fit observable facts. There is rather good evidence that it produced desired results rather than accurate ones. And as to "peer review", I know exactly how low the quality of that can get, while you seem to be unaware of it.
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Interesting)
Even worse you can see the gender difference in monkeys. Put more clearly monkeys who have *NEVER* seen a toy in their life will exhibit classical gender differences when presented with a mix of wheeled toys and dolls.
That should put paid to any notions that it is down to cultural barriers.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie... [bbc.co.uk]
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Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:4, Insightful)
That is true. Another day, another feminism thread, another time for me to wheel out a recent anecdote.
My neice is 4. Both her parents have PhDs. Her father (my brother) would like nothing more for her to be a physicist (actually this puts a who lot of inappropriate pressure on, but that's a rant for another day). A few months ago she declared "girls can't do physics". Where the hell did that come from?
Who knows? But out there there, there is still a vast, continuous low-level pressure against women doing these sorts of things. Anyone who tries to deny it basically has their head in the sand or shoved vey firmly somewhere else. The socialisation starts very early (not all parents are enlightened) and is spreads via peer pressure, which is an immensely influential thing.
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:4, Interesting)
We've been asking this question for decades. We have some ideas and some answers, but aren't satisfied. Political Correctness makes it harder to check some ideas out. It's also just a plain hard question.
Yes, there are gender expectations that work against women going into engineering. But there could also be innate differences in our brains which bear some responsibility for the gender gap. It's not PC to suggest that, but not being PC doesn't make the idea untrue. And that's where we run into a lot of trouble. Testing hypotheses about high level thinking is very difficult. We have good progress on understanding small, more deterministic parts of our brains, like our vision system, but it is very hard to answer why people choose or reject an option that has no obvious advantage or disadvantage, an option that isn't clear cut, that isn't a choice between two chess moves, one of which immediately loses the game.
The article suggests that women are put off of CS by the boom and bust nature of employment in the field. There are a lot of parts to that notion. Are women more risk adverse than men on employment prospects? Is software engineering such an uncertain career path? When choosing a subject to study, do people think first and foremost of where the most and "best" jobs are, or do they try to discover what subjects they like on the idea that having passion for a subject makes one better at it, and therefore more employable? Or, employment opportunities being as arbitrary as they are, do people say the heck with trying to figure that out and merely try to find something they love and do that? In any case, often what matters is having a college degree. If it's not in a field that's in high demand, like STEM is supposed to be if the screams from employers are to be believed (take cries for more STEM workers and H1B visas and all with large grains of salt), then the particular field may not much matter. Lot of people end up working in fields that have nothing to do with their degrees.
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:4, Insightful)
But there could also be innate differences in our brains which bear some responsibility for the gender gap.
There may be some innate difference, but no innate difference is going to make a 4 year old declare that girls can't do physics. A 4 year old doesn't even know what physics is!
If we can eliminate social pressures, then what remains will be the result of innate gender difference, and that will be fine.
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is when it works to discourage women who do not fit the stereotypes, and there are many who do not, from entering fields they could excel in
It's OK to be weird.
Every fucking geek my age is weird. All of us were "discouraged", women and men alike, and as a result are quite welcoming to any who make it through.
I sure hope we're past the days where being into formal logic/math/whatever automatically made you the target for bullying (or at least that it's a bit better now), but life includes obstacles! If children are afraid to do what they like, when it leads to a well-paying career (the top career outside politics in many nations), maybe the problem isn't that their slightly discouraged by the culture. Maybe the problem is we're not raising kids with the strength of character to overcome adversity.
Life will have "discouragements" and setbacks of various sorts. That's just how life works. Don't let it stop you!
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:4, Insightful)
And that is exactly the problem. Men are constantly told they're privileged and to stop whining and suck it up. Women are constantly told they're oppressed and everything is an earthshattering act of victimization.
Fearmongering and disempowerment rhetoric are what keep women out of CS... which is only 10% of conferred degrees, while women as a whole earn a little under 2/3rds of all degrees including a majority of STEM fields.
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Google is not a peer-reviewed study.
I would ask you to post the best study showing:
1) Women are naturally less capable of competing against men in the CS field because of physiological differences between men and women.
Strawman - no one said anything about capability. The common (scientific) consensus is that women are motivated by different things to men. It's not lack of capability that results in skewed numbers, it's lack of motivation to spend more time with machines than with humans.
Oh yeah, one more thing - all those peer-reviewed studies you've been mentioning? Citation needed. All the science studies ones I could find point to different motivational factors for men and women irrespective of fields.
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
Studies showing that, "women are motivated by different things to men [sic]," is not logically equivalent to your claim that, " physiological differences naturally make women less inclined in going into a STEM field." You are moving the goalposts.
Are you seriously too lazy to even see who made the original claim? I made no such claim.
Without even going to the peer reviewed analysis, let us look at the raw data.
That's not what you claimed - you claimed the existence of peer reviewed studies backing up your point, I asked for a citation. Instead of posting a single line citation you post a multi-paragraph explanation of why a citation isn't needed. You do more damage to your own argument than I could ever do.
Just FYI, before you make any more stupid claims to scientists about what we think, here is what peer-reviewed studies look like (and these are all in support of my argument that males and females have different motivations):
Significant difference in motivation between sexes [google.com],
Motivation difference in sex responsible for differing levels of performance [google.com],
Motivation primarily responsible for differences in performance in the sciences [google.com],
In fact, amongst scientists this is already well-known, you can find literally hundreds of peer-reviewed properly done and replicated studies that show that:
a) Women and men are mostly equally capable at all cognitive tasks, and
b) Women and men are almost always motivated by different things, and
c) Motivation is the primary indicator of performance in scientific fields.
Here, check for yourself [google.com]
The problem, in my not so fucking humble scientist opinion, is that people like you don't have a clue about all the research that exists because:
a) You aren't scientists, you don't want to be scientists and it's too much work to think like one,
b) You have a different agenda to push, and common scientific knowledge like I posted above goes against what you feel should be correct, so you ignore it when you find it, just like you will ignore the above research (and the hundreds of papers that deal with this).
number of good papers and studies, so you can use the bibliography as a starting point.
Eric S. Roberts, Marina Kassianidou, and Lilly Irani. 2002. Encouraging women in computer science. SIGCSE Bull. 34, 2 (June 2002), 84-88.
That paper, which I've already read BTW, doesn't add to your argument in any way. In fact, quote the section that you *think* adds to your argument from that paper. There is not mention of artificial barriers, only strategies of increasing female representation - in fact, that's what the entire paper is about: how to increase female representation. Unluckily for
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There is a difference between American women being more interested in perusing a field and women in general being "naturally" more interested in a field. For women to be naturally less interested in it would imply that they are born with some kind of physiological difference that makes them less likely to decide to pursue the field.
If I were to say that women are naturally more interested in nursing children than men, I think I could back it up with some pretty good data (mainly the fact that most men cann
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't agree with the parent, you need to watch this documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Interesting)
It did make the guys who professed that biology had nothing to do with it look a bit like closed minded idiots, but that was mostly their own fault. With the two that were shown the studies contrasting their views starting to call the studies weak, and almost name calling.
The video alluded to many studies that proved that biology had something to do with it, but only really went into details with two of them, and those looked to be one off studies. If they had been repeated by other scientists then I would give them more weight.
The video was a bit bias in its selection on who to present. The 'biology has nothing to do with it' looked to be young and barely out of post grad and wanting to make a name for themselves. They also seemed defensive and emotionally invested in their views. The ones on the other side of the debate were older, and looking to be more established. This gave the 'there's a biological link' a more credible appearance.
Personally I'm with the guy who said that you can't ignore biology and you can't ignore culture. That's also known as the grey fallacy, but when you're trying to find the root cause of something like this you can't cut out one side of the argument, even if its bee proven wrong. You have to continue to prove it wrong with hard facts and understanding, and each time you do you promote more understanding of what the issue is.
The video was also nice in that it pointed out, it was only the scientists form the culture is everything camp that discounted the biological portion of it. The scientists from the biology is important camp didn't say that culture wasn't important.
Re:Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
Any reason given for the low rate of women in C.S. must explain why the trend shifted around the mid 1980s.
Re: Boys are naturally curious... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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That would definitely be an interesting study. Sample size of one and all, but I can answer this for my wife:
met a certain SAT/ACT threshold, with a higher threshold in math, and who also took at least one C.S. or Calculus course in high school.
She'd exceed any standard that you set. She was her high school valedictorian, got a 5 on the AP BC Calc exam. She slayed anything you put in front of her, academically. She was the one that you did not want to have in your class if it was graded on a curve.
take the subset of the women from this set who did not earn a C.S., Math, Engineering or Physics degree, and ask them why they didn't pursue one of those fields.
Because she was busy taking chemistry courses in preparation for med school and she despised computer programming. About midway through college,
Because women aren't stupid? (Score:4, Insightful)
That sounds about right. Why would you bet your career on something that is increasingly being viewed as a blue-collar profession?
Re:Because women aren't stupid? (Score:4, Insightful)
And falsely so. The reason there is so much bad software out there is that most people producing it do have neither the aptitude nor the passion for it. We definitely have far to many people in IT that have no business being there.
I agree on the "view" though. Quite a few companies, among them well-known names, will fail in the next few years because they do not value solid engineering anymore, but regard engineers as somehow sub-human.
Re: (Score:3)
Only because tech managers and teachers have failed to properly impress upon young engineers the importance of doing that stuff.
I'm a pretty passionate coder. I find unit tests to be downright tedious, and if I'm doing something as a favor for someone and not getting paid to do it, you can safe
Congrats guys (Score:4, Insightful)
Univ of IL CS Undergrad Demographics, 1984 v. 2014 (Score:3)
Comparison of the demographics of undergrad CS majors [staticflickr.com] at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1984 and 2014.
Here's a Thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Multiple researchers have tried doing this. The problem is doing it after the fact... who at age 30 can tell you why they *didn't* do something at age 8 or 16? The answers come back mushy, like it just didn't seem interesting or "not my kind of thing". That doesn't get to the question of what about it turned them off. And something must be turning them off (or turning them on to something else) because there are also studies showing girls who do get exposure younger are just as adept at programming as the b
Re:Here's a Thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
Has anyone, you know, *asked* women why they don't go into CS?
When the last story came out, a friend of mine posted it and called it [effectively] bullshit. She said she went into computers despite it being a social death sentence at the time (she would have been the target age when those ads were running). Programming a computer was high geekery and something only a true nerd would take on.
She credits (hold on to your hats, Slashdot) - Bill Gates with making computers cool. Because he was well-known, a complete nerd, and, oh, a multi-billionaire. That last part has some sway with the popular culture still. Jobs may have made Apple cool again, but she sees the swing before that.
Anyway, her point was that her generation of girls avoided computers like the plague because they cared about social standing, by in large, more than males did. Certainly many males did too, but more males didn't care than females didn't care.
I think you have to go back a few hundred million years to find a point where some percentage of adolescent male primates didn't stray from the social group in larger numbers than the females. Blame the culture, I guess, and maybe the marketing people reinforced it, but I don't think those ads were largely seen outside of the target groups anyhow.
People will go on about popular culture promoting boys in computing, but - come on, Wyatt and Gary weren't the center of their social order - they were nearly outcasts before they made Lisa. More girls heard "only freaks use computers" while more males heard "you can have a lot of fun with computers". But, yeah, we should ignore any biological basis and probably shame the chimps for their social orders while we're at it.
Re:Here's a Thought... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, and one of the foremost women in Linux wrote an article about it once: http://www.linuxjournal.com/co... [linuxjournal.com]
This is total BS (Score:3)
My #1 complaint about that BS article every time I see it pop up is this: there is a few false assumptions in it. Firstly, "Computer Science" isn't the ONLY school route to teach computer programming. It is also offered under the label of "Information Technology", or as elective classes under other fields such as "Network Administration" or "Database Administration" - And the other assumption is that SCHOOLING is the only way to learn things. Pretty sure just about everyone here on Slashdot can easily agree that they've learned a hell of a lot more tech either on the job or on their own than they could have ever imagined learning in a classroom environment.
Makes no sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Rational? I don't think you understand. It's harder to make a sarcastic point when you don't understand. You are right, that " the problem is not that simple."
Practical is the word that keeps coming up, and it fits much better than rational.
The trends, right there in one of the hundred or so links, show that enrollment goes up for women when the job market looks good, and down when it looks bad. Not grossly, but enough to satisfy numbers people. If it were just avoidance because of a possible job marke
still need to know... (Score:3)
Apple's Ellen Feis Ad: Worse Than Targeting Boys? (Score:3)
If you were trying to discourage girls from trying to program computers, you'd be hard-pressed to top Apple's famous Ellen Feis 'Switch' ad [youtube.com] (2002 Slashdot discussion [slashdot.org]). Btw, by introducing 'The Computer for The Rest of Us' in 1984 without a viable hobbyist programming language [folklore.org], Steve Jobs and Bill Gates no doubt helped discourage both girls and boys from studying CS, even if BillG is trying to make amends now [code.org].
Men like these jobs. Women don't. (Score:4, Insightful)
That is all this study confirms. Because men are willing to get into things that might not be the best financial move. If women only go into it if there is a lot of money then they're showing up for the money... not the coding.
This confirms what has been established many times already. Men and women get job satisfaction out of different things.
There are jobs women will go into that don't pay as well as other options because they find them personally rewarding.
Men are the same way. But they find different things rewarding.
Shocker... humans are sexually dimorphic. Any biologist or anthropologist or medical professional could tell you this in a heartbeat.
The gender studies academics have their heads so far up their own asses on so many issues. We're sexually dimorphic. Get over it.
My experience... (Score:3)
...was that absolutely CS is like many professions a labor of love, you follow what interests you.
And 100% of the girls in high school - even the ones that were brilliant in science and math - had far, far better things to do with their spare time than to fuck around with a computer in mom's basement or dad's attic.
"women are more practical than men" (Score:5, Funny)
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
Has anyone actually asked the drop-out girls? (Score:3)
I have seen quite a few hand-wringing and postulative articles about why there are not more women in programming or general IT disciplines, and why the ratios of men to women in CS courses widen so much as they progress.
One thing I have not seen in any of those articles is a report on any attempts to reach out to those girls/women and the boys/men who dropped out of CS courses to switch to other options, about why they chose to switch. It seems such an obvious choice that I am sure it must have been done at some point, except that nobody seems to want to mention the results.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
First off (Score:3)
If it is true, is the over- riding reason that gender imbalance is due to men doing things that discourage women from entering those professions?
The "reasons" we hear, that we stopped advertising to women, therefore discouraging them, must mean that we got what we wanted in computer programming, shy and socially awkward males.
If the "reasons" are that these males are sexist pigs and they harass women, of which the "dongle" incident is the biggest example, how do we reconcile the two?
Even if we don't reconcile it, the reasons start to sound more like excuses than verifiable actual causes.
Moreover, why is it possible to discourage women so easily? I can only say as a sample of one, that I have worked around some disagreeable women, yet they have no more influenced my career choice than the wonderful women I have worked with. I just accept it as different people being different, and no mean person is responsible for my career choices, only me.
The most discouraging aspect of this entire discussion is that once you buy into the premise that women are discouraged by advertising, or by guys making "dongle jokes", you are saying women are inherently weaker than men, because they give up easily, and are influenced away from science and tech careers by advertising. I've heard women in the workplace make many off color jokes, and just figured it's what people do at times. It's just people
Do we really want to say that women don't have the ability to stick to what they want to do, and are turned away by what are actually trivial things?
Re:Geez-Louise! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Geez-Louise! (Score:4, Insightful)
Incidentally, "Because only an idiot would invest a lot of money and effort into getting trained for a job that's going offshore to the cheapest bidder" is no less a personal perception than "because IT is loaded with pigs". But it, too, deserves a scientific analysis, not just blind assumptions.
In particular, is such a viewpoint actually more common in women than men, and in proportion to the percentages of men and women seeking IT careers? If so, a hypothesis may be formed AND TESTED. If not, other factors should be considered until something is found that fits. Not by asking loaded questions or "push polls", but by sampling data in ways designed as much as possible to eliminate bias both oh the parts of the interviewer and interviewees.
And, should it prove demonstrable that women are simply less idiot enough to pursue careers in fields where the long-term prospects aren't appealing, we may just have to accept the fact that women may simply be inclined to be more pragmatic. Because men and women aren't the same, regardless of what some people would assert. Any more than that they're the same except when men are inferior. They're simply different, and the differences vary from person to person and are only similar in statistical masses.
Re:Geez-Louise! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Geez-Louise! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Burn the witch burn the witch (Score:3, Interesting)
As a middle-aged white male that's been in I.T. my whole life, having dealt with the globalization of I.T. services, not to mention the wage-supression of our industry being settled within the court system, lately there's seems to be a new threat. People like me are actively discriminated against, in favor of women and minorities. I haven't knowingly experienced it first-hand, but it is impossible to tell. I read HR text all the time explaining how women and minorities are preferred candidates and are encou
Re:Burn the witch burn the witch (Score:4, Insightful)
Job postings are evidence, moron.
However, I think in at least some cases, the active recruiting of women and minorities is not just about meeting quotas, but about busting up cliques.
Re:They're better off avoiding CS (Score:4, Interesting)
I work in an environment where most of IT is outsourced to India-based corporation. My casual observation is that there are many more young females from India in our IT group than Anglo-Americans. I've also noted the same with computer courses - that there are many more Asian women (South Asian and East Asian) relative to their male counterparts than there are Anglo Americans.
I suspect that Asian societies do not view computer work as primarily male-oriented work, and that talented women are encouraged to work in the field.
Among the Anglo-Americans, many of the IT focused women are in their 50's and 60's, having entered the field when mainframes were predominant and hence when computing was viewed as less of a male domain.
Re:Honestly, who gives a fuck? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re: (Score:3)
I'll grant you that this specific article was way too simplistic, but:
All of the people who rely solely on NPR for their news are misinformed.
You're way off with that one. Source: http://www.poynter.org/latest-... [poynter.org]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
the question of misogyny aside, you have to admit that that 'females in CS' is kind of
an odd goal in and of itself.
what about something a little more understandable, like maximum creative output of
human capitol. or maximizing people's satisfaction in what they do every day?
in those terms whether or not half of the population in the western world takes up
one highly self-important profession isn't really a high order bit.
sure cs is hostile towards women, its basically hostile towards everyone. rightfully
seen
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, "more women in computer science" is an odd goal in and of itself. However, if women are somehow discouraged from programming, that means (a) they're being excluded from a rather high-paying profession, and (b) we're getting less programming talent out of our population than we should. If a woman would be happy programming, and is pushed away, then we're not maximizing the creative output of human capital, and we're not maximizing people's satisfaction in what they do every day. We have reason to th
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, bullshit. GamerGate isn't pushing anyone out of tech, it's fighting back against game journalists that are promoting their friends and political ideals instead of just covering games like you'd think they would as game journalists.
In any case, none of the women that "GamerGate" has attacked are techies. Two are "game designers" who've designed non-games that barely fit into the "shovelware" category, and two are journalists. In all cases, they're pushing a feminist, socialist agenda into a space where i
Re: (Score:3)
Oh, bullshit. GamerGate isn't pushing anyone out of tech, it's fighting back against game journalists that are promoting their friends and political ideals instead of just covering games like you'd think they would as game journalists.
Except that everything that was claimed about games journalism in relation to the women involved turned out to be lies. Lies that were repeated over and over again, along with increasingly vicious attacks and threats against them.
The very clear message being put out by GamerGate is that women are not welcome in the gamer community. Women who do try to participate will be subjected extended campaigns of lies and outright hatred, including doxing and death threats. These campaigns go on for years and are seem
Re: (Score:3)
GamerGate is just a movement with pretty much no organization whatsoever, with an overall unclear goal
No: it has a clear goal. It's the personal army of a colossal douchebag who got dumped and then spammed an 8000 word rant about it all over the internet.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Fuck off with your ignorance. Women are being pushed out of tech - look at GamerGate.
None of the "victims" in gamergate were techies, you idiot. You want more women like them in IT? More non-techies in information technology? What would they do here?
Re:Honestly, who gives a fuck? (Score:5, Interesting)
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" [twinery.org] (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.
Re:Honestly, who gives a fuck? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I give a fuck, actually. I'd like a wife. I'd like her to be a colleague. I'd like to think I'm not the only one.
Then become a nurse.
Re:This is an easy one ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Consider the possibility that women just aren't interested.
Yes, but why? It might lead to some insights about ourselves and the field itself.
Could it be something biological, as politically incorrect as that might be? Autism for example, is much more prevalent in males than females: "ASD is almost 5 times more common among boys (1 in 42) than among girls (1 in 189)." [3rd bullet point from top] [cdc.gov]
So it seems like there are brain differences between males and females, when viewed as a group. And the brain creates personality.
If the reason is purely sociological, we can fix that and open the field to women. If the reason is in fact biological, we can stop trying to hammer square pegs into round holes.
Re: (Score:3)
I don't think this really gets to the problem though. The majority of IT folk aren't actually weighted towards Autism. Women I've known in and out of the industry have no more or less an ability to grasp the concepts than men.
Personally I think the problem is that the majority of people in CS are male. Why don't more women apply... because they see a subject dominated by men. And the reasons they don't get into it or get pushed towards it from a young age are the same. It's a feedback look that seems very h
Re: (Score:3)
Only it wasn't. Admiral Grace Hopper wasn't doing the "men's work" of commanding a vessel, she was doing the "women's work" of programming, analysis, and such - just like the women in Bletchley Park and similar of the same generation.
If it was considered "men's work" I doubt the Navy would have employed her in that role.
Face it, we work indoors, at keyboards, dealing with what is almost always very simple mathematics, rarely even simple calculu