2 ms·

Not that I know of. I think there's a lot of stigma on both sides. There may be stigma against women in chat rooms like this one, and women may have a stigma

Not that I know of. I think there's a lot of stigma on both sides. There may be stigma against women in chat rooms like this one, and women may have a stigma against becoming hackers. These are just hypotheses, of course, and by no means do they apply to all hackers or all women. They're just general trends I've heard cited. That being said, the ratio of girl haxxors to guy haxxors in my dorm seems to be getting better. It's like 1:4 where it used to be 1:7. Another problem is that hacking is not very glamorous.

pchristensen 19y ago
1:4!!! That's got to be a record. When I was in school, there were 4 girls in my entire year of CS. They were all TAs, and you know what? They were the best TAs.
pius 19y ago
One thing I really liked about MIT was that there were plenty of women studying computer science. It seemed as if the ratio were around 50/50.
- aston 19y ago
  50/50 for MIT at large. Nowhere near that in Course VI, though.
manvsmachine 19y ago
It's definitely a bit of a mental block. A lot of girls who would love to be able to do things requiring hacking skills, but they don't want to actually have to learn the foundational stuff, i.e, Data Structures/systems programming. They want to be able to jump from the intro-level courses straight to bioinformatics or graphics/multimedia courses, not because they think it's too hard, but because they almost feel like it's going to do something to them as a person. "Yesterday, I gave a talk to our new cohort of Computational Media undergraduates about the CS classes that they will be taking. One student asked me about 3-D modeling, and I told him about our computer graphics classes. Then a young lady asked me a question that bowled me over, "If we don't take computer graphics and we get a Computational Media degree, is all that we can do is become programmers?" The last word just dripped with disdain, as if that was a mid-level in Dante's vision of hell." --Mark Guzdial
- asciilifeform 19y ago
  > The last word just dripped with disdain, as if that was a mid-level in Dante's vision of hell. That's dead-on. It is exactly that.

pchristensen 19y ago

1:4!!! That's got to be a record. When I was in school, there were 4 girls in my entire year of CS. They were all TAs, and you know what? They were the best TAs.

pius 19y ago

One thing I really liked about MIT was that there were plenty of women studying computer science. It seemed as if the ratio were around 50/50.

aston 19y ago
50/50 for MIT at large. Nowhere near that in Course VI, though.

manvsmachine 19y ago

It's definitely a bit of a mental block. A lot of girls who would love to be able to do things requiring hacking skills, but they don't want to actually have to learn the foundational stuff, i.e, Data Structures/systems programming. They want to be able to jump from the intro-level courses straight to bioinformatics or graphics/multimedia courses, not because they think it's too hard, but because they almost feel like it's going to do something to them as a person. "Yesterday, I gave a talk to our new cohort of Computational Media undergraduates about the CS classes that they will be taking. One student asked me about 3-D modeling, and I told him about our computer graphics classes. Then a young lady asked me a question that bowled me over, "If we don't take computer graphics and we get a Computational Media degree, is all that we can do is become programmers?" The last word just dripped with disdain, as if that was a mid-level in Dante's vision of hell." --Mark Guzdial

asciilifeform 19y ago
> The last word just dripped with disdain, as if that was a mid-level in Dante's vision of hell. That's dead-on. It is exactly that.