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Are there any good sources that analyze the causes exodus of women from computer science? To solve these kinds of problems it would be helpful to learn the cau

Are there any good sources that analyze the causes exodus of women from computer science? To solve these kinds of problems it would be helpful to learn the cause of the change.

geofft 10y ago
Here's a survey paper with a bunch of citations: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1soIYek-YEIvqtu9brv3ecdPbuVzQKp_GhAozC06UrLo/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1soIYek-YEIvqtu9brv3ecdPb...
sanjeetsuhag 10y ago
I recommend reading "Unlocking the Clubhouse : Women in Computing" by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher. A good NPR story on this topic : http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/07/22/487069271/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/07/22/487069271/episo... TL;DR: It was the rise of the personal computer. Boys got more access to personal computers thereby allowing them to get farther in the field.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  It's a big ole pile of petitio principii from what I can tell - the reason women didn't continue to enter and prosper in the field of computing (as the narrative goes) is because the field was dominated by men: >"Because if you're in a culture that is so infused with this belief that men are just better at this and they fit in better, a lot can shake your confidence." (Margolis, ibid) // Hang on though, the main premise of the piece was that women were most dominant in the field and excelled [beyond the men?]. From personal experience I don't buy the narrative of computers being chosen to be "boys toys" as a move to exclude women, instead it strikes me boys chose computers, instead say of other things - like a social life. But that's maybe because the [apparent] anecdata they have contradicts my own experience, that my mother bought our computer, that it was in a common room and that my sister completely ignored it. At primary school (UK, 1980s) all the kids were given equal time on the BBC microcomputer during lessons, but it was primarily the boys who chose to stay in at break times and after school to use it. At high-school I was inspired by our IT teacher [female] as were others but AFAIR 90% of those staying to use the computers outside directed lessons were still boys. That link actual goes as far as promoting the idea that boys were given computers and girls were physically restrained from accessing them [based on an anecdote]; to me that sounds like a misconstrual of the situation where boys asked for computers as gifts and so had them in their bedrooms - I can only assume that happened for some girls too. If I'm wrong then nonetheless I don't think you can argue any similar narrative now, for the Western working and middle classes at least - if you have access to a smart-phone or a school/library computer you have all you need to excel at computer science; that surely eliminates any element of exclusion by sex from the field. [+] In this connected digital world where no-one knows online if you're even human [woof!] the premise of male suppression in the proposed narrative would be defeated and a massive up-tick would be expected, but instead the graph shows a fall [in percentages] as the web has grown. In short I don't buy that the ratio of the sexes in computing and tech is skewed by a global male conspiracy to suppress women as a realistic explanation. [Aside, do you know of the study that they refer to in your citation, the results and anecdotes are mentioned but without citation?] tl;dr see [+]
  - tptacek 10y ago
    Since pretty much nobody believes that there's a "global male conspiracy" afoot, rejecting that claim doesn't make your argument very persuasive. Obviously, there could be a number of different reasons why a field could be unfairly skewed against women, many of which require very little intentionality.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
zigzigzag 10y ago
There have been plenty of such studies. There is no "exodus", the industry has been dominated by men for a long time. It doesn't change because at each stage of the educational pipeline where women could make a choice that takes them towards software/hardware, a chunk of them drop out, until you get the ratios in the job you get today which are more or less similar to the ratios that graduate with CS degrees. They drop out partly because, inconvenient though it is to admit this, they tend to get discouraged more easily. There are stats showing that women stop searching for software jobs after X rejections, men after Y (on average), and that Y > X. Google found that women were getting promoted less than men simply because they weren't putting themselves forward for promotion as often. That pattern crops up again and again - women hold back when they could push forward.
- azernik 10y ago
  That is not an accurate representation of the research. See this public summary of a (sadly, paywalled) HBR paper on the subject [https://hbr.org/2016/08/why-do-so-many-women-who-study-engineering-leave-the-field https://hbr.org/2016/08/why-do-so-many-women-who-study-engin...]. At every stage of the educational pipeline, a chunk of women do indeed drop out. The cause, however, is often an encounter with sexist culture along the way. The subject of insecurity does come up: > Throughout college, men and women succeeded equally in the classroom. However, we observed that women started to doubt their problem-solving abilities more than men. [...skipping long illustrating quote]. Women were also much more likely to look to others—teaching assistants, professors, and advisors—to affirm, and reaffirm, their confidence. Men did talk about doubting themselves, but they did not necessarily seek reassurance from others. We found that this search for positive cues carried over into expectations for feedback from supervisors in internships and jobs." However, it is not at all the only phenomenon at play. More discouraging is the gendered treatment they receive from professors and, more importantly, colleagues. > For many women engineering students, however, their first encounter with collaboration is to be treated in gender stereotypical ways, mostly by their peers. While some initially described working in teams positively, many more reported negative experiences. When working with male classmates, for example, they often spoke of being relegated to doing routine managerial and secretarial jobs, and of being excluded from the “real” engineering work. Kimberly wrote, “Two girls in a group had been working on the robot we were building in that class for hours, and the guys in their group came back in and within minutes had sentenced them to doing menial tasks while the guys went and had all the fun in the machine shop.” > There were also descriptions of being treated differently by professors. Rachel described when her team (the only all-girl team) won second place in a design competition: “Our professor wanted to get a picture of our prototype and us. We picked up our prototype and were all smiling and looking all professional; then he said: ‘You guys look like professional catalog models; this picture could go in a catalog and you could sell big time.’” > Men, on the other hand, described mandatory group design projects as exciting turning points, where theory and practice come together. “I made a pretty big stroke of progress last week,” one student wrote in his semi-monthly diary, “I ended up proving the professor wrong on something she had done last year, which actually helped us find better results (well, also more correct results)… It’s really a blast working on something like that.” Anyway, there are more quotes available, if you want to look at it yourself. Note also that there is one other factor they address that isn't related to sexism in the field (but perhaps to broader sexist acculturation in society) - women are more likely to want to work somewhere that is "contributing to society". Part of what's going on here is that it's not considered quite as socially acceptable for women to be ambitious for ambition's sake, at least not in the way that it is for men. But I don't think that's something that the engineering culture enforces, I think that's something that's internalized.
brennen 10y ago
I don't mean this to sound overly harsh, but I think treating this situation as some sort of mystery is part of the problem. All that one really needs to do to understand why the field is unwelcoming to women is to start listening to women.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  During the Cold War, if one showed up in one of the weedout classes for EE, you got the "look to your left & right. One of you will not survive this process" lecture. EE was very seriously a defense discipline and the values-pyramid was feeding bodies into the Military Industrial Complex. I imagine that is part of it.
- sanjeetsuhag 10y ago
  The exodus of women from computing began in the 80s due to the rise of the personal computer. It wasn't because people weren't listening to women. Trivialization of women's issues is a different monster.
pjc50 10y ago
Like AA, first you have to admit you have a problem. (Not you personally, but there are plenty of people who claim it's just the natural order of things.) The profession does not conduct exit interviews, but fortunately every few weeks someone will write a blog post on why they (a women) left computer science. These articles may be posted to HN, where they often get a skeptical to hostile reception. Harrasment is the big one in the news (Uber passim), but there are all sorts of lessor problems which result in women's contributions being ignored or misattributed to men who are louder. (Astronomy is not immune to this problem, even if it might be better: http://www.nature.com/news/astronomy-roiled-again-by-sexual-harassment-allegations-1.19153 http://www.nature.com/news/astronomy-roiled-again-by-sexual-... )
- facepalm 10y ago
  Do men never leave computer science? Or do they just write less about it, or if they do, it receives less attention? For sure men are unhappy with their companies. Otherwise nobody would ever switch jobs. Also it should be considered that women have more career options than men. Since they spread out over more professions (including fulltime mum), it is to be expected that they are not 50% of people in all professions.
  - stale2002 10y ago
    Men do leave, but they leave much much less. All you have to do is look at incoming CS major undergrads vs finished degree CS undergrads, or you can look at any statistic at all along a women's career. Women are leaving in droves. We do not have a pipeline problem. We do not need to get more women in kindergarden interested in math. We have a toxic pipeline problem, when women are driven out of the industry.
    - azernik 10y ago
      Leaky pipeline? :-P
    - nielsabel 10y ago
      > we need to get more women in kindergarden interested in math. Why? What's the (supposed) benefit? I'd rather see general improvement on math lessons in school. Most of these lessons are boring, given by boring teacher. I'd be happy if people went out of school simply not hating math (they don't have to like) it. I find this to be much worthwile instead of pushing girls into math even though they might not be inherently interested in it. The problems in STEM (and science in general) won't be solved by quantity but by quality. (They definitely won't be solved by gender.)
maccard 10y ago
For one indication, look at the ratio of women to men graduating from STEM courses in universities. Even in school, the number of women taking STEM subjects is dwarfed by the number of men. While the issues another poster has mentioned (uber etc) I'm sure do not help the situation, it's still a huge problem even at school ages.
- tptacek 10y ago
  No, this claim is false for any reasonable definition of "STEM" and "dwarfed".
  - maccard 10y ago
    Seems it's a little more nuanced than this actually, sorry. The only numbers I could find were at [0] (I'm in the UK). At GCSE level (roughly aged 15/16) there's an equal split across STEM subjects. For A levels, there's more men than women in every STEM subject bar biology, and women achieve higher grades on average. At university level, men dominate in most of the subjects (engineering is 86% male and CS is 83% male). The problem stems far deeper than the workplace, and is definitely present in Educatikn. [0] https://www.wisecampaign.org.uk/uploads/wise/files/WISE_UK_Statistics_2014.pdf https://www.wisecampaign.org.uk/uploads/wise/files/WISE_UK_S...
    - tptacek 10y ago
      Only if by "most of the subjects" you mean "engineering and CS", which, along with physics, are the entire male bastion of science. Every other scientific field does far better, including pure math, chemistry, neuroscience, astronomy (as Pike notes in this piece), and molecular biology, where women make up (wait for it) over 50% of PhDs granted every year.
      - discombobulate 10y ago
        > Every other scientific field does far better It's not 'better' if some people are more interested in one field vs. others. You have to ignore biology to take your position of certainty. It's delutional. There's no certainty, even with something which is true. Most people prefer to hold on to an ideology or what sounds nice rather than taking ideas to their conclusion. All the long words you can muster don't save you from philosophical suicide. Why take the time to learn biases & logic if you're going to be an intellectual coward?

Are there any good sources that analyze the causes exodus of women from computer science? To solve these kinds of problems it would be helpful to learn the cause of the change.

geofft 10y ago

Here's a survey paper with a bunch of citations: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1soIYek-YEIvqtu9brv3ecdPbuVzQKp_GhAozC06UrLo/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1soIYek-YEIvqtu9brv3ecdPb...

sanjeetsuhag 10y ago

I recommend reading "Unlocking the Clubhouse : Women in Computing" by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher. A good NPR story on this topic : http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/07/22/487069271/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/07/22/487069271/episo... TL;DR: It was the rise of the personal computer. Boys got more access to personal computers thereby allowing them to get farther in the field.

pbhjpbhj 10y ago
It's a big ole pile of petitio principii from what I can tell - the reason women didn't continue to enter and prosper in the field of computing (as the narrative goes) is because the field was dominated by men: >"Because if you're in a culture that is so infused with this belief that men are just better at this and they fit in better, a lot can shake your confidence." (Margolis, ibid) // Hang on though, the main premise of the piece was that women were most dominant in the field and excelled [beyond the men?]. From personal experience I don't buy the narrative of computers being chosen to be "boys toys" as a move to exclude women, instead it strikes me boys chose computers, instead say of other things - like a social life. But that's maybe because the [apparent] anecdata they have contradicts my own experience, that my mother bought our computer, that it was in a common room and that my sister completely ignored it. At primary school (UK, 1980s) all the kids were given equal time on the BBC microcomputer during lessons, but it was primarily the boys who chose to stay in at break times and after school to use it. At high-school I was inspired by our IT teacher [female] as were others but AFAIR 90% of those staying to use the computers outside directed lessons were still boys. That link actual goes as far as promoting the idea that boys were given computers and girls were physically restrained from accessing them [based on an anecdote]; to me that sounds like a misconstrual of the situation where boys asked for computers as gifts and so had them in their bedrooms - I can only assume that happened for some girls too. If I'm wrong then nonetheless I don't think you can argue any similar narrative now, for the Western working and middle classes at least - if you have access to a smart-phone or a school/library computer you have all you need to excel at computer science; that surely eliminates any element of exclusion by sex from the field. [+] In this connected digital world where no-one knows online if you're even human [woof!] the premise of male suppression in the proposed narrative would be defeated and a massive up-tick would be expected, but instead the graph shows a fall [in percentages] as the web has grown. In short I don't buy that the ratio of the sexes in computing and tech is skewed by a global male conspiracy to suppress women as a realistic explanation. [Aside, do you know of the study that they refer to in your citation, the results and anecdotes are mentioned but without citation?] tl;dr see [+]
- tptacek 10y ago
  Since pretty much nobody believes that there's a "global male conspiracy" afoot, rejecting that claim doesn't make your argument very persuasive. Obviously, there could be a number of different reasons why a field could be unfairly skewed against women, many of which require very little intentionality.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

zigzigzag 10y ago

There have been plenty of such studies. There is no "exodus", the industry has been dominated by men for a long time. It doesn't change because at each stage of the educational pipeline where women could make a choice that takes them towards software/hardware, a chunk of them drop out, until you get the ratios in the job you get today which are more or less similar to the ratios that graduate with CS degrees. They drop out partly because, inconvenient though it is to admit this, they tend to get discouraged more easily. There are stats showing that women stop searching for software jobs after X rejections, men after Y (on average), and that Y > X. Google found that women were getting promoted less than men simply because they weren't putting themselves forward for promotion as often. That pattern crops up again and again - women hold back when they could push forward.

azernik 10y ago
That is not an accurate representation of the research. See this public summary of a (sadly, paywalled) HBR paper on the subject [https://hbr.org/2016/08/why-do-so-many-women-who-study-engineering-leave-the-field https://hbr.org/2016/08/why-do-so-many-women-who-study-engin...]. At every stage of the educational pipeline, a chunk of women do indeed drop out. The cause, however, is often an encounter with sexist culture along the way. The subject of insecurity does come up: > Throughout college, men and women succeeded equally in the classroom. However, we observed that women started to doubt their problem-solving abilities more than men. [...skipping long illustrating quote]. Women were also much more likely to look to others—teaching assistants, professors, and advisors—to affirm, and reaffirm, their confidence. Men did talk about doubting themselves, but they did not necessarily seek reassurance from others. We found that this search for positive cues carried over into expectations for feedback from supervisors in internships and jobs." However, it is not at all the only phenomenon at play. More discouraging is the gendered treatment they receive from professors and, more importantly, colleagues. > For many women engineering students, however, their first encounter with collaboration is to be treated in gender stereotypical ways, mostly by their peers. While some initially described working in teams positively, many more reported negative experiences. When working with male classmates, for example, they often spoke of being relegated to doing routine managerial and secretarial jobs, and of being excluded from the “real” engineering work. Kimberly wrote, “Two girls in a group had been working on the robot we were building in that class for hours, and the guys in their group came back in and within minutes had sentenced them to doing menial tasks while the guys went and had all the fun in the machine shop.” > There were also descriptions of being treated differently by professors. Rachel described when her team (the only all-girl team) won second place in a design competition: “Our professor wanted to get a picture of our prototype and us. We picked up our prototype and were all smiling and looking all professional; then he said: ‘You guys look like professional catalog models; this picture could go in a catalog and you could sell big time.’” > Men, on the other hand, described mandatory group design projects as exciting turning points, where theory and practice come together. “I made a pretty big stroke of progress last week,” one student wrote in his semi-monthly diary, “I ended up proving the professor wrong on something she had done last year, which actually helped us find better results (well, also more correct results)… It’s really a blast working on something like that.” Anyway, there are more quotes available, if you want to look at it yourself. Note also that there is one other factor they address that isn't related to sexism in the field (but perhaps to broader sexist acculturation in society) - women are more likely to want to work somewhere that is "contributing to society". Part of what's going on here is that it's not considered quite as socially acceptable for women to be ambitious for ambition's sake, at least not in the way that it is for men. But I don't think that's something that the engineering culture enforces, I think that's something that's internalized.

brennen 10y ago

I don't mean this to sound overly harsh, but I think treating this situation as some sort of mystery is part of the problem. All that one really needs to do to understand why the field is unwelcoming to women is to start listening to women.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago
During the Cold War, if one showed up in one of the weedout classes for EE, you got the "look to your left & right. One of you will not survive this process" lecture. EE was very seriously a defense discipline and the values-pyramid was feeding bodies into the Military Industrial Complex. I imagine that is part of it.
sanjeetsuhag 10y ago
The exodus of women from computing began in the 80s due to the rise of the personal computer. It wasn't because people weren't listening to women. Trivialization of women's issues is a different monster.

pjc50 10y ago

Like AA, first you have to admit you have a problem. (Not you personally, but there are plenty of people who claim it's just the natural order of things.) The profession does not conduct exit interviews, but fortunately every few weeks someone will write a blog post on why they (a women) left computer science. These articles may be posted to HN, where they often get a skeptical to hostile reception. Harrasment is the big one in the news (Uber passim), but there are all sorts of lessor problems which result in women's contributions being ignored or misattributed to men who are louder. (Astronomy is not immune to this problem, even if it might be better: http://www.nature.com/news/astronomy-roiled-again-by-sexual-harassment-allegations-1.19153 http://www.nature.com/news/astronomy-roiled-again-by-sexual-... )

facepalm 10y ago
Do men never leave computer science? Or do they just write less about it, or if they do, it receives less attention? For sure men are unhappy with their companies. Otherwise nobody would ever switch jobs. Also it should be considered that women have more career options than men. Since they spread out over more professions (including fulltime mum), it is to be expected that they are not 50% of people in all professions.
- stale2002 10y ago
  Men do leave, but they leave much much less. All you have to do is look at incoming CS major undergrads vs finished degree CS undergrads, or you can look at any statistic at all along a women's career. Women are leaving in droves. We do not have a pipeline problem. We do not need to get more women in kindergarden interested in math. We have a toxic pipeline problem, when women are driven out of the industry.
  - azernik 10y ago
    Leaky pipeline? :-P
  - nielsabel 10y ago
    > we need to get more women in kindergarden interested in math. Why? What's the (supposed) benefit? I'd rather see general improvement on math lessons in school. Most of these lessons are boring, given by boring teacher. I'd be happy if people went out of school simply not hating math (they don't have to like) it. I find this to be much worthwile instead of pushing girls into math even though they might not be inherently interested in it. The problems in STEM (and science in general) won't be solved by quantity but by quality. (They definitely won't be solved by gender.)

maccard 10y ago

For one indication, look at the ratio of women to men graduating from STEM courses in universities. Even in school, the number of women taking STEM subjects is dwarfed by the number of men. While the issues another poster has mentioned (uber etc) I'm sure do not help the situation, it's still a huge problem even at school ages.

tptacek 10y ago
No, this claim is false for any reasonable definition of "STEM" and "dwarfed".
- maccard 10y ago
  Seems it's a little more nuanced than this actually, sorry. The only numbers I could find were at [0] (I'm in the UK). At GCSE level (roughly aged 15/16) there's an equal split across STEM subjects. For A levels, there's more men than women in every STEM subject bar biology, and women achieve higher grades on average. At university level, men dominate in most of the subjects (engineering is 86% male and CS is 83% male). The problem stems far deeper than the workplace, and is definitely present in Educatikn. [0] https://www.wisecampaign.org.uk/uploads/wise/files/WISE_UK_Statistics_2014.pdf https://www.wisecampaign.org.uk/uploads/wise/files/WISE_UK_S...
  - tptacek 10y ago
    Only if by "most of the subjects" you mean "engineering and CS", which, along with physics, are the entire male bastion of science. Every other scientific field does far better, including pure math, chemistry, neuroscience, astronomy (as Pike notes in this piece), and molecular biology, where women make up (wait for it) over 50% of PhDs granted every year.
    - discombobulate 10y ago
      > Every other scientific field does far better It's not 'better' if some people are more interested in one field vs. others. You have to ignore biology to take your position of certainty. It's delutional. There's no certainty, even with something which is true. Most people prefer to hold on to an ideology or what sounds nice rather than taking ideas to their conclusion. All the long words you can muster don't save you from philosophical suicide. Why take the time to learn biases & logic if you're going to be an intellectual coward?