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>How can we fix it? This is straight up begging the question. The article is taking it as fact that we should fix it. I don't see people trying to get more w

by parfe 16y ago

>How can we fix it? This is straight up begging the question. The article is taking it as fact that we should fix it. I don't see people trying to get more women into garbage collection, snow plowing, roadkill removal, framing, or masonry. And framing in particular includes plenty of math when it comes to laying out rafters to build the roof. I think it has to do with type of computer gaming that boys gravitate to which encourages experimentation with the computer (swapping out video cards, adding RAM, etc) that I just don't think young girls are encouraged (or motivated by slow specs) to do.

ig1 16y ago
Gaming is an interesting area, as it's shifting away from being male dominated. The number of female gamers has increased rapidly in the last few years, which may well result in more females being interested in the development side of it.
rimantas 16y ago
> I don't see people trying to get more women into garbage > collection, snow plowing, roadkill removal, framing, or > masonry. Was going to say something similar. Is nobody afraid that "by neglecting female adoption we're creating the potential for huge disenfranchisement issues in the future." I also saw a comment on reddit stating, that while being 54% of the workforce males account for more than 90% of work-related deaths. Chocking on billions must be the most likely cause then :(
cosgroveb 16y ago
> The article is taking it as fact that we should fix it. Assuming that women are every bit as intelligent as men, our field is missing out on roughly half the population of brilliant minds that could be inventing the Next Big Thing. No? Edit: OK. Summary of the answers so far. A) Cannot necessarily make the above assumption. B) Women on average may be as intelligent as men but they will never be geniuses like Einstein (or likely to go to prison). and C) We don't need that many engineers anyways. Conclusion: they should stay in the kitchen
- T-hawk 16y ago
  Well, the key is in that assumption, and also in the shape of that data. It could be that the average woman is slightly more intelligent than the average man: 55% of American college freshmen are female. But men have a greater variance which brings them out at both ends. So the outlying geniuses like Einstein and Jobs and Feynman tend to be male, and at the other end so does the prison population.
  - cosgroveb 16y ago
    Steve Jobs is a genius of the likes of Einstein and Feynman? I know that Apple fanboyism is rampant in tech circles but it's getting out of hand, really. ;)
- gloob 16y ago
  Only if you believe there is enough demand for software to double the number of people producing it.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Assuming that women are every bit as intelligent as men, That is a) an unproven assumption and b) irrelevant. The right thing to measure is the integral of P(inventing next big thing | intelligence = g, enters computing) P(intelligence = g) dg. (This also assumes g is the only factor, not ambition or other factors, but whatever). A not so terrible substitute for that would be measuring the ratios of men and women with intelligence over some cutoff . This could bew considerably lower even if women are every bit as intelligent as men, if for example the variance of women's intelligence was lower. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_intelligence
- geebee 16y ago
  No way is the conclusion that they should stay in the kitchen. The conclusion is that maybe women are better off in medicine, law, dentistry or other processions, not because they're women, but because most people would be better off in these fields. I think that the reason people fail to understand why there are so few women in software development is because they frame the issue the way you just did. They think about how to convince a young woman that engineering is better than home economics. Instead, try this as an exercise: imagine you're a career counselor at a university, and a very bright young woman has just entered your office asking for advice. She's a top student who can handle math, science, and arts/humanities, and she's got the chops to score in the high percentiles on whatever standardized test is required for a grad program. Imagine a conversation where you try to talk her out of becoming a cardiologist and sell her on a grad program in computer science. Make sure you consider employment prospects, earnings potential, social prestige, job stability at age 48, and so forth. This conversation will demonstrate why it's not engineering vs staying in the kitchen. Young women are starting to out-achieve young men in the US, and I'd be surprised if this isn't the case in the UK. People (who are aware that the achievement gap is now starting to favor women) often think of the scarcity of women in engineering as a dark spot in an otherwise bright picture, but one that should still be remedied. I think they're missing the possibility that the evident aversion women have to engineering or CS is actually a positive thing for women - that women have realized that they can achieve more real power and influence in other fields. By "better off" I'm not talking about some condescending "oh, you'll be happier at home with the kids" kind of thing. I mean wealthy, high income, highly influential, positions of power in business and government kind of "better off". Now for a slightly lame backtrack - I actually do think that science and engineering are amazing fields, and the scarcity of women is a complicated thing - especially at the undergraduate level (after all, the most common academic background at the bachelor's level for fortune 500 CEOs is engineering in the US). However, I do think that the perspective I described above needs to be a big part of the analysis. People seem to view the low participation of women in certain technical fields as a negative for women without adequately understanding the other things women are doing and the possibility that they may be making better choices than men.
jdp23 16y ago
> Actually the article has a section on "Why it matters". Including this: There's a huge shortage of software developers in the UK, the number of software development roles is increasing by approximately 10,000/year. The UK just isn't producing enough talented software developers to meet the demand. When it comes to expanding the talent pool it makes sense to target the groups who are most under-represented. But it is also an issue for society as whole. Having a 90:10 ratio of males to females for software development should be as shocking as having a 90:10 ratio for literacy. Software development is fast becoming one of the fundamental skills of the 21st century as technology starts to dominate every industry. Of the 26 billionaires the web has produced in the last decade, only one has been female. Only a tiny fraction of technology companies started today are started by female technologists. By neglecting female adoption we're creating the potential for huge disenfranchisement issues in the future.
- gaius 16y ago
  But that is completely spurious. Let me tell you a story. I get coffee every morning on the way to work, in London, and at the place I go, everyone who works there is Polish. Now, my fondness of all things Eastern European is well known but even so - is it not insane that we apparently have such a "shortage" of coffee makers in the UK that we have to fly people in from 700 miles away to do it? And as for your next point, that's spurious too. Was there ever a time when the UK - or any country - fretted that not enough people were being trained to make paper and pens? That people can read and write, sure. But don't confuse the tools (computers) with the results (economic productivity).
  - jdp23 16y ago
    Wow. In the US, coffee-makers are low-payed jobs with no benefits -- as opposed to omputing and IT, which are good jobs. So your first analogy doesn't apply. And on the second point, the field of gender HCI has shown that there tend to be differences in how men and women use computer programs. Yes, these are contextual and more likely to be due to societal norms, social pressures, and encouragement with technology than any innate gender difference. Still, they're real. And when software is constructed by almost-all-male teams, those preferred usages get embedded in it.
mcantor 16y ago
Homogeny begets stagnation.
gaius 16y ago
I don't see people trying to get more women into garbage collection That is the dirty little secret of feminism. It's not and never was about "equality". It's about cherry-picking the best jobs - by means other than open competition.

by parfe 16y ago

ig1 16y ago

Gaming is an interesting area, as it's shifting away from being male dominated. The number of female gamers has increased rapidly in the last few years, which may well result in more females being interested in the development side of it.

rimantas 16y ago

> I don't see people trying to get more women into garbage > collection, snow plowing, roadkill removal, framing, or > masonry. Was going to say something similar. Is nobody afraid that "by neglecting female adoption we're creating the potential for huge disenfranchisement issues in the future." I also saw a comment on reddit stating, that while being 54% of the workforce males account for more than 90% of work-related deaths. Chocking on billions must be the most likely cause then :(

cosgroveb 16y ago

> The article is taking it as fact that we should fix it. Assuming that women are every bit as intelligent as men, our field is missing out on roughly half the population of brilliant minds that could be inventing the Next Big Thing. No? Edit: OK. Summary of the answers so far. A) Cannot necessarily make the above assumption. B) Women on average may be as intelligent as men but they will never be geniuses like Einstein (or likely to go to prison). and C) We don't need that many engineers anyways. Conclusion: they should stay in the kitchen

T-hawk 16y ago
Well, the key is in that assumption, and also in the shape of that data. It could be that the average woman is slightly more intelligent than the average man: 55% of American college freshmen are female. But men have a greater variance which brings them out at both ends. So the outlying geniuses like Einstein and Jobs and Feynman tend to be male, and at the other end so does the prison population.
- cosgroveb 16y ago
  Steve Jobs is a genius of the likes of Einstein and Feynman? I know that Apple fanboyism is rampant in tech circles but it's getting out of hand, really. ;)
gloob 16y ago
Only if you believe there is enough demand for software to double the number of people producing it.
yummyfajitas 16y ago
Assuming that women are every bit as intelligent as men, That is a) an unproven assumption and b) irrelevant. The right thing to measure is the integral of P(inventing next big thing | intelligence = g, enters computing) P(intelligence = g) dg. (This also assumes g is the only factor, not ambition or other factors, but whatever). A not so terrible substitute for that would be measuring the ratios of men and women with intelligence over some cutoff . This could bew considerably lower even if women are every bit as intelligent as men, if for example the variance of women's intelligence was lower. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_intelligence
geebee 16y ago
No way is the conclusion that they should stay in the kitchen. The conclusion is that maybe women are better off in medicine, law, dentistry or other processions, not because they're women, but because most people would be better off in these fields. I think that the reason people fail to understand why there are so few women in software development is because they frame the issue the way you just did. They think about how to convince a young woman that engineering is better than home economics. Instead, try this as an exercise: imagine you're a career counselor at a university, and a very bright young woman has just entered your office asking for advice. She's a top student who can handle math, science, and arts/humanities, and she's got the chops to score in the high percentiles on whatever standardized test is required for a grad program. Imagine a conversation where you try to talk her out of becoming a cardiologist and sell her on a grad program in computer science. Make sure you consider employment prospects, earnings potential, social prestige, job stability at age 48, and so forth. This conversation will demonstrate why it's not engineering vs staying in the kitchen. Young women are starting to out-achieve young men in the US, and I'd be surprised if this isn't the case in the UK. People (who are aware that the achievement gap is now starting to favor women) often think of the scarcity of women in engineering as a dark spot in an otherwise bright picture, but one that should still be remedied. I think they're missing the possibility that the evident aversion women have to engineering or CS is actually a positive thing for women - that women have realized that they can achieve more real power and influence in other fields. By "better off" I'm not talking about some condescending "oh, you'll be happier at home with the kids" kind of thing. I mean wealthy, high income, highly influential, positions of power in business and government kind of "better off". Now for a slightly lame backtrack - I actually do think that science and engineering are amazing fields, and the scarcity of women is a complicated thing - especially at the undergraduate level (after all, the most common academic background at the bachelor's level for fortune 500 CEOs is engineering in the US). However, I do think that the perspective I described above needs to be a big part of the analysis. People seem to view the low participation of women in certain technical fields as a negative for women without adequately understanding the other things women are doing and the possibility that they may be making better choices than men.

jdp23 16y ago

> Actually the article has a section on "Why it matters". Including this: There's a huge shortage of software developers in the UK, the number of software development roles is increasing by approximately 10,000/year. The UK just isn't producing enough talented software developers to meet the demand. When it comes to expanding the talent pool it makes sense to target the groups who are most under-represented. But it is also an issue for society as whole. Having a 90:10 ratio of males to females for software development should be as shocking as having a 90:10 ratio for literacy. Software development is fast becoming one of the fundamental skills of the 21st century as technology starts to dominate every industry. Of the 26 billionaires the web has produced in the last decade, only one has been female. Only a tiny fraction of technology companies started today are started by female technologists. By neglecting female adoption we're creating the potential for huge disenfranchisement issues in the future.

gaius 16y ago
But that is completely spurious. Let me tell you a story. I get coffee every morning on the way to work, in London, and at the place I go, everyone who works there is Polish. Now, my fondness of all things Eastern European is well known but even so - is it not insane that we apparently have such a "shortage" of coffee makers in the UK that we have to fly people in from 700 miles away to do it? And as for your next point, that's spurious too. Was there ever a time when the UK - or any country - fretted that not enough people were being trained to make paper and pens? That people can read and write, sure. But don't confuse the tools (computers) with the results (economic productivity).
- jdp23 16y ago
  Wow. In the US, coffee-makers are low-payed jobs with no benefits -- as opposed to omputing and IT, which are good jobs. So your first analogy doesn't apply. And on the second point, the field of gender HCI has shown that there tend to be differences in how men and women use computer programs. Yes, these are contextual and more likely to be due to societal norms, social pressures, and encouragement with technology than any innate gender difference. Still, they're real. And when software is constructed by almost-all-male teams, those preferred usages get embedded in it.

mcantor 16y ago

Homogeny begets stagnation.

gaius 16y ago

I don't see people trying to get more women into garbage collection That is the dirty little secret of feminism. It's not and never was about "equality". It's about cherry-picking the best jobs - by means other than open competition.