5 ms·

What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?

24 points by robg 18y ago

jleyank 18y ago
I have read that those who might do well in computer science choose a different field for their success. Face it, it's not the most financially rewarding career and the hours are probably worse than anything but Ob/Gyn professionals. Toss some "gender biases" (for lack of a better word) into the mix and it's no wonder why there's an estrogen shortage in the field.
- vaksel 18y ago
  don't forget the constant need to refresh your skills. Pretty much any other job requires no refreshes, and the few that do have refreshes that basically involve a 3 hour seminar. Computer Science you gotta be on the cutting edge of technology all the time. And unlike other fields where you basically take a 3 hour seminar to get up to speed, learning a new programming language takes a ton more time. And like you said, its really not that much more financially rewarding than other fields
  - bbgm 18y ago
    That doesn't explain why there are so much women in biology (for example) where the techniques, required skill and knowledge base change every few months or so it seems, and it isn't exactly financially rewarding.
  - llimllib 18y ago
    > Pretty much any other job requires no refreshes You mean to tell me that being a doctor requires less continuing education than CS? Really? You sure you can back that up?
    - blackguardx 18y ago
      Doctors are required to go through a certain number of Continuing Medical Education (CME) courses each year to keep their board certification. Many of these courses are in sunny vacation spots such as Hawaii, San Diego, etc. Depending on the seminar, some doctors go for a few minutes to get credit and then go golfing. That being said, many doctors routinely read journal articles on the latest advances in medicine. I would venture that not as many engineers read IEEE articles. Still, there are many trade publications targeted towards engineers that seem to do a good job of keeping them up to speed. Arguing over who spends more time keeping up to date is pointless.
      - llimllib 18y ago
        > Arguing over who spends more time keeping up to date is pointless. Agreed! but that wasn't what vaksel was arguing. He argued that CS requires "constant refreshes", unlike "pretty much any other job". I'm simply arguing that the medical field, at least, requires just as much "refreshing" of skill as CS does. (re the specific example of doctors, the niceness of the places where they get certified is utterly irrelevant, as indeed are generally their certifications. It requires a lot of continuing education to be a doctor, and it also requires a lot of expensive, worthless certifications.)
    - Hexstream 18y ago
      The technology that powers the body doesn't change much from year to year, unlike for computers.
      - ATB 18y ago
        Doctors are technologists who fix the body - they don't power the body. And yes, the technology that fixes the body does change from year to year, perhaps more so than yearly advances in programming techniques and languages. A friend of mine wanted to join Doctors without Borders (a non-profit that goes places where people most urgently need help), but was strongly discouraged to do so by her colleagues. The reason? All of them suggested she would fall behind far too much in the 3 years or so that she wanted to be gone for. Yes, anecdotes!=data, and surely web programming has also moved on enormously in the last three years, but I would not underestimate (misunderestimate? ;)) the continued education a good doctor has to complete.
Zev 18y ago
I wonder what the impact of having an article that goes "Why aren't women interested in Computer Science" every other month has on this sort of thing..
iigs 18y ago
It's a bit presumptive to call men the reference case and to ask what's wrong with {universities, women} that has caused a drop in female enrollment. Maybe a better question is: Why are there so many men in computer science. The article's author doesn't seem to really make an effort to figure out what happened, other than to reference one individual who went into health care. I think exploring this question to its fullest would require dropping some politically correct guards and questioning quite a few gender assumptions, something that neither web forums nor national newspapers are particularly good forums for.
- ken 18y ago
  Yep. You'd need somebody with absolutely no shame ... like Phil Greenspun! http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/acm-women-in-computing http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/acm-women-in-computing http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science "[A]nyone smart enough to make it as a computer scientist can make it with less work and risk as an MD, MBA, or JD." "A lot of men are irrational, romantic, stubborn, and unwilling to admit that they've made a big mistake. With Occam's Razor, we should not need to bring in the FBI to solve the mystery of why there are more men than women who have chosen to stick with the choice that they made at age 18"
  - nandemo 18y ago
    "[A]nyone smart enough to make it as a computer scientist can make it with less work and risk as an MD, MBA, or JD." This is odd for at least 2 reasons: 1) It's really hard to believe that getting a MD is "less work and risk" than getting a degree in CS. 2) At least in my country, most people who are interested in CS or engineering wouldn't even consider becoming doctors. It's not about money.
  - hugh 18y ago
    "[A]nyone smart enough to make it as a computer scientist can make it with less work and risk as an MD, MBA, or JD." Oh, come now. I see a lot of over-the-top programmer glorification on this site, but this takes the cake. I know plenty of complete dolts who managed to get degrees in CS, and who went on to have reasonably rewarding careers. At no point were their grades (nor their general levels of ability) high enough to get them anywhere near law school, let alone medical school. Now maybe you, dear reader, could have easily got into medical or law school, but the vast majority of your classmates couldn't.
jerf 18y ago
Personally, after all the efforts of the past couple of decades to get women involved in college have succeeded to the point that women now make up the majority of college students (with the trends continuing to favor even more women for the forseeable future), if computer science is actually still dropping, the possibility that it is simply an outlier must be taken seriously. If there are relevant differences between genders w.r.t. to how one chooses a profession (and the negation of that statement would fly in the face of everything we know about such differences), then in all likelihood the gender ratios will be normally distributed. So, I mean outlier in the technical sense of a statistical distribution. There will be extremes at one end or another, and the mere fact of their existence is testimony that gender differences of a statistical nature do indeed exist, not proof that there is some other factor. If we actually got all professions to strict 50/50 proportions, that would be proof positive of major meddling. I mean that first paragraph seriously. In the absence of such efforts, discrimination of some form would be a plausible hypothesis, but given how many other fields have overcome this and the dominant culture of universities, I find it increasingly difficult to believe the members of the field are really the problem. Computer scientists can hardly be blamed for a culture that considers them nerds and tells girls they shouldn't be nerds, if that is the root problem. (Nor will the obvious solutions work; protesting that you aren't really nerds is not a good approach. Making tons of money was a reasonably effective approach, though that has lost its apparent inevitability. :) )
- SamReidHughes 18y ago
  > If there are relevant differences between genders w.r.t. to how one chooses a profession (and the negation of that statement would fly in the face of everything we know about such differences), then in all likelihood the gender ratios will be normally distributed. I don't see any reason why they would be normally distributed. Their weighted average would be the general gender proportion among students, but there's nothing that says or implies the distribution would be normal. One could imagine an extremely different scenario, a species with every field being populated entirely by one gender, and one could imagine a species where a few fields (say, engineering fields) are strongly preferred by one gender while the rest are equally preferred among non-engineering students. There's no reason why the human species is one where these ratios are distributed normally. And if it were, it would be entirely by coincidence.
alaithea 18y ago
I am a woman who has been programming professionally, on and off, for about 9 years, and full-time at a corporate job for two and a half of those. I was the first woman to be hired as a software developer at my workplace in almost 25 years. I hate my job, and next fall, I will enter grad school to go into an allied health profession. My reasons for leaving full-time software development are as follows: 1) The social interaction leaves something to be desired at my job, especially if you are not into gaming or D&D. There are few coworkers with whom I can discuss non-geek topics such as travel or food. This is probably due, at least in part, to having so few women around. The guys constantly revel in their geekitude. It gets old. 2) The work itself is isolating. I love to code, but especially during the long, depressing months of winter, I long for meetings to go to, or phone calls to receive. 3) Similar to the last point: I'd like to have a reason to leave my desk several times a day, for periods longer than it takes to get a cup of coffee or go to the bathroom. The highly sedentary nature of the job starts to make it feel like a prison. In contrast to the last couple of points, my male coworkers act as though they would be happy if they never had to leave their desk chair to go to another meeting. Maybe this is just personality, and not a gender difference. Maybe I don't love programming enough to lose myself in it for hours at a time. I think some of these things, however, especially the social issues, may be indicative of basic female needs to have a connection with others, a feeling of being nurtured (and nurturing others), and good (female) role models. It would be interesting to see a workplace in which the majority of developers are women. I recall reading about a study recently in which they found that men tended to concentrate in the hard sciences (math, physics), where women preferred sciences with a human aspect (psychology, biology). I believe they found that even women who had entered the hard sciences often ended up leaving them for fields with a more human touch.
- tapostrophemo 18y ago
  That's too bad. (I'm male, btw.) Where I work, on an Agile team, we have lots of social interaction. We try to pair with a different developer every day. Each story card (requrement) we implement involves much back-and-forth conversaction between us (the developers) and the users (or more often, but not always, their "representatives" - the Business Analysts). Aside from that, I don't think D & D has come up once the whole time I've been on that team (3+ years). Between being busy with the work we're doing, and the rest of the world's events to discuss, there's no time for games. Politics. The stock market. Parenthood. (Non-parenthood for the single guys and girls too.) Professional sports. Dumb jokes. Etc.
ryanwaggoner 18y ago
Math. j/k :-)
viggity 18y ago
obviously, the cause is men and their evil penises of death!
- Hexstream 18y ago
  Or their inappropriate phallic references, perhaps.
yummyfajitas 18y ago
Statistics FAIL. >Yet women have achieved broad parity with men in almost every other technical pursuit. When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor’s degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, Women have achieved "broad parity" in one other science and engineering field: biology (pre-med). This accounts for a large number of bachelors degrees in science, but it does not account for a large number of technical pursuits. (Actually, women also make up a largish chunk of math majors at schools which don't offer math education as a separate degree. ) CS looks a lot like most other math heavy science fields, like physics, electrical/mechanical engineering and operations research.
time_management 18y ago
I think it boils down to a couple of factors: (1) women, understandably, loathe asking men for permission to do things, and (2) if they want to have children, they can't take nearly as many risks in their early years. Item 1 essentially rules out mainstream corporate environments, which are still the nasty, vulgar, dumb white boy's world they've been for centuries. It also makes VC-backed startups uncompelling, because although startup engineers and VCs are more refined than mainstream corporates, VCs are still mostly men. Moreover, most people want to have children, and while men who want to have kids can wait until their 50s, women can't. This means that men can take more risks when they're young, and it's why, for example, academia is unappealing: it's a career where you need someone's permission (tenure) to start your adult life, and usually don't get it until your late 30s. A lot of the very-smart women who would be entering computer science choose, instead, to become doctors, because medicine's a much better career from this perspective. 1. The risk is low. 2. If you're good, you don't have to ask anyone for permission. (This isn't true in tech; you still need VC.) 3. You have pretty much free rein over whether or not you want to be rich and work long hours, or moderately wealthy with a relaxed work schedule.
- dgabriel 18y ago
  Uh, maybe, but as a female software engineer, I can tell you I'm doing ok on the cusp of my thirties with one kid & two more currently baking. I have my labor-of-love python project on the side, which may or may not ever get backing, and another startup I'm working on with my partner. If I don't get around to launching a company until I'm 40, that's cool, too. However, as far as the attitudes of men, particularly men without families, or with families they have completely foisted off onto their wives, you are correct about the nasty, dumb, vulgar stuff.
syntax-case 18y ago
"How do you write women so well?" ...

24 points by robg 18y ago

I have read that those who might do well in computer science choose a different field for their success. Face it, it's not the most financially rewarding career and the hours are probably worse than anything but Ob/Gyn professionals. Toss some "gender biases" (for lack of a better word) into the mix and it's no wonder why there's an estrogen shortage in the field.

vaksel 18y ago
don't forget the constant need to refresh your skills. Pretty much any other job requires no refreshes, and the few that do have refreshes that basically involve a 3 hour seminar. Computer Science you gotta be on the cutting edge of technology all the time. And unlike other fields where you basically take a 3 hour seminar to get up to speed, learning a new programming language takes a ton more time. And like you said, its really not that much more financially rewarding than other fields
- bbgm 18y ago
  That doesn't explain why there are so much women in biology (for example) where the techniques, required skill and knowledge base change every few months or so it seems, and it isn't exactly financially rewarding.
- llimllib 18y ago
  > Pretty much any other job requires no refreshes You mean to tell me that being a doctor requires less continuing education than CS? Really? You sure you can back that up?
  - blackguardx 18y ago
    Doctors are required to go through a certain number of Continuing Medical Education (CME) courses each year to keep their board certification. Many of these courses are in sunny vacation spots such as Hawaii, San Diego, etc. Depending on the seminar, some doctors go for a few minutes to get credit and then go golfing. That being said, many doctors routinely read journal articles on the latest advances in medicine. I would venture that not as many engineers read IEEE articles. Still, there are many trade publications targeted towards engineers that seem to do a good job of keeping them up to speed. Arguing over who spends more time keeping up to date is pointless.
    - llimllib 18y ago
      > Arguing over who spends more time keeping up to date is pointless. Agreed! but that wasn't what vaksel was arguing. He argued that CS requires "constant refreshes", unlike "pretty much any other job". I'm simply arguing that the medical field, at least, requires just as much "refreshing" of skill as CS does. (re the specific example of doctors, the niceness of the places where they get certified is utterly irrelevant, as indeed are generally their certifications. It requires a lot of continuing education to be a doctor, and it also requires a lot of expensive, worthless certifications.)
  - Hexstream 18y ago
    The technology that powers the body doesn't change much from year to year, unlike for computers.
    - ATB 18y ago
      Doctors are technologists who fix the body - they don't power the body. And yes, the technology that fixes the body does change from year to year, perhaps more so than yearly advances in programming techniques and languages. A friend of mine wanted to join Doctors without Borders (a non-profit that goes places where people most urgently need help), but was strongly discouraged to do so by her colleagues. The reason? All of them suggested she would fall behind far too much in the 3 years or so that she wanted to be gone for. Yes, anecdotes!=data, and surely web programming has also moved on enormously in the last three years, but I would not underestimate (misunderestimate? ;)) the continued education a good doctor has to complete.

Zev 18y ago

I wonder what the impact of having an article that goes "Why aren't women interested in Computer Science" every other month has on this sort of thing..

iigs 18y ago

It's a bit presumptive to call men the reference case and to ask what's wrong with {universities, women} that has caused a drop in female enrollment. Maybe a better question is: Why are there so many men in computer science. The article's author doesn't seem to really make an effort to figure out what happened, other than to reference one individual who went into health care. I think exploring this question to its fullest would require dropping some politically correct guards and questioning quite a few gender assumptions, something that neither web forums nor national newspapers are particularly good forums for.

ken 18y ago
Yep. You'd need somebody with absolutely no shame ... like Phil Greenspun! http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/acm-women-in-computing http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/acm-women-in-computing http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science "[A]nyone smart enough to make it as a computer scientist can make it with less work and risk as an MD, MBA, or JD." "A lot of men are irrational, romantic, stubborn, and unwilling to admit that they've made a big mistake. With Occam's Razor, we should not need to bring in the FBI to solve the mystery of why there are more men than women who have chosen to stick with the choice that they made at age 18"
- nandemo 18y ago
  "[A]nyone smart enough to make it as a computer scientist can make it with less work and risk as an MD, MBA, or JD." This is odd for at least 2 reasons: 1) It's really hard to believe that getting a MD is "less work and risk" than getting a degree in CS. 2) At least in my country, most people who are interested in CS or engineering wouldn't even consider becoming doctors. It's not about money.
- hugh 18y ago
  "[A]nyone smart enough to make it as a computer scientist can make it with less work and risk as an MD, MBA, or JD." Oh, come now. I see a lot of over-the-top programmer glorification on this site, but this takes the cake. I know plenty of complete dolts who managed to get degrees in CS, and who went on to have reasonably rewarding careers. At no point were their grades (nor their general levels of ability) high enough to get them anywhere near law school, let alone medical school. Now maybe you, dear reader, could have easily got into medical or law school, but the vast majority of your classmates couldn't.

jerf 18y ago

Personally, after all the efforts of the past couple of decades to get women involved in college have succeeded to the point that women now make up the majority of college students (with the trends continuing to favor even more women for the forseeable future), if computer science is actually still dropping, the possibility that it is simply an outlier must be taken seriously. If there are relevant differences between genders w.r.t. to how one chooses a profession (and the negation of that statement would fly in the face of everything we know about such differences), then in all likelihood the gender ratios will be normally distributed. So, I mean outlier in the technical sense of a statistical distribution. There will be extremes at one end or another, and the mere fact of their existence is testimony that gender differences of a statistical nature do indeed exist, not proof that there is some other factor. If we actually got all professions to strict 50/50 proportions, that would be proof positive of major meddling. I mean that first paragraph seriously. In the absence of such efforts, discrimination of some form would be a plausible hypothesis, but given how many other fields have overcome this and the dominant culture of universities, I find it increasingly difficult to believe the members of the field are really the problem. Computer scientists can hardly be blamed for a culture that considers them nerds and tells girls they shouldn't be nerds, if that is the root problem. (Nor will the obvious solutions work; protesting that you aren't really nerds is not a good approach. Making tons of money was a reasonably effective approach, though that has lost its apparent inevitability. :) )

SamReidHughes 18y ago
> If there are relevant differences between genders w.r.t. to how one chooses a profession (and the negation of that statement would fly in the face of everything we know about such differences), then in all likelihood the gender ratios will be normally distributed. I don't see any reason why they would be normally distributed. Their weighted average would be the general gender proportion among students, but there's nothing that says or implies the distribution would be normal. One could imagine an extremely different scenario, a species with every field being populated entirely by one gender, and one could imagine a species where a few fields (say, engineering fields) are strongly preferred by one gender while the rest are equally preferred among non-engineering students. There's no reason why the human species is one where these ratios are distributed normally. And if it were, it would be entirely by coincidence.

alaithea 18y ago

I am a woman who has been programming professionally, on and off, for about 9 years, and full-time at a corporate job for two and a half of those. I was the first woman to be hired as a software developer at my workplace in almost 25 years. I hate my job, and next fall, I will enter grad school to go into an allied health profession. My reasons for leaving full-time software development are as follows: 1) The social interaction leaves something to be desired at my job, especially if you are not into gaming or D&D. There are few coworkers with whom I can discuss non-geek topics such as travel or food. This is probably due, at least in part, to having so few women around. The guys constantly revel in their geekitude. It gets old. 2) The work itself is isolating. I love to code, but especially during the long, depressing months of winter, I long for meetings to go to, or phone calls to receive. 3) Similar to the last point: I'd like to have a reason to leave my desk several times a day, for periods longer than it takes to get a cup of coffee or go to the bathroom. The highly sedentary nature of the job starts to make it feel like a prison. In contrast to the last couple of points, my male coworkers act as though they would be happy if they never had to leave their desk chair to go to another meeting. Maybe this is just personality, and not a gender difference. Maybe I don't love programming enough to lose myself in it for hours at a time. I think some of these things, however, especially the social issues, may be indicative of basic female needs to have a connection with others, a feeling of being nurtured (and nurturing others), and good (female) role models. It would be interesting to see a workplace in which the majority of developers are women. I recall reading about a study recently in which they found that men tended to concentrate in the hard sciences (math, physics), where women preferred sciences with a human aspect (psychology, biology). I believe they found that even women who had entered the hard sciences often ended up leaving them for fields with a more human touch.

tapostrophemo 18y ago
That's too bad. (I'm male, btw.) Where I work, on an Agile team, we have lots of social interaction. We try to pair with a different developer every day. Each story card (requrement) we implement involves much back-and-forth conversaction between us (the developers) and the users (or more often, but not always, their "representatives" - the Business Analysts). Aside from that, I don't think D & D has come up once the whole time I've been on that team (3+ years). Between being busy with the work we're doing, and the rest of the world's events to discuss, there's no time for games. Politics. The stock market. Parenthood. (Non-parenthood for the single guys and girls too.) Professional sports. Dumb jokes. Etc.

ryanwaggoner 18y ago

Math. j/k :-)

viggity 18y ago

obviously, the cause is men and their evil penises of death!

Hexstream 18y ago
Or their inappropriate phallic references, perhaps.

yummyfajitas 18y ago

Statistics FAIL. >Yet women have achieved broad parity with men in almost every other technical pursuit. When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor’s degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, Women have achieved "broad parity" in one other science and engineering field: biology (pre-med). This accounts for a large number of bachelors degrees in science, but it does not account for a large number of technical pursuits. (Actually, women also make up a largish chunk of math majors at schools which don't offer math education as a separate degree. ) CS looks a lot like most other math heavy science fields, like physics, electrical/mechanical engineering and operations research.

time_management 18y ago

I think it boils down to a couple of factors: (1) women, understandably, loathe asking men for permission to do things, and (2) if they want to have children, they can't take nearly as many risks in their early years. Item 1 essentially rules out mainstream corporate environments, which are still the nasty, vulgar, dumb white boy's world they've been for centuries. It also makes VC-backed startups uncompelling, because although startup engineers and VCs are more refined than mainstream corporates, VCs are still mostly men. Moreover, most people want to have children, and while men who want to have kids can wait until their 50s, women can't. This means that men can take more risks when they're young, and it's why, for example, academia is unappealing: it's a career where you need someone's permission (tenure) to start your adult life, and usually don't get it until your late 30s. A lot of the very-smart women who would be entering computer science choose, instead, to become doctors, because medicine's a much better career from this perspective. 1. The risk is low. 2. If you're good, you don't have to ask anyone for permission. (This isn't true in tech; you still need VC.) 3. You have pretty much free rein over whether or not you want to be rich and work long hours, or moderately wealthy with a relaxed work schedule.

dgabriel 18y ago
Uh, maybe, but as a female software engineer, I can tell you I'm doing ok on the cusp of my thirties with one kid & two more currently baking. I have my labor-of-love python project on the side, which may or may not ever get backing, and another startup I'm working on with my partner. If I don't get around to launching a company until I'm 40, that's cool, too. However, as far as the attitudes of men, particularly men without families, or with families they have completely foisted off onto their wives, you are correct about the nasty, dumb, vulgar stuff.

syntax-case 18y ago

"How do you write women so well?" ...