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It's a nice story, but it sounds just-so to me. Probably because most women that grew up in the 80s did not in significant numbers show the same fascination wi

It's a nice story, but it sounds just-so to me. Probably because most women that grew up in the 80s did not in significant numbers show the same fascination with computers that the author did. In fact, the current state of the mid-to-senior level job market reflects the interest level from exactly that time period, and it's just as lopsided in favor of men as it's ever been.

parfe 15y ago
"In 1967, when Cosmo’s “The Computer Girls” article ran, 11 percent of computer science majors were women. In the late 1970s, the percentage of women in the field approached and exceeded the same figure we are applauding today: 25 percent. The portion of women earning computer science degrees continued to rise steadily, reaching its peak — 37 percent — in 1984. Then, over the next two decades, women left computer science in droves — just as their numbers were increasing steadily across all other science, technology, engineering, and math fields. By 2006, the portion of women in computer science had dropped to 20 percent." http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-computer-programming-was-womens-work/2011/08/24/gIQAdixGgJ_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-computer-program... The Computer Science/Tech/IT industry created an unwelcoming environment for women; the women left. A random sampling of how IT can be hostile to women: I sat one empty seat away from a long-haired friend in a Computer Architecture class with around 15 students attending lectures in a room with theater style seating and the entrances to the rear. Plenty of room to spread out. On a regular basis, guys would enter from the rear and sit directly next to my long haired friend. No empty seat between. Only after sitting down did these guys realize the woman they just sat next to was actually a goateed dude. These creepers would then get up and quietly leave the classroom horribly embarrassed. This happened for half a semester until enough of these guys learned. I can't imagine how a woman would feel if she had her personal space invaded on a regular basis when clearly there was plenty of room to spread out. Then if a woman gets to the professional world she gets invited to a hackathon where the women will be serving drinks to the men. Or she sits near the front door and visitors assume she is a secretary. Or she "gets" to run the party planning committee. Those experiences add up over time and make life unpleasant.
- greiskul 15y ago
  No. Just no. First of all, anedoctal evidence doesn't mean anything. Sure, women are sexually haressed at technological jobs, but women are haressed EVERYWHERE. And men are also a minority in lots of professions, is that because the women majority on those fields haresses men that try to enter their area? I suggest that you watch the first episode of this series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask If you don't have the time, atleast think about the result of this experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing-systemizing_theory#Evolutionary_explanations_for_sex_differences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing-systemizing_theory#... "Research on one day old babies have found that boys look longer at a mechanical mobile while girls look longer at a face. This, as well as the effects of fetal testosterone on later behavior, is argued to be evidence against the sex differences being only due to socialization"
  - whateverer 15y ago
    Your evopsych argument doesn't explain the drop in female enrollment rate since the 80s.
    - fosk 15y ago
      You can't explain something like that without considering the context, the social/work environment of those years, that led to this change. It may just have been that, for example, since the 80s new interesting fields were born or discovered by women, thus reducing their interest in computer science. This factor, for example, may have led to men predominance in the field, and that subsequently may have led to new scenarios/environments again, and so on till nowadays. I'm sure that if there was a time when multitude of women were interested in CS probably today there would be more of them, and less men. That's unequivocal. Environments change, always in every field.
      - roguecoder 15y ago
        Your hypothesis has the convenient feature that it lets men off the hook, but given that the "social/work environment" is male-dominated, surely they have agency over it. Rather than a "lack of interest", I offer alternative Wildly Made Up Explanations For Why Women Left Software Engineering In Droves and Had CS Enrollment Fall: A) they may have been discouraged or prevented from studying a subject: Grace Hopper, for example, would have been an engineer but was prevented because she was a woman. Instead she studied math, as did many early female computer scientists. When Computer Science programs became common they may have hewed closer to the Engineering approach than Math, and when they became expected for programming jobs it may have closed off the pathway women had been taking into the field. B) They may have faced harassment or hostile environments that discouraged them from pursuing a coding career. That is not them "being interested", it is "them being willing to tolerate the environment they were required to study or work in." C) They may have faced discrimination in hiring, promotions, pay or been preferentially tracked into project management roles. You can't work in a profession if no one will hire you, and you can't advance if employers will only promote you into a non-technical role. D) they may have faced impossible-to-reconcile expectations on their time, if they were unable to find employment working regular hours and so utilize child care. Men being willing to be a primary care giver is a relatively recent phenomenon. I'm not saying any of these are true: I am saying that in the absence of any evidence my wildly made up speculations are just as likely to be true as yours. None of those things have to do with interest in technology, programming or working as a programmer. They all implicate the men who changed the social/work environment of computer science in ways that discouraged or excluded women. They are also all things that we could fix. I'd rather focus on explanations that offer disprovable models we can use to fix the issues at hand if they turn out to be correct. Your approach is like looking at a crash report and being content with the explanation, "something obviously happened that was outside of expected parameters." When I read the article, I want the next generation of girls and boys to have those moments of joy at technology. I don't want half of them to be turned off by the entirely-irrelevant social/work environment.
joe_the_user 15y ago
1. Regardless of the state of the field, you haven't made an argument that these isn't her experiences. 2. Whatever the reason, the number of women involved in computing has been on the decline for the last twenty years. 3. The number of women in senior positions today might not reflect the number who enter the field twenty years if there was significant job discrimination or if women happened to have different preferences. The gender distribution of principals doesn't necessarily reflect the gender distribution of teachers.
- bermanoid 15y ago
  I'm in no way doubting that the explanation offered is a possible one. I just don't think it's been seriously supported. Anecdotally, girls these days actually seem more interested in computers than when I was growing up, and I think that the high availability of computers is actually helping the situation, not hurting. As for point number 3, you are of course correct in theory, but the reality is, there were already no girls in the middle school computer clubs of 1992, the high school programming classes of 1996, and the CS 101 classes of 1999. So I'm not really buying the idea that anything on the job is primarily responsible for the lack of women graduating CS in 2004 or becoming senior engineers in 2012. Rule one of conversion optimization is to figure out where you're actually losing people in the conversion funnel. In tech, we're losing women while they're still girls, for whatever reason, and that's what we really need to track down and fix. Focusing on points after they've already left is premature, since if we can get more women coming through those steps in the first place, the dynamic will change anyways.

parfe 15y ago

"In 1967, when Cosmo’s “The Computer Girls” article ran, 11 percent of computer science majors were women. In the late 1970s, the percentage of women in the field approached and exceeded the same figure we are applauding today: 25 percent. The portion of women earning computer science degrees continued to rise steadily, reaching its peak — 37 percent — in 1984. Then, over the next two decades, women left computer science in droves — just as their numbers were increasing steadily across all other science, technology, engineering, and math fields. By 2006, the portion of women in computer science had dropped to 20 percent." http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-computer-programming-was-womens-work/2011/08/24/gIQAdixGgJ_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-computer-program... The Computer Science/Tech/IT industry created an unwelcoming environment for women; the women left. A random sampling of how IT can be hostile to women: I sat one empty seat away from a long-haired friend in a Computer Architecture class with around 15 students attending lectures in a room with theater style seating and the entrances to the rear. Plenty of room to spread out. On a regular basis, guys would enter from the rear and sit directly next to my long haired friend. No empty seat between. Only after sitting down did these guys realize the woman they just sat next to was actually a goateed dude. These creepers would then get up and quietly leave the classroom horribly embarrassed. This happened for half a semester until enough of these guys learned. I can't imagine how a woman would feel if she had her personal space invaded on a regular basis when clearly there was plenty of room to spread out. Then if a woman gets to the professional world she gets invited to a hackathon where the women will be serving drinks to the men. Or she sits near the front door and visitors assume she is a secretary. Or she "gets" to run the party planning committee. Those experiences add up over time and make life unpleasant.

greiskul 15y ago
No. Just no. First of all, anedoctal evidence doesn't mean anything. Sure, women are sexually haressed at technological jobs, but women are haressed EVERYWHERE. And men are also a minority in lots of professions, is that because the women majority on those fields haresses men that try to enter their area? I suggest that you watch the first episode of this series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask If you don't have the time, atleast think about the result of this experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing-systemizing_theory#Evolutionary_explanations_for_sex_differences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing-systemizing_theory#... "Research on one day old babies have found that boys look longer at a mechanical mobile while girls look longer at a face. This, as well as the effects of fetal testosterone on later behavior, is argued to be evidence against the sex differences being only due to socialization"
- whateverer 15y ago
  Your evopsych argument doesn't explain the drop in female enrollment rate since the 80s.
  - fosk 15y ago
    You can't explain something like that without considering the context, the social/work environment of those years, that led to this change. It may just have been that, for example, since the 80s new interesting fields were born or discovered by women, thus reducing their interest in computer science. This factor, for example, may have led to men predominance in the field, and that subsequently may have led to new scenarios/environments again, and so on till nowadays. I'm sure that if there was a time when multitude of women were interested in CS probably today there would be more of them, and less men. That's unequivocal. Environments change, always in every field.
    - roguecoder 15y ago
      Your hypothesis has the convenient feature that it lets men off the hook, but given that the "social/work environment" is male-dominated, surely they have agency over it. Rather than a "lack of interest", I offer alternative Wildly Made Up Explanations For Why Women Left Software Engineering In Droves and Had CS Enrollment Fall: A) they may have been discouraged or prevented from studying a subject: Grace Hopper, for example, would have been an engineer but was prevented because she was a woman. Instead she studied math, as did many early female computer scientists. When Computer Science programs became common they may have hewed closer to the Engineering approach than Math, and when they became expected for programming jobs it may have closed off the pathway women had been taking into the field. B) They may have faced harassment or hostile environments that discouraged them from pursuing a coding career. That is not them "being interested", it is "them being willing to tolerate the environment they were required to study or work in." C) They may have faced discrimination in hiring, promotions, pay or been preferentially tracked into project management roles. You can't work in a profession if no one will hire you, and you can't advance if employers will only promote you into a non-technical role. D) they may have faced impossible-to-reconcile expectations on their time, if they were unable to find employment working regular hours and so utilize child care. Men being willing to be a primary care giver is a relatively recent phenomenon. I'm not saying any of these are true: I am saying that in the absence of any evidence my wildly made up speculations are just as likely to be true as yours. None of those things have to do with interest in technology, programming or working as a programmer. They all implicate the men who changed the social/work environment of computer science in ways that discouraged or excluded women. They are also all things that we could fix. I'd rather focus on explanations that offer disprovable models we can use to fix the issues at hand if they turn out to be correct. Your approach is like looking at a crash report and being content with the explanation, "something obviously happened that was outside of expected parameters." When I read the article, I want the next generation of girls and boys to have those moments of joy at technology. I don't want half of them to be turned off by the entirely-irrelevant social/work environment.

joe_the_user 15y ago

1. Regardless of the state of the field, you haven't made an argument that these isn't her experiences. 2. Whatever the reason, the number of women involved in computing has been on the decline for the last twenty years. 3. The number of women in senior positions today might not reflect the number who enter the field twenty years if there was significant job discrimination or if women happened to have different preferences. The gender distribution of principals doesn't necessarily reflect the gender distribution of teachers.

bermanoid 15y ago
I'm in no way doubting that the explanation offered is a possible one. I just don't think it's been seriously supported. Anecdotally, girls these days actually seem more interested in computers than when I was growing up, and I think that the high availability of computers is actually helping the situation, not hurting. As for point number 3, you are of course correct in theory, but the reality is, there were already no girls in the middle school computer clubs of 1992, the high school programming classes of 1996, and the CS 101 classes of 1999. So I'm not really buying the idea that anything on the job is primarily responsible for the lack of women graduating CS in 2004 or becoming senior engineers in 2012. Rule one of conversion optimization is to figure out where you're actually losing people in the conversion funnel. In tech, we're losing women while they're still girls, for whatever reason, and that's what we really need to track down and fix. Focusing on points after they've already left is premature, since if we can get more women coming through those steps in the first place, the dynamic will change anyways.