8 ms·

I think these sorts of articles are asking the wrong question when they ask "why aren't there more women in CS?" or "how can we get more women in CS?" Instead

• mrxd 14y ago
  > Personally I believe that gender imbalance in this (and other) professions is only indirectly related to gender. History disagrees with you. In the 1960s, programming was considered to be "women's work", like typing, filing and other clerical duties, while men did the engineering bit of actually building the machines. But people began to realize that software was difficult and important, so they decided women had to go. Women were eliminated from the professional by the creation of personality and aptitude tests that were supposed to evaluate whether someone would be good at programming. They invented the idea that being anti-social was associated with programming skill, which is where today's stereotype of the loner computer geek comes from. They also distributed the answers to the aptitude tests within all-male fraternities and clubs. If you believe in a meritocracy that is blind to gender, then you should be in favor of increasing women in the profession. All men who have any pride in their skills should be embarrassed by the lying and cheating that made us the dominant gender in the field.
  • prudhvis 14y ago
    > They also distributed the answers to the aptitude tests within all-male fraternities and clubs. Do you have any source for this?
    • mrxd 14y ago
      That's from the book "The Computer Boys Take Over" - you can find a summary here: http://stanford.io/x6Pk35 http://stanford.io/x6Pk35
  • eru 14y ago
    Fraternity boys yearning to become programmers, and socially inept nerds?
    • andrewflnr 14y ago
      It's not as crazy as it sounds. Once "socially inept" becomes cool, well, people will do almost anything to be cool. I don't know how much of that was in play at the time.
• danilocampos 14y ago
  > For me, I'm not sure how productive all this gender hand-wringing really is. Demographic dramatically over-represented in government, corporate boards, startup founders, growth industries, etc unconcerned about status quo. And there's the problem.
  • obstacle1 14y ago
    So you choose to ignore the nuances of the poster's argument, instead criticizing it based on the fact that the author is (you think) part of an over-represented demographic? The points can't possibly be valid, since they were written by a middle-class white male? Is your own bigotry bleeding through, or have I misread you?
  • eric_the_read 14y ago
    I read it as, "I'm not sure this is the best way to solve the problem," which is a very different thing to "there isn't a problem," or "the problem isn't all that important."
  • eric_the_read 14y ago
    I read it as, "I'm not sure this is the best way to solve the problem," which is a very different thing to "there isn't a problem," or "the problem isn't all that important."
  • burntsushi 14y ago
    So the GP's argument is wrong because you assume the poster is part of a over-represented demographic? If I've understood your implication correctly, then it's an ad hominem of the genetic fallacy variety.
  • barry-cotter 14y ago
    die younger, less socially connected, more likely to go bankrupt, more likely to be the victim of a violent crime, more likely to commit suicide, less likely to finish all levels of education, more likely to be incarcerated. And there's the problem.
    • 14y ago
• jfoster 14y ago
  If males and females think differently, CS is missing out on some unique perspectives by not having more females involved in the field. Barriers or not, less gender imbalance could enrich the the field.
  • goldfeld 14y ago
    Exactly, and that's the key, and why I'm always excited for initiatives to create more gender balance in the field. We sure are missing out on half of humanity's perspective by having women so dramatically under represented. And if engineers tend to be judgmental introverts, I think that's a pattern that developed from being statistically more representative of the reasoning and frame of mind needed for the profession, to being a vastly socially constructed barrier. By which I mean, yes, it's statistically easier to find good engineers who don't mingle well with society at large, but you can find extroverts and people on the grey areas as well. The thing is they tend to repelled by the current status quo. Which affects a lot of women.
  • mich41 14y ago
    I've seen some women in CS, maths and software dev. Those who were doing their jobs well were hardly doing anything differently than men who were doing their jobs well. The only women or men "thinking differently" were clowns trying to show off. I don't care if I work with women as long as they are doing their job instead of talking how their presence enriches the team and whole Universe. Unfortunately, the letter are the kind attracted by "gender equility" propaganda.
• fossuser 14y ago
  On somewhat of a tangential note affirmative action is an interesting issue. Assuming the goal is to provide equal opportunity for those that were unlikely to have the same advantages as others through their childhood, I think making this distinction by race instead of socio-economic standing perpetuates a lot of racism. It suggests someone is disadvantaged simply because of their race. While it creates an ethnically diverse student body it doesn't create a class diverse student body (so it's a bit of a pseudo diversity). Using a socio-economic standard you abstract away the race issue and give an advantage to those who have less money which has a stronger correlation to actually having less opportunity. This also creates a more diverse student body as well. There is one very important reason it had to originally be done by race - the choosers in the original system were racist. If admissions is racist then you can't do it by socio-economic standing because they'll just only pick whatever race they prefer. To make the switch you have to be able to determine that the choosers are no longer racist. It's another hard problem, but I'm not entirely sure I understand the connection to this issue. If the comparison is that women should be given an advantage because they're disadvantaged technically I'd think that is exactly the sexism that's the core problem - and is unfair to the women who are really great.
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  • Anechoic 14y ago
    Using a socio-economic standard you abstract away the race issue and give an advantage to those who have less money which has a stronger correlation to actually having less opportunity. The problem wrt to race and using a socio-economic standard is that there are almost as many whites in poverty as there are black people in total in the USA (~33 million vs ~38 million according to wiki). There is also the issue that even when accounting for socio-economic status, there is still real discrimination (Pager's Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market points out that a white job applicant with a criminal record is more likely to get a job call back than a black job applicant without a criminal record even when qualifications are normalized). Just looking at socio-economic characteristics doesn't solve the problem.
• mpyne 14y ago
  > The other side believe that an artificial environment needs to be created to correct an imbalance. Rooted in this principle there is often a belief that this situation only exists because of artificially created and perpetuated gender roles. If you're referring to affirmative action, the other side is more akin to the belief that without corrective action of some sort, that there will never be a fair environment in which to have a true meritocracy. This is due to nothing more than competition theory; if you have two evenly matched teams, and one has a substantial lead on the other at the halfway mark of a game, you wouldn't expect the losing team to come from behind except in rare cases. Given that Real Life is very much a Winner-Takes-All type of game that has sharp implications for later generations of each team. Now it may be that there are other reasons for a gender imbalance in this case and so your revised question is probably as simple as it can feasibly get. But affirmative action, while being one of many distasteful choices for a distasteful situation, isn't necessarily just a bunch of do-gooders trying to force things into balance. It's an attempt to ensure a meritocracy is even possible at all.
  • Camillo 14y ago
    When people talk about meritocracy, they are thinking of a competition between individuals. When you assert that it's a competition between races, or between sexes, or between other social groups, the concept of meritocracy doesn't even apply any more.
    • mpyne 14y ago
      Not to put too fine a point on it, but in America WASPy types of persons enslaved black and "mixed" types of persons, and even after that was theoretically eliminated post-Civil War, Jim Crow laws ensured that racial equality was not even possible until near the end of the 1960's. So certainly at a socio-political regional and national level it was very much a "competition between races". At an individual level then sure, it's not like you could point a finger as a black man at one particular white oppressor, but that still didn't make it any better for you (statistically speaking) to have been born black. That's the whole point about the discussion about a meritocracy: How can you say that the alpha nerd on this side and the failed athlete struggling with math on the other were ever engaged in a fair competition for that one programming job? Alpha nerd had a two-parent home (probably a two-income home as well), with computers to practice on since he was a teenager (or earlier), didn't have to worry about being stabbed at school or shot at the public park, went to a public school with a stable and well-established tax base, etc. etc. Whereas Super Jock came from the slums, had to step over the passed-out crackheads on his way to walking miles to school in the morning, his dad was floating along from prison cell to prison cell and it would be even odds if his mother was drunk or not when he got home that evening from his hours of practice for the sport that represented his only effective chance at a stable life as an adult. Math homework? He don't have time for that shit! Now obviously both of those are highly contrived, but the issue is that it doesn't even have to be that severe in practice to go from little individual effects to a noticeable high-level socio-economic effect. Is affirmative action the answer to that? Hell man, I don't know. The underlying issues certainly go much deeper than just "we should give more scholarships to poor minority candidates", for all we know that's 10 years too late to even get minorities interested in STEM, let alone struggling to catch up with it. But HELL YES the concept of "competition" applies to meritocracy. I'm not saying race should have something to do with a meritocracy, I'm saying that it shouldn't, and so are people who actually argue for affirmative action for future equality.
• rayiner 14y ago
  > For me, I'm not sure how productive all this gender hand-wringing really is. It's potentially very productive. The culture of CS, "judgmental introversion" as you put it, is not anything intrinsic to CS. Indeed, software engineering is a profession that demands a high level of communication and cooperation. The "lone hacker" stereotype is in my opinion quite the opposite of the kind of people you want in software engineering (or engineering generally). One of the things the whole "affirmative action" debate ignores, on both sides, is that cultures are self-perpetuating, but affirmative action can move cultures to new, self-sustaining equillibria. The lack of women is by itself something that creates a barrier to entry for women, and once the ratio is corrected through affirmative means, the new equilibrium becomes self-perpetuating. I'll use as an example the profession of accounting. Accounting, like CS, has a perception of being introverted and nerdy. Yet, 45-50% of the employees at Big 4 accounting firms are women. Across the field, 20% of all partners are women, and more importantly, 43% of new partners are women (http://suite101.com/article/accounting-is-becoming-a-womans-world-a224930 http://suite101.com/article/accounting-is-becoming-a-womans-...). But there is no affirmative action for women in accountancy. It's not easier to get a job at PWC or E&Y as a woman. The affirmative action is no longer necessary--because women aren't self-selecting out of the profession, firms don't need to dip down to get equally qualified candidates. The legal field saw a similar shift as a result of affirmative action for women. In a field that used to be an "old boy's club" half of new associates are women and 30% of new partners are women (http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/blog/2012/01/report-30-of-new-law-firm-partners.html http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/blog/2012/01/report-30-o...). But at least at the associate level there is no affirmative action any longer--the new equilibrium is self-perpetuating. It's self-perpetuating because balancing the gender ratio changed the culture in a way that made the profession attractive to women. And you know what? The culture is better. It's modern and professional. There is nothing intrinsic about smoking and dirty jokes that made you better at the practice of law, and frankly there is nothing intrinsic about playing WoW in your spare time that makes you better at programming. So your dichotomy about "meritocracy" is short-sighted. There is nothing "meritocratic" about indulging male culture to keep a field male-dominated. Indeed, that's anti-meritocratic. Affirmative action, ironically, by balancing gender ratios can move the culture in a direction where you can have true meritocracy--where women don't self-select out of a profession because they don't want to be the minority, and where in the long run you don't have to dip down to get qualified women because the qualified women aren't turned away by the male-dominated culture.
• deleted 14y ago
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  • burntsushi 14y ago
    With regards to affirmative action, the GP said: > I suspect the opinion people have on this issue largely mirrors their view on affirmative action. Which merely suggests that one's view of affirmative action tends to predict one's view of these gender bias issues. > The problem is that you a have bunch of horny teenage boys with underdeveloped social skills And females just aren't cut out for hard technical work. /s
• laureny 14y ago
  > Personally I believe that gender imbalance in this (and other) professions is only indirectly related to gender. At the risk of being downvoted into oblivion, I'll ask the question that nobody seems to want to ask: is it possible that females are genetically programmed to be less interested or less skilled than males for computer science?
  • TheZenPsycho 14y ago
    it is "possible" in the sense that anything is possible. It is just as possible that the opposite is true: that women are genetically programmed to be more interested in computer science than men. Either proposal is a red herring though. This is not a worthy line of argument or thought to pursue, and is not backed up by any evidence. More likely is that these are cultural issues. Why is it not worthy? Because the number and proportion of women in computer science is declining. If you really believe this is due to genetic factors, then what we should really be thinking about is what factors are at work here to cause such rapid evolution! But clearly this is absurd, isn't it?
  • astrobe_ 14y ago
    It doesn't matter actually. On average men are stronger and taller than women. But I'm pretty sure you met a woman taller than you at least once, and a woman trained in, say, 400 meter run can ridicule you any day on a track. Same for CS, if ever a scientific study shows that women are "genetically" less fitted for CS, it doesn't mean that you can't find a woman that performs better in the field. I think employers are smart enough to get that. More problematic are some disadvantages of hiring a woman like birth vacations. My country made I think a smart legal move by making such a vacations available to men as well, in order to make both genders equal in that respect.
• eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  Ok, I just want to speak the hell up right now. I have seen misogyny in the workplace. It really does exist, and there really is an Old Boys Club culture in some workplaces. So step one to lowering the barriers of entry to women is to stop speaking of or treating women like negligible trivialities.
  • UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
    > So step one to lowering the barriers of entry to women is to stop speaking of or treating women like negligible trivialities. The point you're trying to make is lost on me. You come here to "speak the hell up" but you didn't really manage to /say/ anything except to point out that women aren't "negligible trivialities" whatever the heck that even means.
    • EliRivers 14y ago
      "Negligible" is an adjective meaning "such a small amount that it has no significance", and a "triviality" is something of no serious concern. Is English not your first language, or do you have the reading skills of an eight year old?
      • UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
        English is in fact my first language. Cannot comment on my read age (since I don't know). In general I am well aware of the word's definitions, but what I wanted to get at was what the OP meant by them or what they were getting at in general. Seems they were very angry but weren't able to really clarify what about. Their point wasn't fleshed out even enough to convey to others.
        • EliRivers 14y ago
          Perfect. That is SO much better than your previous comment and my comment in response. Clear, to the point, adding to the conversation and inviting the OP to more clearly state their case. More please!
  • 14y ago
• Tichy 14y ago
  I never heard of the judgmental stereotype. Anyway, I notice that you seem to also tend to believe that CS is somehow hostile to women because the people in it are not social enough or whatever. I just want to put forward another idea: what if CS isn't attractive to women because it is not really an attractive job and women have better options? Think about it, really! Is CS attractive? It is cool to create cool things with computers, but the job reality is usually vastly different. Watch "Office Space" (everybody in IT should). Think about cubicles, or offices in the basement. Think about being glued to a computer screen all day, with little physical exercise. Think about inane specifications, hundreds and hundreds of pages long. Think about Dilbert. Perhaps being a nanny or a nurse is more fun after all, at least if you care a lot about social interactions (and I don't men because men in CS are not sociable, but because being glued to a screen isn't sociable). Where do the "better options" come in? Nurses and nannies don't earn as much money as IT specialists, but women don't need so much money. They tend to be the supplemental earners in a family, not the main breadwinners. Simple as that.
  • TheZenPsycho 14y ago
    >Nurses and nannies don't earn as much money as IT specialists, but women don't need so much money. They tend to be the supplemental earners in a family, not the main breadwinners. Simple as that. oof, really? That's what you think about women? wow. Reverse the gendered nouns about that. How would you feel, as a man, if someone said something like that about your entire gender?
    • Tichy 14y ago
      What did I say about women that you disagree with? If I said that men tend to be just the supplemental earners in a family it would be false. At least for the present time. I don't understand what you might find offensive about that - I didn't say that women are incapable of earning a lot of money, just that they often voluntarily choose to not do so. And I don't think it is going to change, because women get pregnant and breast-feed their children, which impedes their flexibility in making money. Don't blame me (or society) for biology. Edit: if you are at all interested, I started reading a book yesterday that sounds very promising - "Why Men Earn More" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000TE6BDW?ie=UTF8&camp=213733&creative=393177&creativeASIN=B000TE6BDW&linkCode=shr&tag=notyetregiste-20&qid=1362914034&sr=8-2-spell&keywords=why+men+earn+mor http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000TE6BDW?ie=UTF8&camp... I only read the free kindle intro so far, but it is supposed to help both men and women to make better choices, and it explains the pay gap. The intro was already a very interesting read - it's short, and it's free, highly recommended.
• vacri 14y ago
  "are there any barriers to entry for women in CS?" is a subset of "why aren't there more women in CS?"; they're asking the same thing.
• ZoFreX 14y ago
  > I think these sorts of articles are asking the wrong question when they ask "why aren't there more women in CS?" or "how can we get more women in CS?" Agreed. But I think the right question to ask is "how can we stop driving women out of CS?" Many of my friends left the field due to sexism, and I have personally witnessed a lot of sexism in the field. Add to that the scientific studies showing that everyone is subconsiously biased against hiring women and it's clear to me that we have a very real problem.