3 ms·
I'm commenting here as a response to a few posts that highlight my use of the word "hostile" - a somewhat inflammatory word but my time in the journalism world
by jd0 13y ago
I'm commenting here as a response to a few posts that highlight my use of the word "hostile" - a somewhat inflammatory word but my time in the journalism world taught me to bait clicks.... c:
I wouldn't say -hostile- in the sense that there's an active conscious attempt to bar women and people of color from computer science, what I mean is that in the computer science world there's an underlying structure which is rapidly ejecting (as one example) women. A structure which is reducing the number of women in computer science every year. Let's look at reports from the Computing Research Association:
"In the United States, the number of women represented in undergraduate computer science education and the white-collar information technology workforce peaked in the mid-1980s, and has declined ever since. In 1984, 37.1% of Computer Science degrees were awarded to women; the percentage dropped to 29.9% in 1989-1990, and 26.7% in 1997-1998.[2] Figures from the Computing Research Association Taulbee Survey indicate that less than 12% of Computer Science bachelor's degrees were awarded to women at US PhD-granting institutions in 2010-11.[3]"
that's a quote from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing
which separately sources that paragraph to this study:
http://www.cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CS_Degree_and_Enrollment_Trends_2010-11.pdf http://www.cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CS_De...
- eboyjr 13y agoI think the underlying question should be, "Why are fewer and fewer women are attracted to the field?"
- jd0 13y agoMaybe I should have thought this one out a bit... I'm pretty drunk!!
- xerophtye 13y agoyep, in college, our CS programs usually had hardly 18 to 25 girls in a class of 150. And some of them even dropped out. When we graduated, there were hardly 10 girls amongst us. So it's not that we "eject" them. We just don't get many girls attracted to this field.
- beat 13y agoThis isn't completely representative of the industry, because it's measuring academic behavior, not professional behavior. So the problem is occurring not in the "industry", but rather in high school and early college, when students are being directed toward majors. How do we address it there? How do we convince girls going into college and African-American students to pursue programming as a profession? This is all the more maddening to me because I think computing as a profession and as a community is far less hostile in terms of race and gender than most career paths. The meritocracy, while hardly the libertarian paradise its beneficiaries like to imagine it is, is still quite real. It's very easy to create a situation where you are truly measured by the quality of your work. So rather than asking why the programming profession is hostile to women and minorities, you should be asking why society is hostile to women and minorities entering the profession in the first place.