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ACM Blames the PC For Driving Women Away From Computer Science 329

theodp (442580) writes "Over at the Communications of the ACM, a new article — Computing's Narrow Focus May Hinder Women's Participation — suggests that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs should shoulder some of the blame for the dearth of women at Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter and other tech companies. From the article: "Valerie Barr, chair of ACM's Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W), believes the retreat [of women from CS programs] was caused partly by the growth of personal computers. 'The students who graduated in 1984 were the last group to start college before there was personal computing. So if you were interested in bioinformatics, or computational economics, or quantitative anthropology, you really needed to be part of the computer science world. After personal computers, that wasn't true any more.'" So, does TIME's 1982 Machine of the Year deserve the bad rap? By the way, the ACM's Annual Report discusses its participation in an alliance which has helped convince Congress that there ought to be a federal law making CS a "core subject" for girls and boys: "Under the guidance of the Education Policy Committee, ACM continued its efforts to reshape the U.S. education system to see real computer science exist and count as a core graduation credit in U.S. high schools. Working with the CSTA, the National Center for Women and Information Technology, NSF, Microsoft, and Google, ACM helped launch a new public/private partnership under the leadership of Code.org to strengthen high school level computing courses, improve teacher training, engage states in bringing computer science into their core curriculum guidelines, and encourage more explicit federal recognition of computer science as a key discipline in STEM discussions.""
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ACM Blames the PC For Driving Women Away From Computer Science

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  • Do they? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rbarreira ( 836272 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @02:15PM (#47742927) Homepage

    "With computing, the social element isn't always evident. They ask, 'how am I going to make a difference in the world with a computer science degree?'"

    I've never heard someone saying a sentence like this in high school (girls or boys). Anyone?

    • by khasim ( 1285 )

      I've never heard someone saying a sentence like this in high school (girls or boys). Anyone?

      Not me, either. If anything that would happen in college, wouldn't it?

      Anyway, from TFA (by the way, is it really displaying as grey text on a white background):

      NCWIT senior research scientist Catherine Ashcraft cites the 2008 Harvard Business Review study "The Athena Factor," which found that "56% of technical women leave their private sector jobs by mid-career," she said. "But 75% continue to work full-time, and app

      • Check my math, okay?
        100 tech women
        56% leave the private sector (56 in this example)
        75% of the 56 continue to work full time (42 in this example)
        ~50% of 42 continue in tech (21 in this example)

        So that 21 plus the 44 that did not change is 65. So only 35% of women in tech leave tech in mid-career. 65% are in tech and stay in tech full time.

        Well, there is also a dearth of women studying mathematics.

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @03:43PM (#47743457)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Re:Do they? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by sjames ( 1099 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @05:22PM (#47743937) Homepage Journal

          I would say that is more a problem of perception in HR and hiring managers than reality. If you've seen one silver bullet that willd solve all our problems, you've seen them all.

          Sure, things do change in just a few years, but it's not that hard to catch up given you needn't bother with the flash in the pan stuff that already went away again.

          C is still C, Java is Java. Python is more popular, Perl a bit less. Java is the new COBOL. It's not like taking a few years off to stay at home until a child is school age is spent in total isolation. Most of the tech news is on the web anyway.

      • by timelorde ( 7880 )

        Check my math, okay?

        You've gone too far. You should have stopped when the answer was 42.

  • So... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @02:16PM (#47742943)

    So women stopped studying computer science because they didn't have to anymore? That certainly sounds like a crime against humanity.

  • why can the world (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ganjadude ( 952775 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @02:23PM (#47742977) Homepage
    simply not accept that men and women are different, and like different things? this is getting really creepy how obsessed some people are these days with other peoples lives.
    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @02:45PM (#47743107)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        why men often avoid female dominated jobs such as primary school teaching

        Because the pay is terrible, and you can't support a family as a primary school teacher?

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          That's kind of a crock of shit. My mom is a primary school teacher. At a middle class school in the suburbs, she brought home a very generous salary, followed by a sizeable lifetime pension after retirement. This myth that all these poor teachers are living in poverty needs to end.

          • a few questions

            how long ago was your mom a teacher? and how long was she a teacher?

            I can tell you that there are current grads that are trying to get teaching jobs, most these jobs for a first year student are under 27K a year ( granted thats with 3 months off) but still, in NY, you cant live on that
            • by digsbo ( 1292334 )
              Those are fair questions. There is no question the people in teaching in my area (Philly suburbs) have done very well in pay due to people arguing that there is some kind of across the board national problem with teacher pay. A teacher with 20 years experience probably makes as much per hour as a software engineer with 30 years experience, but has better benefits and retirement. I think you're looking at about $80-$85K for a 180 day school year year w/ master's degree (which was paid for by the employer, an
              • by digsbo ( 1292334 )
                Darnit, that " as a software engineer with 30 years experience" should have read only 20 years experience. Can't edit, I'm sorry. And, while I'm at it, starting salaries are in the 35K range, give or take a little. My teacher friend said his district's contract really didn't show much gains until 14 or 15 years, where he said what they call "The Lifestyle Change" kicked in. The meaning being having 20 years experience was WAY better than 15, compared to 15 vs. 10.
      • by ganjadude ( 952775 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @02:51PM (#47743135) Homepage
        why do we need to care why the differences are there? cant we just accept that there are difference and stop trying to "fix" the non problem?
        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          I think the whole issue is that depending on what the reason is, it is a problem. What's really wrong on both sides of it is that people tend to just assume it is our isn't a problematic reason, without actually getting one anywhere but their ass.
          • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward
            Please repost your question in English.
          • i have no idea what you said but i gather you said

            its a problem because...its a problem

            My response to that is no, its not
        • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @03:35PM (#47743407)
          Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • by AthanasiusKircher ( 1333179 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @07:39PM (#47744573)

            If there is a social cause, then society can work to undo it. If it is a biological cause, then we can stop wasting time and effort thinking it is a social cause.

            First of all, we also need to consider the possibility that it could be BOTH. I.e., that certain gender stereotypes have some relationship to biological facts, and thus gender stereotypes end up having other effects which are not necessarily biological (but may be partly rooted in them).

            The reason I bring this up is because it makes an interesting conundrum for these sorts of arguments. If something is entirely biological, there's supposedly no sense fighting it. (Of course, not all women are exactly the same, and some may have those "natural" biological elements emphasized to more or less degree in their talents and personalities.) But if something is entirely social, it's perceived as a gross injustice.

            But what if we combine these? For example, someone earlier in this thread brought up the biological fact that women bear children and thus may need to take significant time off of work to have a kid and especially in the first year or two do things that only women can do (particularly nursing). If a woman wants to have more than one child, that can easily add up to 5-10 years of absence from the job force. In a fast-paced field, it may be difficult for women to then hop immediately back in to the job force with skills that are already starting to be outdated.

            So, the issue here is not entirely biological (women could choose to forego children or dump their kid into daycare when he/she is a couple months old or women could actively try to keep up their skills even while not working full-time), but it's not entirely social either (men don't have the same hormones driving them to have children or nurse or be with infants). Yet we're still stuck with the problematic effects -- women will often get behind in their jobs or have trouble keeping up or returning to the workforce. We can't just blame it on biology, but it seems impossible to completely eliminate social issues that arise either.

            But I bet that many women of her era would have convinced themselves that being a chemist was a foolish notion and wouldn't have pursued it at all. That's social self-regulation. That should be eliminated.

            Obviously we need to eliminate actual ignorant prejudice. But the problems are often a lot more subtle than that these days. I know a lot of professional women who "came up through the ranks" in the 1970s, and they have horrific stories to tell about the kinds of indignities women suffered in the workforce back then. Let's not forget all the amazing progress we've made in a few decades... it's important to keep that in perspective.

            Nowadays, we're mostly confronting those harder problems I mentioned earlier, like how to figure out a way to be "fair" in a workplace (and all the related decisions like salary, promotion, etc.) where one gender is more likely than the other to disappear from their career for 5-10 years at a time.

            And we also have to deal with cases where "social self-regulation" actually does serve some important purpose. Sure, is it biologically possible for a woman to have a child and dump the infant in daycare almost immediately to be fed with formula? Yes, obviously. And lots of women do it because they have to.

            But aren't there also psychological and perhaps social benefits to allowing women to choose to stay home and take care of a small child as they are biologically programmed to do? Moreover, aren't there also social benefits to having communities where children are raised by some parent (male or female) who can spend more time with them, rather than getting kids out of the home as quickly as possible and into large groups of kids often taken care of by people paid minimum wage? (Of course, some might argue the reverse -- that many parents are bad parents, and daycare may be helpful to the kids. Perhaps that's true

      • Re:why can the world (Score:5, Interesting)

        by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Sunday August 24, 2014 @02:53PM (#47743143) Homepage Journal

        But why do they like different career paths?

        I'm going to posit that women are smarter about accepting abusive work conditions than men are. 90-hour weeks where you sleep at your desk and get free Mountain Dew and a game of pinball in a few times during a death march is an abusive situation.

        What I really don't get is why some women want so badly to put other women in these situations when they're already winning. I guess what we need is more women entrepreneurs, to run companies sanely. Or men to grow a pair and tell their masters to kiss off so that tech work environments can become places where women would feel welcome.

        Yeah, smoke on that one - when you work unpaid overtime you're being hostile towards women.

        • Re:why can the world (Score:5, Interesting)

          by poity ( 465672 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @03:38PM (#47743423)

          Perhaps women have the luxury and privilege of not losing attractiveness when working low-paying jobs. Perhaps men are the victims of a society that forces them to over-work and be over-competitive because women ultimately select whose genes are passed on and whose are not. Perhaps this competitiveness is why men will take on more hard jobs, fight for more raises, and suffer the abuses.

          Is female materialism driving men into high wage jobs? Maybe there should be a federal law to address this...

      • > Is it that there is a biological difference that guides men and women to different career choices, or is there some social prodding that causes men and women to self regulate?

        You do realize the answer is not mutually exclusive, right?

        Men != Women for biological and social reasons. Film at 11.

    • maybe they should watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • by Langalf ( 557561 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @02:25PM (#47742985)
    Please, please, teach them something besides how to code in Java. A little theory would be nice. Some basic understanding of what a computer actually does with that code they type in. Some idea of how algorithms are turned into programs. Please?
    • HTDP2e to the rescue?
    • Please, please, teach them something besides how to code in Java. A little theory would be nice. Some basic understanding of what a computer actually does with that code they type in. Some idea of how algorithms are turned into programs. Please?

      I think the reason why the students are being taught Java is so that the Professors can focus on those other things. For lots of students the gotcha's of native code get in the way of learning the theories, algorithm tuning, and data structures. So by using a managed language in the classes, the classes can spend more time focusing on something else besides language implementation details.

  • I give up. This is some sort of mass hysteria.
  • In 1984... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Gavin Scott ( 15916 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @02:32PM (#47743039)

    "So if you were interested in bioinformatics, or computational economics, or quantitative anthropology, you really needed to be part of the computer science world."

    These weren't even things in 1984.

    Computers were not so pervasive that you were missing out on much if you didn't know anything about them.

    G.

    • These weren't even things in 1984.

      People working with Smalltalk machines and Lisp workstations at that time would probably disagree. But then again, only a chosen few could afford those.

    • "So if you were interested in bioinformatics, or computational economics, or quantitative anthropology, you really needed to be part of the computer science world."

      These weren't even things in 1984.

      It depends on what you mean by "weren't even things." If you mean that most people didn't know about them, well, that's still true. If you mean that NO ONE -- even at research labs and in grad school projects, etc. -- was doing this stuff, well, you're wrong. Even if you just do some searches in Google Books restricting sources to 1984 or earlier, you'll find the use of the term "bioinformatics" going back to the early 1970s (the first shared protein databases go back to the early 70s, and gene sequencin

      • As for "quantitative anthropology," there are a few sources out there that mention applying quantitative methods back then, but I doubt there was as much computer use as in, say, economics. On the other hand, I know a number of people who did their doctoral dissertations in the humanities in the 1960s and early 1970s who were making use of computers to try things similar to what we'd called "digital humanities" today. And I've read papers in the humanities using computer-aided analysis going back to at least the early 1960s. Perhaps it was the "space race" era or something that influenced those projects, but computers were around particularly at universities.

        One word: SNOBOL. :-)

  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @02:35PM (#47743061)

    It sounds like some jocks complaining that they didn't wanna hang with the uncool geek crowd and now they're relegated to polishing the cars of those eggheads.

  • by Cutting_Crew ( 708624 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @02:38PM (#47743069)
    How come there aren't any people complaining that there are VASTLY more women in nursing than men. Surely we need to make sure that core nursing classes are a core subject for both men and women right?
    • How come there aren't any people complaining that there are VASTLY more women in nursing than men.

      There are. For example, have a look at organizations devoted to recruiting more men, like the American Assembly for Men in Nursing [aamn.org] or the "Are you man enough to be a nurse?" [oregoncent...ursing.org] campaign. Also see various studies and concerns about the issue on the Minority Nurse [minoritynurse.com] page. It's really a complicated issue, and organizations like this have really been trying to figure out recruitment efforts.

      Maybe there should be more "people complaining" about this issue, but your assertion that "there aren't any" is just untru

  • by trout007 ( 975317 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @02:40PM (#47743087)

    Where is the push to get men to become primary school teachers? Half of students are male shouldn't the same be true of the teachers?

    Same for healthcare. With the exception of doctors most healthcare is dominated by women yet men are a large number of patients.

    • 2013 Mean salaries

      • Primary school teacher $54,740
      • Computer programmer $92,820
      • Doctor, internal medicine $188,440
      • RN $68,910

      There's also a gap in garbage collectors. Nobody is concerned about those jobs because they are low-end jobs.

      • Primary school teachers: 3 million
        Programmers: 1 million
        Nurses: 3 million
        Doctors: 700,00
        The total payroll for the "poorly paid" lady jobs is higher than the high-test positions, and the majority of men are earning less. There are probably 10x as many waitresses as there are garbage men
  • by Animats ( 122034 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @02:53PM (#47743141) Homepage

    "Computing's Narrow Focus"? Get a degree in petroleum geology or structural engineering if you want a narrow focus. Or pick the wrong field in biology. I know a woman who got a PhD in an area of microbiology that turned out to be a dead end. She ended up managing a coffee shop.

    • by russotto ( 537200 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @03:02PM (#47743197) Journal

      "Computing's Narrow Focus"? Get a degree in petroleum geology or structural engineering if you want a narrow focus. Or pick the wrong field in biology. I know a woman who got a PhD in an area of microbiology that turned out to be a dead end. She ended up managing a coffee shop.

      It's certainly true that my not-far-post-1984 CS degree was focused pretty much on computing itself; computer architecture, automata, algorithmic complexity, database internals. Not so much on applications; the article suggests that pre-1984 there was more focus on what you can do with computers. I'm not so sure this particular explanation holds up, because the drop in women in CS is mirrored by a drop in women in business computing, which by definition remained focused on applications.

      To throw out my own hypothesis, the PC revolution also caused a huge increase in the number of prospective majors in the field. Overwhelmed departments responded with "weed-out" classes and restrictive admissions policies; this may have had a disparate impact on women.

      • It's certainly true that my not-far-post-1984 CS degree was focused pretty much on computing itself; computer architecture, automata, algorithmic complexity, database internals. Not so much on applications; the article suggests that pre-1984 there was more focus on what you can do with computers.

        I must have missed something because when I look at Knuth and Dijkstra, they apparently expect you to already understand how to apply the stuff, and they did so in the 1970s. Was there actually any change in this respect, in the CS field proper?

    • "Computing's Narrow Focus"? Get a degree in petroleum geology or structural engineering if you want a narrow focus. Or pick the wrong field in biology. I know a woman who got a PhD in an area of microbiology that turned out to be a dead end. She ended up managing a coffee shop.

      The last has probably nothing to do with her choice of subject. Most biology students end up as unskilled workers. I have several friends who have studied biology, and the job market for them while big is way too small for the sheer number of biologists educated.

      • by digsbo ( 1292334 )

        I have several friends who have studied biology, and the job market for them while big is way too small for the sheer number of biologists educated.

        Advanced degrees (well, really, PhD), or BS only?

  • by russotto ( 537200 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @02:55PM (#47743161) Journal

    It's certainly true that the first drop in female enrollment happened shortly after the PC came on the scene (the second drop happened after the dot-com crash). I'm not sure that's sufficient evidence to blame the PC (my post title is a formal fallacy, after all), but at least it has better support than the prevalent "smelly misogynistic nerd" theory.

  • by Shadow of Eternity ( 795165 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @03:00PM (#47743183)

    Yknow, like Susan "HedgeMage" Sons? She certainly had some choice words [linuxjournal.com] about this entire tempest in a teacup.

    Also it's worth pointing out that computer science degrees are something like 10% of all degrees conferred in the US, and women utterly *dominate* every single aspect of education from K12 through college, even earning nearly 2/3rds of all bachelors degrees. I would think the fact men are barely over 1/3rd of college graduates in the first place is a bit of a bigger problem than what major women choose.

    • Hey, the focus is on where women are not excelling at. Stop pointing out that they are excelling overall.

      Please ignore my crossed eyes.

  • by poity ( 465672 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @03:14PM (#47743269)

    So, basically, because personal computers made CS more accessible, and men took advantage of this access in greater numbers than women which resulted in the imbalance we see today, it is therefore the fault of personal computers that this imbalance exists.

  • by Shadow99_1 ( 86250 ) <theshadow99&gmail,com> on Sunday August 24, 2014 @03:33PM (#47743387)

    Just the other day we had a story about how american tech companies only want the top 1-10% of available tech workers in the US and everyone else they hire is a visa worker... This suggests that maybe 1 in 10 STEM workers in the US actually can get a job in the US in tech... So for the love of god we need more women to enter this often dead end field why? So more women can remain unemployed, underemployed, and otherwise in debt?

    As fundamental as computers are today I can sort of understand a certain level of computer competency/literacy is probably a good thing... But this drive to force more women into STEM seems a bit silly to me... If they want to sure, if not that's fine....

  • My wife watches those country music awards shows

  • We don't know (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Livius ( 318358 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @03:38PM (#47743431)

    I think the biggest problem is that people aren't willing to just admit we don't now why computer science has the male-female imbalance that it does.

    There are differences between men and women in terms of temperament and aptitudes, but those differences are small and don't seem to explain it.

    There are aspects of the culture in computer science that are inconvenient for parents, and usually wives expect husbands to make compromises (which not all men and not all women are happy about). That doesn't seem enough to explain it either.

    There is certainly no lack of encouragement and support for women in the profession, so it's not that any of that is lacking.

    We don't know, and that means we don't know what the solution is, or even if there is a problem in need of a solution.

  • by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @03:48PM (#47743491) Journal

    "Valerie Barr, chair of ACM's Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W), believes the retreat [of women from CS programs] was caused partly by the growth of personal computers."

    So, it sounds like women don't go into computer science because they don't like computers.

    Alright, that makes sense. I don't like pig shit so I didn't become a hog farmer.

  • by epyT-R ( 613989 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @03:50PM (#47743495)

    The social justice warrior push into tech is getting brazen. The article goes to the edge of suggesting that women are smarter than men, but then says when the applied knowledge gets specific enough, they fall behind? The problem is that the best way to measure mastery of knowledge is to measure how well it is applied to open ended problems. If most women are dropping out at that point, it means they can't hack it. If the majority of high performing employees at places like google are male, that suggests a problem with how the schools measure performance more than anything else. It's not like google isn't rolling out the red carpet for them, and if they were truly better, google would snap them up in an instant and have a female majority by now. Do women earn more credits and get better grades? Probably, but these days, high schools and colleges are bending over backwards to give women the fast track, so I wouldn't trust any of the statistics they present. In fact, the whole article reeks of political think tank style 'research.'

    Lucy Sanders, CEO and co-founder of the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT), noted that compared to universities, "corporations are all different, and they're all very private."

    I think this unintentionally presents the real motivations behind this whole piece: The justification of more regulation from the feminist lobby.

    There are many theories. One asserts that prejudice against women's abilities throws barriers in their way; a related perspective suggests women are less likely to enter technical fields because they expect such barriers.

    If this is even true, I wonder why they expect to find such barriers? Maybe because the media, school system, and society have beaten it into their heads they they're victims of the evil 'patriarchy' keeping them out of everything?

    "Boys fall in love with computers as machines; girls see them as tools to do something else,"

    Exactly true. I would say this is so with all technology, not just computers. However, it takes passion to stay afloat in these fields. You can't just get a degree and then expect to operate as a drone for the rest of your career if you want to move beyond the internship. Perhaps this is the reason why women drop out of the highly competitive applied fields. Hell, most men can't hack those positions either. It's one thing to be motivated by general ideas as the article suggests, but tech people have to have the ability to break those down into individual steps and then build something that executes them.

    If anything, the ubiquity of an open, relatively cheap platform like the PC grants the majority of the population the opportunity to learn computing skills at nearly all levels in a meritocratic environment. Other than the cost of the hardware and an internet connection, there is no boundary, except motivation and interest. Sex has nothing to do with it. It doesn't surprise me that SJWs have a problem with such open meritocracy: it provides objective measurement of individual achievement, which is a big emotional hiccup for those who want to believe we're all intrinsically equally capable, yet 'oppressed' by class warfare.

  • by Glasswire ( 302197 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @04:32PM (#47743671) Homepage

    ... how can you argue that at all, let alone suggest it has a gender bias?

  • by DMJC ( 682799 ) on Sunday August 24, 2014 @09:30PM (#47745051)
    Is the single most bullshit answer ever. Are you people fucking serious? When has having children ever been a hindrance to entering a field such as medicine, law, or science? Women do all of these jobs without issue. That is the dumbest answer I've ever seen. It's also sexist as hell, I'm a guy and I'm not stupid enough to follow that line of reasoning. Lack of interest maybe, social stigma, quite possibly, there's also a huge battery of people saying no no no no no don't do STEM, only guys can do it. It's the man's field. Personally I think it's a lack of parents encouragement. Guys giving up computer time to their sisters, social sexism against women, and a lack of desire due to the above from women themselves. I work for an IT company, it's honestly a hostile workplace. If we ever hired a woman we would get sued to shit for the stuff I hear every day at work.

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