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.""
Re:The problem, as always... (Score:5, Funny)
We can't even solve the problem of Unicode on /.
Let me get this straight (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:The problem, as always... (Score:2, Funny)
I don't have self-confidence for two cents and I'm in CS. Any other theories?
Re:The problem, as always... (Score:4, Funny)
It wouldn't be hard to solve, but given the current state of affairs: no dice.