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.""
Do they? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never heard someone saying a sentence like this in high school (girls or boys). Anyone?
CS Core Curriculum? (Score:4, Insightful)
Know what that sounds like? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
What about nursing?? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:why can the world (Score:3, Insightful)
Because the pay is terrible, and you can't support a family as a primary school teacher?
Re:why can the world (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Computing's Narrow Focus"? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What about nursing?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Because women who want go into medicine end up nurses instead of doctors. This is the result of stereotypes, peer pressure and a largely male establishment.
So what you are saying is if a field is male dominated, it is because of men and we need to change it. If a field is female dominated, it is still because of men. Is there anything that is not a man's fault?
Re:why can the world (Score:5, Insightful)
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We don't know (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
You've got to be kidding me? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
PC is most important tool since the printing press (Score:4, Insightful)
... how can you argue that at all, let alone suggest it has a gender bias?
Re:The problem, as always... (Score:5, Insightful)
As usual, the ACM totters between cluelessness and a corporate stooge.
CS population is a social issue. To be blunt, the USA views STEM as low class. "nerd" and "geek" are 4 letter slurs coming from most people.
Women are taught to be more in tune with social issues so shy away. Later on, 75% of STEM graduates leave the field.
It's worse in Canada and some European countries. After working several years there, I'll never willingly go back. If you're in tech then you're an untouchable lower social rung.
Re:The problem, as always... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Boys fall in love with computers as machines; girls see them as tools to do something else," said Barbara Ericson, a senior research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who tracks the AP exam.
What does this have to do with self-confidence? This is women approaching computers from a different perspective (on average).
"Then girls think, Ãfmaybe I don't belong because I don't love them like the boys do.Ãf(TM)"
And they'd be right. Why do they belong at a company passionate about technology if they aren't passionate about technology? They don't belong there any more than I belong in a doctor's surgery as anything but a patient - I'm not passionate about healthcare and didn't take exams to become a qualified doctor.
Re:The problem, as always is ignorant commenters (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem isn't as obvious as you made it. No quote in the article, including yours, points to self confidence as the problem. The one that comes closest is the second half of your quote.
But that's pointing towards realizing a fairly obvious difference and responding appropriately. Should they overcompensate and think that they belong despite evidence otherwise? Is that how this should work? Ignoring evidence? I'm not sure how else you could interpret that.
This is the first explanation I've seen that really makes sense - that women focus on "what it can do for me" and men focus on "what I can make it do". As men tend to design courses, and that develops into the curriculum, and then to an entire program, computer science is focused on the manly perspective.
The other quote :
I'm not sure how that is backed up by real information, but it certainly makes a certain bit of logic. Women in general do have higher verbal skills (ignoring the applicability to real life of such research). An average woman with strong math would still have a verbal edge. Self confidence plays no part in this one.
The post-PC specialization idea makes a certain amount of sense - women got a CS degree to get further in a chosen career, not to do CS stuff. And now that they can learn on a PC instead of a classroom, there's no need for the CS degree. This has nothing to do with self confidence.
The data near the bottom seems to bear out this concept, and it has nothing to do with self confidence. So no, Anonymous Wrong Person, it has nothing to do with self confidence unless you want to drag out something that 1) has been debunked 2) is ten years old or 3) didn't look at environmental causes.
Re:WTF (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Do they? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The problem, as always... (Score:3, Insightful)
The 'CS population is a "women aren't fucking interested" issue' Stop trying to make it out to be more than it is. Stop trying to make it 'equal'.
People are different.
Genders are different, if you don't realize that, you need to take sex ed over again.
Races are different, if you don't realize that, take a look at distribution of races in sports (All of them from chess to basketball).
Certain groups of people have certain attributes in GENERAL that make them prefer, not prefer, or have some general level of skill above or below the 'average'.
NOTHING YOU DO IS GOING TO CHANGE THAT SHORT OF GENETIC ENGINEERING.
Stop trying to turn it into a fucking social issue, its a god damn evolution issue. WE ARE NOT ALL THE SAME.
That doesn't mean any particular person of a race or gender CAN'T do something or MUST do something, it just means they are predisposed one way or the other and most people of that particular group will behave in a similar way.
Most women don't want to spend all day dicking with computers. FULL STOP.
To be blunt, the USA views STEM as low class.
... Really? Since when? What fucked up part of the world do you live in that believes such a silly statement? Who are the 'upper class' then? Blue collar workers perhaps?
Re:why can the world (Score:4, Insightful)
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
SO WHAT? (Score:2, Insightful)
So what if women DON'T WANT to get nerdy CS degrees. SO WHAT. Why should we FORCE THEM to like something that they DON'T WANT?
Re:SO WHAT? (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't be serious. Of course the answer here is to force them to do something they don't want to do. Because clearly if there's a deficiency in the supply of women in a given field it's clearly because there's something wrong with the men in the field. If we force women to get involved in the field we can put those men in their place.
The fact that you'd now have men that are unhappy and being underpaid due to the increased competition and have women that are unhappy with a career that they didn't really want is completely beside the point.
Re:Do they? (Score:4, Insightful)
You do realize that women don't just go to work one day and go into labor, right? There's generally ample warning.
Depending on the length of the sabbatical and her employer, she might join a different team or department, or perhaps go to work elsewhere. But there's no reason to leave the profession.
Re:The problem, as always... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then we would expect to see very little variation from country to country in terms of male vs. female interest in STEM careers, right? Is that the case? It may be the case there there are physiological differences between men and women on an aggregate level that give rise to some of the gender disparity, but you're an idiot if you don't think social issues also play a part. For instance, if it's all physiological then why was women's participation in computer science higher in 1984 than it is today?