In competition with the two white guys in Redmond (Gates & Ballmer).
Of course, most of them came behind the white guys in Massachusetts.
Giving IQ tests which discriminate against certain segments of our society makes no sense whatsoever IMO.
I saw a study about a year or two ago that said that women do a better job at coding than men. I will see if I can find it and post it.
Here is an article on the study
You can’t infer from that study whether women make better or worse coders. That only looks at open source software, which is a small subset of software development.
Yes! This drives me nuts. I see it all the time. Ack.
It really doesn’t matter whether women or men make better coders. What matters is whether this particular individual, regardless of gender, is a good coder.
Saw this today and thought of this thread - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-makes-us-smarter/ A good lesson for tech companies who want to be innovative - “Decades of research by organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and demographers show that socially diverse groups (that is, those with a diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation) are more innovative than homogeneous groups.”
My son is CS. He thinks that if you are a female in this field the sky is the limit. He told me one of the companies he really wanted an internship gave an offer to a girl he knows. He said she got a ton of offers and that she was nice and competent. But, she had an edge with getting a job. He thinks that the gaming culture is geared towards guys. Many of his friends game online with each other and it is a social thing. He believes that girls are more mature and do not want to spend hours gaming… (geez, I wonder why 
) He said most of the intelligent math girls he knows go into Finance and Accounting and do not want the hassle of CS.
I know Rivet2000’s post #165 was mildly sarcastic. Steve Wozniak helped Steve Jobs a lot! I have read I, Woz, and if I were to choose between being Jobs or Wozniak, I’d choose being Wozniak.
I am on page 11 of the posts at the moment, and I haven’t seen any references to the “Dave to girl” ratio at Carnegie-Mellon, something computed 5 or 10 years ago, when Carnegie-Mellon discovered that it had more CS majors named David than it had young women computer science majors, in total.
The NYT article explains the academic pressures that tended to produce CS departments with very high concentrations of male majors, after women had been present in the field early on. One of the principal pressures was connected with accreditation: a number of accrediting groups in engineering fields (including CS) limit the student to faculty ratio in each major. The universities were generally not in a position to hire more faculty, especially in a field like CS where the faculty salaries tend to run on the high side, relative to average faculty salaries. So the solution was to limit the number of students accepted to the major. We have the same situation currently, in most of our engineering departments. This tended to favor those with computer experience pre-college. The entry-level courses assumed some foundation knowledge of students coming in, and moved quite fast for those with no experience.
After the Carnegie-Mellon faculty discovered that neophyte coders who were smart often developed into better computer scientists in the long run than those who had entered college with experience in the field, they added introductory courses for students with no prior experience. I believe that it is this factor that has allowed the number of women CS majors there to increase. This was mentioned in the NYT article.
As to why men are more likely to enter the university with prior computer experience: I think it is partly due to social-group experiences. Males are more likely to play video games and the gaming world can be pretty hostile to women. Gaming is sort of a gateway experience for coding and other aspects of computer science. Some families will invest more effort in having their sons gain computer experience than in having their daughters gain the same. I think that sexism is actually most rampant in robotics and coding at the high school level. Some families have not experienced this and they are lucky.
I don’t think that all fields necessarily have to be 50/50 in gender composition, in order to prove that there is no gender-based discrimination. But anyone arguing that men’s minds are better suited to computer science has to deal with the fact that women’s participation was higher historically and then it dropped off. Women’s participation was higher in the era when few people of either gender had experience prior to entering college (or even the workforce), and selection was based on intellectual quickness, as well as conscientiousness.
A couple of additional thoughts: My daughter took AP Calc BC in 9th grade (A/5), then took Honors Multi-Variable Calculus and Honors Differential equations at my university in 10th grade, linear algebra and a senior-level Probability and Statistics class in 11th grade, and Honors Abstract Algebra I and II in 12th grade. She took Real Analysis during her first semester in college. She has remarked that she is glad she had the opportunity to see the beauty of abstract mathematics along the way. But for now at least, she has opted out of math, because she did not find the culture congenial.
Also, while I was not too surprised to find myself the only woman in a math or physics class of 12, or one of 2 in a class of 20, over and over again, I had thought that by the time my daughter reached college, those days would be over. But they weren’t.
It is hardly surprising to me that men would grow in mechanical aptitude relative to women during the early and late adolescent years. There are some cultures where young men do not have the hands-on experience that tends to improve mechanical ability, but in many cases in the US, young men are tinkering with cars, working on robotics, and building things, while young women are less likely to be involved in those activities.
My niece took auto shop along with AP courses in high school, and took some courses in summer school in order to fit auto shop into her schedule. When she went the to University of Wisconsin as an engineering major, she did not have much difficulty getting involved in a research lab, because she was able to weld stainless steel. I don’t know that she had to do that often, but having the capability gave her an edge at the hiring stage. She and one other young woman were the only women students taking auto shop.
I would encourage women who are interested in any type of STEM career to pursue it and to learn to live with the obstacles (and perhaps remove a few obstacles for those following them).
I am not all that old, but when I was hired as a faculty member, there were at least two eminent members of the department who were categorically opposed to hiring any woman whatever, period. I did not know this when I accepted the job. One died before he could see what I could really do in the field, but one other apologized to me later on–not, I think, because he was so taken with my work, but because his daughter had gone into STEM academics later. This opened his eyes to some of the obstacles, and also gave him the desire for the field to work out for women.
@ucbalumnus Somehow I missed your remark (CC offers the latest posts in a weird way). Yes, job interviews may be tougher of course for these people, but to give an example, at my previous job I was given a few coding problems to solve at home, and at the current one I was given several question and left alone for two hours. I’m not overly anxious but tend to freeze when I need to think on my feet while being evaluated. Both ways were so much less nerve-wracking and during the face-to-face interview parts I was asked things about my previous work which of course I knew. People from both places eventually told me I was the best candidate by a wide margin and they were happy they hired me.
D has been given coding projects prior to interviews. Proctored and timed online, or just on her own. No whiteboarding yet.
Best wishes to your daughter, OHMomof2!
Google search will provide links to some good strategies for white board type interviews. A little prep goes a long way.
Thank you @QuantMech - she’s got a couple of nice offers now but the company/industry culture is a concern of mine and something she is considering as she evaluates her options.
CBS 60 Minutes just did a piece on closing the gender gap:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/closing-the-gender-gap-in-the-tech-industry-60-minutes/
I sat with my D19 when she watched that segment of 60 minutes last night. When they had that shot of the mile of cubicles with nothing but gamer-type guys I looked over at her to see if she would react,…nothing. But I could see she was taking it in. I don’t think it is an attractive looking environment for a young professional women. It was partly the number of guys, but it was also that it was just such an unattractive space to spend 40 plus hours a week, kind of like walking into a guys locker room. It seemed to me that there is a disconnect between seeing classrooms of young girls excited in learning code, and those professional spaces. Just my two cents…
The fascinating part to me about the 60 Minutes piece was the introduction of coding as game play in kindergarten. The more that coding becomes part of girls’ everyday lives, the more girls will want to study it. I think many of them are turned off by the stereotypes by the time they’re introduced to coding in middle or high school.
There was an interview with the author of Brotopia that touched on a lot of these issues today: https://www.wnyc.org/story/all-of-it-2019-03-04 (this will take you to a link that will take you to the audio when they upload it. It’s not up yet, but should be tomorrow.)
DD is taking CS in college. She didn’t even get into coding until I strongly suggested she take a class in high school. She did very well in it and even the teacher suggested she consider studying it in college. She had a passion for art and writing but had no interest in pursuing either as a college major.
So she decided to go into CS. Though the program is male heavy there are a lot of girls studying it as well. Her current professor is also a female and there is a women in computer science group she has joined as well.
I have been very happy w/ her experience so far, however, and hope the positive experience she is having continues into the field upon graduating.