<p>Maybe MiamiDAP is correct that there are many women in IT, but I haven’t seen a single CS department that wasn’t overwhelmingly male despite the department’s best efforts to increase the numbers. And I am not convinced that they are in the higher paying jobs in CS. Wikipedia says, “A National Public Radio report in 2013 stated that about 20% of all US computer programmers are female.[8]”</p>
<p>CMU’s School of Computer Science admits women with experience in computer science than the guys just for this reason. They went from dismal to 40% and have since sunk back to 32%. </p>
<p>Mathmom, our team is pretty even I think. Not sure if its 50/50 but I’d guess its close. Come to think of it, there are three females off the top of my head that are managers of development teams.</p>
<p>I have noticed that you are not very good at nuanced reading. What I wrote was that culture teaches girls that travel isn’t safe. It is something that women learn. That is why there are all the self-defense courses geared to women. It is a cultural norm that women are taught how not be be raped (because culture teaches them they are responsible for their own rapes). For better or worse, men aren’t taught how not to be raped.</p>
<p>Now as some one who has spent years working in the developing world, I certainly am willing to travel. Do I think it is always safe? It varies by country. In Singapore and China, I don’t have real concerns. In Cambodia or India I do. Does gender enter into my concerns? Yes. </p>
<p>Not all travel is flying in and out. Not all travel consists of hanging with other professionals.</p>
<p>My concerns with international travel are about being mugged for the valuables that I may have as a business traveler (watch, jewelry, cash on hand, computer, smartphone), not being raped. But it’s still irrelevant, because the vast majority of business trips that young American working women take are of the fly to O’Hare and stay at the Hyatt variety, not trekking off to Cambodia.</p>
<p>No, you should learn how to interpret statistics. Any advice about whether they are safer with family or with strangers must account for the amount of time women spend with family vs. strangers.</p>
<p>50/50 is still very unusual if we’re talking computer programmers/techies in more technically oriented computer technology/engineering type firms. </p>
<p>Even while working at an IS/IT department at a financial services firm, there were only two women on our team out of about 10…and one of them was a junior liaison from the marketing department. </p>
<p>Most of the departments where there were a large concentration of engineering/CS graduates…especially of the hardcore type were heavily male or all-male. Granted, there have been some improvements…but that’s mainly in making women less of a minority" rather than anything approaching gender parity. </p>
<p>The IT/IS departments filled with mostly MIS majors tended to be more even genderwise. MIS graduates also tend to be disdained in many quarters of the engineering/CS community for really being an undergrad business degree with some CS/computer applications thrown in. This is mostly the very types of techie cred oneupsmanship common among the hardcore engineering/CS folks I mentioned earlier.</p>
<p>Look, we know in parts of Africa women go without light, heat, or power to avoid gathering firewood at times when they believe – reasonably – that it would expose them to a high risk of rape. But that does not have much to do with whether American culture keeps young women from choosing STEM careers.</p>
<p>Similarly, we could go around and around about all the mommy-war, lean-in stuff, but it would be news to me if there were issues in the STEM world with that to a much greater degree than in the non-STEM world.</p>
<p>At this point, in this thread, I can’t even tell if the initial premise to the discussion is valid, that women choose STEM-related careers to a lesser degree than men. I know it’s not true in medicine and life sciences (and even less true if we expand “medicine” to “health care”). It may be true in some corners of engineering, but not in others. Everyone seemed to agree that there was a problem in the computer world until MiamiDAP showed up to announce not (with some support from others), although I suspect the difference in opinion relates to different ideas about what an appropriate computer science job is. But I am not sure why should I care if women choose pharmaceutical research disproportionately over designing engines.</p>
<p>So . . . is there a problem or not? My son’s AP Physics C class in high school had only one girl in it (who went on to engineering school). But an awful lot of his female friends from high school and college are in medical school, or in some job that involves crunching a lot of numbers.</p>
<p>The only time I can recall being nervous about business travel was when I had to spend the week in Pittsburgh during the 3-Mile Island crisis. But all we did was make sure we had a confirmed return flight before we left. :)</p>
<p>Niquii, if you were only referring to foreign travel, you should have said so in the first place. If you did, I must have missed it.</p>
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<p>I beg to differ. I grew up in this culture, and I felt perfectly comfortable travelling in and out of cities such as London and NYC by public transportation alone at the age of 15, and walking around, taking public transportation within the city, and so forth. I don’t think that I was taught to take any more precautions than a boy of my age in a big city. I spent time in many European countries at that age and throughout my 20s and never felt threatened.</p>
<p>I do remember being in the casbah in Tunis at the age of 15, foolishly wearing the normal clothes of a teenager in those days; ie, a short skirt. That did indeed attract unwanted attention, and quite aggressive attention, at that. Luckily, I was with my parents. And I learned a valuable lesson about cultural norms. But it didn’t instill a fear of travelling that would keep me out of a profession that required business travel. That just seems ridiculous. Okay, one might think twice before travelling to the Sudan or Aghanistan or whatever, but so would a man.</p>
<p>Honestly, I think the victimhood of women can get rather overdone: at least first world women.</p>
<p>"undergrad business degree with some CS/computer applications thrown in. "
-These people are making the most software development, not the software companies, way, way more, not comparable…They are writing new programs in various languages, including even the ones that are not taught at most colleges any more. Some packages are soooo old. but still are very much alive. They are being customized on a (not daily), HOURLY basis. If one thinks that COBOL i(BTW, written by the woman) s not used any more and RPG is outdated, I can only tell, wake up and smell the roses. PERL, and the like will not solve most of the problems. The ones who spent their nights writing computer programs while getting their Business degrees are the ones who are doing the most Softaware development thru spectrum of various industries, they are getting adjusted to every new place of employment, learning some very complex system written for various platforms in different languages. They have to have a business degree to be able to communicate with internal users as well as outside customers. They cannot write software out of thin air, nobody is writing specs for them, they have to figure out what needs to be done, including pleasing the outside customers. They deal with the biggest corporations in a world…</p>
<p>Of course. For some obscure, self-absorbed reason, the STEM advocates seem to think that their careers are So Much Harder and Demanding and that the work/life balance tradeoffs in those careers are So Much More Complicated and All-Encompassing than people in other fields. The ignorance gets old fast. You know, newsflash, work is work. There’s nothing more intrinsically difficult about being a software engineer than a lawyer or an advertising executive. Everyone has to make their own work/life balance tradeoffs as they see fit, and whether you’re doing so in a STEM vs not-STEM career track is irrelevant. This is almost as tiresome as the pretending that academic paths are So Much More Work than other life paths. </p>
<p>And Consolation is right - enough with the self-victimization of women.</p>
<p>Like Consolation, I grew up in this culture. And no, I never learned this message either. I did know of a few women who were of the “oh, wow, you rented the car and drove from the Cincinnati airport to your business meeting in Cincinnati all by yourself!” variety, but they were just stupid women, that’s all.</p>
Or maybe because teaching women some self-defense and awareness actually results in fewer rapes?
Men should learn some self-defense and awareness as well. Both of my children had years of Tae Kwon Do. Hopefully, if they ever need it it will be like riding a bike.</p>
<p>If women represent such a small portion of CS degrees, how is it that “CS is at least 50/50, there is no male dominance at all.” If CS is at least 50/50 why is there such an effort to increase the number of women in CS?</p>
<p>I work at a small company that has a few dozen engineers, usually with either CS or EE degrees. For awhile, we had zero female engineers… not a single one. We did have women in other positions, but not in anything related to software, engineering, or IT. Now we have 2.</p>
<p>There ar many guys now who either take time off to be with kids or work from home. I know several examples around me, one of them (surprize!!) is a lawyer working from home and watching his infant son, while his wife is at work, none are STEM though.</p>
<p>Your armchair psychoanalysis aside, no one actually said that STEM was harder and more demanding in this thread. Someone made a general statement to the effect that that people in corporate America who are willing to work insane hours would get more done than someone who was splitting time at home raising children, and therefore, would get promoted. </p>
<p>I did say that physics and math in particular are presented to freshman as if you could only get a job if you obtained a faculty position, which is very hard to achieve. I don’t think this is accurate, but this is one of the memes traveling around college campuses. In fact, it would be very hard to justify majoring in english if you had to know as a freshman that you would be able to obtain a tenure-track faculty position.</p>
<p>Well, just to validate Pizzagirl’s remark and risk sending the thread up in flames, I will say that I do think that research in STEM fields is harder than almost every other job.</p>
<p>This is not to claim that the hours are longer, necessarily. I understand that people in some businesses and some parts of the government work very long hours. But research in a STEM field very often involves operating at the extreme edge of one’s intellectual capability. Anything that the researcher already knows how to do, or that the researcher can figure out without too much difficulty. is handled quickly. This means that most of the time, the researcher is crawling uphill in the dark. And that is in fact very difficult. (I should be doing it right now.) One of my colleagues spoke at a Gordon Research Conference about thinking about a problem until little beads of blood formed on his forehead. That was metaphorical . . . I think. </p>
<p>Compensating for this, in STEM research one does generally have considerable independence and control over one’s schedule. And on the rare occasions when there is a breakthrough, so that the researcher sees deeper into the structure of the universe, it is an event of true ecstasy.</p>
<p>Of course, there are many positions that draw on undergraduate mathematics and/or physics, that don’t involve research–where one is not supposed to “push back the borders of ignorance,” as my spouse is fond of saying. I think that those positions have obligations that are similar to the obligations of many other positions.</p>