Also thought of this thread today when I saw this is being shown in Boston next week - Code - debugging the gender gap - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4335520/?ref_=nv_sr_1 - you can watch on amazon etc. also.
Hi @ClaremontMom, the LA Times article reminds me of how my CS courses at UCLA were in the late 70s… - we programmed some simple existing games and used math algorithms! On punch cards!
For anyone interested, the Mudd article was posted in the Mudd forum and is generating some discussion.
I work at the same college where I earned my first degree in computer programming in the 80s and I would say without a doubt at all there are fewer females in the program now than when I attended. I attribute this to the gaming generation that has pulled in boys who might have gone in other directions.
My take on all this is that students should be allowed to pursure those careers they feel are a good fit for them and in an area that they enjoy. I am not a big fan of this forced social engineering where we make attempts to steer students into areas because someone has a theory that more females or males need to be in the profession. It will all work out in the end. There is a spot in life for everyone. One just needs to find that spot.
Let kids choose what they want to do.
On a personal level, I agree with you MassDad, as I was steered into engineering in the '80s and decided after I graduated that I didn’t like it. (I may have posted this earlier in this thread but am too lazy to look back to see.) I did not push my kids any direction, my oldest D was an intl affairs/econ major, and once remarked to me that she would have made a good engineer. My S knew from an early age that he wanted to make video games, younger D only discovered CS as a soph in college and ended up in that major.
The problem is kids can’t choose what they don’t know about, so exposing them to these things earlier helps them see the possibilities. If there are problems once they start working and they drop out, the talents of a lot of smart women will not be utilized.
@MassDaD68 that’s all well and good, but many capable girls are steered away from math and computer science n high school by their peers and their teachers.
@mathmom You mention the negative to my positive. I mentioned people steering students into a certain direction and you mention steering people away from a certain direction. I would view both equally bad. As @mamabear1234 mentioned, kids need to be exposed to certain things before they can even consider whether they like it or not. As both boys and girls most likely are exposed to the same classes in HS, it may be the sly comments by educators and peers who have an influence on how girls progress into STEM. If people are making negative comments of girls entering STEM then I can see how this is detrimental. I think kids need to explore this for themselves. They need to remain strong.
The problem is girls are steered away from CS at all levels. There is an interesting study out there. It was in CS or math. Teachers were asked to grade test papers. In a blind study girls did as well as boys. When names were put on the papers girls did significantly worse than boys.
In the workplace women are often thought of as not as capable as men in CS. Kids cant choose freely if there is gender bias at all levels going on
I might be over optimistic, but I believe that gender disposition in CS will change when our daughters will hit the workforce in a few years.
There aren’t enough women in CS graduating in the next few years to make that even plausible. Even if there were, the problems start well before industry, at every level. I know this is a long thread, but I think there are a lot of good discussions here about just how many factors go into this one statistic to contribute to the overall effect.
Having seen what happened in architecture I think it’s certainly possibly to get the women at the college level. In architecture at least, they are still way behind as far as being principals of firms.
“Only 16 percent of the AIA’s membership is female. Forty-nine percent of architecture students and 39 percent of interns are women, but just 17 percent are firm principals and partners, according to a 2012 AIA survey of 2,805 member firms.” (Mind you I’m not a member of AIA because I can’t figure out any good reason to be.)
article about Northeastern looking to increase number of female computer science majors - http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-northeastern-plans-to-reach-equal-male-female-cs-enrollment-by-2021/
Virginia Tech just named a woman as Dean of the School of Engineering. She has experience in increasing the opportunities for women and underrepresented minorities in engineering and information technology . At VT, Computer Engineering and Computer Science are within the College of Engineering. http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2017/01/eng-dean.html
I’m glad that my daughter was able to take several CS classes and discover that she really liked coding, and was very good at it. One of her (female) teachers has become a great mentor to her. We looked at a lot of colleges, and she’s decided to attend a somewhat techy school (WPI) and will probably major in CS. I do think that the encouragement and mentorship by her teacher early on had a big impact.
In my entire high school (2500+), only 3 current female students have taken or are currently taking APCS. My twin sister and I took it last year. It was really hard being in such a collaborative course when my classmates would freely share code and work with each other leaving me to figure things out by myself.
My former CS teacher made no attempt to recruit girls into his class. I went to his class the other day so I could find more female coders for an all-girl hackathon. I sadly find out only one girl signed up this year. Last year, girls made up more than a third of the class. Our team will be the smallest by far.
Another story - this one about the tech women at Industrial Light and Magic https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/movies/star-wars-women-visual-effects.html?_r=0
from the article -
Take Rachel Rose, who has spent the last decade as an engineer at the studio. As a freshman at Grinnell College in Iowa, Ms. Rose had never programmed a computer. She was surprised to find that in her introductory computer science courses, her classmates were all men and had been coding for years. Ms. Rose soon caught up with them, and by the time she graduated with her doctorate in computer science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, she had become accustomed not only to software design and computer graphics, but also to being the only woman in the room.
So she was stunned when she began work at the studio and found herself surrounded by women, particularly in leadership, “It made me feel less out of place,” she said. After her development of virtual production and camerawork for the 2016 Jyn Erso adventure “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” Ms. Rose was recently promoted to supervisor of research and development. She is part of a quiet revolution now taking place at the company, where women account for 60 percent of studio leadership, and have created memorable effects for many blockbuster franchises, including “Star Wars,” “Indiana Jones,” “The Avengers,” “Star Trek” and “Jurassic Park.” Women also account for half of the company’s entry-level ranks.
I know this is reviving an old thread, but I wanted to post this.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-silicon-valley-so-awful-to-women/517788/
I think since I was first posting on this thread, I’ve seen a lot more of this in companies, and I think that the professional world doesn’t appear to be any better than the academics before it. I believe I made points against that before which are pretty naive in retrospect. This article also discusses the perceived meritocracy in tech and its effects.
Just wanted to add that I’m doing my part! D18 is taking AP CS Principles and thinks it’s “so easy”. This is a girl who was adamantly opposed to doing anything with CS a year ago. In addition, she insisted on signing up for AP CS A next year and volunteered to write an app for her iGEM team this summer. She also wants to get a CS minor in college (USC has a CS minor and a “computer programming” minor).
The way I got her over the instant rejection of CS last year was to print out some of the questions on the AP CS-P exam at collegeboard.org. Questions that didn’t require specific knowledge but rather more of the puzzle variety (she’s always doing Sudoku/puzzle books). This was my attempt at demystifying CS, which is often perceived as “hard” or too nerdy. After an eye roll or two (teenagers!), she went through the problems and got most of them right. I told her, “you just passed the AP exam for the class without even taking the class”. A real I can do this moment.
Great to hear, @droppedit !