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Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

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Re: Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

#61

Post by douche »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #37
tomp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what I think every time someone says "We need to encourage more women/people to study CS." If you're only doing it for the money, you're probably doing it wrong. Studying CS for 3 years does not a programmer/hacker make; staying up coding all night or while other kids are playing outside, for years, is what it takes.

Nerd elitism in programming needs to stop. The first hackers didn't have computers when they were kids, let me remind you.

They were tinkerers, though. You've got the MIT model railroad kids, all the people that fooled around with scrap electronics, the radioheads, some gearheads.

I have no references to back this up, but I think it would make an interesting longitudinal study, or if you were somewhat cruel, a twin study: are children that spend most of their play time building with Legos or Kinex or erector sets significantly more likely to end up as engineers and computer programmers?

Re: Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

#62

Post by thedufer »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #33
sridca wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to discourage the female of the species from having fun hacking away like the rest of us do ... but you do make a good point. Where were the "women in tech" back when computer programming was some "weird" hobby of the outcast nerds? What has always bothered me was that feminists have conveniently painted this lack of interest (prior to the financial incentives of current times) as some evil intent on the men. Sex…

> Where were the "women in tech" back when computer programming was some "weird" hobby of the outcast nerds? Programming was originally an exclusively female profession because it was seen as lowly-paid "women's work". Later it became a male profession. But you're talking about the non-professional setting. Well, that started with the home computer revolution. There were few teenage girls programming at home because…

> Programming was originally an exclusively female profession because it was seen as lowly-paid "women's work".

Every time this comes up, someone points out that "programming" was mostly data entry at that time, and that there is a suspicious correlation between the decline in female programmers and the movement of data entry from programmers to administrators.

I can't seem to find hard data either way, though. So make of that what you will.

Re: Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

#63

Post by droidist2 »

eru wrote: post #16
bjwbell wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You doubt university administrators sincerity ;) I've noticed very few of these articles look at the recent past ('80s) when women were a significant percentage of programmers. I'm too young but I have the feeling working conditions were much better back then.

> I'm too young but I have the feeling working conditions were much better back then. You mean working conditions for programmers? From talking to people who worked in computing back then (like my grandfather), it seems like we have it better today. Of course that's only anecdotal, and my perception of today is as coloured as my choice of people to talk to. Would be interesting to see a more formal study.

Old people always say they had it worse though. "In my day we had to walk 15 miles in the snow to compile our code." Yeah but rent costed 2 days pay back then, not 2 weeks.

Re: Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

#64

Post by mrdrozdov »

java000 wrote: post #58

I wonder how much of the underrepresentation of women in this field is due to it being low prestige relative to other formerly male-dominated fields such as medicine or law into which women have made substantial inroads, because women seem much less willing to enter male dominated fields, however well-paying, if they lack prestige (electricians would be an example). If I'm correct, then the very same media outlets la…

Woz, Bill and Larry were coders, geeks and nerds at some point, and in many ways still are. Are they prestigious? I guess it's up for the reader to decide.

Re: Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

#65

Post by yummyfajitas »

kelukelugames wrote: post #57
yummyfajitas wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately finding a contrary result is a career limiting move. Consider Robert Putnam, who suppressed his research (showing that diversity harms social cohesion) for 6 years while trying to "develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity". http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007....

Here's the abstract from your link. A bit more complicated than your summary. Ethnic diversity is increasing in most advanced countries, driven mostly by sharp increases in immigration. In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits. In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social cap…

If you read the paper itself, it's basically empirical work describing the negative effects, followed by an essay claiming the positive ones. As I said - he spent 6 years looking for something to counter his empirical results, and published when he came up with it.

Note also that I'm not strongly endorsing this work - I'm just pointing out the strong desire to not publish a result against diversity.

Re: Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

#67

Post by QuercusMax »

douche wrote: post #56
ngoel36 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Very little of a CS degree is "coding" - CS is so much more than that. It's even beyond "engineering". A proper CS degree teaches you how to think , how to solve insanely hard problems, and how to do so with a team of other smart people - often with different personalities. What separates CS from other degrees is that it does filter out those without the horsepower or fortitude on both the quant side (algorithms)…

University CS programs are kinda shitty for teaching people how to actually write code. It's not really more than that, it's math and theory and proofs instead of that . University faculty, if they ever worked in a professional environment, did it years and years ago before they got tenure. The worst course I took in my CS department was the algorithms and data structures course. Didn't write a line of code. Wrote a…

I went to Kent State, and Data Structures was all about understanding and implementing trees, lists, and the like, in C or C++. It was super easy since I had already gotten all my segfaults out of my system in high school, but very practical.

Algorithms was all about searching, sorting, and heaps, and the main project was implementing several different sort algorithms in C or C++ and comparing their best / worst case performance. Also pretty easy, and very useful.

Advanced algorithms sucked balls. 100% theory and proofs, no implementation. Instructor was awful Didn't get anything useful out of it. All the other students were cheating on the homework together, since all the problems were right out of the textbook and somebody had the solutions manual. Still got an A but it was awful and I got nothing useful out of it.

Re: Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

#68

Post by sridca »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #33
sridca wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to discourage the female of the species from having fun hacking away like the rest of us do ... but you do make a good point. Where were the "women in tech" back when computer programming was some "weird" hobby of the outcast nerds? What has always bothered me was that feminists have conveniently painted this lack of interest (prior to the financial incentives of current times) as some evil intent on the men. Sex…

> Where were the "women in tech" back when computer programming was some "weird" hobby of the outcast nerds? Programming was originally an exclusively female profession because it was seen as lowly-paid "women's work". Later it became a male profession. But you're talking about the non-professional setting. Well, that started with the home computer revolution. There were few teenage girls programming at home because…

> Programming was originally an exclusively female profession because it was seen as lowly-paid "women's work". Later it became a male profession.

I just glanced at Wikipedia on this topic ... and, apart from the convenient mention of Ada Lovelace at the very beginning of both the articles[1] (makes you curious why they do this), history of programming is evidently a mostly -- no, nearly all -- male profession.

Just what kind of "programming" was it that the exclusively female professional partook on, whose profession was to later become a male profession (and what kind of "programming" are the male professionals partaking on)?

> There were few teenage girls programming at home because the means of doing so - home computers - were marketed almost exclusively to boys. Alas, parents seem to avoid buying boys 'girl toys' and vice-versa.

- Marketers will target whatever that can be easily influenced to make a purchase.

- 'girl toys' are neither superior nor inferior to 'boy toys,' ... and feminists are the last group of people to acknowledge this distinction. As a generalization, girls learn to manipulate people from a early age (hence playing with barbies)[2], much as boys learn to manipulate tools. Toys merely fulfill this instinctual desire of humans; they are not being enforced by the hypothetical patriarchal parents and society.

- Thus, it seems far more likely that despite parents'/peers' encouragement to play more with the tools (such as computers) "teenage girls" continued to opt to play with "girl toys" out of their own instinctual preference. Perhaps because they knew deep down that the real power lies in manipulating people and not computers.

[1] Two links:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_science

[2] Diana Davidson describing this in detail: https://youtu.be/mk_WaTdhyT0?t=1m16s

Re: Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

#69

Post by hawkice »

droidist2 wrote: post #63
eru wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm too young but I have the feeling working conditions were much better back then. You mean working conditions for programmers? From talking to people who worked in computing back then (like my grandfather), it seems like we have it better today. Of course that's only anecdotal, and my perception of today is as coloured as my choice of people to talk to. Would be interesting to see a more formal study.

Old people always say they had it worse though. "In my day we had to walk 15 miles in the snow to compile our code." Yeah but rent costed 2 days pay back then, not 2 weeks.

Took me a while to find actual numbers that could give good approximations of how true this is.

http://www.tenement.org/encyclopedia/housing_rent.htm

Turns out, it's actually pretty accurate. But food was much more expensive, sucking up maybe ten days of income (and that's 100% groceries, which is rare enough these days, I suppose). Clothing, though, that's where you see the real change. Cheaper these days in non-inflation adjusted dollars than it was in the 1890's, in you can believe it (maybe I buy fewer articles of clothing than most people, but likely not less clothing than people in 1890).

Re: Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

#70

Post by morgante »

mrdrozdov wrote: post #64
java000 wrote: post #58

I wonder how much of the underrepresentation of women in this field is due to it being low prestige relative to other formerly male-dominated fields such as medicine or law into which women have made substantial inroads, because women seem much less willing to enter male dominated fields, however well-paying, if they lack prestige (electricians would be an example). If I'm correct, then the very same media outlets la…

Woz, Bill and Larry were coders, geeks and nerds at some point, and in many ways still are. Are they prestigious? I guess it's up for the reader to decide.

Nope. The media does not treat even extremely successful and talented coders the same way they treat (for example) top bankers.
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